Philosophy of History

Current table of contents:
1. The Conundrums of History
2. The Historical Materialist and the Concept of History
3. History and Natural History: One Response to Collingwood
4. Praxis and Postmodernism

The Conundrums of History

        Through puzzling about history we reach conundrums of history; through conundrums thrown up by this puzzlement (through scrambling some conventional concepts we already hold of it) we may get closer to what ‘history’ means and what it is.

I

        The first puzzle we might consider is the apparent poverty of the English language when it comes to terms associated with what we call ‘history’. There is always an initial, slightly irritating buzzing-gnat difficulty when we get into philosophical discussion about ‘history’: the question of which sense one is taking ‘history’ to mean. For a language with a larger and more nuanced vocabulary than either Italian or French for example, English is peculiarly lacking in terminology for a whole cluster of (rather important) things under the blanket term ‘history’.

Because we have so few terms handy we frequently get bogged down in having to define them for the purposes of our particular discussion. Do we speak of ‘history’ in the time-honoured fashion of Ranke as ‘what actually happened in the past’ (or as the accumulated record and traces of happenings of the past), or of ‘history’ as the literary interpretation of what happened in the past, as set down in later books by historians? What about the meaning of ‘history’ and ‘historic’ as synonymous with ‘of lasting importance’? As in: ‘history was made that day’, or ‘this will be an event of historic national importance’? Note that the latter expression rhetorically takes ‘history’ into the future. Thus ‘history’ stands for future potential as well as past happening; it is both a noun and the root for an adjective; it is used both in neutral description and as value judgment.  It implies making as well as being, entity as well as process.  All this we have to get clear before we can even begin discussing it.

        It would be a lot easier for us all if the different things represented by the various definitions of ‘history’ were separate and distinct from one another semantically. [1] Especially as there turn out to be so many. That is, to venture classification: History 1 = what happened in the past before our ‘present’; History 2 = the cumulative record and traces of what happened in the past, since unrecorded history may not be ‘history’ at all, though it is difficult to see what other name can be given it – except ‘pre-history’, which it cannot be if such a phenomenon in one part of the world happened contemporaneously with history being recorded in another, as with Amerindian civilisation being extant at the same time as Roman; History 3 = what historians and their students write or have written about ‘what happened’; History 4 = an overall discipline comprising writing, publishing, teaching and philosophising which gets a budget allocation, employs qualified personnel, recommends degrees and is part of an academic faculty; History 5, especially in its adjectival form = what we and others regard as endowed with enduring significance. There may even be a History 6, = that phenomenon in the present which we believe must be of crucial importance in the future. A certain amount of modern or so-called ‘Contemporary History’ (a comical if also tantalising formulation) takes us into our present decade and even into our present year. Histories 2 and 3 may thus include aspects of our ‘present’ as well as our ‘past’, which means that the definition given above for History 1 is inadequate of itself.

        When Howard Zinn entitles his magnum opus A People’s History of the United States, he is using the term ‘history’ in at least four different senses: a history the people made as they struggled, a history of that history written by Howard Zinn, a history for the present people of the United States, and, finally, an account of matters of enduring and perhaps revolutionary significance within the scope of his subject matter. With the implication that it is the proper history of the United States, opposed to ‘establishment’ history.  It is designation, description of content and value judgment.

        There is the question of whether history (the practice of) is an art, a ‘humanity’ or a science. There appears to be little unanimity on this in the academic community. When I was applying to universities to become a history undergraduate, one university required me to take a maths test up to and including trigonometry because its history department came under the faculty of social sciences. Another university asked for no such thing because its history department came under the faculty of arts. One might like to guess as to which university ultimately took me on.

 

II

        The scene is thus set for our realisation, through the proliferation of meanings and their intertwining in one word, that ‘history’ is rather more problematical than we usually care to think. Long ago EH Carr in his What Is History? discussed the very nature of what constituted an historical phenomenon. Certain acts are committed, or events take place which are widely considered at the time to be ‘historical’, along with a great many others which are overlooked but become so anyhow, and still others which were ‘historical’ for a time but which have since slipped into obscurity and oblivion. One has little doubt that the participants in the Tennis Court Oath of 1789 were conscious of partaking in a great historical event, even if only hindsight could have told them quite why it was so historical. On the other hand, those who heard Lincoln delivering his brief Gettysburg Address in 1863 do not seem to have been unduly impressed by what turned out to be a (perhaps the) seminal, defining speech of American history. My great-great grandfather was an eminent Victorian divine whose admired sermons were sometimes published in full in leading British newspapers; I doubt if anyone apart from myself – clutching at straws of greatness - has read them since. There is the event which is set up at the time as ‘historical’ in the formal sense but seldom gets into the history books. If one imagined one had personally witnessed something momentously ‘historical’ in President Franklin Pierce’s Inaugural Address of March 1853 from the Capitol podium, one would have been labouring under a delusion. Of course it gets into ‘history’ as a matter of mere record, but it is not an act which resonates down through the years as something significant, either to immediate posterity or to us.       At any rate it is not much quoted. [2]

Is history some sort of objective phenomenon or is it simply made up? This question becomes more interesting when we consider the possibility that it may be being ‘made up’, as it were, by those who feature in it. Statesmen and others (including some assassins) often wish or need to ‘secure their place in history’ by some act which will bestow a kind of immortality as well as perhaps leading the people to a new dawn. One thinks of Nixon’s desire for a US rapprochement with Communist China as a means (over and above getting the Americans out of Vietnam through ‘peace with honour’) of crowning his political career and belying his previous reputation as an opportunistic Red-baiter. Sometimes this intention comes off, as it partially did with Nixon, and sometimes it may not. Of course not every statesman strives so very hard to become ‘historical’, but it would be only human not to be content with the idea of consignment to permanent obscurity or obloquy, having come so far. Perhaps we all want to become at least a little bit ‘immortal’ in the sense of being remembered after our deaths; it is a self-piteous but no less sad feeling that one will be immediately and entirely forgotten by everyone upon one’s decease.  Can those few among us who actively seek fame in their lifetimes be content with its impermanence unless they do something about that?

          There are those who have written self-serving memoirs or one-sided hagiographies along the lines of Parson Weems’ biography of George Washington, or who have purloined documents [3] or added touches of fakery to extant ones in the hope of ‘rewriting history’. There are the hoaxes, massagings and suppressions, such as the Donation of Constantine, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Tudor manipulations of the record of Richard III, the attempts to suppress the true state of the Russian peasantry from the rest of the world by the Stalin regime in the 1930s, Piltdown Man and the notorious ‘Hitler Diaries’ that so famously fooled Lord Dacre (Hugh Trevor-Roper) for a time. Nixon enters the picture again with his attempt to suppress all or – finally – some of the Watergate tapes, and putting in deletions in the transcript at the very least to perish the thought that he was foul-mouthed. It can take years of dedicated scholarship to spot the gaps or unravel all the misrepresentations in some cases. But we do a slight injustice here, since history (as record) can also be wiped out, fabricated or distorted from the most pious of intentions – one thinks of the woeful destruction of text after text of the ancient world by devout Christians, and on a smaller scale the case of the hero-worshipping Schindler, who destroyed as many of Beethoven’s conversation books as he could lay hands on in order that the master be remembered as ineffable.  Countless widows may have done much the same job on their late husbands’ papers for the same reason. Clementine Churchill had Graham Sutherland’s 1955 portrait of Sir Winston destroyed so that one memorial, at least, would not remain in being, or, perhaps, be remembered. (Of course it is the one portrait that is always reproduced in any illustrated volume on Sutherland or modern British portraiture, perhaps largely because of Clemmie.) Grey Owl, the half-Ojibwa sage who gained much celebrity in the 1920s and 1930s for promoting through his wisdom – and pioneering - the cause of environmentalism, was of course Archibald Belaney (1888-1938) of Hastings, Sussex who had not a drop of Ojibwa blood in him.

The later, post-event writing of history is itself complicated by the deliberate attempt of historical actors themselves to shape or ‘massage’ its interpretation in the first place. In other words, history is being interpreted or purposively shaped at the very time ‘it’ is going on, or shortly after, affecting the general view for long after the events in question – that is, at least until the historical scholars get down to them, and perhaps not even then – especially in the case of quiet excisions from the records. It is not as if this tendency is unknown to armies of researchers down through the years of letters, memoirs and other documents which include more expectedly tendentious partisan journals and newspapers. But what researchers may not have considered in any depth is the serious implication that this obfuscating activity of the past unwraps the neat parcels of separate meanings for ‘history’ itself, and dissolves any supposedly ironclad distinction as between ‘actual’ history and history as interpretation.

Of course many sorts of motive might be at work in the historical actor who distorts or suppresses information on the situation that have little or nothing to do with posterity, such as a desire to escape exposure or detection during one’s lifetime, or to beef up one’s ancestry, or to make money through secretive insider dealing, or to denigrate the character and intentions of one’s enemies, or even simply through being thin-skinned. But it amounts to the same thing. Whether the intention is to deceive, to hide, to uplift, to emphasise, or to immortalise, and whether it is by commission or omission, the fact remains that the historical actor in his/her – contemporary – situation is frequently re-creating their own history in the interpretive sense, as the later historian does so in researching and writing up findings. It would go too far to say that all historical actors have been pre-emptive historians, but a good many of them have assumed this function, systematically or otherwise.

Nor is this merely an individual affair. I have touched on events organised so as to be ‘historical’ at the time, and in this sense such events are also utilised in the deliberate interpretation of history as it happens. The ritual coronation of a monarch or investiture of a Prince of Wales, or the ritual surrounding the election of a new Pope, or a great state funeral, or inauguration of a president – all are plainly intended through impressive panoply or liturgical mystery to impose a meaning on history.  That is, at the very least such manifestations say to future generations: ‘this was important, this was a day to remember!’ There are of course the great stone monuments, from antiquity to – say – the memorials of the First World War, intended surely for posterity if only because of the enduring materials of which they have been constructed. But all sorts of acts suggest deliberate history-making or ‘writing’ at the time. It is impossible to comprehend fully the letters exchanged between Abelard and Heloise without knowing that these epistles were in part intended also for others to read, even after the demise of the correspondents, and were fashioned according to this convention. They are by no means ‘intimate’ love letters but more like public exculpations, though in this case there is not so much deception as a popular misunderstanding on our part of the motives of the past. We have our time capsules, filled with what we believe are important, ‘historical’ artefacts which we place inside the cornerstones of major buildings; we have sent space probes out with such artefacts on board in order to influence the understanding of civilisations on other planets, if any can be found (presumably after we, our children and our children’s children are long dead). No doubt the erection of the ill-fated Millennium Dome in London was intended at least in part to utilise the management skills of hundreds and the labour of thousands in making a mark on Labour government history by dint of the sheer scale of the undertaking. In our time, ‘spin doctoring’ has become politically institutionalised in the administrations of all the leading nations, and not perhaps without at least one eye on history, as with the inevitable and invariably remaindered memoirs of statespersons. And we should not forget governmental attempts to confirm certain ‘official’ interpretations especially of murky events: one picks out for example the Warren Commission, Hutton and the 9/11 Commission Reports. These must also be included in attempts to organise history along certain lines (referred to by ruder detractors as ‘whitewashes’). 

        This is not just a matter for elites and ruling establishments. It is possible to show that ‘the people’ too – amongst more immediate objectives – have sought to impose upon historical interpretation. Mass demonstrations, insurrections, mass meetings, conventions, banners, ringing manifestos, hunger strikes, sit-ins – many with a certain symbolic intent since it may be realised by the more perspicacious activists that no practical change is likely to occur very immediately in their aftermath – these will have had the deliberate intention of creating an ‘important’, that is to say significant and historical event, one that will be hoped to be marked by future generations, or at any rate the next generation. Acts of political terrorism may be committed in part for this reason also: 9/11 itself must have been deliberately engineered as a turning-point in history, which in a number of ways it was.

        Thus it is no simple matter to divide history neatly between ‘what actually happened’ and its contemporaneously attempted interpretation. ‘What happened’ in itself incorporates very often deliberate acts of interpretation or the forcing of the hand of interpretation, with or without posterity in mind, or with a following generation in mind as distinct from a distant posterity.

        The present, in turn, seeks to harness the past to make its own mark on the future. If we consider the post-event historian’s desire to ‘make’ history on his or her own by supplying a striking interpretation of past events, that is, to ‘make’ future history by converting others to a new view of at least a part of the past which in its turn may help to shape attitudes in the future, then we see that there is also the ‘making’ of history operating in reverse, projecting from present into past as well as from past into present.

‘Making’ in this latter instance has two connotations: ‘making’ new interpretation of the past, and – by doing so – ‘making’ history itself.

       

III

          This conjures up the image of a game, a cat-and-mouse game being played between past and present: that is, between historical actors and later historians – the former either individually or in the mass, the latter as the informed representatives of posterity. As historical actors, we may seek to control posterity’s thoughts about us, either on an individual or on a collective basis. As historians, we seek to penetrate through this controlling impulse in our ancestors or immediate forebears in order to get at the unvarnished truth. 

        The study of history is made the livelier by one’s thinking of it, at least to some extent, as a longstanding game played between the ‘teams’ of past and present. It has to be said that the present has most of the advantages: we know who our so-called ‘opponents’ were; the past did not know who we would be. What is more, we change our shapes and our views, while the past is immutable and cannot alter anything of itself, since ‘what’s done is done’.

        At the same time, while the past is fixed where it is (or was), we are vulnerable to motivations so new and so pressing upon us from the events we are caught up in, that we cannot always work out wholly what they are, or what they will lead us to do. Of course, the ‘future’ was a closed book to those before us; but they have said and done what was to be said and done; they are, at least, secure in their historical completeness. We by contrast are incomplete: we do not know where we are going, exactly, and we do not as yet know quite how much the imponderables and pressures of present-day life are affecting our rational judgments on those who lived in the past. So that, although we have the advantage of hindsight over the past, we have also the disadvantage of being in a state of flux and ignorance about ourselves in wider contemporary contexts, an uncertainty which is bound to be reflected in our shifting judgments on the past. [4]

        It should be emphasised that this is no mere fancy conceit. The game is real, depending on the extent to which those in the past sought deliberately to manipulate their images or characterise themselves or their actions, not just for posterity but in relation to one another. And as historians seeking to find them out, we are involved in their game because it is our game. What complicates the game is that ‘both sides’ do not play by the same rules. The particular motives of past participants for interpreting their own ‘history’ may seem hugely obscure to us, in some cases remaining forever unknown – the further back in history we penetrate the more is this likely to be the case. While our own agendas in pursuit of the past would in all likelihood have totally mystified them. At any rate, the intention here is not to imply that ‘game’ is merely a metaphor – that is, it is no mere metaphor to the extent that serious misleading and misrepresentations and the earnest attempts to detect them long afterwards are in full play and constitute important and significant undertakings at either end, with repercussions outside the historical profession as such.

        The idea that, by dint of conscious motives of self-enhancement or self-concealment or dramatisation, historical actors have long played a game with future historians (representatives of ‘posterity’ in general), is put forward here in a spirit of more than just playfulness.

        For it is really quite important, as I have already suggested, that our concept of the phenomenon of historical actors ‘writing’ their own history (not necessarily always in literary acts as such) suggests that ‘history’ is not merely ‘what happened’ as opposed to interpretations of what happened, but a mixture of the two even when it is first revealed as no more than in the form of our raw data. That historical actors have long sought to ‘interpret’ their own actions or force such interpretation upon their contemporaries and descendants critically impinges upon our conventional views of what ‘history’ is. We have something like a phenomenon of ‘contemporary reflexivity’ whether of past or present which must be taken into account in any attempt at a theory or philosophy of history.

IV

        If any ontology focuses purely on the game being played on our side of the carnal divide, then it is both limited in scope and misleading in consequences. The truth is that the game was always being played to quite an extent on the other side as well, when it was carnal. It is precisely through the doubts we have over documents and other primary sources as well as published primary sources that we may be pointed in the right direction: towards a real ‘there’ there, as opposed to Gertrude Stein’s scepticism on the ontological status of Oakland, California. These doubts indicate an object we as historians are dealing with which is extraordinarily concrete, not unreal or fabricated: they indicate that the historical actors of the past have themselves wanted to deceive, imagise advantageously to themselves, or in some other way obfuscate, glorify or plan out what the enduring record should be. In doubting the concrete reality of past history on the grounds that it consists wholly of more or less contemporary-with-us ‘texts’ which are fictions, the postmodernists (at least those for whom this is a leading contention) have missed the point: that the past also attempted the creation of those fictions or semi-fictions which in fact attests to its independent if mummified or attenuated ontological status. And for those other postmodernists who may take from this the view that history is little more than a sort of dialogue between the ‘texts’ of the past and those of the present, the question is begged as to why deception etc. should have been practised by historical actors in the first place. That is, if not in relation to ‘non-textual’ exigencies and pressures of the day?  Did Nixon create and then attempt to destroy the record simply because he wanted to create his own ‘text’, or was this symptomatic of paranoia?  As manifested in him but characteristic also of a new and rising Western-and-Southern ruling group in the United States which was and felt itself to be outside the older, East Coast ‘liberal’ establishment which had ruled the country more or less since its inception?  (Such paranoia had manifested itself in the Westerner Nixon’s Southern presidential predecessor, who instigated White House taping.) .

        Through the grasp of game-playing between past and present, we understand that the past was, and is, more than our own construct and more than the construct the actors of that past attempted, before they passed on. (Exclusive concern with the latter as ‘construct’ might best be described as the ‘culturalist heresy’.) There was someone - grappling with something - out there whom we know was real, at least partly because he or she may have been trying to pull a fast one on others, and ultimately on us.

V

        We might enlarge the discussion to suggest that the game-concept encourages an awareness that human beings of the past were active in pursuit of their interests and goals, individual and collective, whatever their levels of intellect or accomplishment. Even those who tended to be the losers of history – slaves, peasants, artisans on the retreat and workers – had their own ‘axes to grind’ within the respective systems they had been born into or conquered by. Historical actors have generally always attempted to survive, and if possible prosper and triumph, whether or not at the expense of others. The game-concept (which so far I have tended to restrict to the phenomenon of past deceptions) can be widened to show historical actors going beyond mere surviving: deliberately creating or protecting images of themselves or their causes for the perceived benefit of themselves, their fellows and their descendants. By gaining a sense of being in a kind of competition with someone of the past who was trying either to titivate or withhold a record or two, the student of history comes to see the players of the past as not only real but above all as active, not mere passive recipients or victims of happenings and events. Everyone makes history of a sort in the process of trying to stay alive or keep respectable while at the same time coping with the ‘history’ they have already inherited.

        There is an historiographical tendency still surviving that regards ‘the masses’ as an inert lump to be shoved about as suited the ruling orders. The view from the top down is of insensate mobs, docile and mindless peasants and workers, and cannon fodder. Feminist history has been rescuing women from this patronising approach, and not merely by focusing on ‘famous’ women. American Civil War history from a black perspective has been uncovering the decisive impact of the activism of Afro-Americans on the conflict as a whole – in and out of uniform – the activism of a group which American white historians have had a tendency to view as a passive, even inert element of the scene. Working-class and labour historians have been showing the variety of active ways in which workers sought to combat immiseration and ameliorate conditions in the teeth of employer and governmental opposition.

        On the other hand, there is the view that governance itself has been frequently inert, nothing but lassitude compounded with confusion and corruption. Thus revolutions are ‘caused’, it is argued, not by the actions of revolutionary actors but by the exceedingly dithering lassitude of the shortly-to-be overthrown regimes. Dithering there may have been, but overall governance at all levels which is not active and engaged is not governance at all; so one wonders how the social order had ever cohered to begin with, and thus why it faltered at particular points in part because of a revolutionary agency. Yet, also, why revolutionaries failed more often than they succeeded, if not because of a combination of strong opposition with splits inside revolutionary ranks over political formation, tactics and strategies – splits as responses to strong and sometimes decisive reaction.

        In fact, the more passive, inert and ineffectual we make historical actors of all kinds and classes and eras, and the less conflict we invoke by virtue of the supposed ultimate passivity of human beings and their institutionalised formations, the less meaning and significance does history come to contain, to the point where conceptually it degenerates into the one-damned-thing-after-another syndrome – history as mere contingency or accident. This represents an intellectual abdication on the part of historians and of those who think about history – sometimes, as in the case of the liberal historian H.A.L. Fisher in the late and calamitous 1930s, an attitude born of despair.

        Another pitfall is that by embalming past human beings wholly within a social, mass, quotidien, statistical fold, or by turning them exclusively into economic or social ‘factors’, with Trevelyan’s ‘politics left out’, it may be tempting to exclude any vision of historical actors as having been purposively or deliberately active at all. Determinism in this setting becomes an attractive heresy. Yet even something as apparently impersonal as past demography (whose trends overall no individual or group of actors could do much about or even know about, especially the hapless poor of Malthusian theory) is more than what human beings simply inherited. The trends came about through myriad personal, purposive choices and activities, activities which had occasion now and then to erupt into the political sphere and to be focused upon events, movements and leaders, when the socio-economic ‘normalcy’ had broken down. Present conflicts over such quasi-politicised issues as abortion have brought about some exposure of daylight upon individual choices made by women, or upon suppression of such choices – both of these manifested perhaps over a very long time past – which have and have had demographic implications.

        The artificial separation between the voluntarist and the determinist aspects of history – and political strategy - is what a good deal of Marxist historiography and praxis has sought to break down.  This is the spirit of Marx’s 1859 Preface, (to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) a dense and decidedly unlapidary document which is hard to comprehend precisely because Marx is co-relating the ‘underlying’ with the ‘surface’ movements of history and is using a difficult and shifting metaphorical terminology in order to do so.  The Preface does not appear to be so much an attempt to summarise the whole of history accurately on an empirical level (in any case, relating a number of Marx’s formulations here directly to actual historical developments is problematical in some important areas), much less to offer a ‘theory of history’. It appears to be – on my reading – an attempt to break down conceptual barriers as between human motive or purpose and ineluctable ‘underlying causes’.  The mechanism for achieving this breakdown is, itself, historical or ‘diachronic’: that is, Marx casts his argument in a movement across time itself, which he would designate as dialectical, as human motive or purpose leap-frogs, in the name of survival, over established and institutionalised obstacles to the freedom of human manoeuvre. Hence the confusion readers face over the Preface: whether to regard it as either empirically descriptive or as structural, i.e. synchronic analysis, when in fact it is neither, or else something of both in the same breath.

