Marxism as a Prototype for Grand Theories of Society

Marxism and Grand Theory

The notion of grand theory is something of a paradox. Despite its tremendous success and its ubiquitous use, there is little to no agreement on its concise meaning, its application, or its evaluation. The reason for this ambiguity, however, is not difficult to find. Something like an unambiguous definition is already conspicuously absent from its discussion in The Sociological Imagination (Mills, 1959), the text in which C. Wright Mills coined the term in the late 1950s.

The meaning that Mills himself gave to the concept derived almost exclusively from the description of its main point of reference, the structural functionalism of Talcott Parsons, which he endowed with scathing criticism. In addition to this referent, grand theory is specified through its opposite, abstracted empiricism. Abstracted empiricism is equally geared to describe the work of one scholar, in this case, the quantitative survey research of Paul Lazarsfeld. As a result of this personification, the concepts of grand theory and abstracted empiricism, as discussed by Mills, bear more resemblance to ad hominem attacks than to analytical categories.

Despite this shortcoming, it is entirely clear what overall issue Mills aimed to address in coining the terms. His very personalized broadsides against both grand theory and abstracted empiricism are about the relationship between theory and empirical research. Mills uses these concepts to castigate what he perceived as the twin evils of American sociology in the 1950s. Grand theory stands for theory without empirical data; abstracted empiricism for empirical data without theory. Mills’ ideal of scholarship is one that combines the two, that is, theory and empirical research. He identified the realization of this unity of theory and research, as one could call it, with the works of the classics such as Marx, Weber, and Durkheim.

Mills did, in fact, belong to the handful of mid-century scholars who were consciously engaged in forming the sociological theory canon by stylizing the scholars we now consider to be the “classics” as prototypes or model cases for contemporary scholarship. To advance this view, Mills (1960) produced a textbook defining “the classic tradition” that includes readings from all major scholars that we now consider part of the sociological theory canon.

In this article, I argue that the term grand theory, as coined and used by Mills, is a mixed blessing: while it opens up the floor for the very important task of distinguishing between different types of theorizing, it locates these differences exclusively along a one-dimensional spectrum that spans from empirical facts to universal theory. Putting the focus this way, Mills’ concept omits one of the most important aspects of the work of the classics from view. He failed to recognize that the works that he idealized dealt with fundamentally different issues than the quarrel between theorists and researchers that professional American sociologists like himself found themselves in.

Mills’ treatment of Marx, whom he, unlike other sociologists at the time, included among the classics (Mills, 1959, 1960, 1963) is particularly telling for how much his way of thinking about theory departs from the views of the “classics” themselves. The opposite of theory in Marxist thought is not empirical research, but practice, with practice understood a revolutionary political action, not as research practice. The relation between theory and practice that was central to Marx's thinking became subsequently known as the unity of theory and practice in Marxist scholarship (Anderson, 1979; Lobkowicz, 1967; Meyer, 1954).

Marxists were, however, not alone in highlighting the connection between the theory of historical materialism and political practice. Anti-Marxist critics likewise addressed the fact that Marxism provides a motivating force for political action. A common element of anti-Marxist criticism of Marxism is the identification of historical materialism as a secular religion. The point was made by anti-Marxist philosophers such as Karl Popper, Karl Löwith, and Isaiah Berlin: three scholars who came from very different philosophical backgrounds and are not usually discussed in conjunction with each other. Yet the major thrust of their argument against Marxism was the same. Since Marxism provides a totalizing philosophy of society that captures all social life from its beginning until its envisioned end, it assigns all human beings a place in this cosmic scheme and endows life with a purpose, which guides and motivates action.

According to Popper, historical materialism is a millennial pseudo-science and Marx a prophet, rather than a real scientist. What Marxists call the unity of theory and practice is for him no more than a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Marx's prophecy were to become a reality, this would still not be proof of its scientific validity.

It may rather be a consequence of its religious character and a proof of the force of the religious faith which it has been able to inspire in men. And in Marxism more particularly the religious element is unmistakable. In the hour of their deepest misery and degradation, Marx's prophecy gave the workers an inspiring belief in their mission, and in the great future which their movement was to prepare for the whole of mankind. (Popper, 1971 [1945], p. 198; see also Popper, 1957 [1944])

This view on the ability of Marxism to give meaning to history and motivate action is echoed by Karl Löwith. While Popper traces Marx's philosophy of history back to Aristotelian essentialism, Löwith sees it as a result of a fundamental break with ancient Greek thought that was produced by Christianity. To Löwith, Marxism is a secular version of Christian eschatology. “Historical materialism is essentially, though secretly, a history of fulfilment and salvation (…). What seems to be a scientific discovery (…) is, on the contrary, from the first to the last sentence inspired by an eschatological faith.” According to Löwith, it is this eschatological dimension, not its scientific credibility, which makes for the political potency of Marxism. “It would have been quite impossible to elaborate the vision of the proletariat's messianic vocation on a purely scientific basis and to inspire millions of followers by a bare statement of facts” (Löwith, 1949; see also Löwith, 1967 [1941] for a first formulation of the argument).

The model of history of Marxism, according to Isaiah Berlin, endows the history of humanity and the life of every single individual with a purpose “for in reality everything necessarily fits, nothing is superfluous, nothing amiss, every ingredient is ‘justified’ in being where it is by the demands of the transcendent whole” (Berlin, 1957, p. 129). Berlin argues like Popper that different versions of this view of history can be found since Plato and Aristotle, yet he is also of one opinion with Löwith in holding that Marxism has provided such ideas with an unprecedented popularity.

There has grown up in our modern time a pseudo-sociological mythology which, in the guise of scientific concepts, has developed into a new animism – certainly a more primitive and naïve religion than the traditional European faiths which it seeks to replace. (…) Of these Marxism is much the boldest and the most intelligent. (Berlin, 1957, pp. 158–159) (see also Berlin, 1978 [1939] for an intellectual biography of Marx)

Marxists and anti-Marxists alike thus argued that it is the relation of Marxist theory to political practice that matters. They agreed that it is not its theoretical grandness per se (its scope condition, to choose an analytical term) that made Marxism attractive, but the meaning that its model of history produces. It is the certainty to stand on the right side of history and to act in accordance with its ultimate end that provides Marxism with a legitimizing and motivating force.

