Tracks of histoical materialism

The text of this short book needs some explanation. When the Programme in Critical Theory at the University of California at Irvine invited me to give three lectures in a series associated with the Wellek Library, I elected to discuss the contemporary situation of just one such theory. As I had already attempted a sketch in the mid seventies of the evolution of Marxism in Western Europe since the First World War, offering some predictions as to its likely future directions, it seemed opportune to review intellectual developments since then and to look at how my earlier conjectures had fared. The result is not exactly a sequel to Considerations on Western Marxism. This is partly because the period with which it deals is too short scarcely a decade, in effect. Such an interval does not permit the kind of settled retrospect that half-a-century of history can afford. Proportions and relations are always liable to foreshortening from such a close distance

- with consequent distortions. The form of the analyses presented here also differs from that earlier account. Spoken as lectures, in an academic setting, they employ a more informal address than would the ordinary page, one involving more frequent use of the personal pronoun. It seemed artificial to alter this after the event; but it remains a feature to be excused. Another peculiarity of the text, as will be seen, is its initial set at the subject: introduced under the rubric of general remarks on the notion of 'critical theory' itself, and its ambiguities.