Paul Blackledge
Biographic Data
| ID | 254185 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paul Blackledge |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paul |
| FAMILY NAME | Blackledge |
| SIGNATURE | BLACKLEDGE P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Leeds Beckett University |
| ORCID | 0009-0008-7681-6643 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 45 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Friedrich Engels, historical materialism and the Crimean War
Engels, the Dialectics of Nature, and the Birth of “Marxism
Sven-Eric Liedman’s The Game of Contradictions (2022) sets out to be both the most comprehensive study of Engels’s work on the social implications of 19th-century developments in the natural sciences and the most detailed analysis of this aspect of the Marx–Engels relationship. While noting the richness and depth of Liedman’s research, this essay argues that his critique of Engels as a system builder is one-sided. Liedman’s focus on the negative …
Prophet's Children
The Last Years of Karl Marx
Notes1 I draw on my survey of this literature in Blackledge, Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 29–32
Response to Nimtz
Engels's Ecologically Indispensable if Incomplete Dialectics of Nature
Engels was neither a reductionist nor a positivist, and, far from being a political fatalist, he embraced a form of interventionist politics that was underpinned by a historically emergent ethics. It was this standpoint that he aimed to philosophically ground in Dialectics of Nature
Virtue and Politics
Marxist Class Theory for A Skeptical World
Engels vs. Marx
At the bicentenary of his birth, Frederick Engels's reputation as an original thinker is, among Anglophone academics at least, at its nadir. Despite the recent global economic crisis and associated increases in inequality that have tended to confirm Karl Marx and Engels's general critique of capitalism, Marxism is an optimistic doctrine that has not fared well in a context dominated by working-class retreat and demoralization. But if this context…
Marxism and Normative Theory
How relevant, if it all, are Marx’s ideas three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall? Jan Kandiyali in his introduction to Reassessing Marx’s Social and Political Philosophy suggests that ‘far from burying Marx’ the collapse of Soviet Communism liberated interpretations of his ideas from a ‘failed brand of communism’. If this collection makes, Tony Smith writes, ‘an absolutely compelling case that Marx holds a central place in the great trad…
Utopias
Alasdair MacIntyre’s Ethics in the Conflict of Modernity caps a long engagement with Marx and Marxism through a discussion of the life and work of C. L. R. James. MacIntyre’s critique of James is interesting both because James influenced MacIntyre’s early Marxism and because MacIntyre’s mature critique of Marxism can be understood against the background of his failure to realise a broadly Jamesian political project in the 1960s. Moreover, MacInty…
Engels’s Politics
While Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the English Working Class is almost universally praised as an honest, insightful and indeed profound picture of working-class life in Manchester in the 184
War and Revolution
This article explores the link between political and military strategy and tactics in the work of Friedrich Engels. Though widely praised for his understanding of military affairs, Engels’ interlocutors have tended to be dismissive of his political works. By exploring his politics through the lens of his military writings this article challenges the view that Engels was a mechanical materialist and political fatalist thinker. It argues that his m…
On Strategy and Tactics
This essay explores the place of electoral politics within Marxist political theory through the lens of a critique of August Nimtz's two-volume study of Lenin's electoral politics. The problem of how the Marxist left should relate to electoral politics has come to the fore in recent years in, for instance, Egypt, Greece, Spain, the UK and the USA. The debates occasioned by these movements would do well to be informed by a clearer understanding of…
Friedrich Engels and Modern Social and Political Theory
Historical Materialism
Marx’s theory of history is often misrepresented as a mechanically deterministic and fatalistic theory of change in which the complexity of the real world is reduced to simple, unconvincing abstractions. Nothing could be further from the truth. Though Stalin attempted to transform Marxism into something akin to this caricature to justify Russia’s state-capitalist industrialization after 1928, neither Marx nor his most perceptive followers underst…
Frederick Engels, Social Reproduction, and the Problem of a Unitary Theory of Women’s Oppression
In this paper I argue that Frederick Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State remains a fundamental resource for anyone wanting to understand the oppression of women as a capitalist form. By re-examining the strengths and weaknesses of Engels’s historicisation of women’s oppression through the lens of the debates opened by second wave feminism, I argue that, once properly understood, we can overcome the limitations of Eng…