When Popper, Löwith, and Berlin wrote their assessments of Marxism, it was with an eye on the political confrontation between the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite states and the “Free World,” i.e., the United States and its Western European allies, that became known as the Cold War. With this confrontation between the two blocs, the question of how one positioned oneself vis-à-vis Marx was not just a matter of social theory, but it was an issue of immediate political, i.e., practical, relevance. Socialist politics informed by Marx's writings had existed before, but with the Soviet Union as a superpower, socialism existed as a viable alternative at the global political stage that appeared as a promise to some, and as a threat to others.

Marxism (both Soviet Marxism–Leninism and Western Marxism) and anti-Marxism do, however, not exhaust the full spectrum of positions on historical materialism that flourished throughout the Cold War. The incorporation of Marx as a classic of sociology, as facilitated by Mills and others in the 1960s, also gave rise to a brand of scholarship that self-consciously tried to escape this polarization of pro- and anti-Marxist theorizing, that is, to scholarship produced by scholars who considered themselves to be neither Marxists nor anti-Marxists. I look at the work of Jürgen Habermas, Anthony Giddens, and Michel Foucault as striking examples for this brand of grand theory.

Looking at the works of these scholars and its engagement with Marx, I argue that Marxism is not just one grand social theory among many, but that the entire genre of grand theory that flourished in the second half of the twentieth century is the product of a dialogue with Marxism, that is, Marxism is the prototype or model case of grand theory (see also Christoph Henning's comparable assessment of Marx as “the secret center of social philosophy”; Henning, 2005, p. 30).

The engagement with Marxism, exemplified by the grand theories of Habermas, Giddens, and Foucault, went into decline again by the 1990s. Looking at Marxism as the prototype for grand theory thus helps to account for the lack of resonance of this genre that we witness at the present. With the end of the Cold War, debates on Marxism and the style of social theorizing that was facilitated by these debates lost significance (on the decline of grand theories since the 1990s, see Anicker, 2022).

Grand theory, so the main argument of the article, did not flourish from the 1960s to 1990s because there was an unprecedented interest in abstract theoretical ideas, but because these abstract ideas were at heart about a very specific real-life situation. It is, in short, the practice side of the unity of theory and practice of grand theory, not the theory side, that accounts for the trajectory. Conceiving of grand theory only in relation to empirical research, as Mills did, and ignoring its practical implications, removes the causally relevant aspect from view. It is the change in practical relevance of grand theory, rather than the takeover of more positivist-minded empirical research endeavors in the era of neoliberal academic capitalism (e.g., Münch, 2014; Thorpe, 2022) that accounts for the absence of new grand theories in the current century.

Tracing this cycle of rise and decline of grand theory is, however, not the same as looking at the trajectory of theory in total. There are other types of theorizing as well, whose trajectories differ (see the introduction to this special issue for a more detailed discussion of grand theory in relation to other types of theory). To distinguish between different types of theorizing, Mills's concept of grand theory becomes useful, hence the allusion to it as a mixed blessing. Grand theory, as understood in this article, is a form of theorizing that tries to capture social life in its totality. Grand theories do not aim to provide conceptual tool-kids that may or may not apply to specific empirical cases, but they aim to provide a picture of social life that has both global reach and all-encompassing historical scope. In analytical terms, grand social theory is a form of holism that holds that the single elements of social life can only be understood if placed into the context of social life as a whole.

It was this specific form of theorizing that gained significance with the beginning of the Cold War and went into decline with its end. Analytical sociology, by contrast, in particular the formal modeling of social mechanisms, which is best exemplified by the debate on the micro-macro link, was on the rise in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Alexander et al., 1987; Hedström & Swedberg, 1998; Knorr-Cetina & Cicourel, 1981). A general loss of interest in theory can hardly account for such diversified trajectories. The question that animates this article is thus why a particular type of theorizing flourished in the time from the 1960s to the 1990s.

The following section reconstructs the academic discourse on Marx that prevailed in the first half of the twentieth century. Social scientists, philosophers, and theologians discussed Marxism as a secular eschatology (i.e., a teaching of the end of history), and Marx himself as a millennial prophet. The argument was geared toward discrediting the scientific credentials of historical materialism and, with it, the political legitimacy of the Soviet Union. The subsequent sections show how Habermas, Giddens, and Foucault, as part of a generation of scholars who entered academia in the postwar period, made an effort to make Marxism academically acceptable by replacing an essentialist holism that Marx had inherited from Hegel's eschatological model of history with a form of relational holism that was free of any eschatological or millennial connotations. The concluding section looks at the decline of grand theory, both in the form of essentialist and relational holism, with the end of the Cold War.

Marxism as Secular Eschatology

Marxism was absent from the social science curriculum in the time from 1890 to 1920, which is frequently credited as the foundational period of sociology as an academic discipline. In the first sociology textbook written for university instruction by Albion Small and George Vincent, for instance, the authors stated, after enumerating the names of well-known socialists such as Marx, that “it is no part of the purpose of this book to discuss Socialism, except to distinguish it from Sociology” (Small & Vincent, 1894, p. 41).

The few systematic academic discussions of Marxism that existed at the time, such as that by the Czech sociologist Tomas Masaryk (1899), had just as much as the passing reference by Small and Vincent the aim to reject socialism and denounce the status of Marxism as a proper social science. Where Marxism had an influence on the emerging discipline of sociology, with German-speaking countries at the forefront, it was largely ex negativo, that is, as a sometimes explicit and sometimes more implicit denouncement of historical materialism (Käsler, 1984). The view of an incompatibility of Marxism and sociology was echoed by many Marxists as well, such as Georg Lukács, according to whom sociology was nothing but the bourgeois answer to Marx. In Lukács view, the expression Marxist sociology (as used by the Russian social scientist Nikolay Bukharin in the 1920s) was accordingly a contradiction in terms (Lukács, 1925; 1980 [1954]; Kołakowski, 1978, p. 278).

During the classical phase of Marxism that dates from the death of Marx in 1883 until the First World War, Marxist scholarship was dominated by socialist writers outside of academia. The institutional basis of Marxism during this period included not only political parties and labor unions, but also newspapers, journals, and publishing houses, as well as singing clubs, sports clubs, etc. (Lidtke, 1985; Wunderer, 1980). Marxist scholarship was thus fully institutionalized, but it was institutionalized outside the university.

