Pollock defended Marxism as a universal natural science against Sombart’s attack

Evidence

The frank, limitless enthusiasm which the thirty-two-year-old Friedrich Pollock had for Karl Marx was somewhat artless, although it did have its own appeal. Marx, when he was thirty, had worked out his philosophical, sociological and political views so clearly that, right to the end of his life, there was never anything he had to retract', according to Pollock. Marx had struggled untiringly right up to his death for the proletariat, regardless of obstacles’. … Pollock objected to Sombart’s reference to the phenomenological intuiting of general essences [Wesensschau]', demanding empirical research instead. He rejected Sombart's claim that Marx and Engels subscribed to plebeianism’ as a `basic value’, asserting that scientific socialism had the character of a natural science. And he rejected the accusation that materialist dialectics was part of an exclusively proletarian metaphysics of historymainly by appealing to references in Engels’s Anti-Dühring showing that Marx and Engels had been convinced that dialectics had universal validity. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 235

Categorization

• XREF: Pollock’s insistence that scientific socialism is a natural science and dialectics has universal validity connects to the Institute’s later empiricism-versus-metaphysics debates and to the tension between economic and philosophical Marxism that recurs across the Frankfurt School project. — connects to: Pollock held a philistine, pre-Leninist Marxist orthodoxy focused on economics — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 237; Western Marxism diverged from orthodox Marxism over the status of natural science — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 506; Pollock’s 1926 Marx defense rejected Sombart’s phenomenological and partisan readings

Broader Connections

• Pollock held a philistine, pre-Leninist Marxist orthodoxy focused on economics #expands (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 237
• Western Marxism diverged from orthodox Marxism over the status of natural science #qualifies (0.70) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 506