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Southern Political Science ssociation

Marx's Social Ontology: Individuality and Community in Marx's Theory of Social Reality. byCarol C. GouldReview by: A. Belden FieldsThe Journal of Politics, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Aug., 1979), pp. 975-976Published by: Cambridge University Presson behalf of the Southern Political Science Association

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BOOK REVIEWS 975Marx's Social Ontology: Individuality and Community in Marx'sTheory of Social Reality. By CAROL C. GOULD. (Cambridge,

MA: The MIT Press, 1978. Pp. xxvi, 208. $15.00.)Carol Gould's major purpose in writing this book is to establishthe point that while Marx did not dwell on a description of whatthe final stage of communism would look like structurally and whilehe did not directly and explicitly address himself to a definition offreedom and justice, he did indeed possess conceptions of humanfreedom and human justice.

In order to reconstruct and make explicit the concepts of freedomand justice in Marx, Gould turns to Marx's Grundrisse. The Grun-drisse does not speak for itself on these concepts. It needs to beinterpreted. Gould employs what she calls the dialectical methodof critical reconstruction to clarify Marx's philosophically implicitconceptions of freedom and justice. Her major adversary is thedeterministic interpretation of Marx which sees causation rooted inobjective historical laws over which human individuals have nocontrol and thus no real freedom.Gould argues that while such might be a satisfactory interpreta-tion of Hegel, it is not of Marx. She sees Marx as being much moreAristotelian in distinguishing between various levels and kinds ofcausation and in seeing human beings as self-realizing beings.Gould argues that while for Marx history sets the context forhuman choice and action, history is itself the product of thechoices and actions of agents and the course of its development istherefore possibilistic and contingent on these choices and actions.

(28).According to Gould, Marx traces all causal efficacy ultimatelyback to purposive human activity. And, unlike both Aristotle andKant, in whose theories self-realization remains abstract and theactualization of a prefixed conception of potentiality, she sees Marxas leaving open the possibility for virtually unlimited choice in thedomain of self-actualization. In this sense, although Gould herselfdoes not make this comparison, Marx is more like Sartre, who seesindividuals creating their own potentialities in the very process ofrealizing them.For Marx, then, freedom is the activity of individuals who arerealizing themselves. Freedom presupposes the overcoming of nat-ural and social necessity or domination. But it is a process or anactivity engaged in by individuals. It is not a structural arrange-

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976 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, VOL. 41, 1979meantor an abstraction outside of that concrete activity. Justice,the second sought after conception, involves reciprocity and mutual-ity. It is the link between self-actualizing individuals, the char-acteristic of a true community. That is to say, in a just society in-dividuals do not merely leave each other alone to realize themselvesin some sort of privatistic, isolated manner. There would be nocommunity in that case. Rather, in a just society people give con-crete recognition to their understanding of human equality byactively enhancing each other in the use of freedom to developthemselves as non-instrumental beings with particular needs andparticular purposes.Thus Gould establishes that Marx did indeed have a normativeontology. Her book is a very interesting refutation of those whoportray Marx as an historical relativist who could not even criticizecapitalism from a moral point of view because he had no historicallytranscendent conception of justice while capitalism had an historicalfunction. Gould argues that while freedom and justice could onlybe manifest under communism for Marx, they were still universal-istic conceptions which could serve as evaluative criteria for anysystem at any point in time.In the introduction, Gould claims that her dialectical method ofcritical reconstruction can also serve as a guide to practice. Thisshe does not attempt to demonstrate in the body of the text. Shealso claims that her method is freer from the constraints of theinterpreted text than is the hermeneutic school of interpretation.It might be that she is a little too free, particularly when she argues,for Marx circumstances or the objective world have no causal effi-cacy. (83) While it would have been nice to see a demonstrationof the utility of her interpretative method for practice and whilethe interpretation itself might play a little too freely with Marx'sown thinking, on the whole Carol Gould has made a serious and aninteresting contribution to the literature that tries to understandMarx philosophically.

A. BELDEN FIELDS, University of Illinois, Urbana

Women Under Communism. By BARBARA WOLFE JANCAR. (Balti-more: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Pp. x, 291.$16.00.)

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