The inclusion of Marxism into academia only began gradually since the 1920s, giving rise to what is in the history of Marxism is variously known as academic, scientific, or more specifically, social scientific Marxism (Krätke, 1996). The institutions that facilitated the academization of Marxism, such as the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, founded in the 1920s, are well remembered (Albrecht et al., 1999; Jay, 1996). While the impact of the institute was indeed tremendous, it would be wrong to conclude that the institutionalization of the study of Marx at the university was advanced exclusively by the champions of Marxism. Anti-Marxist scholars had an impact as well, which has not yet been systematically acknowledged and analyzed. The study of Marxism as the ideology of the Soviet Union was a central element of area study programs in Western Europe and North America that proliferated with the beginning of the Cold War but often had institutional histories that go back well into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, the study of Marxism and its practical political impact was facilitated by these institutions.

The School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies at University College London provides an example (Roberts, 1991). Founded in 1915, it hosted as one of its first lecturers the already mentioned sociologist Tomas Masaryk, whose two-volume The Spirit of Russia (Masaryk, 1919 [1913]), which discussed Russian social thought with a focus on the impact of Marxism on the Russian intelligentsia, was translated into English during his time at the Institute. The work is an early example of what became known as Marxology during the Cold War, i.e., the scientific study of Marxism as a worldview necessary to take into account if one wants to understand social, political, and economic life in Eastern Europe and Russia (on the place of Marxology in Soviet studies, see for example, Bocheński, 1961 in the inaugural article for the journal Studies in Soviet Thought). Looking only at pro-Marxist discourse and institutions and ignoring the anti-Marxist equivalents misses something crucial from the overall picture.

Today, sociologists regard Marx as a founding father of the discipline, grouping him together with Weber and Durkheim as part of what Bierstedt has dubbed “the Holy Trinity” of classical sociological theory (Bierstedt, 1981). While Marxism had an increasing number of academic proponents since the 1920s, anti-Marxists continued to outnumber Marxists well into the middle of the twentieth century. The place of Marxism in the social science curriculum was, in consequence, anything but fixed. As Connell (1997) has shown, Marx became a full-fledged member of the sociological canon only with the postwar expansion of sociology and the radicalization of university students in the 1960s. “The grouping of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber was, thus, a late development in the construction of the canon. Durkheim and Weber were the survivors of the canon-making enterprise of Parsons's generation, Marx was grafted on in the next generation” (Connell, 1997, p. 1542). In the wake of this development, Marx also assumed a more prominent place in accounts of the history of sociological theory (e.g., Bottomore & Nisbet, 1978).

Up until the 1960s, however, there were hardly any scholars who discussed Marx as a sociologist. The dominant discourse on Marxism within academia, as the examples of Popper, Löwith, and Berlin above show, did not even grant Marxism scientific status. The subsequent classification of Marx as a founder of the discipline of sociology does, however, not only misrepresent the historical facts about the development of the discipline (i.e., the initial exclusion of Marxism from sociology), but it also removes the substantial impact from view that the anti-Marxist argument of the first half of the twentieth century had on the way in which Marxism was included into academic debate. The Marxism that entered the social science curriculum in the 1960s was a Marxism rewritten in the light of anti-Marxist criticism.

Before Marx became a classic of the social sciences, a debate on the religious character of Marxism proliferated. The religious quality of Marxism (Engel's distinction between utopian and scientific socialism notwithstanding) was seen in the fact that historical materialism turns history into a purposeful whole that strives toward a preordained end of history, that is, Marxism provides a secular eschatology of social life, with eschatology meaning the teaching of the end of times (from the Ancient Greek éskhatos “last” and -logy), as understood within Abrahamic religions such as Christianity. Historical materialism is a complete system of thought of social life, with an ontology that entails the description, explanation, and prediction of social life from the beginning of human history until its envisioned end.

Grand theory, understood in this sense, is more than just large-scale theorizing. It is more than just the scope conditions that make it different from other forms of theorizing, such as, for instance, middle-range theorizing. Looking at social life as part of a preordained plan means that everything in social life must be accounted for as part of this plan. Nothing happens by accident or without any purpose. An eschatology provides every individual with a position in this cosmic scheme. It speaks to the question of who the plan can be known by, what role each individual plays in its fulfillment, and how it is supposed to act. In philosophical, rather than in metaphysical terms, an eschatology entails not only an ontology of history, but also an epistemology and an ethic. An eschatology is thus not simply a theory that predicts the future, but a theory that posits the existence of a cosmic scheme that accounts for everything there is.

Descriptions of Marxism as an eschatology proliferated first after the Russian Revolution and again with the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s. Among the first sociologists to advance the argument was the Russian-born sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, whose opposition to Bolshevism resulted in a sentence to permanent exile, which he spent in the United States. According to Sorokin, the central problem with Marx's conception of history was not simply that it was empirically wrong, but the fact that it was wrong because it derived from an eschatological view of history. Marx's causal determinism, he argued, derived from the belief in an “eschatological, ‘historical’ tendency toward socialism,” which “makes any criticism of the Marxian conception of determinism unnecessary. Its weakness is evident” (Sorokin, 1928, pp. 540–541). It is the same thrust of argument that would be spelled out in more detail by Popper, Löwith, and Berlin, although of these three, only Löwith used the term eschatology (in an earlier work that compared Marx and Weber, Löwith had likewise not used the concept of eschatology, but instead referred to “the nineteenth-century faith in progress” in his discussion of Marx, Löwith, 1993 [1932], p. 40).

While the observation of the eschatological dimension of Marxism was made by many scholars, it is usually employed within widely different theoretical frameworks about the place of religion within science. Some scholars refer to Marxism as a substitute religion; others speak of a secular religion. The former expression resonates with assumptions about religious meaning as a universal anthropological need, while the latter emphasizes the historically contingent character in which religious ideas persist in a secular age. Both interpretative frameworks offer primacy of place to religion as the original formulation of the eschatological model of history, while the secular version appears merely as an imperfect copy, as Hans Blumenberg (1983 [1966]) pointed out. Both of these expressions, i.e., substitute religion and secular religion, have accordingly been used just as much by scholars who want to re-emphasize the validity of religious thought in the face of Marxist criticism (e.g., Tillich, 1922) as by those who have the reverse goal to invalidate the legitimacy of Marxist ideas because they are not yet fully secular (e.g., Sombart, 1924).

