Abstract

This ambitious and challenging book, by a noted American Marxist sociologist, tries to do two things at once, both of which should be of interest to social and political philosophers as well as philosophers of science. First, it distances itself from virtually all the European Marxist traditions for their adherence to "science" as the dominant mode of epistemic legitimation; second, it clears the conceptual space for an epistemic practice that retains a sufficiently critical distance from science so as to enable the emergence of a truly emancipatory form of knowledge. It should be said, however, that Aronowitz merely hints at this new practice, which will emerge in forthcoming works on feminism and ecologism as perhaps the first sustained attempts since the Enlightenment to ground rationality in the pursuit of substantive ends, namely, the relationship that humans have to their material existence.