PREFACE In his preface to The Two Marxisms, Alvin Gouldner projected an additional three volumes to complete the sustained critique of Marxism he had promised in The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. These volumes were to deal with, respectively post-Marxist Marxists, the technical and sociohistorical origins of Marxism, and the rationality and limits of Marxism. Clearly, he had revised his intention to write separate volumes on the origins of Marxism and on its rationality and limits, because this book collapses the originally distinct treatments into one volume. It is a study of how the social, political, historical, theoretical, and cultural origins of Marxism shaped both in creative rationality and --- simultaneously - the limits to that rationality. Here Gouldner combines the close textual reading and social history characteristics of The Two Marxisms with the theory of discourse he had elaborated in The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology and the class analysis of The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. He is thereby able to grasp Marxism as a totality; as a politics, as an ideological discourse, as a culture, as an organization, and as a class project. At the same time he returns to themes from The Dialectic and The Future of Intellectuals within the context of a study of a specific politics and class ideology. Against Fragmentation applies resources developed by Gouldner over the last decade to the topic of Marxism. It also allows us to appraise those resources as effective means to understanding the sources of both Marxist rationality and irrationality, and reinserts the accomplishments of earlier work into the project on Marxism. The third and final volume of that project is currently in preparation and will comprise a study of post-Marxists, including Lenin, Stalin, Lukacs, Gramsci, Sorel, Mao and Althusser.
Something should also be said to Gouldner's longer-range project which this particular volume fits into but does not complete. This project inspired him all his days: Sociology, he said, was to reclaim society for man. He never lost faith in the importance of sociology as an enterprise despite its academic vicissitudes and trivializations, but it was not for the technicians, social or others, that social science was to be developed. It was to establish a liberative understanding of the social totality that could mitigate against the fragmentation of modern everyday life
Gouldner saw Marxism as one such attempt: a project inspired in its analysis of reality by a vision of the larger context but ultimately flawed in its ability to return society to man. He felt that inherent in all "grand" systems --- systems attempting a noble holism as Marxism did--is the ever-present danger of succumbing to discontinuity, to forgetting the fragmentation. Whereas this present work is an account of how such fragmentation occurred in Marxism--- keeping the whole beyond its reach --- it is finally a call to social theory, personified in a community of critical theorists, to become the agent to develop a cognitive rationality capable at last of treading the delicate path between recovery and holism. Thus, it was Gouldner's belief, would society be reclaimed for man.
At the time of Gouldner's death, Against Fragmentation was substantially completed with the exception of final editing and a final organization plan. We have limited our editorial involvement to improving syntax and grammar, deleting obviously repetitious passages, and providing a logical internal organization. The latter entailed with ordering the chapters and dividing the book into sections. The text is Gouldner's its organization to the extent he had left ambiguities, is
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