Joseph McCarney
A philosopher with a new angle on Marxism
Andrew Chitty
Thursday September 6, 2007
The Guardian
A member of the editorial collective of the journal Radical Philosophy from 1976 to 2001, he produced his first book, The Real World of Ideology, in 1980. In it, Joe argued that for Marx, ideology simply meant any thought that serves a class's interests in its struggle with other classes. By contrast, the prevalent view of ideology as a set of illusions that arise spontaneously from the structures of society was symptomatic of a contemporary western Marxism that had retreated altogether from the idea of class struggle.
In Social Theory and the Crisis of Marxism (1990), Joe proposed that western Marxism largely understood itself as a "critical theory of society" whose purpose was to show that capitalism failed to match up to some moral or rational standard. This was a concept utterly alien to Marx, who saw his social theory as articulating the consciousness that was developing within the working class of its own intolerable situation, a consciousness that would ultimately lead it to overthrow capitalism, without any need for a moral critique. It was this Hegelian concept of social theory, shared by Marx, Engels, the Hungarian George Lukacs and Lenin, that Marxists needed to recover and develop. Controversially, Joe added that today Marxists must look to the oppressed masses of the third world as the agent of revolution.
As Joe acknowledged, his arguments here depended on an underlying confidence that history was pushing towards socialism, or, in Hegelian terms, that the rational was becoming real. It was perhaps this that led him to his Hegel on History (2000), a lucid exposition of Hegel's idea of history as the emergence of human freedom.
The eldest of six children, Joe was born and brought up on the Curragh in County Kildare. Educated at St Joseph's academy in Kildare, he was the first in his family to go to university, and began studying commerce at University College Dublin. However, after a year there, he spent a year in England, where he sold bibles door to door and worked as a bus conductor. Back at UCD, he graduated in 1964 with a first in politics and history, writing his thesis on the Irish labour movement. He then worked as a secondary school teacher in England before taking a philosophy MA at Warwick University (1966-68).
In 1969 he became a philosophy lecturer at what is now London South Bank University. Joe's lectures were beautifully constructed and he inspired enormous respect from his students, to whom he in turn was intensely committed.
Joe took early retirement from South Bank in 2000, and had completed several chapters of a book on the relationship between Hegel and Marx when he died. His work is united by a deep concern for social justice and freedom, and an implicit conviction that capitalism must eventually be superseded by a society that can realise those aims, or as he once put it, by "a truly human society, one that does not, by its nature, systematically obstruct the attempts of the mass of its members to cope with the burdens of being human".
In 1986, Joe moved with his family to Lewes, East Sussex, where he unobtrusively became a pillar of the local community, and even of the local church. He was a lover of poetry, film, chess, horse racing, and later golf. Although in some ways very private, he was a courteous, warm and generous man with a dry, self-deprecating wit, a raconteur capable of developing friendships with an astonishing variety of people. Above all, he was devoted to his wife Christine, their children Alice and Harry, his daughter from a previous marriage, Kathleen, and his young granddaughter Rose, who survive him.
· Henry Joseph McCarney, philosopher and teacher, born June 19 1941; died August 1 2007
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