        The Preface springs from what Marx called ‘the guiding thread to my studies’, namely the materialist conception of history, originally and most fully adumbrated by himself and Engels in The German Ideology of thirteen years earlier, a work the two never published. ‘Material’, which is inclusive of ‘economics’ but not restricted to it, means ‘the material production and reproduction of real life’ (Engels’ formulation) which is a good deal more capacious than mere ‘economic’ activity. It wholly embraces the old belief that ‘man does not live by bread alone’ but also by thought and intellect, emotion, imagination, socialisation, inspiration, spiritual uplift – in a word, ‘consciousness’. The point was to keep ‘consciousness’ in tandem with ‘bread’ – that is, not to ignore the fact that consciousness does not exist on hot air, that it is more a beneficiary of alimentary nourishment than of a gift from heaven. Indeed, the importance of bread to consciousness, and vice-versa, was the reason why Marx and Engels embarked on their lifelong course of revolutionary politics and studious excavation (in Marx’s case) of the capital relation. Both endeavours were intended to assist the workers in raising themselves above the downgraded, proletarian level of mere daily or ‘animal’ subsistence, by overthrowing the capital system which by its intrinsic dynamic forced workers time and again back down into that subsistence position, or would do if they did not fight back with intellectual weaponry as well as solidarity. Marx focused on the ‘economic’ precisely because the system he analysed was one in which the ‘economic’ was (and is) king, and one which he sought to overthrow. Unfortunately he has been subsequently – and conventionally – characterised by the very qualities he imputed to the system he was criticising, those of the ‘economic determinist’. Critiquing Gradgrind, Marx became Gradgrind himself in the eyes of liberal and neo-liberal commentators and detractors. Certainly Marx celebrated with some personal satisfaction what he regarded as his ultimate scientific achievement: identifying the ‘iron laws’ of capital, but his motive was to expose them to daylight in order that they might oneday be rendered inoperative by the alienated, dispossessed class. Engels later admitted in a letter that he believed he and Marx might have been at least partly to blame for this determinist turn in their reputations because of their concentration on the structure of a system which is, indeed, economically determinist. Yet it would be wise to ponder on certain contemporaries of Marx who, from entirely different perspectives (that of soi disant aristocrats like Balzac and – intellectually, at any rate – Kierkegaard, as well as that of the conservative romantic Carlyle and the non-socialist radical Dickens) excoriated what they saw as capitalist determinism, the ‘cash nexus’, the inexorable law of the accumulation of wealth, in their writings. [5]  All this in a period when industrial capitalism was new and raw enough not to be taken for granted or as given by writers across the political spectrum, as it mostly is today and has been for some while.

        It is the fundamentally Marxist emphasis on the individual, active human historical participant, as found in the early Holy Family of 1845, as well as characterised by the materialist conception of history in The German Ideology, which provides inspiration for our view that a fruitful approach to history begins with not carving it up neatly as between ‘actual happening’ and ‘interpretation’ whether the latter is contemporaneous or subsequent. The history that the history-books present was always sifted through contemporary interpretation and characterisation, by its active human participants as a part of their praxis. The history subsequently written is the scholarly attempt at an historical act from the praxis perspective of the scholar him/herself, however quiet and contemplative such an act may be.

        Perhaps it is as well that the language offers no other words for this multifaceted phenomenon called in English, simply, ‘history’. Because it uses one word to cover so many different things (apparently different), the language itself is tacitly informing us that these elements are interacting within one phenomenon, and are not different or mutually-exclusive phenomena to be parcelled up accordingly.

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[1] The Germans manage all sorts of distinctions. There is ‘history’ as continuous record (Geschichte), ‘histories of’ (historische Darstellungen), and the study of history (Geschichtswissenschaft – our equally cumbersome and not entirely apposite equivalent is ‘historical science’). The writer of history is der Geschichtsschreiber; the scholar of history is der Historiker. The best English can muster for ‘history’ is ‘historian’ and – more condescendingly – ‘popular historian’.

[2] Though Nixon at least read it since in preparing his first Inaugural Address he studied the inaugurals of every president before him, so Pierce’s must have been one of them.

[3] I have been told by a noted professor of the history of modern government policy that, of all the documentation to come out of the British departments of state over the centuries, only 2% has ever found its way into the National Archive: the rest have been or are being burned, shredded or secreted in private archives (i.e., stolen). All this quite apart from 30-year rules, 50-year rules and 100-year rules.

[4] Coming away just now from a production of Macbeth, I never cease to be amazed at how acutely Shakespeare has caught the dilemma of the living historical actor, who desperately seeks a certitude he can never fully know or pin down once and for all, and who thus at the same time bestows unwarranted confidence upon that which he thinks certain.

[5] Kierkegaard’s The Present Age, written in the same year as the Communist Manifesto (1847) is in part an eloquent denunciation of ascendant ‘bourgeois’ values – or lack of them. Carlyle’s thought was not uninfluential on the development of Marxism. 

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  THE HISTORICAL MATERIALIST AND THE CONCEPT OF HISTORY

            First, a little postmodernist archaeology. Not, however, for antiquarian reasons, this essay will commence by taking a fresh look at a controversy between two Marxists now long dead, the contretemps of fifty years ago between the British Marxist historian Edward P Thompson (1924-1993) and the French Marxist/structuralist philosopher Louis Althusser (1918-1990). This will be undertaken through the prism of Thompson’s perspective because here we are concerned primarily with history, and of the two Thompson was the professional historian, in his day sharing the honours with EJ Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill as one of the three most pre-eminent and popular-selling ones of the British Left. Althusser’s structuralist variant taken neat is no longer au courant, to say the least, but the reason for revisiting the controversy unleashed by Thompson, in his seminal essay ‘The Poverty of Theory’ (1978) attacking Althusser, is to lead us towards an appraisal of historical materialism as a science, and what this means in relation to the study or discipline of history. It is clear these days – given the challenge of a large body of postmodernist theory for which this fracas was an important antecedent so far as the Anglo-Saxon academic discipline of history is concerned - that we need to re-define what we are doing in the field of history if we are Marxists, and that is why this particular dispute is of perennial interest because through examining it fairly closely we may be able to do just that. And such is what the second part of this essay will attempt.

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          Thompson’s ‘Poverty of Theory’, which remains something of a landmark in the literature of British Marxist ‘humanism’, arose out of debate between factions within the British New Left in the 1970s, divided as they were roughly between pro- and anti-Althusserians. Thompson (who came from the ‘Old Left’), is above all determined to uphold the ‘humanist’ face of Marxism against what he regards as the dogmatic, determinist and ‘Stalinist’ structuralism of Althusser – ultimately a form of idealism, in his view.  A long-time member of the British Communist Party who left the Party over the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary in 1956, Thompson was and remained deadly serious about ‘Stalinism’ and its lingering and in his view continuing pernicious intellectual legacy on the Left. (Althusser had been a member of the French Communist Party since 1948 and never disavowed its markedly ‘Stalinist’ tendency.)

          In his opening remarks Thompson defends the record of Marxist historians of his and earlier generations, who, he says, have notched up significant contributions to historical knowledge, against what he calls the Althusserian reductio ad absurdam: ‘History is condemned by the nature of its object to empiricism’ (Althusser). Thompson quotes two British Althusserian ‘acolytes’, Hindess and Hirst, from their Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (1975):

Marxism, as a theoretical and a political practice, gains nothing from its association with historical writing and historical research. The study of history is not only scientifically but also politically valueless.

It hardly needs saying that this declaration is something of a scandal for Thompson as well it might be. He says that if historical materialists have not bypassed Althusser altogether, they have accommodated him without true comprehension of the fact that Althusser’s uncompromising rejection of ‘historicism’, ‘humanism’ and ‘empiricism’ has sinister connotations:

Althusser and his acolytes challenge, centrally, historical materialism itself. They do not offer to modify it but to displace it. In exchange they offer an ahistorical theoreticism which, at the first examination, discloses itself as idealism. (Thompson 1978, 196)

But Althusser’s position may be more sophisticated than Thompson realises, even as he cites the following from Althusser and Balibar’s Reading Capital:

We must take seriously the fact that the theory of history, in the strong sense, does not exist, or hardly exists so far as historians are concerned, that the concepts of existing history are therefore nearly always ‘empirical’, i.e. cross-bred with a powerful strain of an ideology concealed behind its ‘obviousness’.  This is the case with the best historians, who can be distinguished from the rest precisely by their concern for theory, but who seek this theory at a level on which it cannot be found, at the level of historical methodology, which cannot be defined without the theory on which it is based. (110 – emphases in the original)

In rebuttal, but apparently without realising that he is falling into Althusser’s trap, Thompson writes:

But critical concepts employed by Marxist historians for more than fifty years every day in their practice included those of exploitation, class struggle, class, determinism, ideology, and of feudalism and capitalism as modes of production  - concepts derived from and validated within a Marxist theoretical tradition. Historical theory must therefore (according to Althusser) be something different from Marxist historical theory. (206)

What Thompson describes might be considered by Althusser to be aspects of a disposable historical methodology; they are not, in any case, the theory of history in the strong sense that Althusser seeks. What is Althusser seeking here if not the historiographical equivalent to Newtonian mechanics or Darwin’s theory of natural selection or Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, amongst many others?  That is, theoretical breakthroughs by means of which the sciences of physics and biology have achieved a fuller knowledge and a higher and more effective level of instrumentality than they could ever have done without them? Compared to which, history is still at a ‘pre-scientific’ level, since no equivalent historiographical breakthrough at the foundational level of historical study has occurred. But Althusser’s ulterior purpose lies beyond establishing history as a science; he wishes this role and intellectual status for Marxism, and believes he can prove it.  

          But there is another aspect to Althusser – a quite respectable philosophical lineage, especially in France - which Thompson does not pick up on, preferring to keep him in his sights as the embodiment of theoretical ‘Stalinism’. According to Althusser, who might be said to have summed up the caveats of all postmodernist thinkers before and since on the subject of historical verification, all epistemological endeavour must base itself upon a theoretical practice; this practice cannot be derived from the mere sifting of ‘facts’ and ‘evidence’, which have – in all likelihood – been determined as ‘factual’ upon ideological grounds, because they are without benefit of ulterior theory. One cannot base an epistemology upon ‘facts’ which cannot of themselves verify the truth behind their selection. It should not be too difficult to trace a line of epistemological foundationalism derived ultimately from Descartes, or to see that Althusser himself is, like so many French philosophers past and present (some of whom would scarcely see eye to eye with him on many points), a natural descendant of Cartesian rationalism. Thus Althusser is concerned – or would be if he thought it were possible - to establish a ‘foundation’ upon which historical knowledge can be built, and he locates this in what he calls ‘theoretical practice’. In a philosophical sense (and not without chauvinist overtones of the old Anglo-French entente non-cordiale) the Thompson-v-Althusser polemic is a re-run in contemporary garb of the arguments between 17^th-century continental rationalism and the contemporaneous British empiricism, with philosophical structuralism as a revivification of that rationalism for the 20^th century. Rationalism has never been very easy to refute on its own terms (hence its evident durability); in the evolution of their running argument with it the 18^th-century British empiricists ended up with a radical subjective idealism in Berkeley and Hume which was not much more than an English Channel away from Descartes. This will make us wonder if the heir to the empiricist position in this debate, EP Thompson, will succeed in removing himself as far from Althusser as he evidently believes he does.[1]

          Thompson’s rebuttal contains serious historical implications for Marxism of which he seems not to be entirely aware. Every one of the categories he names in Marxist historiography – class, class struggle, determinism, ideology, feudalism and capitalism – are, at least without benefit of Althusser’s ‘theory’, somewhat limited in the sense of the ‘theory’ Althusser is seeking. And rather too specific or narrow to be as robust or as protean as a ‘breakthrough’ scientific theory is supposed to be. To take just one example: feudalism. It happens that present-day historical investigation has forced upon us a considerable modification of this category or ‘critical concept’. Nowhere do we find a complete or uniformly ‘feudal system’ having existed, as a structure of vassalage. Engels was perhaps nearest the mark when he wrote somewhere that feudalism only attained its full flowering in the (extra-European) Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. Nor does it appear, as once seemed to be the case, that there was any very dramatic or relatively decisive moment of transition from a feudalism to a capitalism, pace the French Revolution. Indeed, the emergence of the capital relation to attain social and economic dominance happened over a period of some six hundred years and more (embracing the whole of what we call the ‘early modern period’ of pre-industrial merchant capital) which is somewhat of a longue durée to be described as a ‘transition’ as distinct from what was going on in any other period of comparable length. And even after what everyone agrees as being the de facto demise of feudalism certainly by the 18^th or early 19^th century, there was still the aristocrat-peasant relationship in full swing in Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe.  Thompson overlooks the considerable controversy within Marxist circles from the 1950s on, evidenced by the well-known Dobb-Sweezy debate followed by the ‘Brenner debates’, on exactly how capitalism emerged out of feudalism.

          The question remains as to whether Marxism stands or falls with every further development in empirical historical investigation. Those Marxists who incline (whether they realise it or not) to Popper’s falsification principle might be tempted to say that it does, and should. Otherwise it is merely some form of religious faith. But if they have no ulterior ‘theory’ to fall back on,  and if in time ‘theoretical foundations’ like feudalism become hollowed out through substantial and growing qualification, where does this leave Marxists who have nailed their colours to the mast of ‘feudalism’ as a fundamental Marxist category of scientific history, amongst other categories also potentially liable to investigatory unravelling?  One dire possibility is that it leaves Marxist historians with having to fight rearguard actions to save outmoded concepts. If that is the case, then it is counter to Marx’s and Engels’ own dedication to the empirical hard graft of research. Their ‘materialist conception of history’ is founded upon the premise that we must investigate what is there, as opposed to what is not there but merely an idea in someone’s head. Marxist historians are not quite so far from Ranke’s history as discovering ‘what really happened’ as many bourgeois historians (and some Marxists) suppose. Does Marxism, therefore, defeat itself?

          This is a question to which we will return. Meanwhile, let us see what Thompson has to say about those who have hi-jacked ‘static’ and ‘structuralist’ theories from historical study in a parasitic sort of way:

It is the misfortune of Marxist historians…that certain of our concepts are common currency in a wider intellectual universe, are adopted in other disciplines, which impose their own logic upon them and reduce them to static, a-historical categories. [This is a charge Thompson will take up again later, with regard to Marx himself.] No historical category has been more misunderstood, tormented, transfixed and de-historicised than the category of social class; a self-defining historical formation, which men and women make out of their own experience of struggle, has been reduced to a static category, or an effect of an ulterior structure, of which men are not the makers but the vectors. Not only have Althusser and [Nicos] Poulantzas done Marxist theory this wrong, but they then complain that history (from whose arms they abducted this concept) has no proper theory of class! What they, and many others, of every ideological hue, misunderstand is that it is not, and never has been, the business of history to make up this kind of inelastic theory. And if Marx himself had one supreme methodological priority it was, precisely, to destroy unhistorical theory-mongering of this kind.

History is not a factory for the manufacture of Grand Theory, like some Concorde of the global air; nor is it an assembly-line for the production of midget theories in series. (238)

          Thompson’s point that the concept of ’class’ has been bequeathed by Marxist historical study to other disciplines is open to some qualification, if not to be dismissed out of hand. Marx freely admitted that he had appropriated his concept of classes in social struggle from bourgeois historians who were among the first to write about ‘class’ – so if anything the charge Thompson makes against Althusser and Poulantzas could be directed at Marx as well. And we will see later that Thompson, who appears to have realised this in the course of writing his essay, levels precisely this charge of ‘abduction’ against him. But it is to be doubted whether modern Marxist historians, of the likes of EP Thompson and others, will have drawn their concept of class from the ‘Thierry, Guizot, John Wade and others’ whom Marx cites as his own mentors in this regard in his letter to Wedemeyer of 5^th March, 1852. The import of Marx’s letter is to disclaim any originality whatsoever for having centred upon classes and class struggle. It is likely that a combination of lived experience including political struggles, exposure to the works of Marx and Engels at a formative age, and empirical historical work of their own were the means by which modern Marxist historians came to utilise the ‘class’ category in their investigations. The determinant factor here would have been the perceived example of Marx himself. But Marx got it from others. So it is not strictly true that Marxist history has of itself thrown up a category of class which other disciplines have latched on to.

          Thompson’s own description of ‘class’ as a ‘self-defining historical formation’ also leaves something to be desired. Are classes solely self-defining? In which case how do we explain circumstances of apparent class struggle – for example in local or indeed massive industrial strikes - in which the men and women involved at different times and places appear to have been largely unaware of forming a universal proletariat eternally at odds with capitalism, not to speak of being its ‘gravediggers’? And surely also the belief that consciousness is the sole determinant in the formation of classes goes right against the dictum of Marx and Engels that social consciousness derives from social being, not social being from consciousness. To make consciousness the ‘sole determinant’ of class is an idealist, not a materialist position. It would be more accurate, and less undialectically onesided if somewhat more lugubrious, to say that the materialist view is of a consciousness arising from social being which in given conditions feeds back into social being, and so is a necessary determinant of a fuller class existence but within a dynamic reciprocation. Thus does Marx write in Poverty of Philosophy of a class in itself as distinct from a class for itself, and thus does Lenin write, in What Is to Be Done? (more controversially, perhaps) of workers without revolutionary impetus contributed by a revolutionary vanguard reaching ‘trade union consciousness’ at best. As a matter of fact it has always been a Marxist political priority to urge and convince working people to realise the dynamic of their class relationship to the dominant production mode and to act upon this realisation; nor did the outstanding Marxists such as Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci and others leave class struggle up to its own ‘historical inevitability’, contra the dogmatics of the Second International. It is precisely the existence of a class in itself which renders the conscious understanding of a class for itself so urgent; and a consciousness must be consciously formulated, which means that politics including a theory of politics as well as political organization are necessarily involved. Marx and Engels themselves were active revolutionaries all their adult lives whatever the limitations imposed on them by their British exile. To deny the class in itself is to remove any reason for the class for itself. Thompson would appear to deny the structural reality of class, putting the whole of the concept on a one-sidedly conscious, voluntaristic and idealist basis. This formulation is central to him: it can be found as the inspirational motif for his magnum opus, The Making of the English Working Class (1963).

          On the other hand Thompson is surely correct – from a Marxist perspective – to insist that ‘history is not a factory for the manufacture of Grand Theory’. He could and may have taken this direct from Marx’s draft letter to the Russian periodical Otchestvenniye Zapiski of November 1877, to the effect that no one will ever arrive at an understanding of historical factors ‘by using as one’s master key a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.’ (Selected Correspondence, 1965, 313)

          At first glance this broadside of Thompson’s (plus Marx’s own back-up) might seem to be one in the eye to Althusser and his ‘theory of history in the strong sense’ (not to speak of G.A. Cohen). But Althusser, as we will see, would appear to be intent upon ‘improving’ Marx in the light of his own rationalist agenda, which allows him, if one likes, to duck the blow. It is this desire of Althusser’s to improve on Marx that so upsets Thompson, for Althusser to him is quite patently no Marxist at all – even as he has by the late 1970s seemingly hi-jacked so many of the intellectual British New Left!

          Paraphrasing Thompson’s text on p. 202 for the sake of brevity, and incorporating a footnote 12, we have his following useful explication:

          Althusser follows Bachelard’s notion of a science which is constituted by an ‘epistemological break’ with its ‘ideological’ pre-history (not unlike Kuhn’s ‘paradigm shift’ in some ways). Althusser says post-1846 Marxism constitutes a science (‘Theory’) in this way. Generalities I – an Althusserian category – include mental events which are usually called ‘facts’ or ‘evidence’. These ‘facts’ are not singular or concrete: they are already ‘concepts…of an ideological nature’. (For Marx, 183-4) The work of any science consists in ‘elaborating its own scientific facts through a critique of the ideological “facts” elaborated by an earlier ideological theoretical practice’. And For Marx is quoted by Thompson on his own p. 202 re-affirming what we have been calling Althusser’s rationalism as follows:

To elaborate its own specific ‘facts’ is simultaneously to elaborate its own ‘theory’, since a scientific fact – and not the self-styled pure phenomenon – can only be identified in the field of theoretical practice. (184)

          But Thompson asks us how we are to get from Generalities I to Generalities II (the working body of concepts and procedures of the discipline in question). That there are ‘difficulties’ in the mode of operation of GII is acknowledged, but these difficulties are left unexamined by Althusser: ‘we must rest content with these schematic gestures and not enter into the dialectic of this theoretical labour’. (For Marx, 185)

          Apparently we can only get from Generalities I to Generalities II (rigorous critical procedures) and Generalities III (‘knowledge’) by means of logical theorising. By dismissing ‘fact’ and ‘evidence’ as ideological constructs in the first instance, Althusser provides no means for getting us scientifically from one Generality to another, since science can only operate on the basis of fact and evidence, unless it be theology. (Evidently Althusser lacks a foundational Cogito of his own.)  Thus Thompson:

If the object of knowledge consisted only in ideological ‘facts’ elaborated by that discipline’s own procedures, then there would never be any way of validating or of falsifying any proposition; there would be no scientific or disciplinary court of appeal. (202)

Later on, as a dictum of what Thompson calls his own ‘historical logic’, he writes:

The immediate object of historical knowledge (that is, the materials from which this knowledge is adduced) is comprised of ‘facts’ or evidence which certainly have a real existence, but which are only knowable in ways which are and ought to be the concern of vigilant historical procedures. (231)

In this second passage, asserting the primacy of the professionalism of historians in a manner not unlike that of his conservative contemporary GR Elton, Thompson asserts that ‘facts’ and ‘evidence’ have a real existence, though he never tells us what the nature of this existence is, and never seeks to answer Althusser’s charge that they of themselves have no epistemological basis; Althusser would no doubt consider the terms ‘facts’ and ‘evidence’ – as used here – loaded. But what happened, in the meantime, to any ‘scientific or disciplinary court of appeal’ (spelt out in the previous passage), since the facts and evidence Thompson posits in the second passage ‘are only knowable in ways which are and ought to be the concern of vigilant historical procedures’? The only thing that makes ‘vigilant historical procedures’ valid is the belief, here asserted and not argued for, that ‘facts’ and ‘evidence’ in the historical discipline ‘have a real existence’. Presumably to be interrogated by historians on the basis of other facts and evidence. It is beginning to look something like a Police Complaints Commission, run by the police themselves. Extending this simile, philosophy vis-à-vis history would assume a role like that of an authority independent of the police to investigate complaints against the police, which is why we have a philosophy of history, a philosophy of science and a philosophy of just about everything else, acting as ‘tribunals’ of investigation, so to speak, into otherwise unexamined procedures and developments in the various sectors of intellectual specialism. This essay could be called a foray into the philosophy of historical materialism.