Hegemony and Intervention
Alan Shandro's Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony is an original and powerful exploration of the philosophical underpinnings of Lenin's politics. Against both mainstream dismissals of Lenin's supposed elitism and minority attempts to reduce him to the status of a talented Second International Marxist, Shandro powerfully reasserts the claim that the Leninist moment was the point at which Marxist politics finally came of age. If Shandro can be faulted…
The Dialectics of Work and Leisure in Marx, Lukács, and Lefebvre
Marx’s contribution to understanding capitalism as a historical form points beyond the simplistic opposition between work and leisure to explore these practices as novel forms characterised by historically specific contradictions. Extending insights from Marx and Lukács, Lefebvre in particular argues that leisure under conditions of capitalist alienation is best understood not as the free alternative to the necessity of work but as an aspect of b…
Practical Materialism
Frederick Engels’s Anti-Dühring was the most important theoretical response to the emerging reformist tendencies within European socialism in the 19th century. It also proved to be Engels’s most influential, and controversial work. Because it is, as Hal Draper points out, ‘the only more or less systematic presentation of Marxism’ by either by Marx or Engels, anyone wanting to reinterpret Marx must first detach it from his seal of approval. It is …
Reflections on the Marxist theory of history
The recent emergence of global anti-capitalist and anti-war movements have created a space within which Marxism can flourish in a way as it has not been able to for a generation. This book shows that by disassociating Marxism from the legacy of Stalinism, Marxist historiography need not retreat before the criticisms from theorists and historians. It also shows that, once rid of this incubus, Marx's theory of history can be shown to be sophisticat…
Marxism and Ethics
Marxism and ethics
Virtue and politics
The essays in this collection explore the implications of Alasdair MacIntyre's critique of liberalism, capitalism, and the modern state, his early Marxism, and the complex influences of Marxist ideas on his thought. A central idea is that MacIntyre's political and social theory is a form of revolutionary--not reactionary--Aristotelianism. The contributors aim, in varying degrees, both to engage with the theoretical issues of MacIntyre's critique …
Marx in the Anglophone World
The twenty-first century opened on a pessimistic note from some older voices within Anglophone Marxism. Perry Anderson relaunched New Left Review in 2000 with the claim that there no longer existed any “collective agency able to match the power of capital”,1 while inMarx’s Revenge2 Meghnad Desai argued that though capitalism is “the only game in town”, because Marx had outlined the most sophisticated account of its crisis-prone nature his work re…
Alasdair MacIntyre's Engagement with Marxism
Although Alasdair MacIntyre is best known today as the author of After Virtue (1981), he was, in the 1950s and 1960s, one of the most erudite members of Britain’s Marxist Left: being a militant within, first, the Communist Party, then the New Left, and finally the heterodox Trotskyist International Socialism group. This selection of his essays on Marxism from that period aims to show that his youthful thought profoundly informed his mature ethics…
Alasdair MacIntyre
Alasdair MacIntyre's concept of social practice sits at the core of his account of the virtue-fostering forms of resistance to capitalism, liberalism and the modern (un)democratic state. However, while this concept was articulated, in part, as a response to perceived weaknesses with Marx's analysis of working-class revolutionary praxis, and although MacIntyre has criticised Marx for the paucity of his theorisation of such practice, he has himself…
Karl Kautsky and Marxist Historiography
The traditional dismissive characterization of Karl Kautsky's Marxism as a form of mechanical or even Darwinian evolutionism is a caricature that obscures the very real and important contribution he made to historical materialism in the early years of the last century. Kautsky's historical studies of both the early Church and Reformation “communism,” as well as his attempts to analyze the contemporary Russian and American social formations, show …
Hegemony and Intervention
Alan Shandro's Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony is an original and powerful exploration of the philosophical underpinnings of Lenin's politics. Against both mainstream dismissals of Lenin's supposed elitism and minority attempts to reduce him to the status of a talented Second International Marxist, Shandro powerfully reasserts the claim that the Leninist moment was the point at which Marxist politics finally came of age. If Shandro can be faulted…
War and Revolution
This article explores the link between political and military strategy and tactics in the work of Friedrich Engels. Though widely praised for his understanding of military affairs, Engels’ interlocutors have tended to be dismissive of his political works. By exploring his politics through the lens of his military writings this article challenges the view that Engels was a mechanical materialist and political fatalist thinker. It argues that his m…
