Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal Volume 12.

Number 1 & 2

MARX AND THE INNOCENCE OF SCIENCE

Andre Tosel

Beneath the conventional appearances of an intellectual terrorism for which Marx is definitively dead, serious research is aware that Marx represents a necessary stage in responsible thinking of the present day-and more precisely, in the thinking of modern science and technology. Marx, however, is a complex author, and his interpretation is divided both within and outside Marxism. For the Marxists of the Second International such as Karl Kautsky, who are positivists and evolutionists, Marx is a rationalist, a theoretician of progress, a man of science. Non-Marxist philosophers agree, but in a critical way: following Heidegger they identify Marx as the great representative of western rationalism, of productivism (this is the case with the significant works on the subject by Jacques Ellul, Cornelius Castoriadis, and more recently, by Dominique Janicaud and Gilbert Hottois 1 ). The thesis of these authors is all the stronger as it is supported by the employment in real socialist countries of the idea of scientific and technical revolution, set forth and exploited in the very ricl1. and interesting book by the Czechoslovakian reforming

Translated by Christine Gros. The original unpublished text was delivered at an international colloquium entitled Les Pouvoirs de la Seienee: un sieele de prise de eonseienee, held at the Musee National Message Biblique Mare Chagall, in Nice, France. The conference took place from January 30 to February 1, 1986, under the direction of Dominique Janicaud, Professor of Philosophy at the Universite de Nice. We would like to thank the author for granting us permission to publish this translation.
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