MARGINALIZING MARX(ISM): EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

According to our recent analysis of graduate syllabi for introductory seminars in international relations (IR) and comparative politics (CP) at the top-10 political science programs in the United States (as determined by US News & World Report rankings), Marx and Marxism are highly endangered species (Sclofsky and Funk Reference Sclofsky and Funk2018).Footnote ² Only one of the 22 analyzed syllabi featured Marx as “required” reading; only one other syllabus “recommended” one of Marx’s texts. Overall, Marx-authored works represented less than 0.1% of listed readings. In one particularly jarring example, as we observed, “an introductory CP course at University of California–Berkeley dedicates an entire week to the study of class without a single writing by Marx” (Sclofsky and Funk Reference Sclofsky and Funk2018, 50).

This study further examined the total number of “Marxist” authors in these syllabi. Even after adopting a rather elastic definition of Marxism (including, e.g., Benedict Anderson), the results indicated that these authors represent less than 1% of readings. Corroborating these findings, the author of a recent study on the paradigmatic leanings of publications in “major” IR journals during the past 30 years decided to drop Marxism from inclusion in the accompanying graphs, given that “The lines…would be close to zero and mostly flat over the entire period” (Saideman Reference Saideman2018, 690).

Of course, Marxism is hardly the only “critical” framework that has an uneasy relationship with mainstream political science. Thinkers in the feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial traditions also suffer various forms of marginalization.Footnote ³ Furthermore, there are other cases of foundational texts by classical social theorists or political economists that are infrequently assigned in graduate seminars. For example, with the exception of some political theorists, few political science students will read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations during their graduate program. One reason for this lamentable trend may be that thinkers such as Marx and Smith do not fit neatly into contemporary disciplinary boundaries, which imply the separation of politics, economics, and philosophy.

What is particularly concerning about Marxism’s marginalization is that our epoch is defined by capitalism’s global hegemony, its production of recurring crises and ballooning (racialized and gendered) inequalities, and the worldwide spread of a neoliberal logic. As the thinker who arguably understood capitalism better than any other and is capitalism’s most insightful critic, Marx is thus especially relevant for our times.

The lack of engagement with Marxism thus amounts to an important failure in political science education. As Tucker (Reference Tucker1978, ix) suggested, “Not to be well grounded in the writings of Marx and Engels is to be insufficiently attuned to modern thought” and “self-excluded” from the debates that define “most contemporary societies.” This is especially true vis-à-vis the Global South, where Marxism has proven most fruitful for inspiring generations of thinkers to grapple with their social realities (Leeds et al. Reference Leeds, Tickner, Wight and Alba-Ulloa2019). Frantz Fanon, José Mariátegui, dependency theorists, and African and Asian independence leaders come to mind, among many others.

HEGEMONIC LIBERALISM

To reiterate, there is a prevailing “liberal bias” in US political science, although not precisely of the type derided by conservatives. Rather, it is a liberal bias in that ways of thinking that exist outside of liberal philosophy—and perhaps especially Marxism, given its “radical” challenge to liberalism—are largely excluded from mainstream spaces.

We draw from Freeden (Reference Freeden2015), who conceptualized liberalism as an ideology that contains complex—and, at times, contradictory—principles. According to his argument, liberalism has passed through five stages, four of which we entertain here.

The first iteration of liberalism is a theory of restrained power aimed at protecting individual rights, which suggests that to be free “is simply to be unimpeded from exercising your capacities in pursuit of your desired ends” (Skinner Reference Skinner1998, 5). Of chief concern is the preservation of private property (Locke Reference Locke and Macpherson1980 [1690], 66) and establishment of a series of political rights (which were universal in theory but highly exclusionary in practice). The preceding fed into a progressive view of history in which the acquisition of virtue, wealth, and power would maximize human happiness (Freeden Reference Freeden1996).

For Adam Smith, liberalism was reborn as a theory of economic exchange (Dewey Reference Dewey2000 [1935]). The idea in this second stage of liberalism is that individual actions are the key to social welfare. Given that state intervention is viewed as restricting liberty and progress, it is to be limited to safeguarding individual rights and enforcing the rules by which free-market capitalism is played—although in practice, of course, many of Smith’s present-day acolytes demonstrate few qualms about mass incarceration, constant war, and other exercises of state power (Harvey Reference Harvey2007).

Subsequently, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many liberals had realized that limits to human progress also could arise from the market. Thus, the state had the duty to intervene when important human needs (e.g., health care and gainful employment) could not be secured through individual effort (Freeden Reference Freeden2015, 112). This new liberal twist emphasized social interdependence and established the basis for the welfare state.

Finally, and most recently, was the rise of a pluralist approach within liberalism that pushed for the recognition—and, perhaps, celebration—of diversity (Freeden Reference Freeden2015, 116). Such a “politics of identity” became part of the liberal core, thereby undoing some of the tradition’s previous exclusions.

What is most pertinent for present purposes is that ideological diversity, such that it exists in mainstream US political science, is largely confined to competing variations of these themes.Footnote ⁴ Indeed, whereas there are spirited theoretical and political disputes within the discipline’s mainstream, these largely take the form of debates within liberalism rather than between liberalism and critical traditions such as Marxism. For example, the most visible debates in political theory about the work of John Rawls tend to amount to an intra-liberal dialogue between thinkers who present distinct amalgamations (or interpretations) of liberal principles (see Sandel Reference Sandel1984; Reference Sandel2010). Marxist and other challenges to the entire Rawlsian enterprise are far more rare.