On Strategy and Tactics
This essay explores the place of electoral politics within Marxist political theory through the lens of a critique of August Nimtz's two-volume study of Lenin's electoral politics. The problem of how the Marxist left should relate to electoral politics has come to the fore in recent years in, for instance, Egypt, Greece, Spain, the UK and the USA. The debates occasioned by these movements would do well to be informed by a clearer understanding of…
Rationalist Capitalist Concerns
Engels’s Politics
While Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the English Working Class is almost universally praised as an honest, insightful and indeed profound picture of working-class life in Manchester in the 184
Marxism, Nihilism, and the Problem of Ethical Politics Today
We have found no way to replace capitalism as an effective mode of production, and yet that capitalist society as it actually functions violates all defensible conceptions of a rational moral order
Friedrich Engels and Modern Social and Political Theory
Practical Materialism
Frederick Engels’s Anti-Dühring was the most important theoretical response to the emerging reformist tendencies within European socialism in the 19th century. It also proved to be Engels’s most influential, and controversial work. Because it is, as Hal Draper points out, ‘the only more or less systematic presentation of Marxism’ by either by Marx or Engels, anyone wanting to reinterpret Marx must first detach it from his seal of approval. It is …
Alasdair MacIntyre’s Contribution to Marxism
This essay questions, through a critique of his reading of classical Marxism, the path taken by Alasdair MacIntyre since his break with the Marxist Left in the 1960s. It argues that MacIntyre was uncharitable in his criticisms of Marxism, or at least in his conflation of the most powerful aspects of the classical Marxist tradition with the crudities of Kautskyian and Stalinist materialism. Contra MacIntyre, this essay locates in the writings of t…
Anti-Leninist’ anti-capitalism
The emergence, in the wake of the 1999 demonstration against the WTO in Seattle, of what has been labeled variously as an international anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, anti-globalization, or globa
Learning from defeat
Within the contemporary anti-capitalist movement a debate concerning the most effective forms taken by political organizations has opened. However, few of the contributions to this debate include an adequate historical component: indeed, while many have labelled the anti-capitalist movement a new left, few draw any lessons from the first British New Left of 1956–62. This article addresses this lacuna through an analysis of the debate over the que…
Perry Anderson and the End of History
In light of Perry Anderson's recent re-Iaunch of New Left Review, and the publication of Gregory Elliott's Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History, it is perhaps an opportune moment for Marxists to assess Anderson's contribution to socialist strategic thought. At the heart of Anderson's manifesto is the claim that the principal aspect of the past decade ‘can be defined as the virtually uncontested consolidation, and universal diffusio…
Rationalist Capitalist Concerns
Realism and renewals
Perry Anderson is a commanding figure within anglophone Marxism. Moreover, his position as editor of the English-speaking world's most authoritative Marxist journal, New Left Review , gives a unique influence to his strategic pronouncements. This article challenges Anderson's reading of the contemporary international conjuncture and argues that his outline of the present-day strategic position of the international left is unduly pessimistic. It i…
Historical Materialism and Social Evolution
On Richard Weikart's Socialist Darwinism
Learning from defeat
Within the contemporary anti-capitalist movement a debate concerning the most effective forms taken by political organizations has opened. However, few of the contributions to this debate include an adequate historical component: indeed, while many have labelled the anti-capitalist movement a new left, few draw any lessons from the first British New Left of 1956–62. This article addresses this lacuna through an analysis of the debate over the que…
Anti-Leninist’ anti-capitalism
The emergence, in the wake of the 1999 demonstration against the WTO in Seattle, of what has been labeled variously as an international anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, anti-globalization, or globa
Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left
For over forty years Perry Anderson, has been one of the most influential figures on the intellectual Left. Through his writings, his publishing, his editing of New Left Review, and teaching at UCLA, he has introduced and disseminated a range of European Marxist opinion to the English speaking world: Deutscher, Gramsci, Sartre, Lukacs, Althusser, Poulantzas, to name a few. His own books are seminal contributions to political theory. This survey o…
