Historicism and its critics: the case of Karl Marx

Russian Studies in Philosophy, 2012

The article offers a logical reconstruction of Marx's theory of history. On the basis of an analysis of the concept of labor, the author presents and discusses the four main socioeconomic formations of human history. The author challenges the Marxian project of the elimination of both division of labor and private property pointing to its theoretical and practical shortcomings.

Ciências Sociais Unisinos, 2021

This paper aims to point out the limits of the historical determinism thesis in Marx’s thought by analyzing his writings on the Russian issue and the possibility of a “Russian road” to socialism. The perspective of historical determinism implies that Marx’s thought is supported by a unilinear view of social evolution, i.e. history is understood as a succession of modes of production and their internal relations inexorably leading to a classless society. We argue that in letters and drafts on the Russian issue, Marx opposes to any attempt associate his thought with a deterministic conception of history. It is pointed out that Marx’s contact with the Russian populists in the 1880s provides textual elements allowing to impose limits on the idea of historical determinism and the unilinear perspective in the historical process.

1000-Word Philosophy, 2022

A concise introduction to Karl Marx's theory of history.

In what follows, I argue that commentators such as Gerald A. Cohen (1970), Karl Popper (1962) and Bertrand Russell (1920), have misinterpreted Marx‟s conception of history in two important ways. Firstly, the „Vulgar‟ interpretation-- although so influential it could just as well be called `pop-Marxism‟-- is no more than a caricature and as such should be easy to dispense with. The second reading is more influential within Marxist academic and analytical philosophy and will be my main concern for the first part of this essay. It sees material forces of production and social relations as `entirely separate‟ (Cohen 1970, p. 29) and has often been called technologic determinism. I challenge such a reading by a critique of a though experiment developed by Popper in which I hope to show that a clear understanding of historical materialism demands that both elements of the base should be considered in relation to each other.

2023

The “Historicism” that some 20th century philosophers, like Karl Popper, still fought against, is now embedded, to the core, in everything we say or think. We have to make a conscious effort not to think that everything is relative to time and place. Obviously, at least in a trivial sense, everything is relative to time and place. Unless human action takes place in a vacuum, men “suffer” the influence of the world of their own time and “act” over the world of their own time. How is it even conceivable for men not to be influenced by their predecessors and contemporaries or not to live and act in their city or nation? But, without realizing it, another idea creeps into our minds: that if men are indeed children of their one time, perhaps there are no “timeless truths” as regards individuals or societies (perhaps in mathematics, but who can even be sure?). In some centuries, slavery or the inferiority of women was evident, but fortunately we were born in a more enlightened century and region of the globe, and we no longer think that way. But, thinking through this, what sense does it make to censure the prejudices of other “civilizations,” if everything is relative to time and place, considering that a kind of blindfold – their “view of the world” – prevented them from seeing things differently and obviously from imagining problems that did not exist at that time and that they could not even conceive of. Of course, it sometimes surprises us that, without microscopes or laboratories, these other civilizations managed to imagine that matter is made of “atoms,” just as it surprises us that Aristotle debates the morality of slavery or money and Antiphon debates equality among all men. However, the flawed nature of their analyses only confirms our inner conviction about their “blindness.” Curiously, we are not more assertive in discarding them as inevitably outdated precisely because we now have the “historical sense” whose absence is the inherent flaw of all past philosophers – as Nietzsche complained. Indeed, it is difficult for us to understand how it is possible that ancient philosophers, who debated everything from repugnant worms to vast cosmologies, never wrote a page on the “philosophy of history.” There are obviously great narrators of history, but the word “history”, which serves for example as the title of Herodotus’ works, rather designates the set of inquiries that he carried out both about the past and about exotic regions. The so-called ancient historians were seen as belonging to the same “family” as the rhetoricians and the tragedians. The inquiries, narratives and analyses of historians were a useful acquisition (ktema) for all times, whether for statesmen and orators who need to persuade others, or merely for entertainment, but sadly they are not very serious. History is, according to Aristotle, less serious than poetry. Poetry captures and communicates better than history the wisdom about what is timeless in man (for example, love, bravery, shame and magnanimity). It is true that the Romans and medievals worked out a kind of “theology of History”, but when Cicero or Augustine speak of the history that Providence governs, it is the history of empires and nations that they are talking about (discussing, for example, whether the Roman conquest conforms to or is contrary to divine providence). It is something specific, and not whole “civilizations” or “cultures” that include everything that happened in the past. Even God himself cannot govern things that are mere hollow words (flatus vocis). Nietzsche’s criticism may seem just the mere, somewhat outdated, restatement of a previous criticism made by Rousseau. But, in the meantime, a New Continent was discovered (much larger than what Columbus discovered) where the truth about man is revealed to us: History. The most important philosopher of history is of course Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). In Philosophy of Right (1820), which develops themes outlined previously in a subsection of his immense Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (1817), Hegel argues that history is a rational (and reasonable) process that culminates in the Rational State . According to the traditional interpretation , for Hegel, the world is a vast conscious totality, whose spirit acts according to what he calls “dialectic.” Contrary to what the ancient name suggests, dialectics is not a process of philosophical dispute, but a process of self-creation by reconciling opposites: thesis, antithesis and synthesis. This process is not continuous; it advances through leaps, with inevitable conflicts. Indeed, “history is not a stage for happiness; periods of happiness are blank pages in history”. Hegel thus manufactures a post-factum historical account, which largely ignores ordinary events, to focus on fundamental changes in the “spirit” of the relationship between men. In this way, it is through “recognition” that the relationship between master and slave is transfigured, as it is through the emergence of the State that the individual, the family and “civil society” (which for the first time is conceived as something separate from the political regime, in contrast to both the ancients and Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau). Since the historical process is rational and inevitable, there is therefore something absurd about praising or condemning certain practices in certain historical epochs, since they are all part of the inevitable march of history. Indeed, the criterion of what is moral is what history makes triumph. Karl Marx inherited from Hegel this same vision of history as a process whose course is inevitable, thus developing so-called “dialectical materialism” (although this expression is not Marx’s own, but coined by the Russian socialist, Gregory Plekhanov, to designate the philosophy of orthodox communists, it is now current).

