Marx and the Politics of Abstraction

Building upon his earlier work on the methodology of Karl Marx, Marx's Scientific Dialectics, Paolucci (sociology, Eastern Kentucky U.) revisits Marx's methods of critique and abstraction discussed in that earlier text and explores Marx's theory of history in relation to teleology, arguing that Marx's approach is widely misread and not understood as a historical-scientific analysis that is a departure from moral-ethical-political criticisms that rely on abstract absolutes. His analysis of Marx's methodology is heavily influenced by the ideas of Bertell Ollman about Marx's dialectics and extends Ollman's approach to Marx to a range of issues, including the philosophy of science, conceptualizing variables and estimating their association, theories of religion, class analysis, and models of history. Annotation c2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Paul B. Paolucci, Ph.D. (2001) in Sociology, University of Kentucky, is Professor of Sociology at Eastern Kentucky University. He has published several works on Marxist theory, method, and political economics, including Marx's Scientific Dialectics (Brill, 2007).