From Bohm-Bawerk on, political economists have seemingly blown great holes in Marxism, disproving its key concepts and falsifying Marx's predictions. In this book, Geoffrey Pilling maintains that even the most devastating of such factual analyses are fruitless because they misconstrue the nature of Marx's critique. In Pilling's presentation, Marx's critique of political economy is not "economic" but philosophic. In criticizing political economy, Marx transcends it and in so doing is essentially immune from any analysis which turns on "facts." According to (...) Pilling, "Marx's work cannot be reduced to a series of results, to be tested against the 'facts' of capitalist development". Pilling, following the lead of Lenin, seeks to overturn the "shallow empiricism" which has led to the degeneration of Marxism. It is Pilling's aim to recover the "philosophical method" of Capital, i.e., to re-work Capital in the light of Hegel's Logic, to rehabilitate dialectic over empiricism. Pilling begins by showing how "... Marx's critique of political economy [is] of a philosophic nature, rather than one concerned with the details of economic theory alone". Marx, as we know, rejects the individualism of political economy which derives from Locke. He condemns the uncritical and "ahistorical" character of political economy, i.e., the tendency to treat the categories of economics as natural. According to Pilling's. (shrink)

There is a perplexing transition in Dr. Reza Davari's thought, when he problematizes the relation between Iranian and Western history/cultures, on which this paper is focusing. The interperative objective is to clarify this transition on the basis of the implicit relation between the two most fundamental concepts in his earlier and later thought respectively westernization and underdevelopment. Although, by this transition, the level of discussion transits from an ontologico-philosophical to an intellectualist one. So, there are two different levels of problematization (...) in his thought which differ deeply. Therefore, we are not just dealing with the substitution of fundamental concepts, but with different problematizations and different levels of discussion. Obviously, there will be new problems arising which are not just concerning with the justification of the transition but with the problematization of westernization itself. Finally, it's been concluded that in order to clarify these new problems, we should step back to the level of philosophical discussion, and first of all to the clarification of the I-not-I relation which has been neglected thoroughly in the whole project. (shrink)