| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 51

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Simon Tormey, Agnes Heller: Socialism, Autonomy and the Postmodern (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001)

AGNES HELLER, a Hungarian-born philosopher and political theorist now resident in the United States, has produced an enormous body of work over the last four decades concerned with the great questions of socialism and social transformation, the moral foundations of political action and, latterly, the nature of modernity. The same age as Jurgen Habermas (whose development in important respects she parallels), Heller first came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s as a member of the Budapest School. This was a loosely affiliated group of Marxist intellectuals that formed around the great Hungarian Marxist philosopher, Georg Lukacs, and sought to develop an alternative reading of Marxism that challenged the stifling orthodoxy of official Communist doctrine. The School was committed to a philosophical and cultural reading of Marxism and socialism that owed a considerable debt to Marx's early writings, with their emphasis on alienation and cultural transformation as the heart of the socialist project. This interpretation emphasized subjectivity and self-transformation, and hence praxis, in socialist theory and practice, in contrast to the objectivist, scientistic and bureaucratic thrust of official Communism. Socialist revolution was about realizing fundamental human species needs, not achieving the supposed objective interests of the proletariat. It thus required a radical transformation of the entire social situation, and not simply the elimination of economic class relations. Heller's best-known contribution to this "humanist" Marxism, The Theory of Need in Marx, published in English in 1976, remains a compelling expression of the position staked out by the School.	1
Since then, Heller's philosophical and political commitments have undergone substantial and complex transformations, which have seen her abandon Marxism and, more recently, embrace liberal democratic and postmodern themes. Her intellectual trajectory provides interesting insights into the vicissitudes of Marxist and radical thought played out against the backdrop of the global political, social, and economic changes of the last quarter century.	2
Simon Tormey has done an outstanding job in charting this trajectory. An account of the ideas of a complex and demanding thinker often brings forth from the reader the jibe Lord Byron hurled at Samuel Coleridge: "Explaining Metaphysics to the nation — I wish he would explain his Explanation." Happily, this is not the case here. In what is likely to be the dominant, English- language account of her work for some time to come, Tormey offers a carefully detailed and clearly argued treatment of Heller's ideas. He does so evenhandedly and frequently with penetrating insight. He identifies four phases through which Heller's thought has evolved from the late 1960s up to the late 1990s: humanist Marxism, critical or neo-Marxism, "post-Marxism" and finally postmodernism. In the course of exploring and assessing each phase, he discusses key works and relates Heller's position to the intellectual and, to a lesser extent, political, context in which she wrote. Thus, the emergence of the New Left in the 1960s provided the setting for her humanist Marxist period, which drew creatively not only on the ideas of Marx, but also on phenomenological and existential currents of thought. With his emphasis on the public sphere and communicative interaction, Habermas emerges as a key figure in the transition to neo- Marxism. The post-Marxist current and the increasing turn to liberalism and actually existing liberal democracy reflects the concern with questions of justice associated with the rise to prominence of John Rawls and Robert Nozick as key figures in mainstream (primarily American) political philosophy. And as might be imagined, the postmodern phase exhibits for Tormey more diffuse influences, especially in view of the fact that, in contrast to others, Heller's version of it "designates a stance on the modern, not a different place, and certainly not a non-modern world." (167) Nonetheless, Tormey identifies Foucault, Mouffe, and Laclau with their emphasis on contingency and difference, as thinkers with whom Heller shares affinities.	3
For Tormey, Heller has remained committed throughout to several key themes: "the stress on the individual as agent; the hostility to the justification of states of affairs by reference to non-moral or non-ethical criteria; the belief in 'human substance' as the origin of everything that is good or worthwhile; and the hostility to forms of theorising and political practice that deny equality, rationality and the possibility of self-determination in the name of 'our' interests or needs, however defined." (18) Marxist influences remained central throughout most of her evolution as a thinker — until roughly the mid 1980s Heller held to socialism as a fundamental political value and identified this with "the continued stress on the control over the conditions of existence even within generalised commodity production, the emphasis on an ethic of solidarity, and the degree to which all issues to do with motivation and incentive are waved away as part of the rotten world to be got rid of in the course of the 'social revolution.'" (121)	4
But according to Tormey's account, the final phase of Heller's development represents a more fundamental shift. The break with Marxism is now complete, and gone with it is any emphasis on a totalizing conception of social transformation, now condemned as expressing a redemptive philosophy of history that violates the contingency and value pluralism of the modern experience, and hence the conditions of individuality and freedom. Gone, too, is politics as "the expression of the collective will of parties and movements," replaced by "a politics based on the ethical and moral imperatives accepted by radically contingent individuals." (175) This is a politics of decency and civility premised on a concern for others rooted in the Platonic maxim that it is better to suffer than to do wrong. Heller denies this rules out radical critique of the status quo, or even radical change. But her commitment to liberalism as the only ideology with "contingency awareness" (182) coupled with her view that capitalism is part of the essential logic of modernity calls this into question. Certainly what Heller calls the "general orientative principle" of individuals, that "persons with self-esteem respect the person-hood of other persons with self-esteem" (177) seems a flimsy basis for a politics critical of liberal capitalism.	5
A generous critic, Tormey is prepared to give Heller the benefit of the doubt here, suggesting there are potentially radical implications in her view that what she identifies as the three fundamental dimensions of the modern experience — technology, a functional division of labour and statecraft — could conceivably be concretely enacted in different kinds of institutions, including non-capitalist ones.	6
But in a nicely crafted and lucidly argued critical conclusion, he wonders whether Heller's work, with its shift from normative political theory to an "ethics of personality," (206) any longer offers the kind of critical potential he evidently thinks is needed to deal with the injustices of "the liberal- capitalist status quo." (195) Respectful of her willingness to reconsider and even when necessary to jettison long-held positions, and sympathetic to her concerns about the need for an ethical or moral politics, rooted as that is in her wrenching experience as a dissident in a repressive, Soviet-style regime (after writing The Theory of Need in Marx, she was virtually forced to emigrate to Australia because of her apostasy), Tormey nevertheless wonders if in the end what he sees as the two-sided character of Heller's political thinking — her utopianism and her realism — constantly contesting with one another, proves paralyzing, the basis of a peculiarly anti-political politics.	7
Heller viewed political theorizing as both a cure and a poison. It can orient us to the world as it is and should be, even offering a 'crutch' to those unsettled by the radical contingency of modernity. But these same qualities can make it a way of harming others, of justifying arbitrary power and treating people as means, not ends. In Tormey's apt conclusion, it is unclear from Heller which of utopianism and realism is the cure and which the poison. Whatever the limits of Heller's thought or her specific political positions (she has recently offered an account of 11 September as a clash between barbarism and civilization that would not be out of place in George Bush's White House), this is a dilemma worth pondering by those committed to radical thought and fundamental social change.	8
Phillip Hansen University of Regina

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