Western Marxism and Classics (1968-2025)
These intellectual movements have been incorporated in ways that are difficult to untangle. The majority of influential scholars in the field of Classics used one of the strains of Marxism that were established in the 1960s and 1970s to shape processual / structural and post-processual / post-structural methods and theories. To understand Marxism or the Classics it is necessary to restore the political and historical context of these ideas, which were shaped in the years after World War 2 and the years that followed the May 1968 revolutions. Since 1990, much of the meaning of these ideas has unfortunately been forgotten and effaced.
In the years following World War 2, Marxism was transformed by the dominance of the United States militarily and economically, and the political repression of McCarthyism and the cold war that followed. No scholar better embodies this history than M.I. Finley, who brought the ideas of the Frankfurt School / Institute for Social Research into the field (See Tewksbury 2026) These scholars, Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin, were Marxists who came from the intellectual circles of Europe in the post-Russian revolution years. They turned from the revolutionary, Hegelian Marxism ofGyörgy Lukács to the academic, Marxist critical theory of Horkheimer, which did not seek to unify the working and intellectual classes in the ‘totality’ of socialist revolution, but instead sought to critique the fragmentation of the subaltern and dominant societies inherent in ‘the social’ ideology of capitalist unity. In the process, the political economics of Marxism became critiqued as the vulgar materialism of Stalinism and capitalism, and the revolutionary politics of working-class consciousness became the academic study of subaltern status.
For good reason, many have argued that this turn is better understood as post-Marxism. Marxist scholarship in Classics is better understood as post-Marxism. In the process, Rosa Luxemburg and Marxist economic history were effaced and transformed. Marx and Engles’ ideas became incorporated in new, unrecognizable forms.
In Classics, Marxist scholars have in turn updated central ideas from Marxism. Finley substituted class for status, the slave society for the slave mode of production, and Marx’s theory of political economy for historicism’s primitivism argument. de Ste. Croix conflated poor independent farmers with slaves in order to redefine class without the modes of production, and likewise accepted historicism’s primitivist account. The collected articles published in 1975 accept the basic positions of de Ste. Croix. Nonethelss, Paul Cartledge’s spirited critique of M.I. Finley’s abandonment of Marx unfortunately failed to inspire Cartledge himself for long.
Peter Rose’s largely individual attempt to preserve Marxist scholarship in Classics turns to the influence of 1970s post-Marxism, seeking to find the subaltern voice of the oppressed class in the rise of the archaic state and the poet of the Odyssey. Vlassopoulos continues these trends, critiquing his predecessors on post-modern grounds for failing to provide the proverbial ‘bottom up’ account of ‘agency.’ Unfortunately, these are terms which he himself fails to define or defend, making his own contributions and ideas impossible to estimate or critique.
Outside of the field of Classics, the work of Perry Anderson remains the closest to the Marxist account of ancient history before the rise of German critical theory and substantivist economic anthropology. Ellen Meiksins Wood’s 1997 book, Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy, is better known in the intellectual milieu of the New Left. It argues that slavery has been overrepresented in ancient Athens by critics of ancient democracy who have shaped the debate within the terms of the 18th and 19th centuries dismissal of the culture of the working class. She seeks to build on works like E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, setting out to show how the working class culture of ancient Athens has been effaced from history in order to undermine the working class politics of democracy. It is an argument that shows how far ‘Marxism’ has come from Marx’s argument that we will not be able to understand the domination of the worker under capitalist ‘democracy’ unless we are prepared to face the domination of slaves in the Athenian democracy.
1 Classics
1.1 Cambridge/Oxford
The two most influential Marxist scholars in Classics are M.I. Finley (1912-1986) and G.E.M. Ste. de Croix (1910-2000). The extent to which Marxism is studied within ‘Classics’ is largely limited by the debate these two scholars had over the meaning of Karl Marx’s central ideas. Since Finley’s publication of The Ancient Economy(1973), there have been very few openly ‘Marxist’ scholars that have worked in the field. It can even be argued that M.I. Finley did not count himself as one. From 1968 to today, the following authors are inspired by or respond directly within the debates of Cambridge and Oxford Classics.
I. M.I. Finley (Cambridge)
II. G.E.M. Ste. de Croix (Oxford)
III. Paul Cartledge (1975- )
IV. Robert Padug (1975-)
V. Peter Rose (2012)
VI. Kostas Vlassopoulos (2018)
1.2 The Paris School
From here, the map of Marxist history in Classics becomes more difficult to chart. The terrain is potentially vast, and it is difficult to avoid controversial definitions of Marxism / post-Marxism and the theoretical debates of the 1990s that have come to define and categorize the field. Despite the difficulty, a basic overview of Marxism in ‘Classics’ is not complete without a note on French Marxism within ‘The Paris School.’
I. Louis Gernet (Centre national de la recherche scientifique)
II. J.P. Vernant (1969) ”Remarks on the Class Struggle”
III. Pierre Vidal-Naquet (1977) Economy and Society
1.3 The New Left
Two authors have written essential works on ancient Greece and Rome from
the Marxist political perspective of the New Left.
I. Perry Anderson (1974) From Antiquity to Feudalism
II. Melkin-Wood (1997) Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy
1.4 Historical Materialism
Last, there is notable work on the modes of production within the frame- work of international Historical Materialism.
I. Christopher Wickham
II. Garcia Mac-Gaw
2 Archaeology
2.1 British
The influence of Marxism and the making of Cambridge archaeology is a story that is not fully understood. Nonetheless, in archaeology, the influence of Gordon Childe and M.I. Finley has been extremely important to the basic paradigms of theoretical debate in material archaeology today. Much more work needs to be done on the intellectual history of Gordon Childe, Karl Polanyi, and the Institute for Social Research (all of which were singularly influenced by Marx’s historical materialism and international communism) before the intellectual history of Marxism in the field of archaeology and Classics can be properly understood. See McGuire, Randall H. (1992) A Marxist Archaeology and Spriggs, Mathew (2009) Marxist Perspectives in Archaeology (New Directions in Archaeology).
I. Gordon Childe
II. *Colin Renfrew (Cambridge)
2.3 Italian
I. Bianchi Bandinelli (Italian)
II. Renato Peroni (Prehistory)
III. Andrea Carandini (Classics)
2.4 American
I. Randy MacGuire
II. Leanne Wollsey
III. Bruce Trigger
IV. Thomas Patterson