I am very pleased that our very own Chris Bertram has responded to Joseph Heath’s very entertaining and polemical “John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism,” a widely shared Substack post [HT: Dailynous]. Chris has made some important corrections to the public record, and the comments on his post are extending that.
As it happens, I just did a three-part series on Heath’s excellent book, The Machinery of Government: Public Administration and the Liberal State (OUP, 2020). [The first one is here; the second here; here.] And I may do a fourth in which I compare his take on cost-benefit analysis with Dave Schmidtz’s. Do read the first few paragraphs of my first post in the series, so you get a sense of my view of the significance of Heath (Toronto), whom I have never met in real life.
Before I get to my criticism of Heath — and I don’t need to remind regular readers I am no Marxist – Heath’s essay is a rare case of auto-biographical history of philosophy in which Heath gets something important right despite the polemical and boundary-policing efforts — note his repeated use of ‘bullshit.’ Usually, such retrospective first-person narratives are only instructive as polemics and boundary-policing (and a window into the anguished grievances of the author).