Other scholars, by contrast, such as Alf Ahlberg (1949), have argued that there exists no such primacy of Christian ideas, since Christian eschatology itself is just a variation of millennialism, i.e., the belief in the coming of a golden age, that can be found across cultures (see also Mühlmann, 1961 for a comparative ethnology of millennialism). Theologians who make this argument have in consequence tried to separate the Christian Gospel from pre-Christian mythology, most notably Rudolf Bultmann in a program known as the demystification of the New Testament (Bultmann, 1957).

Two Types of Grand Theory: Essentialist and Relational Holism

Through the intense debates on this topic, the argument on the eschatological nature of Marxism turned into common knowledge among postwar social scientists, philosophers, and theologians. The argument was so central, i.e., the weakness of Marxism so evident, to echo Sorokin, that scholars who tried to give Marxism academic credibility focused on overcoming its eschatological dimension. They tried to create an academic or scientific Marx, who would no longer be regarded as a millennial prophet.

The social theories of Jürgen Habermas, Anthony Giddens, and Michel Foucault provide prominent examples. All three scholars have in common that Marxism provides the central point of reference in their oeuvres. As the following analysis shows, it served as a prototype for their own theorizing that they tried to both emulate and move away from at the same time; that is, they tried, like Marx, to formulate a grand theoretical perspective of society while also trying to stay clear of the eschatological dimension of Marxism. As such, they did not identify themselves neither as Marxists nor as anti-Marxists. All three made pronounced statements to this effect.

The way they tried to achieve this goal of formulating an anti-anti-Marxist grand theory is surprisingly similar, given the otherwise stark differences between their theories. All three theorists chose a pluralization of the causal forces that make up social life, and with it a pluralization of theoretical traditions and schools of thought they rely on, as a way to avoid eschatological arguments. Since the causal forces that constitute social life are manifold and their effects can only be understood if studied in relation to each other, social processes are, in the last resort, contingent, making it impossible to predict an end of history or eschaton. To capture the significance of this strategy of writing a non-eschatological grand theory, one has to distinguish between two types of grand theory, i.e., two types of holism, to use the terminology introduced above.

The two main approaches to holism are what I want to call essentialist holism and relational holism (for a similar conceptual distinction in reference to physics, see Teller, 1986). The defining characteristic of holism is the assumption that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” to use the Aristotelian formulation. While the idea behind the concept harks back to classical Greek philosophy, the term holism itself is a neologism coined in the 1920s (Ansbacher, 1994). Proponents of both versions of holism endorse the Aristotelian statement but give different meanings to it.

Essentialist holism holds the view that all individual parts of social life are an expression of the whole, that is, each element of the whole is an expression of an essence (or “Wesen” to use the term familiar from German idealist philosophy), which lies “behind,” “underneath,” or “at the root” of its individual expressions. One could also call it expressive holism, in the sense that each part of the whole is taken to express the essence of the whole. The notion of expressive totality advanced by Hegel and the philosophy of history that it animates is the example in point.

Relational holism, by contrast, does not assume that such essences exist. To understand social life, we have to look at all its individual parts in relation to each other; that is, we require an account of all individual elements together with an account of their interaction. The whole is the sum of its parts plus the properties that result from their interaction. Interactions and their emergent properties, rather than essences, are the reason why the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The following section shows that Habermas, Giddens, and Foucault share that they tried to convert Marx's essentialist holism into a form of relational holism.

All three authors—Habermas, Giddens, and Foucault—used conceptual distinctions that capture this contrast. This is indeed the significance of the distinction for this analysis. Apart from its wording, the contrast between essentialist and relational holism is not new, but already an integral part of contemporary social theory (a recent rejuvenation of the contrast can be found in Bruno Latour's distinction between the concept of society as an assemblage of heterogeneous elements and the concept of society as a substance or reified structure, Latour, 2005).

Habermas, Giddens, and Foucault replaced Marx's essentialist holism with a relational holism that follows a pluralist theory architecture. All three authors make an explicit effort to draw on a plurality of schools of thought to avoid monistic arguments. The theoretical syntheses they built out of this plurality of schools of thought do not result in a novel monistic theory. Each of the schools of thought the three authors draw on is held to be valid. Their synthesis does not deny the validity of these sources as stand-alone theories; it merely extends them by putting them into a larger framework, that is, the theoretical plurality is retained in their syntheses.

Previous grand theories, such as the historical materialism of Marx, were synthetic too, in the sense that they used many sources, but they were not pluralist. Their authors used multiple sources to formulate monistic theories of their own, and not to calibrate the relative validity of a plurality of different schools of thought and put their arguments in relation to each other. This very peculiar design principle of the contemporary social theories of Habermas, Giddens, and Foucault is a crucial similarity that exists despite all differences in content.

This is not to deny that there are substantial differences on core theoretical issues between them. In this article, I want to draw the focus away from the content of these theories, i.e., the positions the authors take on substantive theoretical issues (such as, for instance, the question of functionalism vs. causality, the role of rational vs. habitual action, the influence of cultural ideas vs. material interests, and others) and instead focus on the form of these theories. I look at the architecture of these theory buildings, to use a metaphor, rather than at the way they are furnished. This theory architecture, so the argument goes, uses the historical materialism of Marx and Engels as a prototype (or model case) for the construction of a grand theory of society. This form of influence, however, was mediated by the anti-Marxist discourse of the 1940s and 1950s.

Jürgen Habermas

The work of Jürgen Habermas is explicitly staged as a continuation of the Marxist tradition. While Habermas repeatedly refused to be labeled as a member of the Frankfurt School, he nevertheless placed his work in the larger context of Hegelian Marxism that is characteristic of this school. This tradition of Marxist scholarship that contrasts with the Marxism–Leninism of the Soviet Union is also known as Western Marxism, a term made popular by Perry Anderson (1979). As Habermas stated in an interview, everything “which I have made my own has only acquired its significance in connection with the project of a renewal of the theory of society grounded in this tradition” (Habermas in Dews, 1986, p. 149).

