Abstract
Patrick Murray draws a historical line, starting from Berkeley’s critical phenomenology, passing through Hegel, and ending in Marx, where he sets up a treatment of what he calls ‘bad abstraction’, and how this relates to the notion of abstraction in Marx. He then finds a second division that goes from Berkeley to Marx, passing through Samuel Bailey. Neither Berkeley nor Bailey, though critics of political economists for dealing with abstract ideas, understood value as the expression of the social nature of wealth. They were both held prisoner by the bad abstractions that the capitalist mode of production generates. The author then reviews Marx’s way of dealing with these bad abstractions in his works, both in Philosophy and in Political Economy, concluding with thoughts on the problem of what would be the meaning of ‘abstract’ in abstract labor.