Bertell Ollman
Biographic Data
| ID | 245561 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bertell Ollman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bertell |
| FAMILY NAME | Ollman |
| SIGNATURE | OLLMAN B |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 54 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 181 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 51 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1968 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Radicalism in the Contemporary Age
The Eight Steps in Marx’s Dialectical Method
What one understands about dialectics often depends on the order in which it is presented. This article begins with the philosophy of internal relations, in which everything is conceived of in terms of relations and processes, and its accompanying process of abstraction, which enables us to focus on and separate out the part(s) of these relations and processes that are best suited for studying the problem(s) at hand. All the other steps Marx take…
Karl Marx
The Culture Industry
This chapter, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," from Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, critiques the standardization and commodification of culture under capitalism. They argue that the culture industry, encompassing film, radio, and popular music, produces homogenized cultural products that pacify and manipulate the masses, hindering critical thought and reinforcing existing power structures. The essay an…
What Is Political Science? What Should It Be
This article examines the five myths that govern political science: that it studies politics; that it is scientific; that one can study politics cut off from the other social sciences and history; that the state is neutral; and that the bulk of the work in the discipline furthers the cause of democracy. Within political science, there have been three main approaches to criticizing these myths: a moderate one that treats the elements in these myth…
Preface to the special issue
The Gordian knot foiled all attempts to undo it until Alexander the Great came along and cut it open with his sword. This legend is often presented as a model of what it means to act decisively and to think outside the box. Few seem to have given much thought to the threads that were cut into small pieces and rendered useless by Alexander's act. The problems of our world are intertwined in much the same way as the threads in the Gordian knot, and…
Marxism and the philosophy of internal relations; or, How to replace the mysterious 'paradox' with 'contradictions' that can be studied and resolved
The problems most people have in understanding Marx come not only from the complexity of his theories, but also from the frequent changes in the meanings of his concepts. The present article attributes this unusual practice to Marx's 'philosophy of internal relations', which serves as the foundation for his dialectical method, and his use of the process of abstraction (breaking up our internally related world into the 'parts' best suited to study…
Historical Archeology, Dialectical Marxism, and “C.F.U.G. Studies”
Dialectics and World Politics
Every child knows the story of Humpty Dumpty who fell off a wall and broke into so many pieces that all the king's horses and all the king's men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again. How diff
Karl Marx
Why Dialectics? Why Now?
The common, of course, was the land owned by everyone in the village. By the late middle ages, feudal lords were claiming this land as their own private property. In universities today, we can discern two opposing kinds of scholarship: that which studies the people who steal a goose from off the common ('Goose From Off the Common Studies', or G.F.C. for short) and that which studies those who steal the common from the goose ('Common From the Goos…
Dialectics for the New Century
This anthology contains some of the more important Marxist thinkers now working on dialectics. As a whole the book is an unusual 'Introduction to Dialectics', a systematic restatement of what it is an
America Beyond Capitalism
Research Article| January 01 2006 America Beyond Capitalism: A Socialist Stew Prepared for Liberals and Conservatives Bertell Ollman Bertell Ollman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Good Society (2006) 15 (3): 28–30. https://doi.org/10.2307/25702832 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Bertell Ollman; America Beyond Capitalism: A Socialist Stew Prepared for Liberals and Conservative…
What Constitutes a “Stolen Election”? Toward a Politics of Delegitimation
The Utopian Vision of the Future (Then and Now)
Oscar Wilde said that any map that doesn't have utopia on it is not worth looking at. There are few quotes I've cited as often or with as much pleasure as this one. Yet, there is something in the sweeping nature of the claim that has always left me unsatisfied. In examining utopian thinking, I will also try to distinguish what is valid and useful in Wilde's claim from what is notThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where …
Marxism, this Tale of Two Cities
Dance of the Dialectic
How to Take an Exam . . . and Remake the World
New Political Science's Charles A. McCoy Life Achievement Award Acceptance Speech
Why Does the Emperor Need the Yakuza
Japan’s flashy gangsters look to be the antithesis of its austere emperors. Bertell Ollman contends that there is a structural connexion between them. Rule by an unelected bureaucracy requires an inviolate imperial symbol for compensating legitimacy, which must in turn be shielded from queries or criticisms by criminal thugs. An American Marxist challenges the central taboo of Japanese public life
Searching for Dollars or Sense
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Market Socialism Revisited
What Is Political Science? What Should It Be
This paper examines the five myths that govern political science: that it studies politics; that it is scientific; that one can study politics cut off from the other social sciences and history; that the state is neutral; and that the bulk of the work in the discipline furthers the cause of democracy. Within political science, there have been three main approaches to criticizing these myths: a moderate one that treats the elements in these myths …
Reply to Carl Davidson on market mystification
What we can still learn from the communist manifesto
Alienation
In this book, the most thorough account of Marx's theory of alienation yet to have appeared in English, Professor Ollman reconstructs the theory from its constituent parts and offers it as a vantage point from which to view the rest of Marxism. The book further contains a detailed examination of Marx's philosophy of internal relations, the much neglected logical foudation of his method, and provides a systematic account of Marx's conception of hu…