In an autobiographical statement, Habermas located his formative intellectual experience in the ideological battles of the early years of the German Federal Republic and described himself as rejecting both the Marxism–Leninism of the Soviet Union and the conservative anti-Communism of the early postwar years. It is in the context of these ideological battles between Marxists and anti-Marxists that Habermas retrospectively describes his own position as “anti-anti-communism” (Habermas, 2014, p. 48).

An engagement with Marxism can already be found in Habermas’ early publications, such as for instance, a review of the “Philosophical Discussion on Marx,” first published in 1957, that subsequently formed a central piece in his work on Theory and Practice (Habermas, 1973 [1963]). Already at this stage of his career, Habermas appropriated Marxism in a way that tried to stay clear of the philosophy of history that Marx had adopted from Hegel, although he was equally critical of Löwith's attempt to return to classical Greek conceptions of history as an antidote to the eschatological historicism of Hegelian Marxism. The fact that his review of Löwith's work (Habermas, 1963) became part of the collection of essays in Theory and Practice—although not in the English edition—shows that Habermas’ engagement with Marxism was from the very beginning informed by anti-Marxist criticism. In Theory and Praxis, Habermas tried to cut ties with Hegelian Marxism to instead advance an “empirically grounded philosophy of history” (Habermas, 1973 [1963], p. 179).

Yet the complete rejection of the Hegelian conception of history and its accompanying notion of totality did not occur before the late 1960s, as Martin Jay has pointed out (Jay, 1984). Habermas initially supported the aim of his previous mentor, Theodor W. Adorno, to use the dialectical method of Hegelian Marxism for the study of social life. Following Adorno, he defended the dialectical method in the positivism dispute (“Positivismusstreit”) of German sociology in the 1960s as distinct from the tradition of empirical social research practiced by mainstream sociology. Throughout the debate, however, Habermas took over many of the arguments advanced by the critics of Adorno. According to Jay, the positivism dispute was a turning point for Habermas that resulted in a final departure from Hegelianism. He now held that to make Marxism a viable theory, it had to be separated from its Hegelian roots and put onto firmer ground.

Habermas achieved this emancipation from the Hegelian remnants of Marxism by reconstructing historical materialism through a synthesis with non-Marxist theoretical schools of thought. The most central of these were the sociological systems theory of Talcott Parsons; psychological learning theory associated with Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg; and pragmatist philosophy from Peirce to Mead (Jay, 1984, p. 483). The grand theoretical synthesis that Habermas formed in this way was an attempt to transform the essentialist holism in Marxism into a relational holism.

Theory pluralism thus formed Habermas’ main strategy to overcome the weaknesses of historical materialism. Whether this pluralized version of Marxism still qualifies as Marxism has been disputed since. Anderson (1979), for instance, did not include Habermas in his influential volume on Western Marxism because he assumed his theoretical pluralism disqualified him from membership (see the article by Therborn, 1971 on Habermas’ eclecticism that informed this point of view).

In a recent volume dedicated to the issue, some contributors argue that Habermas ceased to be a Marxist after forming this synthesis, while others hold that Marxism is a central element even in his late work (Rapic, 2014; more extensive discussions are provided by Rockmore, 1989 and Tomberg, 2003). Mediating between these positions, Outhwaite (2014) suggests that Habermas engagement with Marx matches a bell curve, with the publications of the 1970s, such as Legitimation Crisis (Habermas, 1975 [1973]), displaying the peak. In Habermas’ own view, his reception of other theoretical traditions did not result in a departure from historical materialism, but in its reconstruction. What Habermas left behind in the 1970s was merely the Hegelian notion of totality, that is, the essentialist holism of Hegelian Marxism.

While Habermas put a substantial distance between his work and the Hegelian tradition of Western Marxism, he nevertheless remains the closest among the three scholars discussed in this article to picking up on the utopian element of Marxism. In his view, avoiding eschatological arguments does not entail that the entire notion of progress must be rejected. Habermas reacted against this equation and upheld the notion of progress, calling for what he termed a “differential concept of progress” that “does not inhibit courage, but rather ensures that political action can hit its mark with greater accuracy” (Habermas, 1979b, p. 59).

One of the main aims of Habermas work was to provide a non-eschatological notion of progress that informs what he calls “the unfinished project of modernity” (Habermas, 1981 [1980]). Yet this project, which carries forward the values of the Enlightenment, is seen as neither unidirectional (i.e., it can also backslide), nor as striving toward completion by necessity (i.e., it can also fail). In a collection of essays originally titled On the Reconstruction of Historical Materialism, which was translated as Communication and the Evolution of Society (Habermas, 1979a [1976]), Habermas outlined how he intended to re-formulate the utopian dimension of Marxism in a non-eschatological way that would later culminate in his Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas, 1989a [1981]; 1989b [1984]).

According to Habermas, Marx was wrong in equating progress with the development of the productive forces, i.e., the economic base of society.

The species learns not only in the dimension of technically useful knowledge decisive for the development of productive forces but also in the dimension of moral-practical consciousness decisive for structures of interaction. The rules of communicative action do develop in reaction to changes in the domain of instrumental and strategic action; but in doing so they follow their own logic. (Habermas, 1979a [1976], p. 148)

Norms of social interaction, as part of the superstructure in Marxist terminology, follow a development in their own right that can be progressive (or regressive) as well. In the same way that it is possible to speak of economic and technological progress, it is, according to Habermas, possible to speak of social and normative progress.

In Habermas’ view, the crucial importance of this distinction between two logics of progress taking place at two separate levels of society was not only missed by Marx, but also by his followers. “Among Hegelian Marxists like Lukacs, Korsch, and Adorno,” Habermas complained, “the concept of social totality excludes a model of levels” (Habermas, 1979a, p. 143). Yet it is only by appreciating the distinct levels of historical change that the concept of progress could be salvaged. The contrast between these two independent logics of social development was later translated into the contrast between system and lifeworld, one guided by instrumental rationality, the other by communicative action. In his discourse ethics, Habermas further specified the criteria by which it is possible to assess whether social change can be judged as progressive in a normative sense (Habermas, 1990 [1983]; 1993 [1991]).

While Habermas thus considers it possible to make rational, i.e., scientific, value judgments, which make it meaningful to speak of normative progress, he does not hold that this progress is something that happens by necessity. History is a contingent, rather than a teleological process. In his own view, Habermas thus departs from the eschatological view of history that is part of the Enlightenment notion of progress in general and its Hegelian Marxist version quite in particular.

