Brian Leiter, the law and philosophy ratings maven, is an interesting guy. He's an insightful Nietzsche scholar and legal theorist with a bit of a reputation as a bullying ideologue. (He's treated me disrespectfully on a few occasions for what I assume are political reasons, which I mention in the spirit of full disclosure.) Anyway, I found this interview with Leiter in 3:AM really stimulating, and well worth reading. There's a bunch of good stuff in there, and some not-so-good stuff, too.

Leiter's right-on that the academic cleavage between "analytic" and "continental" philosophy fails to mark a meaningful intellectual (as opposed to stylistic) distinction. Leiter's alternative classificatory scheme, which distinguishes between "naturalists" and "anti-naturalists," on the one hand, and "realists" and "moralists," on the other, cuts across the analytic/continental divide (i.e., there are both continental and analytic thinkers in every square of the implied 2 x 2 matrix) and draws into focus some real differences in intellectual disposition and conviction. Like Leiter, I think of myself as a naturalist and realist, which leaves me curious about his idea of naturalist-realist politics. Well, it's not my idea. Though I knew him to be a staunch leftist, Leiter's politics turns out to be, somewhat to my surprise, a relatively orthodox form of Marxism. Why should I be surprised? I suppose it strikes me as odd that such an erudite guy with an evidently robust bullshit detector would treat old-school Marxism as a plausible explanatory theory. Here's Leiter:

Marx certainly didn’t need to be saved by sophomoric post-modernists; indeed, Marx didn’t need to be saved at all. On two central issues, Marx was far more right than any of his critics: first, that the long-term tendency of capitalist societies is towards immiseration of the majority (the post-WWII illusion of upward mobility for the “middle classes” will soon be revealed for the anomaly it was); and second, that capitalist societies produce moral and political ideologies that serve to justify the dominance of the capitalist class. Marx had three faults, to be sure: one was that he took Hegel seriously; another was that he wasn’t a very good fortune teller, so wildly over-estimated the pace of capitalist development; and a third is that he had no account of individual psychology, of the kind Nietzsche and Freud provide. Within academic philosophy, however, far more harm, in my view, has been done to Marx by moralists like G.A. Cohen than by any of the post-modernists. Cohen - a truly smart man and delightful human being to boot - did two unfortunate things to academic Anglophone Marxism: first, by offering a philosophical reconstruction of historical materialism in its least interesting form (namely, as functional explanation, rather than in terms of class conflict); and second, in his later work, by calling for a moralistic change in the consciousness of individuals, regardless of historical circumstances. This latter, Christian turn in Cohen’s thought represents as profound a betrayal of Marxism as Habermas‘ attempt to supply it a Kantian foundation - in this respect, both Anglophone and “Continental” Marxism betray Marx’s original realism.