Review
"Torrance's book is packed with suggestive notions .... The issues raised in the book are indeed of lasting and contemporary importance." Richard D. Chessick, American Journal of Psychotherapy
"...Torrance operates in the analytical mode and aims to give the reader a plausible construal and defense of Marx's ideas -- at least in the area under discussion. And, in this aim, the book very largely succeeds." David McLellan, American Jounral of Sociology
Book Description
Karl Marx's writings contain, besides economic analysis and the political theory of revolutionary communism, an influential sociology of ideas, explaining how social life shapes and distorts people's ideas and beliefs. This book presents a fresh critical study of this theory, establishing what Marx did and did not say, and distinguishing the more scientific parts of his thought from those that were overly influenced by his revolutionary aims. The author argues that Marx's own theory of ideas can play an important role in explaining the subsequent degeneration of Marxist thought itself.
Karl Marx's Theory of Ideas FROM THE PUBLISHER
Marx's ideas about how society presents a misleading appearance to its members have been the subject of many conflicting interpretations. In this book John Torrance takes a fresh, un-Marxist approach to Marx's texts and shows that a more precise, coherent and cogent sociology of ideas can be extracted from them than is generally allowed. The implications of this for twentieth-century capitalism and for recent debates about Marx's conceptions of justice, morality and the history of social science are explored. The author argues that Marx's theory of ideas is sufficiently independent of other parts of his thought to provide a critique and explanation of those defects in his own understanding of capitalism which allowed Marxism itself to become, by his own definition, an ideology.
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