Volume 32, Number 18 · November 21, 1985
What's Left of Marx?
By Michael Walzer
Making Sense of Marx
by Jon Elster
Cambridge University Press, 556 pp., $15.95 (paper)
Jon Elster is a Norwegian political scientist who works at the Institute for Social Research in Oslo and teaches at the University of Chicago. He has written a number of lively and contentious books, chiefly in the philosophy of the social sciences, and this most recent book, still lively and contentious but also very long, follows directly from his previous work. Except in a limited and special sense, it doesn't follow from previous Marxicology. Making Sense of Marx is meant to represent a new style in Marxist studies—as if to say of earlier scholars that whatever they have made of Marx, they have not made sense of him (and many of them have not made sense at all). Elster's aim is to make Marx make sense, and his notion of what is sensible is, as we shall see, both straightforward and narrow. Hitherto academic Marxists have tried to shape the social sciences to fit a Marxist model; Elster tries instead to shape Marxism to the model of modern social science.
Review, 4202 words
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