          Both Thompson and Althusser seek to derive, it seems, a science (or ‘knowledge’ i.e. Generalities III in Althusser’s case) for history. The difference between them boils down to the fact that Althusser emphasises the theoretical aspect in order to put the science on a proper epistemological foundation, while Thompson emphasises the sacrality of evidence as the empirical foundation. Althusser says one cannot trust evidence prior to theory because it is ideologically come by in the absence of theory; Thompson that one cannot trust theory not derived from evidence. Rationalism versus Empiricism, Round Two (20^th century).

          According to Thompson,  Althusser’s procedure is wholly self-affirming (oddly, rather like his own ‘classes’ in history), a sealed system within which concepts endlessly circulate, recognise and interrogate each other, and the intensity of its repetitious introversial life is mistaken for a ‘science’. This ‘science’ is then projected back upon Marx’s work: it is proposed by Althusser that Marx’s own procedures were of the same order; and that after the miracle of the ‘epistemological break’ (‘an immaculate conception which required no gross empirical impregnation’ in Thompson’s brilliant phrase) all followed in terms of the elaboration of thought and its structural organisation.

          But there are problems with Thompson’s view, too. If a science consisted solely of amassing what were apparently discrete ‘facts’, there would be no way of determining their significance or relationship – in other words no means of determining whether they were ‘facts’ at all. Aristotelian physical science (significantly that to which Descartes was so opposed) abounded in the concrete observation of ‘facts’, but instead of invoking the unifying means of mathematics initiated latterly by Kepler and Galileo it simply found a separate, discrete ‘theory’ for every single thing under observation. The pre-Galilean world was packed with all conceivable dubious theories, based on the ‘facts’ of pure, innocent observation, none of them relating to any of the others and not much better than old wives’ tales though in more highfalutin language. As Descartes himself realised, science could not have got beyond Aristotle without some rigorous, abstract theorising, of which mathematics is the most abstract and rigorous – and Descartes was right. ‘Common sense’ of the Aristotelian variety has no place in science. And Althusser wishes to raise history (or at any rate Marxism) above the level of (ideologically derived) ‘common sense’.

          Here is another dictum of Thompson’s:

          …[T]he preoccupations of each generation, sex or class must inevitably have a normative content, which will find expression in the questions proposed to the evidence. But this in no way calls in question the objective determinacy of evidence (233).

But by what means do we determine this ‘objective determinacy’? At no point does Thompson tell us for all his vigorous assertions of the validity of fact and evidence. Even the ‘fact’ of French G.N.P. for 1962 is a construction drawn from all sorts of sources, some of them economically ideological. It only comes together, enhanced as a fact, in a text which proclaims it as such, within a discipline that accepts G.N.P. figures as being all-important, perhaps to the point of a reification. It is, at best, a ‘fact’ eclectically gathered together from goodness knows what in terms of strict verifiability all down the line.   

          History writing abounds in ‘facts’ which are elicited, invoked and embedded within interpretations. The statesman’s ‘single-minded’ action to Historian A is his ‘fanatical’ action to Historian B. The statesman’s ‘effective’ use of force to Historian A is the selfsame statesman’s ‘tyrannical oppression’ to Historian B. Historian A’s ‘inevitable’ famine is Historian B’s ‘preventable’ one. That a particular statesman or famine existed and did certain things will be a matter of historical record (sometimes a record that research historians have considerable difficulty in tracking down in the first instance), and interpretations necessarily are modified by the yield of further evidence. But even the statesman’s doing of certain things, however Historian A or Historian B regards it, and whatever the interpretation is, has been isolated by historical processes and fall-out in an ex post facto prioritising of events, largely to do with our hindsight. Lenin’s actions during his pre-1917 exile become crystalised and discrete because we know he subsequently carried through a successful revolution.  For these ‘discrete’ doings have been removed from the ceaseless flow of the statesman’s life and being – and so are already a construction, a formulation, which has no independent that is to say distinct ontology apart from that formulation, which has been arrived at after the consequences. Why should we, and how can we, pluck out and isolate one doing as opposed to another? That is, even before we then go on to endow it with a meaning or adjective according to some interpretive slant or other, presumably to do with a wider context which we have also selected – again, in hindsight?

          On the other hand it will be argued that the selection involved only conforms to the real existence of real outcomes; we are right to prioritise and select from the doings of the exiled Lenin precisely because the successful Bolshevik Revolution was a real outcome, and therefore we are not being ‘ideological’ in doing this. To which one might reply that this involves teleological reasoning. Teleology: a thing ‘is’ what its outcome or purpose is, yet the thing’s existence at the time pre-dated the outcome or fulfilment of its particular destiny or purpose, an outcome which – like every outcome – had its contingent and unpredictable aspects, or the art of prediction would be rather more successful than it has ever proved to be. We select from Lenin’s pre-1917 actions; for example we find it significant that Lenin sat in the Zurich public library in 1915 reading and making extensive notes from Hegel’s Science of Logic. Without this means by which Lenin grasped a fuller dialectic of revolution, the revolutionary outcome might have been very different in one way or another. But had no revolution occurred (if such a hypothesis may be permitted) we would – if we knew about it at all – regard Lenin’s sojourn in the Zurich public library two years’ earlier as about as much a ‘fact’ of history as the tooth-powder with which he brushed his teeth every morning: that is, something that undoubtedly happened, but for historiographical purposes not requiring any isolating or singling out from anything else Lenin did on an average day in 1915.  History, after all, is not about everything that ever happened everywhere involving everybody all the time. There is an even more telling example in Hitler’s pre-1914 existence and lifestyle. Hitler lived in and out of Viennese dosshouses as a penniless, moony and aimlessly ‘unfulfilled artist’ youth, a life of complete triviality and inconsequence. Only hindsight makes this feckless existence ‘historical’ – indeed makes Hitler’s dosshouse life a ‘fact’ of epochal significance since it was apparently in these listless years that he was drawn more and more into a rabid anti-Semitism. Subsequent events endow these pre-1914 years with a dimension they literally had not and could not have had of themselves and at the time. This reasoning is not unlike our close, retrospective evaluation of the thoughts and apparently trivial actions of an obscure psychotic before he became a headline serial killer. The teleology lies in retrospective selection and a strong temptation to interpret certain phenomena or events of themselves in the light of the outcomes that followed from them. ‘Anne Boleyn was doomed from the moment she first met the King’s gaze’ does not read like it might be a very faithful rendering of that particular scene, and although it is true in retrospect it was not true at the time. Thus the reason for evaluating such preliminary ‘facts’ as arise from it cannot be put down to the mere existence of the ‘facts’ themselves or be based upon them and their discrete nature and irrefutability. Their ‘discrete nature’ in such instances as I have mentioned came after they had happened, paradoxical as this seems.

          In the course of enumerating the points of his ambitious ‘historical logic’, which unfortunately is far too lengthy to be gone into here in any detail, Thompson throws us a complete red herring:

The finished processes of historical change, with their intricate causation, actually occurred, and historiography may falsify or misunderstand, but can’t in the least degree modify the past’s ontological status. (231)

But no one has suggested, and certainly not Althusser – who according to Thompson fully accepts the underlying material reality from which even dubious ‘facts’ may be adduced – that in some mysterious fashion the ontological status of the past (which I take as meaning its actual happening and existence, though it might be impossible retrospectively to characterise whatever happened as ‘what actually happened’ according to a particular formulation) alters with every passing thought we have about the past. How could it? Thompson seems to be confusing Althusser’s caveat about the ideological status of ‘fact’ and ‘evidence’-construction (which Althusser consigns to Generalities I) with an occult belief that we can alter the way the past once existed by the way we think about it now – such as Big Brother in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four could seemingly or to all intents and purposes alter the past at will through suppression of certain of its references and intensive mass indoctrination in the present. The Battle of Hastings of 1066 is or was not an amalgam of our constructed facts about it. Its existence was prior to those derived ‘facts’. If nothing else, we know of this existence – its ‘ontological status’ - from its lingering effects and traces in the present. Of course we build up histories of the Battle of Hastings, replete with differing interpretations down through the generations, out of a compendium of the ‘facts’ we have squeezed out of it, but the Battle of Hastings has had a prior existence, not made up of discrete ‘facts’ – which is not reliant upon our histories and indeed has no very straightforward relationship to them. Is this not what makes historical research and interpretation so apparently inexhaustible? And does it not also create problems for history as a ‘science’, the very problems occasioning the polemical discourse under examination here?

        Dealing with this matter of ‘science’ later will bring us to an understanding of the historical materialist position relating to historical study, and the relationship of history to science.

          Indeed, Thompson’s position appears to be shifting with regard to history as a proper ‘science’. This is hardly surprising since he cannot come up with any means of justifying ‘evidence’ apart from ‘evidence’ itself. And so we have this passage in the ‘historical logic’ which looks like becoming a sudden and dramatic U-turn (‘The Poverty of Theory’ is nothing if not dramatic – one source of its perennial appeal):

Historical knowledge is in its nature, a) provisional and incomplete (but not therefore untrue), b) selective (but not therefore untrue), c) limited and defined by the questions proposed to the evidence (and the concepts informing those questions) and hence only ‘true’ within the field so defined. In these respects historical knowledge may depart from other paradigms of knowledge, when subjected to epistemological enquiry. (231)

Thus does Thompson appear to be wriggling out from under the inescapable Cartesian demand for a foundational knowledge for a science, which is grounded in theory. But then comes the thunderbolt:

In this sense I am ready to agree that the attempt to designate history as a ‘science’ has always been unhelpful and confusing. (Ibid.)

Whether he means ‘science’ or science, this would appear to be a turnabout. The whole thrust of the earlier polemic against ‘theoretical practice’ was in the name of science! In Thompson’s arguments against the ‘theoretical’ Althusser the practice of history was equated with scientific procedure. It was subject to ‘a scientific or disciplinary court of appeal’. Now that it is evident Thompson cannot provide a validating basis for his science, it is no longer one! Who, indeed, is being ‘unhelpful and confusing’?

          It might be added that the (a), (b) and (c) criteria enumerated by Thompson in the last passage but one do not actually distinguish historical knowledge from science at all. Science too is ‘provisional and incomplete’, ‘selective’ and ‘limited and defined by the questions proposed to the evidence’. The difference (or so the difference would be to Althusser) is that science, in the sense, say, of physical or biological science, is ramified by theory and characterised by theoretical breakthrough; history so far is not, and therefore has as yet no scientifically validating basis. Thompson has had to retreat to a fall-back position: of historical knowledge not being science. But then – throwing caution to the winds – Thompson goes even further:

Marx certainly knew, also, that History was a Muse, and that the ‘humanities’ construct knowledges. (Ibid.)

Replete with newfound Capitalisations, a new mystique. But was this not precisely Thompson’s dispute with Althusser? What is the difference between the latter’s constructing a knowledge out of ‘theoretical practice’ and the ‘humanities’ constructing knowledges? And is philosophy (Althusser’s domain) not also a ‘humanity’, with its own justifiable claims towards contributing to the construction of knowledges?

          Let us now back-track a little in Thompson’s essay to reproduce his own summation of his general objection to Althusserian thought:

The absurdity of Althusser consists in the idealist mode of his theoretical constructions. His thought is the child of economic determinism ravished by theoreticist idealism. It posits (but does not attempt to ‘prove’ or ‘guarantee’) the existence of material reality: we will accept this point. It posits also the existence of a material (‘external’) world of social reality, whose determinate organisation is always in the last instance ‘economic’; the proof of this lies not in Althusser’s work – nor would it be reasonable to ask for such proof in the work of a philosopher – but in the mature work of Marx. This work arrives ready-made at the commencement of Althusser’s enquiry, as a concrete knowledge, albeit a knowledge not always aware of its own theoretical practice. It is Althusser’s business to enhance its own self-knowledge, as well as to repel various hideous ideological impurities which have grown up within the silences of its interstices. Thus a given knowledge (Marx’s work) informs Althusser’s procedures at each of the three levels of his hierarchy; Marx’s work arrives as ‘raw material’ – however elaborate – at GI; it is interrogated and processed (GII) according to principles of ‘science’ derived from its mature apercus, unstated assumptions, implicit methodologies, etc.; and the outcome is to conform and reinforce the concrete knowledge (GIII) which approved portions of Marx’s own work already announce. (204)

Althusser’s self-appointed task is to re-process Marx in the light of an essentially rationalist procedure. But as Thompson relinquishes any anti-rationalist approach to justify history as a science, for lack of a principle of validation, it is at first difficult to see in which direction he can next turn, for – against Althusser and on these grounds – he really has no cards left to play. History is now a ‘Muse’, and thus even more likely to fall into Althusser’s clutches than before.

          And so Thompson now trains his sights on Marx.

          For it is clear that Althusser has had some help: he could not have thought up this theoretical monstrosity all on his own. And ‘economic determinism’ seems to hold the key here. What is there about Marxism – and Marx himself – that makes them vulnerable to the kind of Althusserian onslaught that even Thompson with all his considerable powers of often highly cogent rhetoric cannot withstand?

          Thompson now proposes that Marx, having in his youth been a liberator of human thought, proposing an entirely new world-view in such seminal works as the 1844 Manuscripts and The German Ideology, (a position fully endorsed by  this writer) became in the course of time entangled in the toils of Political Economy. The following is offered up at some length so that the reader will not accuse me of quoting wilfully out of context. Let us read it and then see how a historical materialist might go about answering Thompson’s charges:

From the outside, in the 1840s, [Political Economy] appeared to Marx as ideology, or, worse, apologetics. He entered it in order to overthrow it. But, once inside, however many of its categories he fractured (and how many times), the structure remained. For the premises supposed that it was possible to isolate economic activities in this way, and to develop these as a first-order science of society. It is more accurate to say that Marx, at the time of the Grundrisse, did not so much remain within the structure of ‘Political Economy’ as develop an anti-structure, but within its same premises. The postulates ceased to be the self-interest of men and became the logic and forms of capital, to which men were subordinated; capital was disclosed, not as the benign donor of benefits, but as the appropriator of surplus labour; factional ‘interests’ were disclosed as antagonistic classes; and contradiction displaced the sum progress. But what we have at the end is not the overthrow of ‘Political Economy’, but another ‘Political Economy’.

Insofar as Marx’s categories were anti-categories, Marxism was marked, at a critical stage in its development, by the categories of Political Economy; the chief of which was the notion of the ‘economic’, as a first-order activity, capable of isolation in this way, as the object of a science giving rise to laws whose operation would over-ride second-order activities. And there is another mark also, which is difficult to identify without appearing to be absurd. But the absurdities to which this error has been taken in the work of Althusser and his colleagues – that is, the absurdities of a certain kind of static self-circulating ‘Marxist’ structuralism – enable us to risk the ridicule. There is an important sense in which the movement of Marx’s thought, in the Grundrisse, is locked inside a static, anti-historical structure. (252-3; emphases in the original)

Before our Marxist rejoinder commences, look very closely at the last few sentences of this passage. As he states himself, Thompson’s view on Marx is, it seems, saved from ‘absurdity’ by Althusser and his ‘theoretical practice’. Althusser himself enables Thompson to ‘take the risk’. Does this mean that, bereft of Althusser, Thompson’s view of Marx’s ‘static, anti-historical structure’ would be stuck in its absurdity? Does it mean that if we do not take Althusser seriously, we may feel free to ridicule Thompson’s position? If this is true, does it not therefore follow that Thompson needs Althusser in order to maintain this otherwise ‘absurd’ position?

          Although Thompson had previously castigated the idea of an ‘epistemological break’ between the young and mature Marx, suggested to Althusser by Bachelard’s formulation in the context of defining a ‘science’, and itself a central tenet of Althusserian Marxology, here we have Thompson affirming the selfsame break! True, in contrast to Althusser he favours the young Marx over the old Marx. Yet his formulation is merely an inverted mirror-image of Althusser’s: there are two Marxes, the young one and the old one. You take your pick. Thus not only does Thompson require Althusser’s stated position to put these ‘absurd’ variants of his own forward without a blush; he even falls in with Althusserian thinking on post-1846 Marxism, a thinking which he previously noted with disapproval – and that turns out to be because he dislikes post-1846 Marxism as much as Althusser likes it. This ‘new’ position of Thompson’s is the consequence of having previously tried unsuccessfully to assert a scientistic (but non-theoretical) position regarding history when previously challenging Althusser.

          One wonders from reading Thompson how he expected Marx to analyse anything in depth without recourse to a non-narrative model. It is, after all, standard practice for historians themselves to depart from narrative from time to time to analyse the structures of the objects of their inquiry in depth. Social history, of which Thompson was the pre-eminent practitioner of his day (his magnum opus, previously referred to, remains in print and continues to sell well more than fifty years after it was first published), is especially difficult to write purely narratively. But what did Thompson think, for example, of Namier, who wrote in copious detail of the political structure of government in Britain at the accession of George III in the one year 1760? What of the Annales school with which Thompson appears to be in some sympathy? (His esteem for Marc Bloch, at any rate, is high.) Is not all this a structural approach, and so – according to Thompson – ‘anti-historical’?

          And just how ‘static’ is Marx’s model? Is it not, rather, dynamic and dialectical – in contradistinction to orthodox Political Economy? Surely it is the dynamic nature of Marx’s critique which fascinates – and often torments – those who have read or attempted to read Capital? Assuredly Marx departs from strict history-writing to explicate in depth his model of the workings of capital, which he saw as the principal phenomenon of the era: indeed it was the era. Capital cannot be classified as a history book although it is permeated with historical writing and example – as befits an author who casts a critique of Political Economy in a dynamic, specific historio-social process. And what of Marx’s refusal to treat ‘economics’ as a discrete entity? This is one of the reasons why he is so disreputable an ‘economist’ to the bourgeois orthodox: he refuses to exclude such criteria from his analysis as class-struggle and human exploitation and suffering – indeed, they are central to it. To describe either the Grundrisse or Capital as ‘static’ and ‘anti-historical’ is to ignore what is actually written in them.

          To what extent does Thompson, in rejecting the later Marx of the critiques, reject historical materialism itself?

          Both Thompson and the Cartesian Althusser appear to have forgotten – or been unaware of – the fact that Marx did propound a foundational scientific law, not only for the subject of history as such but for all social-science disciplines, extending its authority into natural history as well by way of ecology. It is as foundational as the laws of thermodynamics, Darwin’s origin of species by natural selection, Einstein’s General Relativity and all other ‘epistemologically foundational’ scientific laws. And the great joke here is that neither Thompson nor his bête noire Althusser spotted it although it was staring them in the face the whole time in one of the basic and best-known of all Marxian texts: the 1859 Preface to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. It is almost embarrassing for me to have to quote extensively from this much-quoted passage, known to all Marxists (or nearly all, it seems), perhaps in some cases by heart:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. 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. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution…Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social formation is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient to have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. (Selected Works, pp. 173-4)

There we have it: the ‘foundational’ theory that Althusser was insisting upon.  Human society, at least after the lengthy period of hunter-gathering (which is still with us in some parts of the world), evolved into a dialectic between forces and relations of production, the relations created to work these forces until development of these forces came to bring on the necessity of changing or overcoming old relations in favour of new ones. Class structures evolved out of the necessarily and increasingly sophisticated division of labour and a need to safeguard and build up social surplus wealth. That is why, according to the Communist Manifesto, the [recorded] history of humankind has been a history of class struggle.

          I leave it to non-Marxists to disagree with this law as not being foundational (or even true); the point here is that it is the ‘epistemological foundation’ for historical materialism, stated in the above quotation (if somewhat abbreviated by me) with succinct concision and precision.

          This is not a theory of history but a theory for history. Theories of history, which in itself is an abstract nothing, can therefore be only fanciful or idealist. Althusser is thus shown in the present article to be chasing an idealist will o’ the wisp while Thompson denies himself the means to say so. And all because of an inconceivable ignorance on the part of both of them of what Marx said in the most circulated of all his texts along with Theses on Feuerbach and the Communist Manifesto.

          If human history consists of what men and women do, in relation to and in response to their natural earth-conditions, then a meaningful and scientific theory for history can only deal with human life activity as embodied inevitably in societies. It is also a theory that must be substantiated empirically even as it guides empirical study, as Marx says it guided him. It is the Marxian propaedeutic for all that follows by way of detailed historical materialist study.

          Such a law is not ‘unfalsifiable’ in the Popperian sense if it continues to be proven through empirical study and research and not disproven. No scientific law is ‘unfalsifiable’ in principle: it may be that something will indeed come along that will bring the whole edifice built on such a law tumbling down. So we can say that such a law as Marx’s is not falsified (yet), rather than saying it’s ‘unfalsifiable’.

          As outlined masterfully by Henry Heller in his Birth of Capitalism (2011 – see bibliography), historical materialism contains within its practice all kinds of shades of opinion and indeed opposing views, even over such fundamental matters of interest to Marxists as the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Thus it works no differently from, say, biological science since the days of Charles Darwin, whose own foundational theory created that science’s ‘take-off’ and continues to be validated by all subsequent biological discovery and even internal controversy – just as with Marx and his law of the same year as Origin of the Species, 1859. As I say, it forms the propaedeutic to the actual ‘doing’ of historical materialism as an intellectual activity necessarily integral to a political activity.

Which is exactly how Marx and Engels regarded their early work together: not to be discarded (except in some cases with regard to withholding from publication), but to be treated as insights and hypotheses to be expanded, refined and fulfilled by further necessary empirical study with the concomitant elucidation of theory. At the same time, to regard this ‘peripheral’ work as merely ‘ideological’, and thus unworthy of the later work – as it is by an Althusser in thrall to Bachelard – is a gross caricature of what is involved here and the sheer depth of the insights ‘dashed off’, and with relevance to the later work; for it lit the way for Marx throughout the further twenty years of his toil in ‘all the economic shit’ of Political Economy.  Therefore to reject the later work, as Thompson does, is also to denigrate and deny the fulfilment of the promise latent within the early work.  

