Overview

Roger Garaudy was for many years at the centre of the French Communist Party but was eventually expelled for his liberal views. In the Seventies, he strove to bring Marxism and Christianity together, to include all humanity in a project to set all people free. What emerges from Garaudy's project is a very modern Marxism, with its emphasis on the individual, its ecological politics, and in its insistence on religion as central to human emancipation. Although Garaudy himself became frustrated by the failure of Marxism and converted to Islam, eventually resulting in his work being discredited in the West, it is certainly possible that Garaudy's project represents a good, perhaps even the best, starting point for Marxism in today's world.

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"""Occasionally, certain studies throw a vivid light on the gloomy bookshelves of the history of ideas. Such is Julian Roche's book. The author shares with the French philosopher, once the leading intellectual of the French Communist Party, the singular ambition of synthesizing Christian faith and Marxism. Roger Garaudy's project, after he was expelled by what he called a Stalinist party, was indeed to insert transcendence (the actual love of God rather than the mere philosophical concept) in the revolutionary anti-capitalist project of accomplishing social justice on earth. Roche's disappointment lies in what he considers as the betrayal of his project by Garaudy himself as he converted to Islam--thus opening the door to a subsequent drift into radical anti-Zionism that associated him with Holocaust denial. He takes up Garaudy's project where the French philosopher would have abandoned it, and makes a valuable intellectual contribution to a project that is close to his heart: uniting faith in Christ and the aspiration for justice on earth. A thought-provoking and stimulating book."" -- Dr. Didier J.-F. Gauvin, author of Un intellectuel communiste illégitime: Roger Garaudy"

Author Information

Julian Roche's philosophical academic interests lie mainly in Continental Marxism, and in particular Marxist approaches to contemporary issues and problems. He also has an active career as an economist outside academia.

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