The Merging of these Two Developments in Epistemology and the Political/Economic Spheres Yielded the Surging to Prominence of Non-Rational and Irrationalist Left Socialisms

While some on the Left modified their ethics, others set to revising Marxist psychology and epistemology. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s there had been some early suggestions that Marxism was too rationalistic, too logical and deterministic. In the 1920s, Mao had urged that will and assertion of the peasants and especially of the leaders counted for more than passively waiting for the material conditions of revolution to work themselves out deterministically. In the 1930s, Antonio Gramsci had rejected the belief that the Depression would necessarily spell the doom of capitalism, and he had argued that finishing capitalism off would require the creative initiative of the masses. That creative initiative, Gamsci argued, was however neither rational nor inexorable but rather subjective and unpredictable. And early Frankfurt School theorizing had suggested that Marxism was too wedded to reason, that reason led to major social pathologies, and that less rational psychological forces had to be incorporated into any successful social theory.

Those voices were mostly ignored for two decades, swept aside by the dominant voices of classical Marxist theory, the Depression and World War II, and by the conviction that the Soviet Union was showing the world the true path.

By the 1950s, however, two developments began to merge, one epistemological and one political-economic. In the world of academic epistemology, both European and Anglo-American theorists were reaching skeptical and pessimistic conclusions about the powers of reason: Heidegger was ascendant on the Continent and Logical Positivism was reaching its dead end in the Anglo-American world. And in both theoretical and practical politics and economics, the failure of Marxism to develop according to the logic of its traditional theory was reaching a crisis. The merging of these two developments yielded the surging to prominence of non-rational and irrationalist Left socialisms.

--Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Tempe, AZ: Scholargy Publishing, 2004), e-book.