History and development
Origins
Karl Marx never used the words "historical materialism" to describe his theory of history; the term first appears in Friedrich Engels' 1880 work Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,[7] to which Marx wrote an introduction for the French edition.[8] By 1892, Engels indicated that he accepted the broader usage of the term "historical materialism," writing in an introduction to an English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific;
This book defends what we call "historical materialism", and the word materialism grates upon the ears of the immense majority of British readers. [...] I hope even British respectability will not be overshocked if I use, in English as well as in so many other languages, the term "historical materialism", to designate that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another.[9]
Marx's initial interest in materialism is evident in his doctoral thesis which compared the philosophical atomism of Democritus with the materialist philosophy of Epicurus[10] as well as his close reading of Adam Smith and other writers in classical political economy.
A caricature drawn by Engels of
Max Stirner, whose 1844 work
The Unique and its Property prompted Marx and Engels to theorize a scientific approach to the study of history which they first laid out in
The German Ideology (1845) along with a lengthy rebuttal of Stirner's own critique of socialism
Marx and Engels first state and detail their materialist conception of history within the pages of The German Ideology, written in 1845. The book, which structural Marxists such as Louis Althusser[12] regard as Marx's first 'mature' work, is a lengthy polemic against Marx and Engels' fellow Young Hegelians and contemporaries Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Max Stirner. Stirner's 1844 work The Unique and its Property had a particularly strong impact[13] on the worldview of Marx and Engels: Stirner's blistering critique of morality and whole-hearted embrace of egoism prompted the pair to formulate a conception of socialism along lines of self-interest rather than simple humanism alone, grounding that conception in the scientific study of history.[14]
Perhaps Marx's clearest formulation of historical materialism resides in the preface to his 1859 book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:
The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
Continued development
In a foreword to his essay Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886), three years after Marx's death, Engels claimed confidently that "the Marxist world outlook has found representatives far beyond the boundaries of Germany and Europe and in all the literary languages of the world." Indeed, in the years after Marx and Engels' deaths, "historical materialism" was identified as a distinct philosophical doctrine and was subsequently elaborated upon and systematized by Orthodox Marxist and Marxist–Leninist thinkers such as Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Georgi Plekhanov and Nikolai Bukharin. This occurred despite the fact that many of Marx's earlier works on historical materialism, including The German Ideology, remained unpublished until the 1930s.
In the early years of the 20th century, historical materialism was often treated by socialist writers as interchangeable with dialectical materialism, a formulation never used by Marx or Engels.[17] According to many Marxists influenced by Soviet Marxism, historical materialism is a specifically sociological method, while dialectical materialism refers to the more general, abstract philosophy underlying Marx and Engels' body of work. This view is based on Joseph Stalin's pamphlet Dialectical and Historical Materialism, as well as textbooks issued by the Institute of Marxism–Leninism of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.[18]
The substantivist ethnographic approach of economic anthropologist and sociologist Karl Polanyi bears similarities to historical materialism. Polanyi distinguishes between the formal definition of economics as the logic of rational choice between limited resources and a substantive definition of economics as the way humans make their living from their natural and social environment.[19] In The Great Transformation (1944), Polanyi asserts that both the formal and substantive definitions of economics hold true under capitalism, but that the formal definition falls short when analyzing the economic behavior of pre-industrial societies, whose behavior was more often governed by redistribution and reciprocity.[20] While Polanyi was influenced by Marx, he rejected the primacy of economic determinism in shaping the course of history, arguing that rather than being a realm unto itself, an economy is embedded within its contemporary social institutions, such as the state in the case of the market economy.[21]
Perhaps the most notable recent exploration of historical materialism is G. A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence, which inaugurated the school of Analytical Marxism. Cohen advances a sophisticated technological-determinist interpretation of Marx "in which history is, fundamentally, the growth of human productive power, and forms of society rise and fall according as they enable or impede that growth."[23]
Several scholars have argued that historical materialism ought to be revised in the light of modern scientific knowledge.[who?] Jürgen Habermas believes historical materialism "needs revision in many respects", especially because it has ignored the significance of communicative action.[24]
Göran Therborn has argued that the method of historical materialism should be applied to historical materialism as intellectual tradition, and to the history of Marxism itself.[25]
In the early 1980s, Paul Hirst and Barry Hindess elaborated a structural Marxist interpretation of historical materialism.[26]
Regulation theory, especially in the work of Michel Aglietta draws extensively on historical materialism.[27]
Spiral dynamics shows similarities to historical materialism.[how?][28]
