Marx and the Ancients: Classical Ethics, Social Justice, and Nineteenth-Century Political Economy.

• Author: Meacci, Ferdinando

By George E. McCarthy, Savage, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1990. Pp. xii, 342. $46.50. "Without an appreciation for Epicurus's theories of happiness and nature or Aristotle's theory of universal and particular justice, the purpose of Marx's later analyses of the classical political economy of Ricardo. Smith, and Malthus would be lost." Puzzled? If so, it is worth noting that the very purpose of McCarthy's book is to substantive and develop this unusual claim as put forward by the author himself at the beginning of his introduction. If the reader's specialization is, according to the new JEL classification, B3 (History of Thought: Individuals), reading this book is a must. But if only the reader's specialization were the adjacent B1 (History of Economic Thought through 1925) this reading might turn out to be a waste of time. Indeed, what McCarthy (who holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology plus an M.A. and Ph.D in philosophy) seems to have done by writing this book is the same job that he thinks everybody does and Marx did par excellence in writing his later works: i.e., a further development, explication and expansion of the initial Ph.D. dissertation. Now, while this may or may not be true with regard to the relationships between Marx's Grundrisse, Theories of Surplus Value and Capital, on the one hand, and his early dissertation on the Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature plus the related Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy on the other (most scholars with a specialization other than B1 may indeed regard the whole issue as irrelevant), one should find McCarthy's two Ph.D theses an early proof that his present book, whatever the progress that its author may have made in the meantime, belongs to the field of philosophy rather than to that of economics (not to speak of the "nineteenth-century political economy" mentioned in the book's title in lieu of "classical political economy"). It is not by chance, therefore, that the weakest chapter of the book is the one where the author deals with the relationship between Ricardo and Marx, a crucial topic for everybody interested in classical political economy. It is perhaps this weakness that accounts for the sharp contradictions that seem to lie in what McCarthy probable believes to be his strongest conclusions. For instance, when he quotes Marx's criticisms of the "natural laws" of nineteenth-century political economy" in the sense that "thus there has...