Anthony Giddens

Anthony Giddens began his publishing career as an interpreter of classical sociological theory. Among his best-known works is an introductory theory textbook on Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (Giddens, 1971). First published in 1971, the work was one of the most influential texts in adding Marx to the canon of classical sociological theory, grouping him together with Weber and Durkheim as a founder of sociology. As stated in an interview, the aim was to counter the idea that Marx, like Comte or Spencer, is merely a pre-sociologist and not a founder, a then-influential view that Giddens attributed to Talcott Parsons. “Nowadays, it is commonplace to refer to Durkheim, Weber, and Marx equally as the founding fathers of modern sociology, but at the time Capitalism and Modern Social Theory was written, this was certainly not a widely shared view” (Giddens in Kießling, 1988, p. 289; author's translation). The motivation behind this addition to the theory canon was the aim to rehabilitate the Marxist analysis of class, which was the focus of Giddens’s early work. In The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (Giddens, 1973), he juxtaposed class analysis to the study of stratification and argued that the former was far from obsolete in the twentieth century.

Yet while Giddens objected to those who argued that history had proven Marx wrong, he also rejected the arguments of orthodox Marxists. In his view, Marx had to be combined with other theoretical traditions and adapted to recent social conditions to provide a viable theory of contemporary society. Marx, to Giddens, is a classic not in the sense that he provides final answers, but in the sense that his writings provide a point of departure for asking questions. In an anthology of both classical and contemporary writings on class, published together with David Held, Giddens argued that Marx's writings contain ideas of continuing significance, while at the same time pointing out that “neither of us believes that an unreconstructed version of Marxism has any hope of coming to terms with a twentieth-century world that is very different from the one which Marx anticipated” (Giddens & Held, 1982, p. ix).

Giddens’s own systematic reconstruction of Marxism was carried out in two volumes (initially planned as a trilogy) titled A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Giddens, 1981, 1985), where he ventured “to demonstrate the relevance of historical materialism to today's world” (Giddens, 1985, p. 1), although he also pointed out not to accept the label “Marxist” for his work (Giddens, 1981, p. 1). Instead, Giddens set out “to use Marx against himself” (Giddens, 1981, p. 7), as he put it, that is, to embark on a project that asked Marxist research questions, while providing non-Marxist answers. The phrase “using Marx against himself” can thus be read as analogous to Habermas’ self-positioning as an anti-anti-communist.

While Giddens agreed with Marx that the study of capitalism was indispensable for an understanding of contemporary society, he took fault with Marx's essentialist holism. In line with Althusser's critique of Hegelian Marxism, he rejected the essentialist notion of totality (Giddens, 1979, p. 156). In Reading Capital (Althusser et al., 2016 [1965]), Althusser had influentially distinguished between expressive and structural totalities (or structures in dominance as decentered totalities) to advance a reading of Marx that stays clear of essentialist holism (see Benton, 1984, for an account of Althusser's use of these concepts also in other parts of his work). Althusser's distinction is, in fact, identical with the conceptual contrast between essentialist and relational holism used in this article, although he departed from his own relational ambitions when he argued, like Engels before him, that economic forces are decisive for the course of history in the last instance. Giddens, by contrast, tried to avoid this lapse back into essentialism. His reconstruction of historical materialism represents a form of relational holism in which the interaction between a plurality of institutional dimensions is central and economic forces are not considered to be more decisive than others (see Wright, 1983, for a more detailed analysis of this strategy to reconstruct Marxism).

Giddens made a distinction between class-structured and class societies, arguing that it is only in contemporary capitalist society that class conflict can count as the major causal force. By looking at history as the history of class struggles, Marxist theory, according to Giddens, is unable to account for the significance of the nation state and nationalism in the development of the modern world, which are just as characteristic of contemporary societies as capitalism and class conflict.

In his subsequent work on The Consequences of Modernity (Giddens, 1990), Giddens reiterated the argument that modernity is multidimensional on the level of institutions, adding industrialism and surveillance as institutional dimensions, although he reaffirmed his previous analysis by stating that capitalism and the nation state are the most significant of these four institutional dimensions.

As in the case of Habermas, theoretical pluralization thus served as the answer to the perceived shortcomings of Marxism. Unlike Habermas, however, Giddens incorporated neither Parsons’ structural functionalism nor modernization theory in his pluralist reconstruction of historical materialism. Giddens explicitly presented his own theory of structuration as an alternative to structural functionalism. In his view, both Marxism and structural functionalism shared the same shortcoming, which Giddens discussed under the heading of functionalism. Functionalism, according to Giddens, entailed the view that the social whole or totality has an existence above and beyond its parts (Giddens, 1976). While different in name, his critique of functionalism is a critique of essentialist holism.

In his own theory of structuration, which Giddens developed gradually since the 1970s and which culminated in his magnum opus on The Constitution of Society (Giddens, 1984), he tried to avoid the shortcoming of Marxism just as much as those of structural functionalism. He tried to dispense with the notion of function, without sacrificing an interest in the analysis of long-term, large-scale social processes. The core of the theory of structuration is what Giddens calls the duality of structure, referring to the fact that social structure provides both the context in which social action takes place, as well as its point of reference. “By the duality of structure I mean that the structured properties of social systems are simultaneously the medium and outcome of social acts” (Giddens, 1981, p. 19).

The theory of structuration tries to emphasize the importance of social structure for an understanding of social action, while at the same time avoiding the economic determinism of Marxism and the cultural determinism of structural functionalism. To account for social actors’ reflexive awareness of the social situation and their ability to choose their own course of action, Giddens made a distinction between discursive and practical consciousness. The main point of reference for the latter is Erving Goffman's theory of strategic interaction. As in his analysis of the structure of modern society, theoretical pluralism thus serves the purpose to avoid the pitfalls of essentialist holism in his analysis of agency.

This pluralist model of structure and agency entails that the future course of history is ultimately open. Giddens rejects the Marxist eschatological model of history, emphasizing, like Löwith and others, that the modern idea of progress is a secular version of Christian eschatology.

