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Marx's Theory of History: The Contemporary Debate
In recent years there has been a renewed interest in Marx's theory and this text is intended as an accessible guide and contribution to this debate. It presents research findings together with summaries of alternative approaches to the interpretation of historical materialism.
242 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1992
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February 9, 2025
This book is built around GA Cohen's 1978 book "Karl Marx's Theory of History, A Defence". It opens with a summary of Cohen's thesis and then presents a number of discrete chapters which assess Cohen's approach to method, the influence of the state, and a short final chapter on the impact on ethics. Much of the book is taken up with various assessments of Cohen's use of functional explanation, rather than a general assessment of the "analytical philosophy" method of Cohen.
The general sense then is one which accepts the premise of Cohen's argument and aims to explore it in some detail. It's fair to say that I find this approach to Marx simplistic and wrong headed. It takes a positivist view of cause and effect which reads Marx as dividing society into sharply divided blocks of "forces of production", "relations of production", and "superstructure" and then seeks straight line cause-and-effect relationships between them. This is an overly mechanical approach which cannot realistically account for real societies or the flow of historical change. It relies too much on the well known Preface to "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" as the only summary of Marx's view. In looking for concrete mechanisms they do too little to include (class) struggle and the sort of analysis of reciprocal effect that dialectics emphasise but which analytical philosophy dismisses as "bullshit".
As a preparation for (re)reading Cohen, this is an interesting book. But in terms of the theories it presents, it is too simplistic and positivist. It may fit Marx into an framework that suits English philosophy, but that doesn't make it a useful analysis of Marx.
The general sense then is one which accepts the premise of Cohen's argument and aims to explore it in some detail. It's fair to say that I find this approach to Marx simplistic and wrong headed. It takes a positivist view of cause and effect which reads Marx as dividing society into sharply divided blocks of "forces of production", "relations of production", and "superstructure" and then seeks straight line cause-and-effect relationships between them. This is an overly mechanical approach which cannot realistically account for real societies or the flow of historical change. It relies too much on the well known Preface to "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" as the only summary of Marx's view. In looking for concrete mechanisms they do too little to include (class) struggle and the sort of analysis of reciprocal effect that dialectics emphasise but which analytical philosophy dismisses as "bullshit".
As a preparation for (re)reading Cohen, this is an interesting book. But in terms of the theories it presents, it is too simplistic and positivist. It may fit Marx into an framework that suits English philosophy, but that doesn't make it a useful analysis of Marx.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review