Going Beyond the State
Timothy Mitchell's article "The Limits of the State" in the March 1991 issue of thisReviewstimulated an unusual variety of interested comments. John Bendix, Bartholomew Sparrow, and Bertell Ollman offer critiques and suggestions from quite different points of view. In response, Mitchell clarifies further the distinctiveness of his own approach and its implications
Toward Class Consciousness Next Time
Why haven't the workers in the advanced capitalist countries become class-conscious? Marx was wont to blame leadership, short memories, temporary bursts of prosperity, and, in the case of the English and German workers, national characteristics. In the last fifteen years of his life he often singled out the enmity between English and Irish workers as the chief hindrance to a revolutionary class consciousness developing in the country that was mos…
Marxism and the philosophy of internal relations; or, How to replace the mysterious 'paradox' with 'contradictions' that can be studied and resolved
The problems most people have in understanding Marx come not only from the complexity of his theories, but also from the frequent changes in the meanings of his concepts. The present article attributes this unusual practice to Marx's 'philosophy of internal relations', which serves as the foundation for his dialectical method, and his use of the process of abstraction (breaking up our internally related world into the 'parts' best suited to study…
Putting Dialectics to Work
(1990). Putting Dialectics to Work: The Process of Abstraction in Marx's Method. Rethinking Marxism: Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 26-74
Marx's Use of 'Class
We attempt to derive Marx's theory of class through the way he uses the terms, rather than through an interpretation of his most general statements on the subject, which is how class has usually been approached. "Class" is seen to refer to social and economic groupings based on a wide variety of standards whose interrelations are those Marx finds in the real society under examination. By conceptualizing a unity of apparently distinct social relat…
Marxism and Political Science
Why Dialectics? Why Now? (With an Appendix on “The Dance of the Dialectic”)
Dialectics has to do with how the “bigger picture,” both spatially and temporally (past and future), enters into and affects whatever we perceive directly and immediately. All the cat-egories associated with dialectical thinking help bring some part of this bigger picture, to which we all belong, into focus. Special attention is given here to how to study the socialist/communist future that lies “concealed” inside the capitalist present as a nece…
How to Study Class Consciousness, And Why We Should
What Is Political Science? What Should It Be
This paper examines the five myths that govern political science: that it studies politics; that it is scientific; that one can study politics cut off from the other social sciences and history; that the state is neutral; and that the bulk of the work in the discipline furthers the cause of democracy. Within political science, there have been three main approaches to criticizing these myths: a moderate one that treats the elements in these myths …
What Is Political Science? What Should It Be
This article examines the five myths that govern political science: that it studies politics; that it is scientific; that one can study politics cut off from the other social sciences and history; that the state is neutral; and that the bulk of the work in the discipline furthers the cause of democracy. Within political science, there have been three main approaches to criticizing these myths: a moderate one that treats the elements in these myth…
The Culture Industry
This chapter, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," from Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, critiques the standardization and commodification of culture under capitalism. They argue that the culture industry, encompassing film, radio, and popular music, produces homogenized cultural products that pacify and manipulate the masses, hindering critical thought and reinforcing existing power structures. The essay an…
Dialectics and World Politics
Every child knows the story of Humpty Dumpty who fell off a wall and broke into so many pieces that all the king's horses and all the king's men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again. How diff
The Utopian Vision of the Future (Then and Now)
Oscar Wilde said that any map that doesn't have utopia on it is not worth looking at. There are few quotes I've cited as often or with as much pleasure as this one. Yet, there is something in the sweeping nature of the claim that has always left me unsatisfied. In examining utopian thinking, I will also try to distinguish what is valid and useful in Wilde's claim from what is notThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where …
Academic Freedom in America Today
Three brief case studies: in 1915, Scott Nearing, a socialist professor of economics, was fired from the University of Pennsylvania for publicly opposing the use of child labor in coal mines. With an influential mine owner on the Board of Trustees, the president of the university decided he had to let Nearing go. As far as I can discover, he is the first professor fired from an American university for his radical beliefs and activities.This artic…
Is There A Marxian Ethic
Marx's Use of 'Class
We attempt to derive Marx's theory of class through the way he uses the terms, rather than through an interpretation of his most general statements on the subject, which is how class has usually been approached. "Class" is seen to refer to social and economic groupings based on a wide variety of standards whose interrelations are those Marx finds in the real society under examination. By conceptualizing a unity of apparently distinct social relat…
The Sociology of Marx.Henri Lefebvre , Norbert Guterman
Is There A Marxian Ethic
Toward Class Consciousness Next Time
Why haven't the workers in the advanced capitalist countries become class-conscious? Marx was wont to blame leadership, short memories, temporary bursts of prosperity, and, in the case of the English and German workers, national characteristics. In the last fifteen years of his life he often singled out the enmity between English and Irish workers as the chief hindrance to a revolutionary class consciousness developing in the country that was mos…