          Moreover, a rejection of the later work in favour of the earlier entails a rejection of what makes historical materialism truly distinct. For both the early effusions and the later popularisations comprise a writing about historical materialism (a term,  incidentally, never used by Marx in his writings) incorporating vigorously a view of its possibilities, but do not represent historical materialism actually in being, actually being ‘done’. Perhaps many readers who have never got beyond the polemics regard them as ‘historical materialism’ in toto, and they are likely to be supported by anti-Marxist scholars in this regard, but they would be wrong.  Marx and Engels realised this work for what it was themselves when they dismissed The German Ideology of 1846 as an exercise in ‘self clarification’ and consigned that vast manuscript to ‘the gnawings of the mice’. (By contrast they evidently considered The Communist Manifesto a good rallying-cry for what they had to announce to the world since they continued to publish it in revised form in their lifetimes.)

          What is the nature of Thompson’s own historical materialism? One comes away from ‘The Poverty of Theory’ wondering why anyone should choose to become a historical materialist, for though Thompson defends historical materialism robustly enough, he doesn’t manage to characterise it with any great precision.

          What we appear to gather from Thompson in his ‘historical logic’ is that it represents the view that all history is unitary, all aspects of it are interlinked, interconnected in one way or another, that there are no such things as discrete historical facts or events entirely cut off from all other facts or events. This view, taken by itself, seems rather anodyne. One doubts if there are many present-day historians who would openly gainsay it. Almost every historical study or monograph at least pays lip-service to the various connections of the subject matter under review to the ‘wider world’, itself ignored because invariably there is no space to follow up these connections. It is very milk-and-water historical materialism: ‘respectable’, yes, but fully deserving of Kolakowski’s remark somewhere in his Main Currents of Marxism that historical materialism may only be trivially true, and therefore of not much real interest to anybody.

          On the other hand, these early works – when read closely – do indicate the ‘paradigm shift’ latent in them, though the ‘shift’ as such did not all come only from the writings of Marx and Engels. What historian – as opposed to evangelist - will now write of divine intervention in human affairs? Or of Absolute Mind coming to know itself through its unfolding of the progressive stages of history? Or of history as the determinations of ‘great men’? Or of history being furthered fundamentally by ‘great ideas’  floating out of the ether (not unlike Arthur C Clarke’s monolith in the film 2001)? In short, what historian now believes in the ‘idealist conception of history’ as opposed to a ‘materialist conception’? What historian does not take history for granted as materially-based and human-centred? That is, human in relation to humanity’s natural environment, the material world? These were fighting words in the rather more pious 1840s but one can hardly call them burning issues to be fought over on the barricades of today. That in itself is a measure of how profound was the effect of the paradigm shift latent in the early works, though of course we should not view them in isolation, away from – for example – the impact of Darwin in the same period and later the writings of Nietzsche. Not to speak of a general secularisation as organised religion failed to reach adequately the new millions of the emergent urban industrial working classes of the 19^th century.

          But perhaps the ‘idealist conception’ has yet life in it. For Thompson’s view of unitary history is not only merely anodyne but also idealist. Everything connects to everything else, may be, but if this unitary holism is not grounded in some material, historical manifestation then it might as well be Buddhism. Thompson offers no materialist reason why there is such a unity, or how it works out in practice – in other words, what phenomenally or really substantiates this unitary state of history in a specific historico-social totality. Or, indeed, what makes a totality: history is not, as stated above, about ‘everything’, so on what materialist basis may it postulate delineated totalities? Thompson’s could just be a ‘unitary principle of history’, handed down from on high and generally accepted because it sounds good. It is this sort of vapid, lingering idealism in the name of historical materialism that makes historical materialism seem so trivial, as well as indistinct from bourgeois conceptualisation, though amenable to bourgeois habits of mind and politically quietist – high prices to pay for trying to render historical materialism ‘respectable’ in academia.[2] Althusser’s method is to re-animate traditional rationalist argumentation and impose it upon historical materialism in order to fulfil his own latter-day Cartesian foundationalist agenda. Thompson’s is to water down historical materialism into an anodyne and purely conceptual ‘unitary’ history which admits of all ‘empirical’ (empiricist?) practices: ecumenism before all else, even truth. Thompson declares that it is Althusser who is trying to undermine historical materialism, but it seems Thompson is having a fair crack at it himself. Let us turn to an early annunciation of historical materialism from its founders:

The apparent absurdity which transforms all the various interrelationships of men into the single relationship of utility, an apparently metaphysical abstraction, follows from the fact that in modern civil society all relationships are in practice subordinated to the single abstract relationship of money and speculation. (The German Ideology, transl. TB Bottomore, Bottomore and Rubel 1969, p. 169.)

          It was precisely this that Marx set out to substantiate voluminously in his subsequent critiques. From Grundrisse to the volumes of Capital, Marx constructs a highly-elaborated general theory of capital. This theory, developed in detail  through trial and error and covering a good thousand or two pages and backed up by an enormous amount of evidence, references, statistics and mathematics, substantiates the claim made in the above passage that capital itself operates in the ‘anti-historical’, anti-human way that is denounced by Thompson as a fault of Marx’s studies of it. The mature theory goes far beyond The German Ideology (but does not gainsay its status as a critical overview and agenda) in grounding this alienated activity not in ‘money and speculation’ but in production itself, an insight which could not have been reached and substantiated without enormous empirical investigation. Capital production itself is an alienated, alienating phenomenon, the repository of all value, for the last two centuries or so the only (intermittently challenged) mode for the production and reproduction of human life, or it came to be so as it spread across the world from the industrial West. And Marx was right to see that a detailed critique of Political Economy, and not mere polemics, however stirring, was the only means at his disposal for getting to grips with capital: isolating it, describing but also abstracting it, analysing its workings, transmogrifications, connections and effects. History may be made by men and women. Thompson says so and Marx, young or old, says so. As a matter of fact Marx never departed from this declaration of his younger days:

History does nothing; it ‘does not possess immense riches’, it does not ‘fight battles’. It is not ‘history’ which uses men as a means of achieving – as if it were an individual person – its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends. (The Holy Family, transl. by TB Bottomore, 1969, 78 - emphases in the original.)

This quote should help us understand why Marx would never have been amenable to a single, grand theory of history (‘unitary’ or otherwise); that would have of necessity to take history as its subject, not all the diverse natures and motives of self-willed men and women. But capital as Marx found it was something new: a process – accessed for the human mind only through what he calls ‘the power of abstraction’ - which was coming to reach into more and more areas of human life – even into the political, the cultural, the sexual: all coming to be ‘subordinated’ by capital - as heralded in The German Ideology. And to determine the very history that men and women should have been making for themselves. Class-struggle in the past, yes; money and usury, yes; commodities, yes. But there had never before been anything like industrial big-business capital, that is, before capital took over the employment and deployment of mass wage labour, and Marx knew it to a more profound depth than anybody else, though older contemporaries like Thomas Carlyle with his ‘cash-nexus’ society and in fictional terms Honoré de Balzac had more than an inkling. Not even the medieval Catholic Church had been so universally pervasive and so apparently beyond the restraints of ordinary mortals. In time capital impinged globally on the prerogative of  men and women to make their own history (a particularly brutal and prolonged historical example lies in the denuding of West Africa of some 38 million people over the course of more than three hundred years to serve as slaves in the New World and elsewhere in the interests of capital accumulation). Capital itself dominates even the actions of the ‘personifications of capital’, the capitalists and their minions and politicians, to an extent that the rule of no powerful king, lord or prelate was ever so dominated by ‘the feudal system’ in every instrumental act. As Marx points out, under the rule of capital the material relationship of men is experienced as the social relationship of things. Thompson seems not to have come across the Marxian category of reification as most effectively spelt out in the ‘commodity fetishism’ of Capital I, in which relations between men are superseded by a value not residing in human beings which, if not resisted by human beings, comes to determine the nature of all relations. (‘To find an analogy, we must have recourse to the nebulous regions of the religious world.’)

          Marx saw what was inexorable and determinist about the encroachments of capital upon all human endeavour, and ever since he wrote he has been the messenger blamed for the bad news by a long line of critics, including – from a somewhat unexpected quarter – EP Thompson.

          It is precisely Marx’s awareness of the actual centrality of the real dominance of capital and its encroachment upon the liberty and creativity of human beings down to an everyday level – plus a scientifically grounded critique and a call to action with which to combat this encroachment – that renders the historical materialist position truly distinct from any other.

          It is the historical materialist perception of the centrality of this real phenomenon, capital, which creates the materialist unity of our time and of recent times; it is a phenomenon grounded in actuality more than a mental construct, though of course as apprehended consciously it is also correspondingly a mental construct.

          Without the intention of overthrowing capital (Thompson has Marx initially animated merely by a desire to overthrow Political Economy), urged on by capital’s all-embracing actuality in the world (and not just in the head), historical materialism is indeed an intellectually milk-and-water affair, and despite its novel world view no different in fundamental approach from any other purely philosophical disquisition or polemic. Only a Marx ‘locked’ in his Political Economic studies could have rendered up the historical materialism which is true to the materialist mode and world view of the original Marxist agenda, in so far as its central unifying premise – capital production – is not a ‘principle’ but a material phenomenon – yet also or in time a material phenomenon that comes to swallow up principles. It is this which marks out historical materialism from all other constructs on history and other social disciplines which are merely that: constructs, purely mental frameworks of thought, approaches and methods of classification – like the Dewey Decimal System: useful no doubt but of an instrumentality alienated from the material, as the Dewey Decimal System has nought to do with the contents of books except to arrange the volumes in convenient ways. [3] Historical materialism is conceptually organised around that unifying force which is material and real, not conceptualised in the way that ‘the modern industrial era’ or ‘the age of chivalry’ or ‘the age of Roosevelt’ or ‘the dawn of the Flapper era’ are pure conceptualisations more literary -  even journalistic - than scientific. This essay has been at fault if it has led readers to believe that most modern-day historians are not idealists; what it should be clear in saying is that most historians no longer consciously embrace ‘the idealist conception of history’; yet crypto-idealists they may continue to be, as conceptualisers and organisers of textbook-periods without any material or totalising bases in reality.[4] This is what sets historical materialists apart from and against them.  And it is the historical materialist critique of Political Economy – having by recourse to theory and evidence descried capital as a real phenomenon dominating production, circulation and exchange – which has grounded historical materialism in the reality of capital, not in the plausibility of philosophically compelling ‘historical materialist’ asseverations. Thompson himself initially puts this quite well, though from a viewpoint by now diametrically opposed to that of Marx:

Capital is an operative category which laws its own development, and capitalism is the effect, in social formations, of these laws. This mode of analysis must necessarily be anti-historical, since the actual history can only be seen as the expression of ulterior laws; and historical evidence, or contemporary (empirically-driven) evidence, will then be seen as Althusser sees it, as instances or illustrations confirming these laws. But when capital and its relations are seen as a structure, in a given moment of capital’s forms, then this structure has a categorical stasis: that is, it can allow for no impingement of any influence from any other region (any region not allowed for in the terms and discourse of this discipline) which could modify its relations, for this would threaten the integrity and fixity of the categories themselves. (253)

          But it is precisely because it is in the nature of capital expansion to ‘law its own development’ that ‘actual history’ (the history or life-activity of men and women) becomes ‘the expression of its ulterior laws’. This unfortunate circumstance is none of Marx’s doing and not even Althusser’s. It is dictated by the advance of capital itself into more and more areas of life (even down to the social provision of water: how soon will air come to be ‘privatised’, one wonders?) It is not a case of Marx having set up an ‘anti-historical structure’ as of Marx having disclosed an ‘anti-historical structure’, in the sense of being a structure opposed to history as determined by real men and women.

To write of this model being a conception of ‘stasis’ is similar to confusing the inert billiard-ball models of atoms found in science museums with the way that physicists understand real atoms functioning in quantum physics. Thompson has become hopelessly confused as between the use of a model for scientific understanding and some belief that by employing models we somehow imprecate a stasis to the reality these models represent. There is nothing ‘static’ about capital, as Marx well knows. It is frighteningly dynamic, with its own built-in teleology: ‘Accumulate! Accumulate! That is the law of Moses and the prophets!’ Once in motion, capital’s operation is not even dependent upon human greed: the logic of accumulation, now on a corporate basis, proceeds on its own way, undisturbed by motivation or intentionality. And no human beings escape its control over their lives, whether they be rich or poor or somewhere in the middle, though many and probably most will experience the downside of this control more than others and in ways that reflect the multi-dimensional experience and reach of human beings, that is, psychological as well as economic.

          The atom is not a mental construct, however characterised or named. It is a real phenomenon, like gravitational force and Vitamin C [5] – and capital. The apprehension of instrumentally real but underlying or ‘hidden’ phenomena and fields is what characterises science, not the creation of mental concepts out of pure rationality or ratiocination (Althusser) or the mistaken identification of any passing object with its own source of being and acting (Thompson). It is science in this sense that has overcome any dichotomy between the rationalist and the empiricist with respect to those areas in which science has made breakthroughs.

          Only in certain of its manifestations can capital be seen or touched or even perhaps tasted, but whether hidden or transmogrified into something out in the open, it is capital, not mature Marxism, which ‘cannot allow for any impingement of influence from any other region which could modify its relations’. Marx himself showed that capital operations are riddled with self-contradiction and – more controversially – that their inherent tendency is for the rate of profit to fall, though the theory fully embraces the variables that may, and so far have, not only impeded a final catastrophic decline but have also if anything seen (certainly in recent years) a dramatic upsurge in absolute profit - there are now something like 2000 billionaires in the world, as an indication – even if relative rates of profit are in secular decline. The theory points towards the means of showing that capitalism must ultimately give way to socialism – or barbarism (‘the mutual ruin of the contending classes’ in the Communist Manifesto). It is this ‘or barbarism’ that Marxists must be alert to. [6] For there is nothing inherent in the theory to suggest anything more than capitalism eventually collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions – and it is sufficiently capacious a theory to allow for capital’s protean ability to renew itself, if at ever greater cost to the exploited, not to speak of the intensified deterioration of the natural environment. But what does such a ‘collapse’ entail in the real world? What is to be the actual fall-out from this? Does it mean ever more dictatorial repression from regimes seeking to maintain ‘law and order’, or does it not also provide opportunities and incentive for working people across the globe to seize back history? If Marx had ever been able to complete his original agenda and move on from capital to a similar treatment in magnitude of politics, he might have told us himself. It is here that Marxian theory or historical materialism unites with socialist praxis in fostering and helping to organise the conscious and deliberate overthrow of this alienating and inevitably declining system by the victims both of capital and of the increasing oppression that may - or perhaps already is - emerging out of capital’s ultimate decline: victims exploited, expropriated and in so many ways virtually enslaved by capital itself, in whatever circumstances they may be identified as a ‘proletariat’ as the grip tightens on more and more persons (for example also upon those who have till now seen themselves as ‘middle class’ but who are no longer to be counted amongst the privileged) – all as concomitant with a system in its death throes.  

This is an extraordinary mode of thought to find in a materialist [writes Thompson of Marx!], for capital has become Idea, which unfolds itself in history. (Ibid.)

This may be the most fatal error in the whole of ‘The Poverty of Theory’. Thompson equates the Marxian characterisation of capital with idealism! But capital is not an idea or even Idea; capital is money, land, credit, interest, rent, surplus value, commodities, factory machinery – and always a means for the expropriation of labour power for profit and accumulation. Or rather:

In themselves, money and commodities are no more capital than are the means of production and of subsistence. They have to be transformed into capital. But this transformation itself can only take place under certain circumstances, whose essential features are, that two very different kinds of commodity-producers must come into contact: on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production, and means of subsistence, who are eager to increase the sum of values they possess, by buying other people’s labour-power; on the other hand, free labourers, the sellers of their own labour-power, and therefore the sellers of labour. (Capital I, from Bottomore/Rubel 1969, 142)

Capital today moves around the world at the speed of electronic signals. But this is no mere ‘idea’ zipping about the globe: it is innumerable transactions in commodities, bricks and mortar, social labour, sweat and toil. And if anyone gets too carried away by the belief that it is merely an ‘idea’, then he or she might recall – for just one example - Black Wednesday back in 1987, when the money-markets collapsed with reverberations which rattled through the world economy. Do we call money an ‘idea’ because it is a symbol of wealth or value in paper form? It is some ‘idea’ that can determine whether you eat or starve. (Unless, of course, it is an ‘idea’ that translates well into, say, best-selling books or blockbuster movies – in other words, a commodified idea.)

          What Marx is attempting to do is to demonstrate the reality of a relation, which is what capital is and what all ‘things’ are. This concept of the dynamic relation as the fundamental form of being can be seen vividly expressed in Marx’s very early 1844 Manuscripts and Capital departs not one jot from what Marx wrote in this respect in the work of his youth. But whereas in the Manuscripts the young Marx could only express this concept philosophically, as a kind of reasoning or annunciation, and only about the social world in general than any society in particular, in Capital Marx was able to locate and exhaustively treat the real phenomenon which embodies this relation perfectly and pervasively – and in such a way transformed Marxism out of philosophy (the apprehensions of pure thought) into science (the intellectual apprehension of a real if largely underlying phenomenon implying an instrumentality for confronting and dealing with it). This was achieved by a combination or reciprocation of theoretical methodology with political activism and empirical observation, which brought together seem to elude both Althusser and Thompson. Thompson appears to regard Marx’s grasp of capital-as-relation as the invocation of the Idea because he cannot fathom that something can be real which is not always physically palpable – and yet is no mere mental construct either. (Many persons have difficulty grasping such real entities-as-relations in quantum physics, too.)

          To be fair, Thompson did seek to grasp something of this in his words on the ‘unitary’ nature of history and the interrelationships of all things.  But this is still very much back at (and somewhat below) the level of the Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts;  Marx realised not so long after that the only way to overcome philosophy in characterising his relational concepts was to centre them materially on a real phenomenon that is real by dint of being a relation. ‘Philosophy’ thus itself becomes real – that is to say, material - through the materialist philosophy-cum-science whose central concept is a real relation, not (or not merely) a mental construct. Philosophy does not die before science; using a Hegelian term, it is subsumed or ‘sublated’ within it.

          And it is quite obtuse of Thompson to equate the posited existence of capital with Hegel’s Absolute Idea. Did the Absolute Idea ever build airplanes and skyscrapers, or create empires, or transform agriculture, or send people down mines, or make anybody a fortune? (Did it ever do anything apart from creating a prodigious industry of Hegel interpretation?)

The ‘organic system’ is then its own subject, and it is this anti-historical stasis or closure which I have been indicating. The ‘it’ inside this organism is capital, the soul of the organ, and ‘it’ subordinates all elements of society to itself and creates out of society ‘its’ own organisms…

Marx has moved across an invisible conceptual line from Capital (an abstraction of Political Economy which is his proper concern) to capitalism (‘the complicated bourgeois system’), that is, the whole society, conceived of as ‘an organic system’. But the whole society comprises many activities and relations (of power, consciousness, sexual, cultural, normative) which are not the concern of Political Economy, and for which it has no terms. Therefore Political economy cannot show capitalism as ‘capital in the totality of its relations’; it has no language or terms to do this. Only a historical materialism which could bring all activities and relations within a coherent view could do this. And, in my view, subsequent historical materialism has not found this kind of ‘organism’ working out its own self-fulfilment with inexorable idealist logic, nor has it found any society which can be simply described as ‘capital in the totality of its relations’. (254; emphases in the original)

A number of points might be raised here: the first is that – contrary to what Thompson seems to imply - nowhere in his writings does Marx use the term ‘capitalism’. This is not a trivial observation. To write of ‘capitalism’ is strictly speaking to reify a process of capital growth into a thing in itself. ‘Capitalism’ implies the invocation of a false totality, that is, a mental construct or the ‘label’ of a totality; restricting usage to the term ‘capital’ (together with the term ‘capitalist’ to denote a specific class, though we do not also say ‘workerist’ or ‘middle-classist’) implies a real relation whose embrace of societies denotes the rise of a real totality as the process comes to dominate or even swamp all forms of human endeavour and relationship. But due to the weight of custom and convention we perforce speak and write of the whole phenomenon as ‘capitalism’, though I am wondering whether Marx himself would have approved.

          Another point worth making is that Marx was fully aware of the many-sidedness of human life, which is why production and reproduction of real life, which is so central and crucial to human existence, should be as creatively and joyfully carried out as social conditions and technology would ever permit. Surely even Thompson knew that Capital had been meant to form only a fraction of Marx’s entire projected work on the science of man. All his working life Marx devoted much time and many pages to writing about and commentating upon the political affairs of Europe and America; he and Engels were both absorbed in European politics and the political struggles of working people. He co- founded the International Working Men’s Association, feuded with Bakunin, kept exceedingly close watch on the Paris Commune of 1871 on which he spoke in a lengthy Address. It has been shown by scholars (notably SS Prawer) how suffused in both the ancient-classical and the romantic literature and poetry of his day Marx’s mind was. Capital, especially in its footnotes, is crammed with literary and classical allusions – rather more so than the average economics textbook. He liked roistering company and a drink or two, as Francis Wheen has amusingly shown. He wasted a whole year, 1860, on a diatribe against one Herr Vogt. Marx complained bitterly to Engels by letter about being swamped in ‘all the economic shit’ while obviously yearning to get back to something more congenial, such as literature or politics. Marx was a man of many consuming interests and passions (to such an extent that he had to be bullied by Engels to finish anything on time), of which the passion for human justice was probably the deepest felt: hence his perceived need to drive himself on in his political economic critiques, for the one thing he wished to bequeath to working people was an understanding of the mechanisms of capital: know your enemy.

          That the whole society comprises ‘many activities…which are not the concern of Political Economy’ is precisely why Marx embarked on a critique of Political Economy, a critique in which he himself did not ‘define out’ human relations and values in his treatment of the economic workings of capital but showed how these themselves were ‘defining’ them out.

