Abstract
In addition to Bax’s attack on the Idealists explored in the previous chapter, Bax took up the cudgel against the Idealists again in The Problem of Reality, in 1892. There, Bax subjected Idealist theory to an explicit and, by nature of the book’s character, far more wide-ranging critique. However, the unusual metaphysical argument that Bax outlined in The Problem of Reality performed a double polemical service. Not only did it serve to undermine the philosophical objections to Hedonism posited by Green and his followers, it also functioned as an implicit challenge to Engels and his protégés in the movement of European Social Democracy. Bax still had ‘Kant on the brain’, and in the process of sorting the wheat from the chaff in the metaphysic propounded by the Idealists, Bax found a means to address, in a non-confrontational way, what he felt were the numerous shortcomings of what he began to describe a short time later as ‘the orthodox Marxist position’.
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Notes
- 1.
Bax, Reminiscences and Reflexions, p. 47.
- 2.
Reviewing a later elaboration of the themes posited by Bax in The Problem of Reality, namely The Roots of Reality, the aforementioned book dedicated to Juarès, Arthur O. Lovejoy remarked that, ‘the book will appear, to the collector of historic types of transitional doctrine, a curious and interesting hybrid’. The Philosophical Review, 18/1 (1909), pp. 79–80. More recently, Mark Bevir accorded recognition to the singularity of Bax’s philosophy. Bevir assessed Bax’s work in a favourable light next to the work of the English philosopher, historian, and archaeologist, R. G. Collingwood. ‘Universality and particularity in the philosophy of E. B. Bax and R. G. Collingwood’, History of the Human Sciences, 12/3 (1999), pp. 55–69. Bevir provides an extremely pithy exposition of Bax’s philosophy in The Making of British Socialism (pp. 50–56). He does so, however, without regard to chronology on the one hand, or the various fields of controversy that Bax was embroiled in on the other. It stands only, that is to say, as a rational reconstruction Nonetheless, despite its historical shortcomings, it is an excellent introduction to Bax’s thought.
- 3.
Bax, Handbook, p. 380.
- 4.
Tom Rockmore, ‘Engels, Lukács, and Kant’s Thing-in-Itself’, in Steger and Carver (eds.), Engels After Marx, pp. 148–149. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, p. 2.
- 5.
Ibid., p. 11.
- 6.
Bax, Reminiscences and Reflexions, p. 47. Ernest Belfort Bax, The Problem of Reality: Being Outline Suggestions for a Philosophical Reconstruction (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1892), pp. 1–2, 4. ‘The superficiality of Engels’s understanding of idealism did not go unnoticed at the time’, Stedman Jones observed, speaking of an earlier period. ‘According to Henrich Burgers, one of Marx’s closest companions from Cologne, Engels’s ‘aversion to philosophy and speculation derive much less from an insight into their nature than from the discomfort which they have produced in his not very persevering mind’. Engels, he thought, probably resolved to protect himself from this discomfort in the future by ‘the exorcism of contempt’ and setting himself a descriptive task’. Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘History and Nature in Karl Marx: Marx’s Debt to German Idealism’, History Workshop Journal, 83/1 (2017), p. 103.
- 7.
Bax, Problem of Reality, p. 6.
- 8.
Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, p. 59.
- 9.
Thomas, Marxism and Scientific Socialism, p. 33. For a short account of Marx’s relationship to the idealist tradition in philosophy see, also, Stedman Jones, ‘History and Nature in Karl Marx’, pp. 98–117.
- 10.
See Tudor and Tudor (eds.), Marxism and Social Democracy. Haupt, ‘Marx and Marxism’, p. 282.
- 11.
Stedman Jones, Karl Marx, pp. 565–566.
- 12.
Tudor and Tudor (eds.), Marxism and Social Democracy, p. 7.
- 13.
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 49, pp. 448–449, 475.
- 14.
Ibid., p. 497. For Bernstein’s relationship with the Fabians see H. Kendall Rogers, ‘Eduard Bernstein Speaks to the Fabians: A Turning-Point in Social Democratic Thought?’, International Review of Social History, 28/3 (1983), pp. 320–338.
- 15.
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 49, p. 402.
- 16.
Engels, Socialism, p. 29.
- 17.
Ibid., p. 33.
- 18.
Like Henry Sidgwick, for example, who had presided over the Society for Psychical Research twice over since 1882, or William Stewart Ross, who changed the name of the Secular Review in 1888 to the Agnostic Journal. Royle, Radicals, Secularists, and Republicans, pp. 115–116. Stefan Collini, ‘Sidgwick, Henry (1838–1900)’, ODNB. W. B. Owen and H. C. G. Matthew, ‘Ross, William Stewart (1844–1906)’, ODNB.
- 19.
Bax, Reminiscences and Reflexions, p. 26.
- 20.
Ernest Belfort Bax, ‘The Practical Significance of Philosophy’, in Outlooks from the New Standpoint (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1891), p. 188.
- 21.
Engels, Socialism, pp. 33, 36.