Tocqueville (Reference Tocqueville2003 [1835], 524) was remarkably prescient when he observed that “In America, the majority has staked out a formidable fence around thought. Inside those limits a writer is free but woe betide him if he dares to stray beyond them.” Thus, as long as one claims to belong to the liberal in-group, it is possible to reach the commanding heights of political science, even if one’s scholarly production is replete with xenophobic anxieties and antidemocratic sentiments (as in the case of Samuel Huntington). That is, ostensibly politically and economically conservative thought that springs from the liberalism of classical philosophy, such as the neoliberalism of today (Brown Reference Brown2015), tends to find a much more welcoming home in political science than left-wing alternatives such as Marxism.

POSITIVISM AND FEIGNED OBJECTIVITY ON THE “ROYAL ROAD TO SCIENCE”

We now consider a second factor in explaining Marxism’s marginalization. In recent years, various interpretivist-inspired approaches—including ethnography, discourse analysis, and critical race theory—have attained increased visibility within political science (Funk Reference Funk2019; Yanow and Schwartz-Shea Reference Yanow and Schwartz-Shea2013). Furthermore, at least in IR, a rising minority of US scholars—nearly 40%—now identify as “non-” or “post-”positivists.Footnote ⁵ Whereas this trend could open space for Marxism, many such thinkers—including numerous postmodernists, poststructuralists, and postcolonialists—instead “have joined the mainstream in either neglecting or rejecting Marx” (Sclofsky and Funk Reference Sclofsky and Funk2018, 55).

Additionally, positivism—and its associated values of “objectivity” and “scientific neutrality”—still retains a dominant position within the discipline’s mainstream, which aspires for political science to be taken seriously as a “science” in the same way as the field of economics (Schram and Caterino Reference Schram and Brian2006). This is reflected in the extent to which positivist understandings—as embodied in texts by King, Keohane, and Verba (Reference King, Keohane and Verba1994) and Van Evera (Reference Evera and Stephen1997)—have played an outsized role in graduate curricula and defining what counts as “legitimate” scholarship (Schwartz-Shea Reference Schwartz-Shea2003; Tickner Reference Tickner2005). Moreover, this is reflected in the fact that nearly 75% of 2016–2017 publications in the American Political Science Review were categorized by editors as “quantitative,” “formal,” or both (Koenig et al. Reference Koenig2018, 482). The story, of course, is not one of absolute domination; indeed, significant pockets of difference exist. Yet there nevertheless is a discernible positivist mainstream that is suspicious of outsiders.

How is this related to the marginalization of Marxism? Perhaps most problematic from a positivist perspective is that Marx refuses to adhere to a fact–value separation, between what is and what ought to be (Ollman Reference Ollman1971). His scientific work simply cannot be separated from his political project or “normative” concerns. Indeed, he sees the latter (i.e., real-world change) as the ultimate goal of the former (i.e., intellectual production). Hence, his famous observation: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (Marx Reference Marx and Tucker1888, 145; italics in original). Thus, interpreting and changing are inextricably linked in that “the purpose of understanding the class structure of capitalism is to understand the conditions of transforming it” (Wright Reference Wright2015).

For the positivist mainstream, Marx (Reference Marx and Tucker1964) poses several problems. First, he challenges the notion that scholarship could ever be “neutral,” “objective,” or “value-free” by relentlessly highlighting the embeddedness of our ideas within political–economic structures. Second, he evinces clear normative commitments relating to class, alienation, and exploitation. Marx demands that we put our scholarship at the service of the larger goal of human emancipation. Here, he enters into fundamental conflict with mainstream political science, which is highly suspicious of open normative commitments—or at least those that deviate from mainstream, “liberal” values (Oren Reference Oren2013).

It is not surprising, then, that one of the discipline’s disciplining effects is to socialize members into the belief—reinforced through tenure-related incentive structures—that publication for publication’s sake is the proper scholarly goal (Schmidt Reference Schmidt2001). In his account of how to “survive” academia as an “activist–scholar,” the noted political scientist Sanford Schram (Reference Schram2013, 43) revealed how his graduate education dulled his radical commitments: “Doctoral study had made me stop thinking about being a revolutionary; more and more I just wanted to change society for the better rather than keep believing that I could be part of a movement to overturn the structure of power.”

To be clear, positivism is willing to countenance that ethical concerns can motivate scholarship—and that our chosen research topics should be, in some vague sense, “consequential for political, social, or economic life” (King, Keohane, and Verba Reference King, Keohane and Verba1994, 15). Yet, somewhat contradictorily, it simultaneously suggests that such beliefs must be bracketed during the research process lest they contaminate the well from which “science” drinks.

Given this background, as our recent study concluded, “For those who proffer the problematic (and ideological) notion that social science can and should be value-free…Marx is thus indeed a haunting specter” (Sclofsky and Funk Reference Sclofsky and Funk2018, 53). In other words, contrary to political science’s stated desire for ideological diversity, Marx is largely beyond the pale because he shatters the illusion that to be “apolitical” is either possible or desirable and undermines the claim that social scientists can be “neutral on a moving train” (Zinn Reference Zinn2018).