Leon Trotsky’s Contribution to the Marxist Theory of History
Karl Kautsky and Marxist Historiography
The traditional dismissive characterization of Karl Kautsky's Marxism as a form of mechanical or even Darwinian evolutionism is a caricature that obscures the very real and important contribution he made to historical materialism in the early years of the last century. Kautsky's historical studies of both the early Church and Reformation “communism,” as well as his attempts to analyze the contemporary Russian and American social formations, show …
Alasdair MacIntyre's Engagement with Marxism
Chapter Five. Notes From The Moral Wilderness
Alasdair MacIntyre’s Contribution to Marxism
This essay questions, through a critique of his reading of classical Marxism, the path taken by Alasdair MacIntyre since his break with the Marxist Left in the 1960s. It argues that MacIntyre was uncharitable in his criticisms of Marxism, or at least in his conflation of the most powerful aspects of the classical Marxist tradition with the crudities of Kautskyian and Stalinist materialism. Contra MacIntyre, this essay locates in the writings of t…
History, Ethics and Politics
Alasdair MacIntyre's Engagement with Marxism
Although Alasdair MacIntyre is best known today as the author of After Virtue (1981), he was, in the 1950s and 1960s, one of the most erudite members of Britain’s Marxist Left: being a militant within, first, the Communist Party, then the New Left, and finally the heterodox Trotskyist International Socialism group. This selection of his essays on Marxism from that period aims to show that his youthful thought profoundly informed his mature ethics…
Alasdair MacIntyre
Alasdair MacIntyre's concept of social practice sits at the core of his account of the virtue-fostering forms of resistance to capitalism, liberalism and the modern (un)democratic state. However, while this concept was articulated, in part, as a response to perceived weaknesses with Marx's analysis of working-class revolutionary praxis, and although MacIntyre has criticised Marx for the paucity of his theorisation of such practice, he has himself…
Reflections on Empire - By Negri, Antonio
Marx in the Anglophone World
The twenty-first century opened on a pessimistic note from some older voices within Anglophone Marxism. Perry Anderson relaunched New Left Review in 2000 with the claim that there no longer existed any “collective agency able to match the power of capital”,1 while inMarx’s Revenge2 Meghnad Desai argued that though capitalism is “the only game in town”, because Marx had outlined the most sophisticated account of its crisis-prone nature his work re…
Marxism, Nihilism, and the Problem of Ethical Politics Today
We have found no way to replace capitalism as an effective mode of production, and yet that capitalist society as it actually functions violates all defensible conceptions of a rational moral order
Virtue and politics
The essays in this collection explore the implications of Alasdair MacIntyre's critique of liberalism, capitalism, and the modern state, his early Marxism, and the complex influences of Marxist ideas on his thought. A central idea is that MacIntyre's political and social theory is a form of revolutionary--not reactionary--Aristotelianism. The contributors aim, in varying degrees, both to engage with the theoretical issues of MacIntyre's critique …
Marxism and Ethics
Marxism and ethics
Reflections on the Marxist theory of history
The recent emergence of global anti-capitalist and anti-war movements have created a space within which Marxism can flourish in a way as it has not been able to for a generation. This book shows that by disassociating Marxism from the legacy of Stalinism, Marxist historiography need not retreat before the criticisms from theorists and historians. It also shows that, once rid of this incubus, Marx's theory of history can be shown to be sophisticat…
The Dialectics of Work and Leisure in Marx, Lukács, and Lefebvre
Marx’s contribution to understanding capitalism as a historical form points beyond the simplistic opposition between work and leisure to explore these practices as novel forms characterised by historically specific contradictions. Extending insights from Marx and Lukács, Lefebvre in particular argues that leisure under conditions of capitalist alienation is best understood not as the free alternative to the necessity of work but as an aspect of b…
Practical Materialism
Frederick Engels’s Anti-Dühring was the most important theoretical response to the emerging reformist tendencies within European socialism in the 19th century. It also proved to be Engels’s most influential, and controversial work. Because it is, as Hal Draper points out, ‘the only more or less systematic presentation of Marxism’ by either by Marx or Engels, anyone wanting to reinterpret Marx must first detach it from his seal of approval. It is …
Political science (37 works) · Politics (34 works) · Sociology (34 works) · Law (33 works) · Philosophy (29 works) · Law (26 works) · Epistemology (25 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (25 works) · Philosophy (21 works) · Marxist philosophy (14 works)