Beiheft 20

Studies in Marxist Historical Theory

Cover image: photograph of Karl Marx, by John Jabez Edwin Mayall (1875)

+ PHILIP J. KAIN, Marx's Theory of Ideas, History and Theory 20 (December 1981), Bei. 20, 357-378.

In The German Ideology (1845-1846), Marx developed his notion of "the materialist view of the world," which differed from both the earlier 1844 Manuscripts and the later Grundrisse, Critique of Political Economy, and Capital. First, whereas Marx had distinguished human life from other forms of life as the result of an essence, Marx now argued that material conditions determine the human condition. Second, ideas can affect human life but they are themselves the product of material conditions. Third, though he later reverses himself, he rejects not only the identification but the value of abstractions and categories. Fourth, Marx no longer considers man's history to be a radical self-creation through labor, but a natural self-consciousness modified by productive and social intercourse. Finally, Marx inverted his theory of language and now considered it the product rather than the source of material conditions.

+ WALTER L. ADAMSON, Marx's Four Histories: An Approach to His Intellectual Development, History and Theory 20 (December 1981), Bei. 20, 379-402.

Helmut Fleischer has distinguished three different approaches to history in the development of Marx's thinking: the "anthropological" (in the 1844 Manuscripts), the "pragmatological" (in the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology), and the "nomological" (in the Critique of Political Economy and Capital). However, these represent a less continuous and coherent development than Fleischer claims. The 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse can be instanced as a fourth view, more focused than the others on historiography, and at variance with what Marx says elsewhere. The sequence and overlapping of these four views call into question both the interpretation of Marx's development as smoothly continuous and the interpretation of his development as "ruptured" into "early" and "late."

+ ROBERT A. GORMAN, Empirical Marxism, History and Theory 20 (December 1981), Bei. 20, 403-423.

"Empirical Marxism" comprises a number of Marxists from the nineteenth century to the present who have tried to formulate an alternative to the orthodox materialism and determinism which would be more open to verification through empirical science. This interest connects such otherwise diverse thinkers as the empirio-critics, Eduard Bernstein, the Austro-Marxists, Galvano Della Volpe, and Lucio Colletti. In different ways, all of these attempted but failed to resolve the tension between revolutionary theory based on a priori premises and empiricist methodology responsive to factual research.

+ HOWARD R. BERNSTEIN, Marxist Historiography and the Methodology of Research Programs, History and Theory 20 (December 1981), Bei. 20, 424-449.

Marxist historiography has always claimed to be "conceptually" rooted in the natural sciences and has therefore been concerned with the function of laws, the structure of theories, and the logical relations between hypotheses and empirical data. Minimal criteria for the identification of a scientific research program as developed by Lakatos and Laudan include: a negative heuristic; explanatory or predictable scientific theories; a central model or paradigm; identification and solution of internal problems; self-conscious awareness by researchers of a common tradition; and the internal dynamics of conflict and convergence. Less than a generation ago, Marxist scholarship seemed to offer the most innovative methodologies in history. More recently, however, Marxist scholarship seems to be reliving old glories while other approaches (psychohistory, quantitative history, and historical anthropology) have advanced more innovative research programs.