          An obsession with personal independence has always characterised the petty-bourgeoisie of all nations – obsessional because, under the growth and rule of capital, it is constantly under threat in one way or another. Those petty-bourgeois who have drifted into one variety or another of Marxism have not thereby automatically rejected or overcome their class origins. It is perhaps this which makes the ‘early’ Marx more congenial to them than the ‘mature’ Marx, because the studies of the latter throw up the very real threat to all human independence, a threat which may, for some, be too much to countenance. It is conceivable that, if the philosophy of the ‘early’ Marx alone could somehow be acted upon, there would needs be no serious ruptures, apart from a romantic political revolution or two, on the way towards peace, harmony and personal independence and spiritual fulfilment. Alas that the ‘mature’ Marx, anticipated by the ‘early’ one, has thrown a spanner in the works; first one must overcome the present mode of production itself, with all the hideous divisiveness and perhaps undisguisably nasty violence this will entail. Apart from anything else, it takes guts. And since the ideology of the petty-bourgeoisie does not incline to the mass, collective action required to achieve this goal, the ‘answer’ must be to turn away from any possibility of a proletariat (itself a threat to ‘individualism’) in favour of a non-divisive (i.e. non-class) resolution. Since this removes the only effective potential for the overthrow of capital, (as well as the only reason for doing so), the way out for the petty-bourgeois Marxist is to deny the reality of the all-encompassing phenomenon of capital itself. Where there is no solution, there is no problem.

          And so, much better to fulminate against the ‘closed system’ of the ‘mature’ Marx, and nail that as the enemy, thus remaining some sort of Marxist without involvement in class struggle. Marxism, it seems, can be assimilated to the prevailing culture, provided we process and fillet Marx in the ‘right’ way and invent some new nomenclatures and typologies in reorganising him.

          Historical materialism posits no grand theory of history. It poses a theory for history: the dialectic of forces versus relations of production: the theoretical basis for a Marxian theory of capital.  The latter may seem an unduly narrow basis for a theory with historical implications and pretensions, but it turns out that this theory, and the foundational theory pointing to it, affect not only the study of history but that of all the other so-called social sciences: economics, sociology, psychology, law and jurisprudence – all of which will only break down the barriers between them when Marx’s law is seen as the recognition of the essential unity of all social practice going back through history. And the theory of capital will perhaps seem unduly ‘narrow’ until we recall that capital is the unchallenged mode of production throughout our entire global civilisation, penetrating one way or another into every aspect of human life, even as we try to live creatively and lovingly around it. Such a phenomenon did not spring up overnight, and indeed has been hundreds of years in the making, in the social and political as well as in the economic sense. It is in grasping capital as the central or core phenomenon – its present, its past and even perhaps its future, not to speak of its widespread, nay universal operations - that historical materialism thus appropriates history. The theory of historical materialism is ‘totalising’ and ‘holistic’ only in the sense and to the degree that the reality of capital is totalising and all-embracing on this actual earth. This is the materialist ground for a historical materialist ‘unitary’ concept: the reality of the phenomenon of an all-determining and all-embracing capital. Because capital is a real phenomenon which only historical materialism grasps in its fullness and full implications, historical materialist theory is history-as-science, the only one  possible, because the Marxian theory of capital is history’s only (rough) equivalent to the theory of natural selection or the General Theory of Relativity: that is, a theoretical breakthrough into a formerly pre- or proto-scientific endeavour called ‘history’ which is characterised by literary devices combined with some aspects and ad hoc  eclectic borrowings from sciences such as sociology and statistics.[7] Historical materialism is therefore as ‘falsifiable’ as any science, but as it is a theoretical-practical praxis it is also vulnerable to the ups and downs of the working-class movement in the real world, so that its standing is profoundly affected in the universities by what goes on outside them in the streets – or doesn’t. It is also provisional in the sense that capital will one day be no longer with us, in which event the theory we presently know will have no subject matter except a retrospective one. It is not so much, therefore, that the theoretical element in historical materialism is narrowminded as that capital is pervasively dominant and has been so for some time – not something, incidentally, that historical materialists embrace joyfully and out of choice. As capital reaches into the workings of politics and is even manifested in the wholesale commodification of culture, so historical materialism is a ready instrument to use in focusing upon these aspects of history, inherently as widely ‘interdisciplinary’ in this sense as is capital itself, which potentially knows no boundaries to its activism and power – unless somebody or two raises them up.

          The uniqueness of capital’s means of being the social power extends to the realisation that there can be no precise equivalent to it in the power-structures of any pre-capitalist epoch. Structures of power there have been at the very least since the earliest civilisations, but these cannot be anywhere near precisely analogous to the rule of capital. Each socio-historical society and epoch must be judged with reference to its own unique constituents and formation, accessed through empirical research. By drawing upon the same inspiration that Marx drew upon to substantiate his work on merchant and industrial capital, that is, the materialist conception of history, it is possible for the historical materialist to get to grips with non- and pre-capitalist societies and eras by using and refining similar hermeneutic tools, so long as one draws no easy parallels. In his 1877 letter, previously quoted, Marx writes that one must place the particular subject of study, in his random example the Roman proletariat, within its specific socio-economic context in order to identify and describe it correctly, and not, one might say, merely refer to it as a sort of industrial working-class of its day. Likewise, whereas Anglican protestant theology in Britain in the 21^st century might not feature very crucially in a discussion on the contemporaneous ‘British economy’, a discourse centred on the material means of production and reproduction in Aztec civilisation will do well to consult – fairly extensively - Aztec cosmology and ritualised belief. Similarly the crystallisation of class in historical materialist terms characterises and parallels the development especially of manufacturing and industrial labour, but ‘class’ in pre-industrial early modern England has to be re-conceived according to the dominant and transitional production modes of that period. (As it must be re-conceived in societies such as that of the United States today where working people are largely employed in services with only 12% of the working population so employed in manufacturing industry.) The materialist conception of history poses human material production and reproduction at the very heart of the origins and development of human life on earth, initially – well, for nearly a million years of ‘initially’ - involving primarily a struggle with nature to obtain sustenance and therefore achieve survival. However, with the spread of agriculture and a more sedentary existence from about ten thousand years’ ago leading to the rise of the early civilisations, the struggle to obtain sustenance, while remaining wholly natural in respect of maintaining life and limb, is largely internalised within the societies in question, and as these become class societies of one sort or another, ‘natural’ struggle transforms into social struggle, with the same object in view: namely, the production and reproduction of human life based on survival through obtaining sustenance. This is why the Communist Manifesto writes of the history of all past (recorded) society as one of class struggle, and why the young Marx and Engels write of history being but an extension of natural history. But of course the history of all past recorded society is not only of class struggle, and in any case the historian investigating these pre-capitalist areas has to research them painstakingly to come up with the most accurate formulation possible of the existence of class struggle in each instance. The materialist conception provides the impetus for all this, but not by any means the details or the (falsifiable) corroboration. And within any such society must be found the real totalising process, which Marxists refer to as the mode of production, although ‘mode of production and reproduction of real life’ is closer to the right formulation, since bare ‘mode of production’ reads too much (well, to me) like economics with its factories and such. Yet in cultures of the distant past, magic and ritual were also material forces, aspects of those ‘modes of production’ in a way that they could not be considered as such in Western capital society today except in as much as their sophisticated modern variants provide part of what Marx referred to as the ideological ‘superstructure’ justifying the mode of production at hand, with its concomitant rate of exploitation.

          Incidentally, the Thompsonian mode of identifying classes as solely ‘self-affirming’ will become increasingly problematical the further back into history one goes, since the further back we go the less data we are likely to be able to gather on what people in the mass thought. If we have little or no access to what they thought, what their consciousness was, then by Thompson’s method we have to write off any serious attempt to identify the classes of those periods, or certainly those classes that have left comparatively little trace of their own due to illiteracy, enslavement or whatever. [8]

          Just as theory and practice are not separate but interrelating activities in historical materialism, so ‘falsification’ of historical materialism does not pertain only to either one side or the other of the equation. Unlike other schools of thought - though they too reflect the ideological temper of the times - historical materialism can, for example, be falsified by a counter-revolution that completely extinguishes the Marxist movement (as it was extinguished in Germany from 1933) or less unequivocally by a massive indifference, insecurity, defeatism, demoralisation, lethargy, antipathy, corruption or general amnesia amongst a potential agent-class as a whole. Historical materialism’s scientific vulnerability as well as its scientific strength lies in the real, material world. It is tied to the ups and downs of revolutionary development in the world at large, outside the groves of academe but deeply affecting what goes on within them.

          One final task remains here, and it is an imperative when justifying the scientific nature of Marx’s thought and method. This involves examining, as briefly as possible, the import of Hegelian philosophy on the evolution of Marxism. Thompson’s evident distaste for Hegel is yet one more thing he shares with Althusser. Althusserians will tell us that the dialectics of Marx’s early period are pre-scientific and ideological, prior to the conventional methods of science employed by him in the ‘hard’ matter of his later work.

          But for many others, the ‘hard stuff’ of the mature Marx is not free of dialectical contamination either. It has been frequently asserted that Marx’s ‘coquetting’ with Hegel, as mentioned in Capital I and as evident in the pages of the Grundrisse counts against him as a true scientist. Opposed to this was the Stalinist imposition on Soviet Russia of a mechanistic secular religion given the somewhat Orwellian appellation ‘Diamat’, short for dialectical materialism. Even Soviet physical science had to conform to ‘Diamat’ if it was to gain official approval. This embrace of a Hegelian derivative of dialectics seems not to have rubbed off on the Communist Althusser despite his fascination for Bachelard’s ‘epistemological break’, which is scarcely distinguishable from the dialectical materialist ‘law’ of the qualitative leap, or the transformation of quantity into quality.

          Marx was not a Hegelian. He disavowed Hegel while still a young man, after a brief and troubled adherence. Marxists remain divided, however, as to how much Marx truly owed to Hegel. It is evident that he derived a great deal of his early social and political thought from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, whatever his extensive critique of it, and Hegel’s discussion of the master-slave relationship in the Phenomenology was clearly an enduring formative influence on his thought. But an embrace of Hegelian dialectics per se is less clear, at least to many. Some, like Colletti, would avow that Marx does not merely ‘invert’ Hegel (as Marx himself claimed) but is entirely inimical to him, deriving much more from Kant. In the first instance this chalk-and-cheese is fairly obvious in as much as Hegel was an idealist and Marx was a materialist (hence Marx’s ‘inversion’), but of course philosophically it goes deeper than that. The mature Marx makes tantalisingly few references to Hegel though the ones he does make are not all that uncomplimentary. But one suspects – for example from the footnotes in Capital I – that it was Aristotle who was Marx’s favourite philosopher, not Hegel or anyone else in the German Idealist tradition. Marx’s projected pamphlet on dialectics never materialised. He seemed to think a disquisition on dialectics worth no more than ‘two or three printer’s sheets’: thirty-two pages as opposed to the hundreds of pages he actually devoted to the critique of Political Economy. One gains the impression that Marx was simply not all that interested in the matter. Or at any rate in the presentation of materialist dialectics as such. He was undoubtedly grateful to Engels for lifting the responsibility for its exposition off his own shoulders – the only other man in the world at that time who could. For indeed he encouraged Engels in the writing of Anti-Duhring, to which he himself contributed a few chapters, the founding work in the exposition of materialist dialectics and one that extends its practice into mathematics and the physical sciences. But Marx seems to have been concerned with dialectics principally to the extent of harnessing it as a methodology for his work on capital, a methodology he considered superior to the cobbled-together conceptualising of bourgeois ‘professors’.

          Yet it is evident from the very texture of Marx’s writing, early or late, that he was the most profoundly dialectical thinker who ever lived, not excluding Hegel himself.[9] Marx appears to have been incapable of a nondialectical thought. Thought was dialectical thought. To read others after reading Marx is to be reminded of how onesided and one-dimensional so many of them are, plucking ideas out of the ether and connecting them up any old way, a sort of Anthony Giddens approach, to name but one. Their thinking is dominated by strict causality, by arbitrary and even whimsical mental classification, by ‘either/or’. It is somewhat easier, by the way, to say what dialectics isn’t rather than what it is. As someone once said: ‘I would know the answer if you didn’t ask me.’ Perhaps this quote from Ernst Fischer will help:

[Marx] was to remain faithful to the dialectic – the inner contradiction within the nature of thought and of all things, the recognition that nothing can be understood in isolation or as a rectilinear sequence of cause and effect, but only as the multiple interaction of all factors and as being in conflict with itself; that everything, as it comes into being, produces its own negation and tends to progress towards the negation of the negation. But he went far beyond Hegel in the consequences he drew. (1970, 18)

Essentially Marx appropriated dialectics to avoid blind-alley literalism or ‘common sense’ categories while at the same time drawing nearer to the movement and relations and internal contradictions – in general, the workings - of the real world. In other words, dialectics for him was wholly appropriate for fashioning a science to uncover real but hidden and paradoxical phenomena, because it builds a detached ratiocination into the very act of seeing (which is otherwise a purely passive act), through a logic – interposing itself between the observer and the observed – which casts light on the inner dynamics of the observed that cannot otherwise be seen with the naked eye or the unreflecting mind – what Marx called ‘the power of abstraction’, which is an instrumentality that must be used in a field where microscopes and other tools for uncovering reality are unavailing. He was fond of saying, coining an expression of Heraclitus: if the eyes alone could see the truth, science would be unnecessary.

          The point is that upon minute examination capital poses dynamic internal (‘dialectical’) paradoxes and contradictions that are wholly appropriate to dialectical reasoning. Hegel’s logic – at least to the untutored and to Anglo-Saxon philosophers – may be weird and wonderful; Marx shows us time and again that the ‘topsy-turvy’ world of capital, if anything, is even weirder and wonderfuller, though entirely comprehensible. How, otherwise than dialectically, may it be comprehended? Crazy system – crazy logic. And so appropriate logic. Marx was appropriately scientific in harnessing the right tool for the job at hand, which is crucial to the practice of any science. Dialectics was for Marx what mathematics was for Galileo: in providing a mind-set logic appropriate for reaching the inner core of the paradoxical subject matter at hand. No theory of capital qua capital could have attained a scientific status by any other means.

          Dialectics may or may not be consciously invoked in practice. The leading geneticist Richard Lewontin of Harvard has consciously appropriated dialectical reasoning with regard to biology and genetics for years, and he is by no means the only physical scientist to have done this. (Crazy nature, too?) Others, most conspicuously quantum physicists, may utilise such reasoning without being consciously aware of its formulated derivation in the field of philosophy – for the nano- or micro-world of physics seems to be pretty crazy as well. There are many paradoxes in historical study for which the application of dialectical reasoning will surely be appropriate, but one must strongly qualify all this by saying that dialectics even at its most fruitful has never been a magical means of doing without prodigious research, something that Engels took pains to say in his letters about it. 

In the final analysis, materialist dialectics – that is, dialectics removed from idealist hands – is not a theory or a principle, but a utility or instrumentality. It is as much a utility as is the Aristotelian logic or the differential calculus. For years Marxists have debated whether dialectics can be applied both to mankind’s sociality and to nature (a la Engels), or whether it is only applicable where man is the paradoxically self-willed and reflective subject. That is, as opposed to the unproblematic and non-paradoxical workings of nature or the universe. Those who suggest it applies only to human society seem to be unaware of Marx’s and Engels’ contention that human society and history are only extensions from within natural history. The thinking of the present writer on this is fairly straightforward. If dialectics is a form of logical reasoning, and if it embodies and articulates the process of internal contradiction, then it is most usefully and creatively applied to problems and enquiries whose only qualifying criteria for the fruitful use of dialectics is that they show all the symptoms of being paradoxical or internally contradictory. One does not wish on problems a paradox which does not arise from within them. One seeks the kinds of problems which only dialectics may help logically to resolve. On the other hand, it is possible that internal contradiction is what characterises a ‘problem’ in the first place. And so this would be likely to apply in nature as much as in the human social world. In any case, it is surely undialectical to pose some sort of abrupt and purely arbitrary (or metaphysical) break or breach or cleavage between the two – as if nature did not respond, for example, to capital waste that is manifested in the form of generated carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

Why dialectics as a method is either embraced or utterly rejected relates also to capital, in as much as it is a means of mentally appropriating the dynamic or constantly changeable essence of phenomena. Those who cannot accept that capital and the system it creates are subject to the stresses germinated from within their own negation – in other words who have some stake in believing that capital and ‘capitalism’ are eternal and fundamentally unchanging or un-negate-able, are hardly likely to feel comfortable with a form of thought whose slogan might well be ‘all that is solid melts into air’. By association, even dialectical thinking being applied to some matter that is apparently unrelated to capital is bound to induce discomfort – the more so as capital moves into all areas, or at any rate has the potential to do so.

Meanwhile, Marx’s law of forces and relations of production has been coming into its own in late capitalism more than ever before. As Henry Heller puts one aspect of this, the political aspect:

[One] of the essential elements of the present situation is that the state and its territorial base continues to be essential to the continued operation of capitalism, and yet has become an obstacle to the further development of capitalism as a global system with an appropriate global means of regulating itself. Indeed, the development of such a world-wide institutional mechanism, necessarily limiting the power of the territorial state, might well constitute a barrier to further capital accumulation. (The Birth of Capitalism, pp. 248-9)

At the same time, although industries run along traditional lines continue to expand in non-western countries, in the advanced West economies are moving more and more towards information technologies and relations of production that are eating away at profit accumulated from living labour power – the basis of all industrial capital profit. Automation is experiencing ‘take-off’ after a lengthy gestation; and automation evolves over time into automated machines making automated machines. This undermines the whole basis and premise and source of – capital profit, even as competition among capitalists drives them ever further along this self-destructive road. Financialisation is not a cause but a symptom of this as capital investors and speculators move more and more into purely money markets and industrial concerns become – like General Motors and GE – dependent upon their financial operations more than on their manufacturing. Irrelevance has been creeping up on the capitalist class for some considerable time, but the signs are now that it is taking hold exponentially: that is, as an irrelevance to everyone except the capitalists themselves (think nobles of the ancien regime before the French Revolution).  And now of course we have the world on the brink of environmental catastrophe through the plundering and polluting of natural resources which capitalism in its withering-profit death throes cannot impede but only accelerate. The whole situation including increased rationalisation and modernisation of production indicates the need for socialism and the social ownership of means of production with the ending of private property altogether (not ‘personal’ property, which means personal effects, but that property privately owned that lies entirely in the public sphere). All this in the name of a fair distribution democratically arrived at, saving of the environment and less dependency upon jobs that can – and will – be done by nonhuman means, paving the way for new and unforeseen uses for human time. All of this including the political/territorial element is the working out of Marx’s law of 1859 concerning forces and relations of production, which this very day are undergoing epochal changes. And inherent in Marxian theory is the pressing need for conscious action to be taken to overthrow the present system before it overthrows us.

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Lenin, VI:                      Philosophical Notebooks (transl. Clemens Dutt) Collected Works vol. 38 Moscow 1961

_________:                What Is To Be Done? (transl. SV & Patrician Utechin) London 1970

Lewontin, Richard & Richard Levins:

                                      The Dialectical Biologist London 1985

Lukacs, George:           History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics (transl. Rodney Livingstone) London 1971

Luxemburg, Rosa:       Selected Political Writings (ed. Dick Howard) New York 1971

Marwick, Arthur:         The Nature of History London 1993

________________:                                                             ‘Two Approaches to Historical Study: the Metaphysical (Including Postmodernism) and the Historical’, Journal of Contemporary History vol. 30 (1995) 5-35

Marx, Karl:                   Capital I (transl. Ben Fowkes) Harmondsworth 1976

__________:             Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (transl. Martin Milligan) London 1970

__________:             Grundrisse (transl. Martin Nicolaus) Harmondsworth 1993

__________:             The Poverty of Philosophy New York n.d.

__________:             Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy (transl. TM Bottomore; eds. TM Bottomore & M Rubel) Harmondsworth 1969

Marx, Karl & Frederick Engels:

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Meszaros, Istvan:         Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition London 1995

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________________:                                                             Socialism or Barbarism: From “The American Century” to the Crossroads New York 2000

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                                      Hegel, Marx and Dialectic: A Debate Brighton 1980

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Palmer, Bryan D:          Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History Philadelphia 1990

Perry, Matt:                  Marxism and History Basingstoke 2002

Popper, Sir Karl:          Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge London 2002

Prawer, SS:                   Karl Marx and World Literature Oxford 1978

Priest, Stephen:            The British Empiricists. From Hobbes to Ayer Harmondsworth 1990

Rees, John (ed.):          Essays on Historical Materialism London 1998

Sayer, Derek:                The Violence of Abstraction: The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism Oxford 1987

Sayers, Sean:                Reality and Reason: Dialectic and the Theory of Knowledge Oxford 1985

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[1] Thompson at one point recalls that Althusser, like Stalin, was once a theological student. This is somewhat misleading, in as much as Althusser’s antecedents are Cartesian, not Catholic or for that matter Orthodox, except in so far as rationalism itself draws on earlier if unacknowledged methods and stances of medieval theological disputation, featured for pre-eminent example at the University of Paris.

[2] I would refrain from saying that Thompson’s own motives had anything to do with making historical materialism ‘respectable’ in bourgeois academia.

[3] I have often mused that a more pertinent ordering of bookshelves in libraries and bookshops ought to come under two alternative headings: ‘symptoms’ and ‘solutions’. But this would involve the librarian or bookseller in having to consume the contents of all the incoming publications.

[4] Historians of my acquaintance, at least the older ones,  are almost entirely opposed to the imprecations of a Hayden White that history is little more than the composition of literary tropes, yet they seem unaware that piling up tropes – in place of conceptual thought - is as usual for them as the compiling of figures to go with them.

[5] Vitamin C was unknowingly utilised long before it was scientifically discovered – that is, by the Royal Navy in the 18^th century distributing limes to its sailors owing to the perceived ability of their consumption to eradicate shipboard scurvy – hence the appellation bestowed ever after on Britons as “limeys”. The scientific basis for this efficacy of citrus fruit consumption was not fully grasped until the 1930s.

[6] As for example was Rosa Luxemburg and – more recently – Istvan Meszaros in his Socialism or Barbarism: From the “American Century” to the Crossroads (New York 2001).

