Marx, Weber, and moral objectivity

Part I showed that liberals and radicals, to be consistent, must affirm some version of moral realism and that both are committed to recognizing significant ethical progress. In fact, they have similar – often identical – reasons for endorsing realism and insisting on the historical advance of human freedom, notably the abolition of slavery. As one major theme, Part II contends that given these underlying moral similarities, the major social theoretical and political disagreements between the leading competing democratic and social theories – radical and liberal, Marxian and Weberian – are empirical; they do not arise from opposed underlying moral premises. Relativists have insisted on the comparative intractability of moral disputes; this part, however, suggests how important contemporary debates can be objectively resolved.

As a second central theme, Part II contends that the underlying ethical unity of liberal and radical theory requires a reworking of each. Marx defended social individuality – a society in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Yet he neither elaborated a theory of communist individuality nor explored the implications of clashing views of individuality – for instance, eudaemonist conceptions versus reductionist class accounts – for the political theory of a revolutionary regime.