UC Berkeley

Bax was the leading philosopher of the socialist revival in Britain during the 1880s. He saw Marxism as an economic and historical science that lacked a philosophical and ethical basis. Consequently, he tried to justify the Marxian dialectic by using a philosophy indebted to German idealism to show that the dialectic was a fact about reality itself, and he also tried to provide an ethical defence of Marxism in terms of a positivist ethic enshrining the goals of the French Revolution. Such an understanding of Bax's philosophy makes his political activities appear more rational than historians have previously thought.