[7] Various periods and strains of fashion in historical studies  - when before being seen or no longer seen as an offshoot of literary belles lettres - have been characterised by a ‘leaning’ of historians towards certain temporarily privileged physical or social sciences: thus a dominant trend in history writing in a given time or within a given strain might  - earlier - have been theology (literally a science of God), later biology (via Social Darwinism or the “survival of the fittest”), later still economics and economic theory closely aligned with the mathematics of econometrics or ‘Cliometrics’, or in another demographics, in another sociology, in another structuralist or Geertzian anthropology, in another individual psychology, in another geography, in another political science. The general trend now seems to be away from such sciences, whose influence is soon more or less spent, in favour of the nomenclatures of postmodernist linguistics and literary criticism and theory.  It seems historians without historical theory find it necessary for history’s validation to appropriate – perhaps now and then misappropriate - theory from other disciplines, going round the houses and back again. They currently appropriate theory from ‘theory’ itself. EPT bravely and perhaps quixotically defied the lot with a home-brewed ‘historical logic’.  History is like that genial old party at a social gathering who listens, open-mouthed and cross-legged on the floor, to the smartest voice in the room. 

[8] According to Thompson’s social historian critics at the time Making of the English Working Class first came out, the main problem for them arose from Thompson’s selective choices of evidence to prove the existence of a working-class consciousness between 1780-1830 – and this in an England with more profuse historical records and traces across the social levels than exist for, say, the Sumerians.

[9] Though Hegel seems to have been supremely dialectical to the end. When he was on his deathbed, he is reported to have said in his last breath: ‘There was only one man who ever understood me. And even he didn’t understand me.’ 

            

History and Natural History: One Brief Response to Collingwood

          It is rather late in the day for me to be clambering on to an already overloaded bandwagon in getting into an argument with RG Collingwood’s philosophy of history, but I would like to take up one or two points by way of sketching out my own views. To encompass all would be well beyond my capabilities, intellectual and purely scholarly. Apart from having been considered one of Britain’s foremost philosophers of history, if not the foremost (amongst many other distinguished accomplishments) RG Collingwood (1889-1943) had perhaps the most fertile and wide-ranging intellectual imagination of any British philosopher of his generation, and the thought that results is, as I suggest below, protean in the sense of spawning further thought – creative or otherwise – in all of us who encounter him. For this reason alone we are in his debt. He was also of an independence of mind that shines through everything he wrote, complemented by close and disciplined reasoning and a highly readable elegance of expression. It is in the sense of honouring him that I take up such cudgels against him as I possess.

          In the “Epilegomena” to his posthumously published The Idea of History, Collingwood writes: “I must begin by attempting to delimit the proper sphere of historical knowledge as against those who, maintaining the historicity of all things, would resolve all knowledge into historical knowledge”. [i]

          As he goes on to describe the view of the opponents of this historicity:

Since the time of Heraclitus and Plato, it has been a commonplace that things natural, no less than things human, are in constant change, and that the entire world of nature is a world of ‘process’ or ‘becoming’. But this is not what is meant by the historicity of things; for change and history are not at all the same. According to this old-fashioned conception, the specific forms of natural things constitute a changeless repertory of fixed types, and the process of nature is a process by which instances of these forms (or quasi-instances of them, things approximating to the embodiment of them) come into existence and pass out of it again. Now, in human affairs, as historical research had clearly demonstrated by the eighteenth century, there is no such fixed repertory of specific forms. Here, the process of becoming was already by that time recognized as involving not only the instances or quasi-instances of the forms, but the forms themselves. … According to modern ideas, the city-state itself is as transitory a thing as Miletus or Sybaris. It is not an eternal ideal, it was merely the political ideal of the ancient Greeks. … Specific types of human organization, the city-state, the feudal system, representative government, capitalistic industry, are characteristic of certain historical ages. [ii]

Collingwood goes on to suggest why historicism has come to be widely accepted because “the transience of specific forms” can no longer be “imagined a peculiarity of human life”. Biology has shown that living nature goes through a continuous process of evolution. So the distinction between human history and the natural world cannot be put down to change in one and the “changeless repertory” of the other. There will have to be found ways of making such a distinction between human society and nature which do not rest on a separation in terms of transience and changelessness.

          I will not be the only one who finds it difficult to make any clear conceptual separation or distinction between “history” and “evolution”, so to speak. That is, any that does not appear to be either arbitrary or idealist, or both. And my view on this is grounded in my materialism, which certainly bears little resemblance to Collingwood’s idealism, nurtured on classical philosophy. The very impact of Darwin lies in his giving natural philosophy the possibility of a traceable history – that is, as embodied in evolution. Prior to Darwin and Wallace it was universally thought, indeed, that nature was fundamentally unchanging in its entirely cyclical changes, though geologists were already questioning this on the basis of the study of discovered fossils of obviously extinct flora and fauna. (The argument that God had put the fossils in the ground at the same time as He created living nature did not stand up to much scrutiny even in pre-Darwinian days.) In other words, the same species existing in the 19^th century were thought to have been those that had been created over a period of days by God, as described in Genesis, perhaps as far back as 4004 BC according to the prodigious calculations of Bishop Ussher. This “creationism” offering us a stasis in nature lends some credence to the split between history and nature, since history – according to such a doctrine – changes while nature is unchangeable. Darwin, meanwhile, can be said to have undermined such a dichotomous view considerably, even if subsequent idealists such as Collingwood have sought to maintain it in modified form.

          According to such a materialism as will oppose this idealism, humankind is both a natural phenomenon and a social construct, the latter arising out of and interrelating with the former. Socialised human beings (and all human beings are socialised, itself a part of the definition of what it is to be “human” at all) are as much of nature as any other animal species, however much their natural being is mediated and modified socially. Apart from what they do that is specifically “human” and which other animals do not do, they are similarly mortal along with other animals in that they are born and they die – though human societies in particular appear to be able to exert some relative control over the incidence of infant mortality, quality of nutrition and the averages of life expectancy. Because we appear to be alone in knowing rather long in advance that we are going to die, the impact of the natural fact of both human birth and human death on human history and civilisation is incalculable. Human beings share urgently the oxygen-intake needs of all other animals; they require daily feeding and excretion; they have to have shelters or protective coats or both (although human beings have to sew their coats together according to some design or other) necessarily to keep out the elements; and they are positively bursting to reproduce.

Idealists never seem to have put any special stress on these mundane matters when discussing “human nature”, let alone human history, perhaps because they have enjoyed various occupational privileges that did not require them to give undue attention to assuaging animal needs, perhaps with the exception of sex. We are made up of 96% of the same genes as our near animal cousins the chimpanzees. We evolved from ape-like creatures at a certain stage in the earth’s development. Given the evolution of air through natural interactions that produced sufficient oxygen, this very existence would appear to have been founded further upon a natural contingency, indeed a number of them. One of the most significant was the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago as the dominant group, perishing in what is now more or less generally agreed to have been a cosmological event in the form of the impacting of a small asteroid in the area around the Yucatan Peninsula. In a world from which dinosaurs were removed (except in the offshoot form of birds) it proved possible for mammalian species to expand their activities and grow in size and intelligence from the small, furry, shrew-like creatures scuttling under the feet of the great reptiles. Without that mammalian expansion after the dinosaur holocaust it would not have been possible for apes and then hominids, and from the latter the Homo sapiens, to evolve at all. Indeed, it is quite possible that, but for the Yucatan catastrophe, a species of dinosaur might itself have developed the level of intelligence we associate exclusively with human mammals today – and I believe various palaeontologists have already marked out their particular dinosaur favourites in this regard. The singularity of the cause of the reptilian extinction on this planet suggests that if we are ever to come across an intelligent life form from a life-bearing planet in another solar system it is more than likely to claim descent along a more unbroken chain of reptilian evolution than our own. So human evolution, pre-history and history are intimately bound up with contingent “evolution”, even with the movements of wayward asteroids from outer space long ago. And when the sun finally expands to engulf the earth we will have to suffer the same fate with all the other dying creatures on the planet, if we have not killed ourselves and everything else off first, or have long since technologically geared up to colonise other planetary environments. Perhaps then will be the appropriate time to read Fukuyama’s End of History, which otherwise seems a bit premature.

          As we come to understand the various interactions of humankind with nature we see that it is difficult to avoid a human history which encompasses both in relation to each other. This is evident from the study of demography, which has advanced considerably since Collingwood’s day. The Black Death of the 14^th century is only one example within the history of human societies of a natural catastrophe of considerable magnitude – in this case welling out of a symbiosis between a particular kind of flea and a particular subspecies of westward migrating rat that decimated Asian and European human populations. It played its part in the crumbling of serfdom and of the whole feudal order – at any rate in Western Europe - as the system of obligation on the land broke down with the eradication of a high proportion of the peasant population, putting a premium on a scarcer labour in the following century which stimulated a greater mobility of paid labour on the land. This is certainly not the whole truth about the decline of feudalism as a social order but it forms a significant criterion amongst its causes. The so-called Little Ice Age of the 17^th century had a negative effect on European population numbers (along with fratricidal religious warfare), as well as drawing through adverse social conditions cheap – and extremely necessary - English labour towards the newly-founded white colonies of North America and the West Indies, but as the climate warmed up towards the end of that century, bringing with it longer growing seasons and more abundant crops, European populations entered a growth that, effectively, never went down again, either in relative or absolute terms, and the tide of white cheap labour reaching North America gave way to black. In fact a continuously burgeoning population in Europe led to the population pressures over the following century that resulted in severe strains on the more or less antiquated social systems that were economic, social and ultimately political in their effects. [iii] It is still a matter of controversy among historians as to how the triad - population growth-improved agriculture-industrial development - actually worked out, in terms of cause and effect. For example the populations of the non-industrial regions of eastern and central Europe expanded at about the same rate as those stimulated by economic/industrial growth in the northwest. But the very foundation for the most epochal of developments of changes in Europe during the 18^th and 19^th centuries had been a relatively sudden warming of the climate that offered greater and more continuous yields which themselves stimulated the growth in human populations - apart from creating a more amenable physical environment for more persons, in infancy and later, surviving because of higher mean average temperatures in a climate less subject than before to the colder extremes that had been borne by humans in the 17^th century.

          We could say that even the far-distant celestial bodies and their movements have had their effect on human history, at least from the time of the dominance of the Babylonian astronomer-astrologists who based their power in ancient society on their ability to foretell the seasonal future through their observations of the sun, the moon, the planets and the stars. There are theories suggesting that the building of the great pyramids of Egypt, as well as of Stonehenge in far-off Britain, was founded upon astronomical observations that may have played a central role in the organisation of literate and pre-literate great cultures and civilisations spread very widely apart across the globe, an organisation manifested through requisite cosmologies and ideologies (“thought”). And we cannot minimise the upheavals in Western thought, religious and philosophical as well as scientific, that followed from astronomy and physics from the time of Copernicus (the so-called Copernican Revolution) through Kepler and Galileo to Newton and beyond. Not to speak of the immense implications for atomic physics deriving in part from Einstein’s theories of Special and General Relativity and their confirming observations of light by Michelson and Morley in 1919, hand in hand with the contemporaneous emergence of quantum mechanics which led in time to the successful splitting of the atom.

The history of magic, alchemy and then science and its advancements is no more, in essence, than a record of the interaction of humankind with nature – and the “nature” within human beings as natural creatures - which characterises all human historical development.

For such an interaction burgeoned qualitatively from about 10,000 years ago in the deliberate cultivation and husbandry that led to a so-called ‘agricultural revolution’ releasing many tribes and cultures from the utter dependence on the vagaries of hunter-gathering that had been the mode of human existence for perhaps a million years. This agricultural revolution (and we have by no means seen the end of it – this is a ‘revolution’ that lasts a long time indeed!) did not stop with changing the way human beings lived, leading to the creation of civilisations that could grow great and powerful on the basis of food surpluses; it led also to changes in the natural topography of the earth itself. To take a comparatively small and familiar example, it is difficult to imagine the original vegetation of the island of Britain before it began to lose most of its forests due to an agricultural exploitation commencing long before the culture in question was advanced enough to keep written records. As for what is to happen to the planetary ecology taken as a whole with the development latterly of an industry and mass transportation that pollute on a vast scale, together with ever-burgeoning population and the putting of ever more land including virgin rainforest under monocultural cultivation or grazing, this is perhaps the main challenge facing our present century. If it is true that human activity, especially in the production of CFCs, carbon emissions from industry, homes and road transport, and the seemingly inexorable expansion of commercial jet airline travel, may induce a growing hole in the ozone layer and stimulate global warming, not to speak of accelerating prices and inflation due to ever-dwindling ready supplies of oil and their social and political effects, and if it is also true that much of the refusal to do anything about this decisively can be put down to the greed, competition and shallow materialism exemplified in the power politics of what is now a world economy, then we will find that human and natural history have intertwined with a vengeance.

          Leaving aside the ecological disasters occurring in the wake of the over-expansion of American Indian cultivation and population which account, for example, for the extinguishing of the Mayan and Anasazi civilisations (in these instances ultimately disastrous interrelationships between human society and nature), we might recall certain great natural disasters occurring within recorded history, such as the inundation of Pompeii by the ash of Mount Vesuvius or the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and in more recent times the eruption of Mount St Helens in the northwestern USA, the giant Indian Ocean tsunami at the end of 2004, the more recent (2005) catastrophic effect of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans and the US South bordering the Gulf of Mexico – said to have resulted in the worst civil disaster in American history to date. Katrina is reckoned to have sent world oil prices spiralling, with a decided effect on the economy, not to speak of politics, in the USA and beyond. All of these disasters are only “half” natural; the cataclysms themselves have been natural enough, but they have affected history in as much as more and more human beings have either chosen or been forced to live in areas where the paths of destruction of these phenomena were easily predictable; it was never a matter of “if”, but only “when”. If global warming has the effect of further destabilising our weather systems (caused in part or in an underlying sense by whatever natural cycles are in progress), we might well expect more cataclysms than before. Human history and natural movements – even geological movements - interact in ways that cannot be ignored by any historian. 

          A relatively new branch of historical study known as environmental history has opened up in recent decades: the history precisely of these interactions between human societies and the natural environment.

          It may be said that all of the above might well be far from refuting Collingwood’s distinction between the historical and the natural and might even confirm such a distinction by making references to “interactions” between them.

          Therefore such a distinction might continue to be philosophically defended. But its defence in idealist terms will rely upon a confusion between a distinction created for the purposes of useful if temporary abstraction and one that is posed as the actual ground of history in relation to natural history, a distinction that cannot itself stand up to a detailed study either of human history or its extension from and interaction with nature and the history of nature.  

          What is being sought is some explanation to account for an apparent distinction to be made between “unthinking” nature and “thinking” humankind. But this pre-supposes the idea that thought – and its absence – are the vital determinants of existence and therefore the only means of grasping the differences between one form of existence and the other. But if we accept, on the contrary, that consciousness arises from social being which in turn is co-extensive with natural being, the dichotomy will not stand as a fundamental explanation for the human historical situation on earth. It also begs a question: where does “thought” come from? Nothing comes from nothing, and if thought does not arise from evolutionary-cum-social developments co-extensive with nature, then it must surely derive from a supernatural source: there seems to be no third alternative.

          I have already suggested that human history and the events of the natural setting for human civilisation which is the planet spinning within its solar system are bound up with each other, whether or not the weight of emphasis lies in the one direction or the other at one phase or another or in one analysis or another. The natural warming of the climate from the 18^th century had a profound underlying effect on European history thereafter; the threat of human industrial advance and rise in energy consumption are more and more seen as having a profound effect on planetary nature (of which the accelerating annual rate of animal extinctions, itself due largely to adverse human activity, is but one feature). The human impact on the development of natural environments is nothing new (think of the human changes wrought on the ecology of the Mediterranean region from before classical times) but in our era its pervasiveness and radical aspect are becoming more immediately apparent and calculable. On this basis is it any longer possible in theory to separate human from natural history?  A case for such a separation might have been just possible in a philosophical sense in Collingwood’s day, though I would suggest that even then it was unlikely to fit the truth of the matter.

          So much for the impact of nature on society and vice versa by way of arguing from historical and immediately pre-historical events and phenomena.

          My second point is that the positing of a distinction between natural event and human history creates a problem that might not have been there without the positing of it. Namely, at what point did human beings begin producing a ‘history’ that was distinct from their evolution from primitive hominids as natural creatures? When can the activity of human beings on the earth be said to have become possible to distinguish from the activity of the earth itself?  Precisely when did history become “the history of thought”?  I suggest that this could only give rise to a sterile controversy over fixing a date in time for such a transformation, for it might be reasonably considered to have taken place (if it took place at all) anywhere along the scale of human development to the present day depending on the criteria one chooses to believe are the most significant. Were the discoveries of fire for domestic use and the inventions of the Clovis spear-point and the wheel and the most primitive of creation myths derived from less profound cogitation and ratiocination than the creation of rocket science or brain surgery or The Iliad? Perhaps with the creation of the earliest belief systems and the art that went with them; perhaps with the spreading of agriculture; perhaps with the invention in various places of numbers and writing – you name it. Such a distinction poses a needless pursuit of the “solution” to a problem which is artificial to begin with, a consequence of abandoning the principle of Occam’s Razor in argumentation.

          My third point is a reiteration of the materialist belief in humans as being natural animals, with ever-pressing animal needs. It is this that in part accounts for the presence throughout most known history of class struggle within post-hunter-gatherer societies. Amongst other things, struggles between classes have been over the satisfaction of material wants and needs within the setting of organised civilisation, which in turn derive from natural animal needs. If people did not require feeding every day, we would not – for example - have had food riots in times of either natural or induced scarcity, from the epochs of ancient civilisations up to the 19^th century. Control over the agricultural surplus was what formed the basis for rule over the society of an ancient civilisation and that which constituted the basis in wealth of that rule. Whole peoples do not engage in clashes with one another over the control of the means of production for the sheer excitement of it. A sense of urgency in these struggles is indicative of the requirement for satisfaction of natural human/animal needs, however culturally and politically these struggles are mediated. Where such clashes and struggles are averted, the reason is that some sort of modus vivendi or stand-off has been achieved between different classes that enables most people most of the time to be fed, clothed and sheltered according both to fundamental and acquired need. And that is where – according to this argument - the role and development of nature and the developments in human history link up the most strongly: that is, in the arena of social revolution. On this basis, any attempt to separate human history from natural history is arbitrary and selective, however analytically useful in a temporary sense, since the history of human societies is predicated upon the satisfying of human/animal needs, themselves an expression of nature. If a given society cannot even deliver the satisfaction of fundamental needs for most persons living in it, its stability and security lie in some peril.

          One complication is that the scale of human “need” is a moveable feast, culturally determined to a great extent. What constitutes a “basic need” or “poverty line” in modern Britain or the USA will probably not be the same as that which is so constituted in Bangladesh or in the barrios of developing-world cities. As is often said, one of the most difficult things to do is to reduce one’s standard of living as it tends to drift ever upward in terms of material satisfactions given a modicum of financial security and prosperity. There is the question as to what such a standard of living should be reduced to. This may indicate a strengthening of the argument on the idealist side, for although a materialist argument could well be made for such a phenomenon of living-standard relativity, it might not coalesce with another materialist argument rooting human nature and especially social conflict in fundamental animal and natural needs. Nevertheless, at base both materialist arguments should stand. How human beings satisfy their natural needs, and to what degree or in what matter of emphasis here and there, does not rule out the crucial importance of meeting those needs in the first place. It is possible, however, that except in the very starkest conditions for the majority of a given population, a social or political upheaval will not in the first instance be predicated upon the most basic requirements of human/animal needs. That this is likely to be true indicates the distance human civilisation has travelled from an immediate dependence upon nature. But that distancing is as much a part of the history of humankind-with-nature as is a former closer proximation of human need to natural conditions.

          My final point in this section is that “interaction” indicates not the impact of two billiard balls bouncing against each other, one billiard ball being “evolution” and the other “history”. It indicates a dialectical unity and interpenetration of opposites. One need not concur with Collingwood on these matters if one accepts that in a certain, crucial way, human society interacts with nature, both directly and through the biological needs of human beings within society. Through human social organisation have human beings survived as a race, and only through it. We have no known or possible record of human beings originally evolving as isolated individuals. Our simian inheritance made us “social” from the very beginning of human time. A human being without society is not, virtually by definition, “human’” at all, or most certainly to nowhere near anything like a full extent. To the extent that certain autistic or insane human individuals are tragically cut off from society around them is the extent to which there is a suffering for, damage to and loss of all that we commonly consider being in a state of “humanity” to be. Robinson Crusoe, a character adapted by Daniel Defoe from the true-life castaway experiences of Alexander Selkirk, survived because he was eminently practical and had brought “human society” as embodied in its artefacts and know-how along with him. Yet those classical political economists who have cited “Robinson Crusoe” in the past might have recalled the fact, also, that he felt continuously oppressed and imprisoned by a desert island, not because it could not give him sustenance but because he pined for human company, from whose loss he was mercifully delivered by Man Friday. The madness and hallucinating so vividly, progressively and tragically self-depicted on audio tape and video by the lone Donald Crowhurst in his drifting yacht in the Atlantic in 1968 gives us a more recent testimony – a man displaying symptoms described by tougher (and rather better) yachtsmen who was the more vulnerable to them because of his guilty awareness of the deception he was practising on the world as a “round-the-world” yachtsman champion.

To paraphrase the young Marx, the human being is the social being, and it is sociality itself that confers or cultivates individuality. Human beings are no more ‘human’ by dint of a primordial individuality than an individual ant can be understood without reference to its ant colony and the part it plays within it. Unlike ant colonies, however, human societies create the conditions by which more individualised denizens will emerge in appearance, motivation, thought and outlook. Let us look, by analogy, at the human family. The family contains within itself male and female parents, children, grandparents and grandchildren, aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces. These form webs of internal family relationships that in turn stimulate the emergence of individual personality within the family group. People are the more individuated through being the more contrasted with other people - and, indeed, in what is sometimes the perceived competition for material goodies and privileges and for attention, respect, love and affection.  There is also the perceived stultifying effect that families are sometimes said to create in certain individuals within them who seek to escape the family claustrophobia to take their individuality and its fuller realisation that much further afield into a wider world that embraces and satisfies such drives.