In what follows, I argue that commentators such as Gerald A. Cohen (1970), Karl Popper (1962) and Bertrand Russell (1920), have misinterpreted Marx‟s conception of history in two important ways. Firstly, the „Vulgar‟ interpretation-- although so influential it could just as well be called `pop-Marxism‟-- is no more than a caricature and as such should be easy to dispense with. The second reading is more influential within Marxist academic and analytical philosophy and will be my main concern for the first part of this essay. It sees material forces of production and social relations as `entirely separate‟ (Cohen 1970, p. 29) and has often been called technologic determinism. I challenge such a reading by a critique of a though experiment developed by Popper in which I hope to show that a clear understanding of historical materialism demands that both elements of the base should be considered in relation to each other

Sociological Theory, 2004

This article argues that an application of Marxism to itself can help us transcend Gouldner's (1980) dichotomy between scientific and critical Marxism. After demonstrating that the paradigmatic document of scientific marxism, Marx's Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, turns the structural logic of capitalist economy into the basis for a transhistorical theory of social-economic development, this article explores the limitations of critical Marxism's response to scientific Marxism and concludes that a viable, not class-centered, reformulation of the emancipatory project is possible through an analysis of capitalism's ''dialectic of scarcity.'' The task of the emancipatory project, it is argued, is to turn humanity, and not the working class, from a political subject in itself to a political subject in and for itself. Adapting Whitehead's (1929:63) generalization about the history of Western philosophy, one could argue that the history of Marxism after Marx consists of a series of reactions to the model of historical materialism that Marx lays out in his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. 1,2 In Levine and Wright's (1980:48) words, ''The cutting edge of twentieth-century Western Marxism. .. has tended to oppose the historical materialism of the Preface.'' Even as they criticize the ''rigidly determinist cast'' of the Preface, Levine and Wright (1980:48) characterize this text as ''the classical formulation of historical materialism,'' thus aligning themselves with Cohen (1988:3), a defender of the Preface, who contends that the Preface is ''not. .. just one text among many, but. .. the text which gives the clearest statement of historical materialism.'' The struggle within Marxism over the validity of the Preface is symptomatic of the struggle, described by Gouldner (1980), between ''scientific'' and ''critical'' Marxism. This article will argue that the supersession of Gouldner's dichotomy is possible through the application of Marxist theory to itself and will proceed to trace the important political implications of the reconstruction of Marxist theory that the supersession of this dichotomy makes necessary. I will begin with a critical discussion of Cohen's (2001) interpretation of Marx's theory of history because, in defending the historical materialism of the Preface, this work also provides a sophisticated defense of scientific Marxism. After identifying crucial contradictions in Cohen's argument, I will show how an application of Marxism to itself makes possible a new, more complete interpretation of the historical *The author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and Sarah Abramowicz for their insightful criticisms of earlier versions of this paper. The responsibility for any remaining weaknesses lies with the author.

Mills writes: G. A. Cohen's influential ‘technological determinist’ reading of Marx's theory of history rests in part on an interpretation of Marx's use of ‘material’ whose idiosyncrasy has been insufficiently noticed. Cohen takes historical materialism to be asserting the determination of the social by the material/asocial, viz. ‘socio‐neutral’ facts about human nature and human rationality which manifest themselves in a historical tendency for the forces of production to develop. This paper reviews Marx's writings to demonstrate the extensive textual evidence in favour of the traditional interpretation ‐ that for Marx, the ‘material’ includes the economic, and is thus ineluctably social in character. Thus those critics of Cohen who have urged the inclusion of the relations of production in historical materialism's explanans do seem to have Marx's terminological and conceptual backing.