Marx’s scientific and political criticism: The internal relation

Abstract

Marx’s method of critique via several philosophy of science categories reveals logical problems, as well as political biases, within different competing approaches of his period. Some principles subject to Marx’s criticism include: metaphysics, ahistoricism, false universalisation, inversion, reductionism, idealism, obscurantism, incommensurability, and tautology. This paper examines these categories and their logical bases, the competing approaches Marx targets as politically biased because of their failure to either respect such principles or their violation of them, and the way in which, by extension, several traditions in modern social discourse reveal parallel political biases because of similar logical failures.