          In a crucial sense, but one that embraces the natural-history setting for human life and activity, human society exists in opposition to the forces of nature that long ago would otherwise have annihilated puny human beings attempting to survive on a wholly individual basis.  Cultural evolution takes over from biological evolution in the ongoing human adaptation to natural conditions and exigencies, and so a distinction between “society” and “nature” is evident. In the process, however, the societies appropriate their requirements necessarily from a finite nature, which is what societies do and function for, in the interests of human survival. And the surrounding nature, in the process, is transformed by their impact upon it, inducing changes that, in turn, impact on them. The two form opposites existentially speaking, but they form interpenetrations of each other. Without such interpenetration there can be no opposition, and without opposition there can be no interpenetration. We are not, therefore, discussing two discrete “things” which just happen to coincide or bump into each other: we are discussing a single whole consisting of an interpenetration of the opposites within it. And what is existential is also historical, since history is existence through time.

          According to Collingwood, “the historian, investigating any event in the past, makes a distinction between what may be called the outside and the inside of an event”.  At the same time, he states that the two can only be viewed as “an indissoluble unity”. [iv]  So much the better for dialectics – that is, if these proposed oppositions are interpenetrating and not inert.

In the case of nature, this distinction between the outside and inside of an event does not arise. The events of nature are mere events, not the acts of agents whose thought the scientist endeavours to trace. [v]

To the scientist, according to Collingwood, nature is a “mere phenomenon”. To the historian, by contrast, history is no mere phenomenon – one must penetrate the thought behind it. Thus the line of questioning apparently goes as follows: “Why did the blue litmus paper turn pink?” as opposed to “Why did Brutus kill Caesar?” The second question should be translated into: “What did Brutus think, which made him stab Caesar?”  The litmus paper thought nothing, but just turned pink. Then we go on to a famous summing-up:

The processes of nature can therefore be properly described as sequences of mere events but those of history cannot. They are not processes of mere events but processes of actions, which have an inner side, consisting of processes of thought; and what the historian is looking for is these processes of thought. All history is the history of thought. [vi]

But processes exist in both nature and human society, and so one needs to look more closely at what distinguishes a “mere event” from an “action”. Processes in nature cannot be discerned entirely by the naked eye: they require science if their “inside” is to be traced. There is as much of an “inside” and an “outside” to nature requiring study and analysis as there is in human history, which cannot simply be the history of outward event, just as what happens in nature is no “mere event” but invariably an extremely complex process. But it is too simplistic simply to distinguish between the one and the other as the absence or presence of “thought”. For one thing, the matter is complicated by the fact that human beings in history act as creatures of nature in feeling their needs and, to some extent, in satisfying them through economic, social, and even political action. For another, there is motive. What gives rise to thought is the motive, itself a response to various pressing needs. Natural events proceed also from something very much like motive, as in gravitational and other forces, themselves invisible to all but the trained eye or scientific instrument. When these natural events extend to mating rivalries amongst stags or alpha male gorillas, rudiments of something more like human motive are present, in these higher animals. Is human thought thus no more than a further elaboration of such a force or motive, a mediation of it? Where, then, lies Collingwood’s basic distinction?

Collingwood’s thought is protean in the sense that it gives birth to ever more enquiries. My initial ones are these:

·        Where does the thought come from?

·        Whose thought, and by how many? Individuals or in the mass?

·        When are processes of nature not only “mere events” (in any case, who classifies them as such, and why?) but also have a profound effect on human reasoning and action?

·        When are processes of nature modified or determined by human reasoning and action?

·        What is the difference between the internal processes of nature (described as “laws”) and the internal processes of history (described as “thoughts”?)

It would appear as though Collingwood is describing somewhat similar phenomena when attempting to demarcate differences. Science would be unnecessary if outward appearance corresponded - to the naked eye - exactly to inner process. If we believed otherwise we would still be back with the physical science of Aristotle. Similarly, human history would be virtually unintelligible if narrated only as a series of outward events and not in terms of underlying processes, developments, trends, ideas, and human intellectual reflexivity in response to all those things (known commonly as “learning from experience”). But Collingwood appears to be vulnerable to the accusation of reductionism. Are all such “hidden” historical processes necessarily reducible to “thought”?

          One immediate problem lies in historical contingency. It is unlikely that any grand scheme (or even small scheme, such as an individual assassination) initiated by any one individual or group ever achieved, historically, exactly what it set out to achieve, even if it apparently did so for a limited period of time. “Thought” may determine a good deal, but quite unthinking forces within history may gather to defeat the progress of any particular “thought” – as, for example, in great financial panics which if anything are generated by the absence of “thought” and the predominance of herd instinct.  

          Thus to limit the study of history to the tracing of “thought” or projected plan or stratagem would be to downplay the dialectical and contradictory – and external - processes by which “thought” realises itself in history. There is certainly nothing “pure” about thought; it is inextricably bound up within physical circumstances. It is true that Marx and Engels made and stood by their famous formulation that it is men – living men (and by definition women) – who make their own history, and human beings certainly work and function to a considerable degree by conscious design, but – as Marx added in a vital rider – they do not make history just as they choose, but as they inherit it from previous generations and, I would add, also from the natural circumstances within which they find themselves at given times and in given places.  

          But the principal objection I have to Collingwood’s formulation is that while it is perfectly reasonable for analytical purposes to pose an opposition of human to natural history within a totality, as stated by Collingwood this particular formulation poses a fundamental – and arbitrary - dualism in our understanding of human history in relation to natural history. This dualism implies that each phenomenon or process - nature on the one hand and human society and history on the other - goes its separate way; there is no accounting for either how they dynamically interact or how “history as thought” came into being in the first place. There is no accounting of human beings as animals co-extensive with natural history and with animal needs that affect social conflict. [vii]

Since the study of history is a study of origins, causes and effects, it would therefore have to be said that Collingwood’s understanding of history, for all its richness of concept - is unhistorical.

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[i] RG Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1989) 210.

[ii] Ibid. 210-211

[iii] We might note that Europeans (and their African slaves) unknowingly brought with them to the Americas Old World diseases to which the native populations were not immune; it has been calculated that over the first 130 years of white settlement from the time of the Spanish, some 90% of Indian populations were wiped out by disease: along with the Black Death one of the most massive and tragic human obliterations known to history. In this instance it is impossible to separate the workings of nature from the subsequent development of New World human history.

[iv] Ibid. 213

[v] Ibid. 214

[vi] Ibid. 215

[vii] This seems at a glance to lead me dangerously near a socio-biological or “naked ape” view of “human nature”, which of course I should also be at pains to refute, but will not attempt to do so here except to say that I am not being illogical in rejecting this just as much as I reject Collingwood’s idealism: on the grounds that it is yet another one-sided formulation – perhaps the mirror opposite of Collingwood’s. Meanwhile I trust to the impression left by the bulk of this essay to show where my own position lies. 

History and Natural History: One Brief Response to Collingwood

            It is rather late in the day for me to be clambering on to an already overloaded bandwagon in getting into an argument with RG Collingwood’s philosophy of history, but I would like to take up one or two points by way of sketching out my own views. To encompass all would be well beyond my capabilities, intellectual and purely scholarly. Apart from having been considered one of Britain’s foremost philosophers of history, if not the foremost (amongst many other distinguished accomplishments) RG Collingwood (1889-1943) had perhaps the most fertile and wide-ranging intellectual imagination of any British philosopher of his generation, and the thought that results is, as I suggest below, protean in the sense of spawning further thought – creative or otherwise – in all of us who encounter him. For this reason alone we are in his debt. He was also of an independence of mind that shines through everything he wrote, complemented by close and disciplined reasoning and a highly readable elegance of expression. It is in the sense of honouring him that I take up such cudgels against him as I possess.

            In the “Epilegomena” to his posthumously published The Idea of History, Collingwood writes: “I must begin by attempting to delimit the proper sphere of historical knowledge as against those who, maintaining the historicity of all things, would resolve all knowledge into historical knowledge”. [i]

            As he goes on to describe the view of the opponents of this historicity:

Since the time of Heraclitus and Plato, it has been a commonplace that things natural, no less than things human, are in constant change, and that the entire world of nature is a world of ‘process’ or ‘becoming’. But this is not what is meant by the historicity of things; for change and history are not at all the same. According to this old-fashioned conception, the specific forms of natural things constitute a changeless repertory of fixed types, and the process of nature is a process by which instances of these forms (or quasi-instances of them, things approximating to the embodiment of them) come into existence and pass out of it again. Now, in human affairs, as historical research had clearly demonstrated by the eighteenth century, there is no such fixed repertory of specific forms. Here, the process of becoming was already by that time recognized as involving not only the instances or quasi-instances of the forms, but the forms themselves. … According to modern ideas, the city-state itself is as transitory a thing as Miletus or Sybaris. It is not an eternal ideal, it was merely the political ideal of the ancient Greeks. … Specific types of human organization, the city-state, the feudal system, representative government, capitalistic industry, are characteristic of certain historical ages. [ii]

Collingwood goes on to suggest why historicism has come to be widely accepted because “the transience of specific forms” can no longer be “imagined a peculiarity of human life”. Biology has shown that living nature goes through a continuous process of evolution. So the distinction between human history and the natural world cannot be put down to change in one and the “changeless repertory” of the other. There will have to be found ways of making such a distinction between human society and nature which do not rest on a separation in terms of transience and changelessness.

            I will not be the only one who finds it difficult to make any clear conceptual separation or distinction between “history” and “evolution”, so to speak. That is, any that does not appear to be either arbitrary or idealist, or both. And my view on this is grounded in my materialism, which certainly bears little resemblance to Collingwood’s idealism, nurtured on classical philosophy. The very impact of Darwin lies in his giving natural philosophy the possibility of a traceable history – that is, as embodied in evolution. Prior to Darwin and Wallace it was universally thought, indeed, that nature was fundamentally unchanging in its entirely cyclical changes, though geologists were already questioning this on the basis of the study of discovered fossils of obviously extinct flora and fauna. (The argument that God had put the fossils in the ground at the same time as He created living nature did not stand up to much scrutiny even in pre-Darwinian days.) In other words, the same species existing in the 19^th century were thought to have been those that had been created over a period of days by God, as described in Genesis, perhaps as far back as 4004 BC according to the prodigious calculations of Bishop Ussher. This “creationism” offering us a stasis in nature lends some credence to the split between history and nature, since history – according to such a doctrine – changes while nature is unchangeable. Darwin, meanwhile, can be said to have undermined such a dichotomous view considerably, even if subsequent idealists such as Collingwood have sought to maintain it in modified form.

            According to such a materialism as will oppose this idealism, humankind is both a natural phenomenon and a social construct, the latter arising out of and interrelating with the former. Socialised human beings (and all human beings are socialised, itself a part of the definition of what it is to be “human” at all) are as much of nature as any other animal species, however much their natural being is mediated and modified socially. Apart from what they do that is specifically “human” and which other animals do not do, they are similarly mortal along with other animals in that they are born and they die – though human societies in particular appear to be able to exert some relative control over the incidence of infant mortality, quality of nutrition and the averages of life expectancy. Because we appear to be alone in knowing rather long in advance that we are going to die, the impact of the natural fact of both human birth and human death on human history and civilisation is incalculable. Human beings share urgently the oxygen-intake needs of all other animals; they require daily feeding and excretion; they have to have shelters or protective coats or both (although human beings have to sew their coats together according to some design or other) necessarily to keep out the elements; and they are positively bursting to reproduce.

Idealists never seem to have put any special stress on these mundane matters when discussing “human nature”, let alone human history, perhaps because they have enjoyed various occupational privileges that did not require them to give undue attention to assuaging animal needs, perhaps with the exception of sex. We are made up of 96% of the same genes as our near animal cousins the chimpanzees. We evolved from ape-like creatures at a certain stage in the earth’s development. Given the evolution of air through natural interactions that produced sufficient oxygen, this very existence would appear to have been founded further upon a natural contingency, indeed a number of them. One of the most significant was the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago as the dominant group, perishing in what is now more or less generally agreed to have been a cosmological event in the form of the impacting of a small asteroid in the area around the Yucatan Peninsula. In a world from which dinosaurs were removed (except in the offshoot form of birds) it proved possible for mammalian species to expand their activities and grow in size and intelligence from the small, furry, shrew-like creatures scuttling under the feet of the great reptiles. Without that mammalian expansion after the dinosaur holocaust it would not have been possible for apes and then hominids, and from the latter the Homo sapiens, to evolve at all. Indeed, it is quite possible that, but for the Yucatan catastrophe, a species of dinosaur might itself have developed the level of intelligence we associate exclusively with human mammals today – and I believe various palaeontologists have already marked out their particular dinosaur favourites in this regard. The singularity of the cause of the reptilian extinction on this planet suggests that if we are ever to come across an intelligent life form from a life-bearing planet in another solar system it is more than likely to claim descent along a more unbroken chain of reptilian evolution than our own. So human evolution, pre-history and history are intimately bound up with contingent “evolution”, even with the movements of wayward asteroids from outer space long ago. And when the sun finally expands to engulf the earth we will have to suffer the same fate with all the other dying creatures on the planet, if we have not killed ourselves and everything else off first, or have long since technologically geared up to colonise other planetary environments. Perhaps then will be the appropriate time to read Fukuyama’s End of History, which otherwise seems a bit premature.

            As we come to understand the various interactions of humankind with nature we see that it is difficult to avoid a human history which encompasses both in relation to each other. This is evident from the study of demography, which has advanced considerably since Collingwood’s day. The Black Death of the 14^th century is only one example within the history of human societies of a natural catastrophe of considerable magnitude – in this case welling out of a symbiosis between a particular kind of flea and a particular subspecies of westward migrating rat that decimated Asian and European human populations. It played its part in the crumbling of serfdom and of the whole feudal order – at any rate in Western Europe - as the system of obligation on the land broke down with the eradication of a high proportion of the peasant population, putting a premium on a scarcer labour in the following century which stimulated a greater mobility of paid labour on the land. This is certainly not the whole truth about the decline of feudalism as a social order but it forms a significant criterion amongst its causes. The so-called Little Ice Age of the 17^th century had a negative effect on European population numbers (along with fratricidal religious warfare), as well as drawing through adverse social conditions cheap – and extremely necessary - English labour towards the newly-founded white colonies of North America and the West Indies, but as the climate warmed up towards the end of that century, bringing with it longer growing seasons and more abundant crops, European populations entered a growth that, effectively, never went down again, either in relative or absolute terms, and the tide of white cheap labour reaching North America gave way to black. In fact a continuously burgeoning population in Europe led to the population pressures over the following century that resulted in severe strains on the more or less antiquated social systems that were economic, social and ultimately political in their effects. [iii] It is still a matter of controversy among historians as to how the triad - population growth-improved agriculture-industrial development - actually worked out, in terms of cause and effect. For example the populations of the non-industrial regions of eastern and central Europe expanded at about the same rate as those stimulated by economic/industrial growth in the northwest. But the very foundation for the most epochal of developments of changes in Europe during the 18^th and 19^th centuries had been a relatively sudden warming of the climate that offered greater and more continuous yields which themselves stimulated the growth in human populations - apart from creating a more amenable physical environment for more persons, in infancy and later, surviving because of higher mean average temperatures in a climate less subject than before to the colder extremes that had been borne by humans in the 17^th century.

            We could say that even the far-distant celestial bodies and their movements have had their effect on human history, at least from the time of the dominance of the Babylonian astronomer-astrologists who based their power in ancient society on their ability to foretell the seasonal future through their observations of the sun, the moon, the planets and the stars. There are theories suggesting that the building of the great pyramids of Egypt, as well as of Stonehenge in far-off Britain, was founded upon astronomical observations that may have played a central role in the organisation of literate and pre-literate great cultures and civilisations spread very widely apart across the globe, an organisation manifested through requisite cosmologies and ideologies (“thought”). And we cannot minimise the upheavals in Western thought, religious and philosophical as well as scientific, that followed from astronomy and physics from the time of Copernicus (the so-called Copernican Revolution) through Kepler and Galileo to Newton and beyond. Not to speak of the immense implications for atomic physics deriving in part from Einstein’s theories of Special and General Relativity and their confirming observations of light by Michelson and Morley in 1919, hand in hand with the contemporaneous emergence of quantum mechanics which led in time to the successful splitting of the atom.

The history of magic, alchemy and then science and its advancements is no more, in essence, than a record of the interaction of humankind with nature – and the “nature” within human beings as natural creatures - which characterises all human historical development.

For such an interaction burgeoned qualitatively from about 10,000 years ago in the deliberate cultivation and husbandry that led to a so-called ‘agricultural revolution’ releasing many tribes and cultures from the utter dependence on the vagaries of hunter-gathering that had been the mode of human existence for perhaps a million years. This agricultural revolution (and we have by no means seen the end of it – this is a ‘revolution’ that lasts a long time indeed!) did not stop with changing the way human beings lived, leading to the creation of civilisations that could grow great and powerful on the basis of food surpluses; it led also to changes in the natural topography of the earth itself. To take a comparatively small and familiar example, it is difficult to imagine the original vegetation of the island of Britain before it began to lose most of its forests due to an agricultural exploitation commencing long before the culture in question was advanced enough to keep written records. As for what is to happen to the planetary ecology taken as a whole with the development latterly of an industry and mass transportation that pollute on a vast scale, together with ever-burgeoning population and the putting of ever more land including virgin rainforest under monocultural cultivation or grazing, this is perhaps the main challenge facing our present century. If it is true that human activity, especially in the production of CFCs, carbon emissions from industry, homes and road transport, and the seemingly inexorable expansion of commercial jet airline travel, may induce a growing hole in the ozone layer and stimulate global warming, not to speak of accelerating prices and inflation due to ever-dwindling ready supplies of oil and their social and political effects, and if it is also true that much of the refusal to do anything about this decisively can be put down to the greed, competition and shallow materialism exemplified in the power politics of what is now a world economy, then we will find that human and natural history have intertwined with a vengeance.

            Leaving aside the ecological disasters occurring in the wake of the over-expansion of American Indian cultivation and population which account, for example, for the extinguishing of the Mayan and Anasazi civilisations (in these instances ultimately disastrous interrelationships between human society and nature), we might recall certain great natural disasters occurring within recorded history, such as the inundation of Pompeii by the ash of Mount Vesuvius or the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and in more recent times the eruption of Mount St Helens in the northwestern USA, the giant Indian Ocean tsunami at the end of 2004, the more recent (2005) catastrophic effect of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans and the US South bordering the Gulf of Mexico – said to have resulted in the worst civil disaster in American history to date. Katrina is reckoned to have sent world oil prices spiralling, with a decided effect on the economy, not to speak of politics, in the USA and beyond. All of these disasters are only “half” natural; the cataclysms themselves have been natural enough, but they have affected history in as much as more and more human beings have either chosen or been forced to live in areas where the paths of destruction of these phenomena were easily predictable; it was never a matter of “if”, but only “when”. If global warming has the effect of further destabilising our weather systems (caused in part or in an underlying sense by whatever natural cycles are in progress), we might well expect more cataclysms than before. Human history and natural movements – even geological movements - interact in ways that cannot be ignored by any historian. 

            A relatively new branch of historical study known as environmental history has opened up in recent decades: the history precisely of these interactions between human societies and the natural environment.

            It may be said that all of the above might well be far from refuting Collingwood’s distinction between the historical and the natural and might even confirm such a distinction by making references to “interactions” between them.

            Therefore such a distinction might continue to be philosophically defended. But its defence in idealist terms will rely upon a confusion between a distinction created for the purposes of useful if temporary abstraction and one that is posed as the actual ground of history in relation to natural history, a distinction that cannot itself stand up to a detailed study either of human history or its extension from and interaction with nature and the history of nature.  

            What is being sought is some explanation to account for an apparent distinction to be made between “unthinking” nature and “thinking” humankind. But this pre-supposes the idea that thought – and its absence – are the vital determinants of existence and therefore the only means of grasping the differences between one form of existence and the other. But if we accept, on the contrary, that consciousness arises from social being which in turn is co-extensive with natural being, the dichotomy will not stand as a fundamental explanation for the human historical situation on earth. It also begs a question: where does “thought” come from? Nothing comes from nothing, and if thought does not arise from evolutionary-cum-social developments co-extensive with nature, then it must surely derive from a supernatural source: there seems to be no third alternative.

            I have already suggested that human history and the events of the natural setting for human civilisation which is the planet spinning within its solar system are bound up with each other, whether or not the weight of emphasis lies in the one direction or the other at one phase or another or in one analysis or another. The natural warming of the climate from the 18^th century had a profound underlying effect on European history thereafter; the threat of human industrial advance and rise in energy consumption are more and more seen as having a profound effect on planetary nature (of which the accelerating annual rate of animal extinctions, itself due largely to adverse human activity, is but one feature). The human impact on the development of natural environments is nothing new (think of the human changes wrought on the ecology of the Mediterranean region from before classical times) but in our era its pervasiveness and radical aspect are becoming more immediately apparent and calculable. On this basis is it any longer possible in theory to separate human from natural history?  A case for such a separation might have been just possible in a philosophical sense in Collingwood’s day, though I would suggest that even then it was unlikely to fit the truth of the matter.

            So much for the impact of nature on society and vice versa by way of arguing from historical and immediately pre-historical events and phenomena.

            My second point is that the positing of a distinction between natural event and human history creates a problem that might not have been there without the positing of it. Namely, at what point did human beings begin producing a ‘history’ that was distinct from their evolution from primitive hominids as natural creatures? When can the activity of human beings on the earth be said to have become possible to distinguish from the activity of the earth itself?  Precisely when did history become “the history of thought”?  I suggest that this could only give rise to a sterile controversy over fixing a date in time for such a transformation, for it might be reasonably considered to have taken place (if it took place at all) anywhere along the scale of human development to the present day depending on the criteria one chooses to believe are the most significant. Were the discoveries of fire for domestic use and the inventions of the Clovis spear-point and the wheel and the most primitive of creation myths derived from less profound cogitation and ratiocination than the creation of rocket science or brain surgery or The Iliad? Perhaps with the creation of the earliest belief systems and the art that went with them; perhaps with the spreading of agriculture; perhaps with the invention in various places of numbers and writing – you name it. Such a distinction poses a needless pursuit of the “solution” to a problem which is artificial to begin with, a consequence of abandoning the principle of Occam’s Razor in argumentation.