Enlightenment thought, and Western culture in general, emerged from a religious context which emphasised teleology and the achievement of God's grace. Divine providence had long been a guiding idea of Christian thought. (…) It is in no way surprising that the advocacy of unfettered reason only reshaped the ideas of the providential, rather than displacing it. One type of certainty (divine law) was replaced by another (the certainty of our senses, of empirical observation), and divine providence was replaced by providential progress. (Giddens, 1990, p. 48)

Giddens sees the current development of society as the dismantling of this secular eschatology of enlightenment thought. It is, in Giddens's view, not a symptom of a departure from modernity and the beginning of a postmodern age, as many have argued, but of a radicalization of modernity. “We have not moved beyond modernity but are living precisely through a phase of its radicalisation” (Giddens, 1990, p. 51).

The radicalization of modernity entails a rejection of the notion of progress, not only in its Hegelian Marxist form, but also in the Habermasian version of modernity as an unfinished project that is carried forward by communicative action. In the place of the model of history as a project that can be rationally controlled, Giddens puts the image of the juggernaut, that is, “a runaway engine of enormous power which, collectively as human beings, we can drive to some extent but which also threatens to rush out of our control and which could rend itself asunder” (Giddens, 1990, p. 139). In Giddens’s view, Habermas and other advocates of rational progress did not go far enough in leaving the secular eschatology of Marxism behind.

Michel Foucault

At first sight, Foucault is the least Marxist of the three authors. In fact, there are numerous pronouncements in his published work as well as in interviews, where he rejected being called a Marxist. In an interview a year before he died, for instance, Foucault stated that he had “never been a Marxist” (Raulet, 1983, p. 198). In the light of this and similar statements, it is not surprising that Foucault's relation to structuralism and poststructuralism often stands in the foreground when the theoretical influences on his work are discussed. The common labeling of Foucault as a structuralist turned poststructuralist seems to remove him entirely from the orbit of Marxist analysis. At closer inspection, however, it turns out that Marxist ideas are even more central to Foucault's work than to that of Habermas and Giddens (on Foucault's Marxism, see Olssen, 2004 and Pavón-Cuéllar, 2022).

The central role played by Marxism in Foucault's work becomes evident if one considers the specific tradition of Marxism with which he was engaged. It was the structuralist Marxism of his teacher and friend Louis Althusser that provided a constant point of reference throughout his career (on structuralist Marxism as one of the traditions of Marxist analysis, see Poster, 1975 and Jaeggi & Honneth, 1977). Like Althusser, Foucault was a member of the French communist party in the early 1950s, although only for a short time.

Althusser's Marxism differs from the Western, i.e., Hegelian Marxism, which influenced the work of Habermas and Giddens. Attesting to the writings of Marx an epistemic break that divided the early works on alienation from the later economic analysis in Capital, Althusser argued against the Hegelian reading of Marx work that was based on the early manuscripts. As already outlined in the discussion of Giddens’s work, Althusser also opposed the Hegelian notion of expressive totality, i.e., Hegel's essentialist notion of holism. While Foucault shared the criticism of essentialist holism with his mentor, he nevertheless rejected Althusser's analysis of the modern state. In his analysis of the state apparatus Althusser argues, much like Engels before him, that it is in the last instance the economic interest of the bourgeoisie that shapes social processes within capitalist society through the power exercised by a centralized state. In Foucault's view, however, there is no such centralized form of power. Power in contemporary society is instead dispersed and localized, taking different forms in different settings, hence his detailed analyses of a plurality of institutions such as the asylum (Foucault, 1965 [1961]), the clinic (Foucault, 1973 [1963]), and the prison (Foucault, 1977 [1975]).

Foucault employed the genealogical method of Nietzsche as a corrective to the economic determinism of both Marx and Althusser. Instead of postulating the existence of a single causal force that determines social change, Foucault traces unique power/knowledge constellations and their trajectories over time. Nietzsche's work is thus the answer to the perceived shortcomings of Althusser’s structuralist Marxism. In fact, despite repeated denials of being a Marxist, Foucault referred to himself as a “Nietzschean communist” (quoted in Eribon, 1992, p. 58). In this way, Foucault displays the same anti-anti-Marxism as Habermas and Giddens, that is, he adopts a position on Marxism that derives from a rejection of both orthodox Marxism and anti-Marxism. Unlike Habermas and Giddens, however, Foucault never tried to engage the work of Marx systematically in his own writings.

Yet the sparsity of references to Marx does not point to an absence of Marxism in Foucault's work, but to a different strategy of engaging it. Rather than tackling the problematic aspects of Marxism by way of reconstruction, Foucault simply avoided addressing Marxism at all. There are, however, a few texts where the importance of Marxism for his work becomes explicit, such as his lectures on the punitive society from the early 1970s (Foucault, 2015) that prepared the publication of Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1977 [1975]). In these lectures, Foucault uses Marxist terminology and makes explicit references to Marx, which shows that his work on the disciplinary society qualifies as a reconstruction of Marxism.

According to Foucault, the disciplinary society is a society in which human beings are turned into productive workers. With the rise of capitalism, man's unproductive consumption of time, i.e., their enjoyment of leisure, had to be curtailed. Not just the prison, but also the workshop and the factory, are the sites analyzed in the lectures, leading to the argument that it is in the “class relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat that the condensed and remodeled penitentiary system begins to function; it will be a political instrument of the control and maintenance of relations and production” (Foucault, 2015, p. 149). The explanatory key for the rise of the disciplinary society, as Foucault would later call it, thus lies with class conflict and exploitation during the emergence of capitalism. The contrast between societies of sovereignty and disciplinary societies is, in the last resort, identical with the Marxist contrast between feudal and capitalist societies. Like Marxism, Foucault advances a stage model of history, although he only addresses the contrast between two of these stages and refrains from embedding this contrast in an eschatology that, like historical materialism, captures all of history from its beginning until its envisioned end.

Despite these similarities with Marxism, Foucault chose to highlight the differences between his analysis and historical materialism. Implicitly referencing Marx, he states that labor is not part of man's species being, unlike “certain famous post-Hegelians” (Foucault, 2015, p. 232) have argued. The reverse emphasis would have been possible as well. Foucault's analysis in the lectures is largely identical to the work of the Marxist historian Edward P. Thompson (who is referenced in the lectures) on the disciplining of the working class during early capitalism. While Thompson saw his work as a continuation of the Marxist tradition, Foucault chose to present identical arguments as a departure from it.

