MOISHE POSTONE
Jean Cohen's exposition and critique of Marx is a serious attempt to contribute to the creation of a critical social theory that would be adequate to contemporary societies. Her approach is very much informed by the experiences, perceptions, and concerns of the Left in the past two decades. It is marked by an insistence upon political freedom, civil liberties, and human rights as ends in themselves, an uncompromisingly critical stance towards so-called real existing socialist societies, emphasis on new social movements, and a skeptical attitude towards the notion of the proletariat as the revolutionary subject.
A new adequate critical theory should, in Cohen's opimon, retain what is valid in Marx's analysis but must get beyond its weaknesses. A central theme of Cohen's book is her insistence on the importance to any social critique of a theory of political institutions, one that concerns itself with the institutionalization of legality, plurality, and publicity, that is, with what Cohen terms the key features of civil society (p. 225). It is precisely in this area, according to Cohen, that Marx's theory was most deficient. She claims, moreover, that this deficiency was not merely contingent, but necessarily was rooted in the nature of Marx's analysis, in particular, in his class theory.
Cohen argues this position by means of a consideration of Marx's social theory, which she precedes and follows with a discussion of some modern social theorists. She begins her exposition with a critique of what she considers to be variations of Marx's class theory: the theories of Marcuse,