- 22.
Ibid., pp. 33, 34, 35.
- 23.
Ibid., p. 37.
- 24.
E. B. Bax, ‘The Synthetic or the Neo-Marxist Conception of History’, Social Democrat, 6/9 (1902), pp. 270–274.
- 25.
Bax, Reminiscences and Reflexions, p. 26.
- 26.
Bax, Problem of Reality, p. 106.
- 27.
Bax, ‘The Practical Significance of Philosophy’, p. 191.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 182.
- 29.
Engels, Socialism, pp. 36–37.
- 30.
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 48, p. 93.
- 31.
Ibid., p. 417.
- 32.
Ibid., p. 458.
- 33.
Bax, ‘The Practical Significance of Philosophy’, p. 188.
- 34.
Ibid., p. 187.
- 35.
Ibid.
- 36.
Ibid.
- 37.
Ibid.
- 38.
Bax, Problem of Reality, pp. 26–27.
- 39.
Bax, ‘The Practical Significance of Philosophy’, p. 192.
- 40.
Ibid., p. 180.
- 41.
Bax, Problem of Reality, p. 29.
- 42.
Bax, ‘The Practical Significance of Philosophy’, p. 182.
- 43.
Ibid., p. 188.
- 44.
Ibid.
- 45.
Bax, Problem of Reality, p. 49.
- 46.
Ibid., p. 48.
- 47.
Bax, ‘The Practical Significance of Philosophy’, pp. 188–189.
- 48.
Bax, Problem of Reality, p. 22.
- 49.
Ibid.
- 50.
Ibid., pp. 15–16.
- 51.
Ibid., p. 37. Bax, ‘The Practical Significance of Philosophy’, p. 182.
- 52.
Bax, Problem of Reality, p. 37.
- 53.
Ibid., p. 38.
- 54.
Ibid., pp. 38, 39.
- 55.
Ibid., pp. 41–42.
- 56.
Ibid., p. 44, 40.
- 57.
Bax, ‘The Practical Significance of Philosophy’, p. 182.
- 58.
Comte , although not acknowledged, had also made a case for the primacy of Feeling over Reason. ‘It is quite certain’, Comte argued, ‘that Feeling and Activity have much more to do with any practical step that we take than pure Reason’. General View of Positivism, p. 23.
- 59.
Bax, Problem of Reality, p. 99.
- 60.
Ibid., pp. 35, 93.
- 61.
Ibid., p. 90.
- 62.
Ibid., p. 91, 90.
- 63.
Jones, ‘The Social Organism’, p. 18.
- 64.
Ibid., p. 19.
- 65.
Bax, Problem of Reality, p. 97.
- 66.
Ibid.
- 67.
Ibid., p. 93.
- 68.
Ibid.
- 69.
Ibid., p. 141.
- 70.
Ibid., p. 146.
- 71.
Ibid., p. 147.
- 72.
Ibid., p. 97.
- 73.
Ibid., pp. 56–57.
- 74.
Jones, ‘The Social Organism’, p. 19.
- 75.
Bax, Problem of Reality, p. 113.
- 76.
Ibid., pp. 116, 113, 114.
- 77.
Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, p. 46.
- 78.
Ibid., p. 35.
- 79.
Ibid., p. 45.
- 80.
Bax, Problem of Reality, p. 157.
- 81.
Ibid., p. 66.
- 82.
Ibid., p. 68.
- 83.
Ibid., p. 79.
- 84.
Bax, ‘The Practical Significance of Philosophy’, p. 189.
- 85.
Bax, Problem of Reality, p. 79.
- 86.
Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
- 87.
Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, p. 46. Bax, Problem of Reality, p. 81.
- 88.
Ibid.
- 89.
Ibid., p. 82.
- 90.
Ibid., p. 80.
- 91.
Ibid., p. 158.
- 92.
Ibid.
- 93.
Ibid.
- 94.
Ibid.
- 95.
Ibid., pp. 157–158.
- 96.
Ibid., pp. 161–162.
- 97.
Ibid., p. 159.
- 98.
Bax, ‘The Practical Significance of Philosophy’, p. 194.
- 99.
Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, p. 48.
- 100.
Ernest Belfort Bax, ‘The Will of the Majority’, in Ethics of Socialism, p. 127.
- 101.
Bax, Reminiscences and Reflexions, p. 46.
- 102.
Ibid., pp. 46–47. It is unclear which articles Bax had in mind in the passage cited. But it is probable that he meant Engels’s letter to J. Bloch, sent in 1890, and published after Engels’s death in October 1895. In that letter Engels refutes the charge that he and Marx believed that ‘the economic element is the only determining factor’ in history. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 49, p. 34.
- 103.
Bernstein, Preconditions of Socialism, p. 9.
- 104.
Ibid., p. 11.
- 105.
Ibid., p. 13.
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Flaherty, S. (2020). ‘Historical Agnosticism’: Bax, Engels, and Classical German Philosophy. In: Marx, Engels and Modern British Socialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42339-1_9
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