As Stéphane Legrand has observed, Foucault has a consistent tendency to hide the Marxist frame of reference from which his analysis develops. As a consequence, the main concepts of his work, such as the disciplinary society, “remain irremediably blind if they are not articulated to a theory of exploitation and a theory of the capitalist mode of production” (quoted in Pavón-Cuéllar, 2022, p. 336). What is lacking in Foucault's work is not the influence of Marxism, but the willingness to identify with it.

Foucault's model of history is likewise informed by an engagement with Marxism. Like Habermas and Giddens, Foucault tried to reconstruct Hegelian Marxism in a non-eschatological way, although he again chose the strategy of sidestepping an explicit engagement with Marxism. Foucault employs a stage model of history that locates a major historical break associated with the rise of capitalism in the eighteenth century. Yet he made no pronouncement about any subsequent transformations of society. There is no overt eschatology in his work for the simple reason that he avoided talking about the future at all. In fact, there is even a striking sparsity of statements on contemporary postwar society. In contrast to both Habermas and Giddens, Foucault chose to stay within the confines of historical analysis.

As Wood (2007) has pointed out, Foucault made no comments about the relevance of panoptic discipline to the ways that administrative power has been enlarged and enhanced by computers since the 1960s. While some scholars have tried to close the gap by employing Foucault's concepts to contemporary surveillance technologies (Poster, 1990, for instance, speaks of databases as an electronic superpanopticon), others have followed Gilles Deleuze, who argued in his Postscript on the Societies of Control (Deleuze, 1992 [1990]) that we have reached the end of the disciplinary society as described by Foucault and are moving into a society of control. The advancing control society coerces without prohibitions. It is based on data-driven marketing and media strategies that regulate through incentives, luring consumers into obedience that is freely chosen (Brusseau, 2020). Regardless of whether one holds this account to be accurate, it is striking that it was Deleuze, not Foucault himself, who made the description of such current trends and a prediction of their future developments using Foucault's work as a template.

In The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault (1972 [1969]) made clear that he holds to a contingent model of history which assumes the future to be open and thus impossible to predict. The Hegelian Marxist eschatological model of history provided the contrast to his own view. For Foucault, Hegelian Marxism seeks to analyze history as a totality, where each temporal unit is seen as an expression of the whole course of history. In countering this notion, Foucault made a distinction between total history and general history. Total history draws all phenomena around a single center—be it a principle, a worldview, or a spirit—which creates a homogenous system of relations. General history, by contrast, speaks of series, divisions, and limits, with equally heterogeneous relations between the evolved elements. While different in wording, the contrast between total and general history drawn by Foucault is the same as the contrast between essentialist holism and relational holism outlined above.

The absence of a systematic discussion of developmental trends in contemporary society in Foucault's work is thus not necessarily a theoretical blank point, but it can just as well be read as the consequence of a rejection of an eschatological model of history.

Conclusion: The Decline of Grand Theory

The rise of grand theory that started in the 1960s came to an end with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Liessmann refers to the events following the fall of the Berlin Wall as “the second death of Marx” (Liessmann, 1992). It was, however, not only the death of Marx, but also the death of an entire arsenal of theories that had been built up as supports, supplements, or substitutes of and for Marx. When the Cold War faded, not only did the debate on Marxism–Leninism go into decline, but the entire genre of grand theory that was built around it. Marx continues to be a point of reference in academic debate—what went into decline is its use as a grand theory. André Tosel fittingly called the time since 1989 the era of thousand Marxisms (Tosel, 2008), that is, the use of Marx's work is no longer focused on writing theories of comparable scale, but proceeds in more eclectic ways.

The decline of grand theory, however, was not restricted to those theories whose main raison d’être was to argue either pro or contra Marx. Its wider repercussions are easily overlooked because the centrality of Marxism to grand theorizing is often not recognized. In the time from the 1960s to the 1990s, there existed a wide range of social theorizing that was motivated by scholars positioning themselves between Marxists and anti-Marxists. Habermas, Giddens, and Foucault are core examples for scholars whose grand theories can be described as anti-anti-Marxism. Marxism provided a prototype for their theories of society, yet they reconstructed this prototype in the light of anti-Marxist criticism.

The theories of Habermas, Giddens, and Foucault are still read, but there are few, if any, new grand theories of this kind produced in the current century. This is not to say that social theory as such has declined or disappeared. Theory production continues to flourish in other forms since the 1990s, rather than as grand theory. Examples are the various concepts and models addressed as “turns” in the social sciences, such as the interpretative turn, the performative turn, the spatial turn, etc. (see Bachmann-Medick, 2016, for an overview), which aim to provide theoretical research perspectives that can be applied across topics, but which do not provide grand theories of society. Within sociology, more specifically, the turn to the study of causal mechanisms as part of the micro-macro debate that flourished since the late 1980s represents such a theoretical research perspective with no ambition at grand theorizing.

The rise and decline of the style of pluralist grand theorizing analyzed in this article was largely tied to one generation of scholars and the peculiar historical constellation in which they were entangled. The biographical similarities of the scholars known as contemporary social theorists are, in fact, striking. Not only does the publication of their seminal works span the same period, but their dates of birth also make them part of the same generation. They were part of a generation that was too young to experience World War II through active military duty, but also too old to view the Cold War as already settled, i.e., won by either of the two competing sides. How to position oneself vis-à-vis Marxism was the core social, political, and economic issue for this generation. Foucault was born in 1926, Habermas in 1929, and Giddens in 1938. Other well-known contemporary social theorists who produced grand theories of society belong to the same generation: Luhmann, for instance, was born in 1927, and Bourdieu in 1930. The works of these social theorists are still read, but there are few, if any, contemporary scholars who try to produce theories of the same type in the current century. The grand theories produced by these theorists remain contemporary through their continued impact on scholarship, even though few of the scholars who produced them are still our contemporaries.

By recognizing the specificity of these pluralist grand theories of society and the equally specific historical moment during which they were produced, it becomes possible to give a better explanatory account of their rise and decline. Regardless of how one evaluates this development, it is important to recognize that grand theory did not flourish from the 1960s to 1990s because there was an unprecedented interest in abstract theoretical ideas at the time, but because these abstract ideas were at heart about a very specific real-life situation—the political confrontation of the Cold War. It is theory understood through its relation to political practice, not theory understood through its relation to research, that mattered during this period.