Comment on Kelly's “Alienation”
Alienation
Social Revolution and Sexual Revolution
Marx claimed that from the sexual relationship "one can...judge man's whole level of development...[T]he relationship of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man's natural behavior has become human." The women's liberation movement has provided ample evidence that in our society this relationship is one of inequality, one in which the woman is used as an object, and one …
Marxism and Political Science
Three Views on Reich's Concept of Sexual Repression
The article on Wilhelm Reich by Bertell Ollman ("Social Revolution and Sexual Revolution," MR, September 1973) raises a number of important issues too long ignored by the mainstream of Marxist thought. As elucidated by Ollman, these issues center around social-psychological inquiries as to the mechanisms of social control of the subconscious mind.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are publishe…
Marx's Vision of communism a reconstruction
Recognition of the trends and their meaning has led to a renewed interest in Karl Marx's vision of the communist society. Marx construed his vision of communism out of the human and technological possibilities visible in his time, given the priorities that would be adopted by a new socialist society. The programs introduced by a victorious working class to deal with the problems left by the old society and the revolution would unleash a social dy…
Alienation
In this book, the most thorough account of Marx's theory of alienation yet to have appeared in English, Professor Ollman reconstructs the theory from its constituent parts and offers it as a vantage point from which to view the rest of Marxism. The book further contains a detailed examination of Marx's philosophy of internal relations, the much neglected logical foudation of his method, and provides a systematic account of Marx's conception of hu…
Radical Textbooks
Review of American Politics, Power and Change by Kennedi Dollbeare and Murray Edelman; Democracy for the Few by Michael Parenti; The Politics of Power by Ira Katznelson and Mark Kesselman; The American Political System, A Radical Approach by Edward Greenberg.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review websi…
Marxism
The role of Marxism in universities is only slightly less obscure than the role of universities in Marxism, but perhaps some light can be shed on both subjects by examining Marx's little-known response to an ancient Roman myth.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
Class Struggle
Social and Sexual Revolution
Marxism
Marxism is a body of social, political, and economic thought derived from the writings of Karl Marx and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels. Various schools of Marxism have emerged since Marx's death in 1883; many of these remain influential today (see also SOCIALISM and COMMUNISM).This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at t…
The Left academy
With today's conservative mood on university and college campuses, academics and students will find The Left Academy a useful reference to the current state of Marxist thought. This book explores Marxism in the social sciences and applied sociology fields such as social work and health. The Left Academy features essays that analyze the state of Marxism in various academic disciplines by a well-known scholar in that discipline. In addition to the …
Social and Sexual Revolution
Theses on the Capitalist State
(1) One major aim of Marx's analysis of capitalism is to explain how people can make their own history and be made by it at the same time, how we are both free and conditioned, and how the future is both open and necessary. (2) In Marx's theory of politics, the capitalist state is conceived of as a complex social relation of many different aspects, the main ones being political processes and institutions, the ruling class, an objective structure …
In Search of Critical Games
Sol Yurick writes radical novels, good ones, and loves to speculate on how culture gets inside people's bones. In the early 1970s, Sol and I spent a lot of time musing over Monopoly, a game many leftists love to hate, others hate to love, and practically everybody plays. According to Shelly Berman, the comedian, "Monopoly evokes a unique emotion, the surge of thrill you get when you know you've wiped out a friend." But what else is going on as we…
Academic Freedom in America Today
Three brief case studies: in 1915, Scott Nearing, a socialist professor of economics, was fired from the University of Pennsylvania for publicly opposing the use of child labor in coal mines. With an influential mine owner on the Board of Trustees, the president of the university decided he had to let Nearing go. As far as I can discover, he is the first professor fired from an American university for his radical beliefs and activities.This artic…
Left Academy
With today's conservative mood on university and college campuses, academics and students will findThe Left Academya useful reference to the current state of Marxist thought. This book explores Marxism in the social sciences and applied sociology fields such as social work and health.The Left Academyfeatures essays that analyze the state of Marxism in various academic disciplines by a well-known scholar in that discipline. In addition to the essa…
The Meaning of Dialectics
There is so much misinformation about dialectics that it may be useful to start by saying what it is not. Dialectics is not a rock-ribbed triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis which serves as an all purpose explanation, nor does it provide a formula that enables us to praise or predict anything, nor is it the motor force of history. The dialectic as such explains nothing, proves nothing, predicts nothing, and causes nothing to happen. Rather, dial…
Toward a Marxist Interpretation of the U.S. Constitution
When Moses invented ten fundamental laws for the Jewish people, he had God write them down on stone tablets. Lycurgus, too, represented the constitution he drew up for ancient Sparta as a divine gift. According to Plato, whose book, The Republic offers another version of the same practice, attributing the origins of a constitution to godly intervention is the most effective way of securing the kind of support needed for it to work. Otherwise, som…
How to Study Class Consciousness, And Why We Should
Sociology (41 works) · Political science (38 works) · Law (32 works) · Philosophy (32 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (28 works) · Epistemology (27 works) · Politics (27 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · History (14 works) · Law (14 works)