            My third point is a reiteration of the materialist belief in humans as being natural animals, with ever-pressing animal needs. It is this that in part accounts for the presence throughout most known history of class struggle within post-hunter-gatherer societies. Amongst other things, struggles between classes have been over the satisfaction of material wants and needs within the setting of organised civilisation, which in turn derive from natural animal needs. If people did not require feeding every day, we would not – for example - have had food riots in times of either natural or induced scarcity, from the epochs of ancient civilisations up to the 19^th century. Control over the agricultural surplus was what formed the basis for rule over the society of an ancient civilisation and that which constituted the basis in wealth of that rule. Whole peoples do not engage in clashes with one another over the control of the means of production for the sheer excitement of it. A sense of urgency in these struggles is indicative of the requirement for satisfaction of natural human/animal needs, however culturally and politically these struggles are mediated. Where such clashes and struggles are averted, the reason is that some sort of modus vivendi or stand-off has been achieved between different classes that enables most people most of the time to be fed, clothed and sheltered according both to fundamental and acquired need. And that is where – according to this argument - the role and development of nature and the developments in human history link up the most strongly: that is, in the arena of social revolution. On this basis, any attempt to separate human history from natural history is arbitrary and selective, however analytically useful in a temporary sense, since the history of human societies is predicated upon the satisfying of human/animal needs, themselves an expression of nature. If a given society cannot even deliver the satisfaction of fundamental needs for most persons living in it, its stability and security lie in some peril.

            One complication is that the scale of human “need” is a moveable feast, culturally determined to a great extent. What constitutes a “basic need” or “poverty line” in modern Britain or the USA will probably not be the same as that which is so constituted in Bangladesh or in the barrios of developing-world cities. As is often said, one of the most difficult things to do is to reduce one’s standard of living as it tends to drift ever upward in terms of material satisfactions given a modicum of financial security and prosperity. There is the question as to what such a standard of living should be reduced to. This may indicate a strengthening of the argument on the idealist side, for although a materialist argument could well be made for such a phenomenon of living-standard relativity, it might not coalesce with another materialist argument rooting human nature and especially social conflict in fundamental animal and natural needs. Nevertheless, at base both materialist arguments should stand. How human beings satisfy their natural needs, and to what degree or in what matter of emphasis here and there, does not rule out the crucial importance of meeting those needs in the first place. It is possible, however, that except in the very starkest conditions for the majority of a given population, a social or political upheaval will not in the first instance be predicated upon the most basic requirements of human/animal needs. That this is likely to be true indicates the distance human civilisation has travelled from an immediate dependence upon nature. But that distancing is as much a part of the history of humankind-with-nature as is a former closer proximation of human need to natural conditions.

            My final point in this section is that “interaction” indicates not the impact of two billiard balls bouncing against each other, one billiard ball being “evolution” and the other “history”. It indicates a dialectical unity and interpenetration of opposites. One need not concur with Collingwood on these matters if one accepts that in a certain, crucial way, human society interacts with nature, both directly and through the biological needs of human beings within society. Through human social organisation have human beings survived as a race, and only through it. We have no known or possible record of human beings originally evolving as isolated individuals. Our simian inheritance made us “social” from the very beginning of human time. A human being without society is not, virtually by definition, “human’” at all, or most certainly to nowhere near anything like a full extent. To the extent that certain autistic or insane human individuals are tragically cut off from society around them is the extent to which there is a suffering for, damage to and loss of all that we commonly consider being in a state of “humanity” to be. Robinson Crusoe, a character adapted by Daniel Defoe from the true-life castaway experiences of Alexander Selkirk, survived because he was eminently practical and had brought “human society” as embodied in its artefacts and know-how along with him. Yet those classical political economists who have cited “Robinson Crusoe” in the past might have recalled the fact, also, that he felt continuously oppressed and imprisoned by a desert island, not because it could not give him sustenance but because he pined for human company, from whose loss he was mercifully delivered by Man Friday. The madness and hallucinating so vividly, progressively and tragically self-depicted on audio tape and video by the lone Donald Crowhurst in his drifting yacht in the Atlantic in 1968 gives us a more recent testimony – a man displaying symptoms described by tougher (and rather better) yachtsmen who was the more vulnerable to them because of his guilty awareness of the deception he was practising on the world as a “round-the-world” yachtsman champion.

To paraphrase the young Marx, the human being is the social being, and it is sociality itself that confers or cultivates individuality. Human beings are no more ‘human’ by dint of a primordial individuality than an individual ant can be understood without reference to its ant colony and the part it plays within it. Unlike ant colonies, however, human societies create the conditions by which more individualised denizens will emerge in appearance, motivation, thought and outlook. Let us look, by analogy, at the human family. The family contains within itself male and female parents, children, grandparents and grandchildren, aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces. These form webs of internal family relationships that in turn stimulate the emergence of individual personality within the family group. People are the more individuated through being the more contrasted with other people - and, indeed, in what is sometimes the perceived competition for material goodies and privileges and for attention, respect, love and affection.  There is also the perceived stultifying effect that families are sometimes said to create in certain individuals within them who seek to escape the family claustrophobia to take their individuality and its fuller realisation that much further afield into a wider world that embraces and satisfies such drives.

            In a crucial sense, but one that embraces the natural-history setting for human life and activity, human society exists in opposition to the forces of nature that long ago would otherwise have annihilated puny human beings attempting to survive on a wholly individual basis.  Cultural evolution takes over from biological evolution in the ongoing human adaptation to natural conditions and exigencies, and so a distinction between “society” and “nature” is evident. In the process, however, the societies appropriate their requirements necessarily from a finite nature, which is what societies do and function for, in the interests of human survival. And the surrounding nature, in the process, is transformed by their impact upon it, inducing changes that, in turn, impact on them. The two form opposites existentially speaking, but they form interpenetrations of each other. Without such interpenetration there can be no opposition, and without opposition there can be no interpenetration. We are not, therefore, discussing two discrete “things” which just happen to coincide or bump into each other: we are discussing a single whole consisting of an interpenetration of the opposites within it. And what is existential is also historical, since history is existence through time.

            According to Collingwood, “the historian, investigating any event in the past, makes a distinction between what may be called the outside and the inside of an event”.  At the same time, he states that the two can only be viewed as “an indissoluble unity”. [iv]  So much the better for dialectics – that is, if these proposed oppositions are interpenetrating and not inert.

In the case of nature, this distinction between the outside and inside of an event does not arise. The events of nature are mere events, not the acts of agents whose thought the scientist endeavours to trace. [v]

To the scientist, according to Collingwood, nature is a “mere phenomenon”. To the 

historian, by contrast, history is no mere phenomenon – one must penetrate the thought 

behind it. Thus the line of questioning apparently goes as follows: “Why did the blue litmus 

paper turn pink?” as opposed to “Why did Brutus kill Caesar?” The second question should 

be translated into: “What did Brutus think, which made him stab Caesar?”  The litmus paper 

thought nothing, but just turned pink. Then we go on to a famous summing-up:

The processes of nature can therefore be properly described as sequences of mere events but those of history cannot. They are not processes of mere events but processes of actions, which have an inner side, consisting of processes of thought; and what the historian is looking for is these processes of thought. All history is the history of thought. [vi]

But processes exist in both nature and human society, and so one needs to look more 

closely at what distinguishes a “mere event” from an “action”. Processes in nature cannot be 

discerned entirely by the naked eye: they require science if their “inside” is to be traced. 

There is as much of an “inside” and an “outside” to nature requiring study and analysis as 

there is in human history, which cannot simply be the history of outward event, just as what 

happens in nature is no “mere event” but invariably an extremely complex process. But it is 

too simplistic simply to distinguish between the one and the other as the absence or 

presence of “thought”. For one thing, the matter is complicated by the fact that human 

beings in history act as creatures of nature in feeling their needs and, to some extent, in 

satisfying them through economic, social, and even political action. For another, there is 

motive. What gives rise to thought is the motive, itself a response to various pressing needs. 

Natural events proceed also from something very much like motive, as in gravitational and 

other forces, themselves invisible to all but the trained eye or scientific instrument. When 

these natural events extend to mating rivalries amongst stags or alpha male gorillas, 

rudiments of something more like human motive are present, in these higher animals. Is 

human thought thus no more than a further elaboration of such a force or motive, a 

mediation of it? Where, then, lies Collingwood’s basic distinction?

Collingwood’s thought is protean in the sense that it gives birth to ever more enquiries. 

My initial ones are these:

·      Where does the thought come from?

·       Whose thought, and by how many? Individuals or in the mass?

·         

When are processes of nature not only “mere events” (in any case, who classifies them 

as such, and why?) but also have a profound effect on human reasoning and action?

·         When are processes of nature modified or determined by human reasoning and action?

·         What is the difference between the internal processes of nature (described as “laws”) 

and the internal processes of history (described as “thoughts”?)

It would appear as though Collingwood is describing somewhat similar phenomena when 

attempting to demarcate differences. Science would be unnecessary if outward appearance 

corresponded - to the naked eye - exactly to inner process. If we believed otherwise we 

would still be back with the physical science of Aristotle. Similarly, human history would be 

virtually unintelligible if narrated only as a series of outward events and not in terms of 

underlying processes, developments, trends, ideas, and human intellectual reflexivity in 

response to all those things (known commonly as “learning from experience”). But 

Collingwood appears to be vulnerable to the accusation of reductionism. Are all such 

“hidden” historical processes necessarily reducible to “thought”?

            One immediate problem lies in historical contingency. It is unlikely that any grand 

scheme (or even small scheme, such as an individual assassination) initiated by any one 

individual or group ever achieved, historically, exactly what it set out to achieve, even if it 

apparently did so for a limited period of time. “Thought” may determine a good deal, but 

quite unthinking forces within history may gather to defeat the progress of any particular 

“thought” – as, for example, in great financial panics which if anything are generated by the 

absence of “thought” and the predominance of herd instinct.  

            Thus to limit the study of history to the tracing of “thought” or projected plan or 

stratagem would be to downplay the dialectical and contradictory – and external - processes 

by which “thought” realises itself in history. There is certainly nothing “pure” about thought; 

it is inextricably bound up within physical circumstances. It is true that Marx and Engels 

made and stood by their famous formulation that it is men – living men (and by definition 

women) – who make their own history, and human beings certainly work and function to a 

considerable degree by conscious design, but – as Marx added in a vital rider – they do not 

make history just as they choose, but as they inherit it from previous generations and, I 

would add, also from the natural circumstances within which they find themselves at given 

times and in given places.  

            But the principal objection I have to Collingwood’s formulation is that while it is 

perfectly reasonable for analytical purposes to pose an opposition of human to natural 

history within a totality, as stated by Collingwood this particular formulation poses a 

fundamental – and arbitrary - dualism in our understanding of human history in relation to 

natural history. This dualism implies that each phenomenon or process - nature on the one 

hand and human society and history on the other - goes its separate way; there is no 

accounting for either how they dynamically interact or how “history as thought” came into 

being in the first place. There is no accounting of human beings as animals co-extensive 

with natural history and with animal needs that affect social conflict. [vii]

Since the study of history is a study of origins, causes and effects, it 

would therefore have to be said that Collingwood’s understanding of history, for all its  

richness of concept - is unhistorical.

[i] RG Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1989) 210.

[ii] Ibid. 210-211

[iii] We might note that Europeans (and their African slaves) unknowingly brought with them to the Americas Old World diseases to which the native populations were not immune; it has been calculated that over the first 130 years of white settlement from the time of the Spanish, some 90% of Indian populations were wiped out by disease: along with the Black Death one of the most massive and tragic human obliterations known to history. In this instance it is impossible to separate the workings of nature from the subsequent development of New World human history.

[iv] Ibid. 213

[v] Ibid. 214

[vi] Ibid. 215

[vii] This seems at a glance to lead me dangerously near a socio-biological or “naked ape” view of “human nature”, which of course I should also be at pains to refute, but will not attempt to do so here except to say that I am not being illogical in rejecting this just as much as I reject Collingwood’s idealism: on the grounds that it is yet another one-sided formulation – perhaps the mirror opposite of Collingwood’s. Meanwhile I trust to the impression left by the bulk of this essay to show where my own position lies. 

Praxis and Postmodernism: Nine Theses on History

1. There is never only one historian researching any given area of subject matter. No matter how specialised the work at hand, a cluster of scholars is involved. No historian works or thinks in a vacuum. An individual’s findings are under continuous critical survey and scrutiny by their peer-group. After whatever period of controversy over given issues, a consensus will frequently be reached before the debate in question moves on to other aspects of contention. Historiographical debate and literary debate are not of the same kind. The literary aspect of the historical work is rarely remarked upon (unless, perhaps, the style of the work in question is opaque or even impenetrable). Historical narrative necessarily requires employment of prose language, and this incorporates narrative structures as well as prose styles and tropes. (It may also require the inclusion of statistical tables, algebraic formulae/econometrics and/or graphs, as well as reference notes and bibliographies, incorporating lists of primary and secondary sources). But this surface narrative similarity with fictional or epic-poetical narratives is or can be deceptive and misleading. Purely literary gifts do not rank highly amongst specialist concerns as opposed to those of popular historians and are, indeed, likely to be treated warily if manipulation of evidence through literary legerdemain is suspected. Novelists, poets and literary critics will dispute primarily the literary worth of the literary works that fall within their purview, but the criterion of fidelity to outside evidence is not normally part of the dispute of the literary work in question. That is, outside the field of the historical realist novel, such as Gore Vidal’s Lincoln, which purports to be a serious and realistic account; here, a possible criticism of Vidal from some (who are likely to be historians and Lincoln experts) might well be – whatever any plea for artistic licence - that he has distorted evidence, because the nature of that particular genre leads to such critique. But this is not usually the case with controversies over novels and poems in general. It is central to any historiographical controversy. Biography is history closest to the novel, with at the very least one important exception: the biographer cannot put forward unascribable introspections of the actors except by well-grounded if still tentative supposition (or by recourse to diaries, letters and personal memoirs and, in the case of living subjects, through oral interrogation). The novelist may simply implant introspection as existing on the same plane of veracity as outward action. The existence of historians quarrelling over evidence and its interpretation may provide a prima facie case for the validity and scientific nature of historical enterprise. “The skeptic says that the quarrelling is proof of subjective perspectives. We’re inclined to think it attributable to the commanding and often unyielding presence of those objects which people seek to incorporate into their world of understanding.” [i]

2. The thoroughgoingly empirical cannot stop at one set of facts, or at facts per se.  A necessary extension of the empirical process lies in reasoning and interpretation, if the empirical project is to be carried out. In other words, a “purely empirical” process of “fact gathering” must contribute to reasoning derived from discovery together with conclusions, interim and qualified or otherwise, or else no so-called empirical study would figure as anything other than a heap of raw data.  Reasoning itself determines – through “methodology” – the sweep and often-broad direction of the research itself. “Empirical” practice and the philosophical school of empiricism are not to be confused, but there is one sense in which they link up: we commence any empirical investigation from where we are. Empirical practice is not to be equated with super-human objectivity.

3.  Science is posited upon human mastery over the object. This is not a neutral position, which is why scientific pursuit is misunderstood when conceived as being neutral. The need to know is driven by the need to master, whether by intervening, harnessing, manipulating or merely measuring and predicting. The objectivity of science is an instrumental objectivity, for if anything is to be understood as a means of gaining mastery over it, then the object’s true workings must be grasped, inductively. I assume the doctor or specialist I consult is professionally committed to my cure, and is not neutral regarding me and my prospects of health. At the same time I would hope he or she would look objectively into my condition in order to be able to cure it. I would have no confidence in a postmodernist doctor who believed that all diagnoses were “social constructions of reality”, or who regarded any prescription as “only a text”. Science is praxis. Its practising and practical objective is human success. And that is whether in the form of cures, discovery/hypothesis leading to understanding of inner workings or accurate prediction. The successes of science reflect a hold on objective truth: for that which consistently “works” according to scientific understanding reflects the nature of the object being seen and made to “work”. An understanding of science as praxis does not rule out a scientific activity distorted by corporate, political or military priorities. In such cases the praxis of mastery is mixed up with or collapsed into the praxis of domination. Nor does such understanding rule out the use of science to save the environment – quite the contrary. When successful, science really works (a tautology), yet it remains provisional in its determinations. Social science amounts almost to a separate category. I say “almost” because certain aspects of social science have an undeniable functional utility (surveys, for example, for public health purposes, assessments of poverty, and the like), while the more theoretical reaches of economics, sociology, anthropology and psychology concentrate a heavier ideological input than the utility side. This is because these sciences are grounded in ideology to begin with, in the sense of “false consciousness”, and continue to promote ideological designs – necessarily so where the subject of the study exists on the same level of (human) existence as the investigator, and since the study is invariably carried out within a social context of class domination. Postmodernism ignores crucial distinctions to be made between physical science as manifesting mastery – as described - over objects (whatever the distortions of militarism etc.), and social science in its manifestation as an intellectual power-source serving by and large ruling interests in class-dominated and class-divided societies. As well as ignoring a distinction to be made between utility social science and the theoretical-ideological. The purpose of this unwarranted collapse of physical and utility/theoretical social sciences into “science” in general (that is, as scientistic ideology) is to obscure the differences in praxis between them so as to discredit any possibility of “objectivity” at all. In this sense postmodernism is a present-day extension from classical Western philosophy after Bacon, which took care – whether through rationalism or empiricism - to qualify the possibility of our apprehension of direct reality: a theme running through all Western epistemology. [ii]   There is no warrant for this even if all science is predicated upon the praxis of mastery.  The proportions of utility to ideology in any science at any given time, physical or social, are not fixed, though the view here is that the ideological content of social science is much higher than in physical science, and that even where the physical science is aimed at ideological ends, its instrumentality is of the highest objectivity possible.  As praxis science will partake of both objectivity and ideology in given circumstances but is neither alone. But whereas physical science is ideological by extension and practice into “non-scientific” uses, social science is inherently ideological with extensions into practical uses that would be vital to the existence of any complex society. Historians looking to science for an “objective” model are looking in the wrong direction. They should be looking for a model of mastery over given objects of enquiry, discovery and interpretation. At the same time, the objectivity of scientific procedure is built into scientific practice because – as praxis – science exists to master its objects and to deliver results from enquiries, and this requirement forces the removal of as much illusion and error as possible vis-à-vis the object. So a scientific mode should not be thrown out the window because the motivation behind scientific endeavour is not neutral and value-free. “Our version of objectivity concedes the impossibility of any research being neutral (that goes for scientists as well) and accepts the fact that knowledge-seeking involves a lively, contentious struggle among diverse groups of truth-seekers. Neither admission undermines the viability of stable bodies of knowledge that can be communicated, built upon, and subjected to testing. These admissions do require a new understanding of objectivity.” [iii]

4. Unlike the social sciences, which are nourished on it, history has an uneasy relationship with theory. “The danger in any survey of the past is lest we argue in a circle and impute lessons to history which history has never taught and historical research has never discovered – lessons which are really inferences from the particular organisation that we have given to our knowledge.” [iv]  The dictionary definition of theory is: “Supposition or system of ideas explaining something, esp. one based on general principles independent of the facts, phenomena, etc., to be explained…” (Concise Oxford). A historical study founded upon a theory of history will deduce from that which has yet to be proved. Historical study proceeds not by deduction but by induction: from reasoning and empirical research; the one feeds the other. Empirical research in any given area is potentially never-ending, and there is consequently no static theory which could ever keep up with it. Only continuous reasoning can do that.  A problem for postmodernist historians is that even if they accept certain “postmodernist” categories, or the offshoot of the “linguistic turn”, or privilege the concepts of perception and identity over a delineation of actual historical processes, they must still cast “perceptions” and “identities” in a historical mode, seek out evidence for them from the past and interpret them in narrative forms, much as if these “perceptions” and “identities” were themselves “historical facts”. They cannot, therefore, be truly postmodernist, because validation through historical means and methods is not acceptable since, in postmodernism, there is no “evidence” – and therefore no means of interpreting such phenomena as seem to arise – only “textuality” and “intertextuality”.  Historical writing is nothing more than tropes, and might as well be considered as fiction. In which case, even with regard to postmodernist categories like “perceptions”, “consciousness” and “identities”, there is apparently no means of verifying anything about them from the past, and - indeed - there is nothing to be found out. Moreover the historian, according to that arch reactionary demon GR Elton with regard to “theories” in general “is not entitled to know his conclusions before he has got there by specific study of historical evidence”. [v]

 “The historian … can help [social scientists] to understand the importance of multiplicity where they look for single-purpose schemes, to grasp the interrelations which their specialization tends to overlook, to remember that the units in which they deal are human beings. While the historian can profit from the social scientist’s precision, range of questions, and willingness to generalize, he can repay the debt by giving instruction in the rigorous analysis of evidence, sceptical thinking, and the avoidance of ill-based generalizations. [vi]

A champion of postmodernist history, the late Keith Jenkins, may be right to some extent in charging Elton “with failing to meet philosophical points by articulating his own ideas philosophically.” But if we charge Elton thus, we fail to understand what Elton was actually saying. “Elton did not express his ideas philosophically because he believed that history could be talked about in a different way.” That is, from the perspective of professional historians. [vii]  One might add that Elton’s outlook probably still informs the practice of most historians if not their remarks at interdisciplinary conferences.

5. Marxism as an historical movement, for example in the heyday of the Second International (1889-1914), has partaken in positivism in the past (that is, a system of thought which recognises only positive facts and observable phenomena as valid objects of study), but we must look further back at the classical Marxism of historical materialism to distinguish a Marxian empiricism from a positivist one (the latter as originally invoked by Comte, the founder of philosophical positivism.) First of all, “material” in historical materialism does not mean, or only mean, “economics”. Historical materialism is not economic determinism: it exists to combat it. “Material” in historical materialism means the opposite to “ideal”: the natural world and human history are not created or run by eternal ideas or the Absolute Idea – or even by Comte’s three “necessary” historical stages: the “theological”, the “metaphysical” and the “positive/scientific”, but by actual, concrete processes in nature vis-à-vis the affairs of definite human beings in definite social formations. History is human and grounded in material nature. Consciousness cannot be ruled out. Far from it, for it is consciousness which Marx holds to be the distinguishing feature separating human production from animal “production” for survival. Thus history can in certain developments be dominated by human-derived ideas – but not by the Idea. Only from the perspective of a human-centred history is it possible to perceive and grasp historical reification: that is, the invocation – in the struggles of classes – of supra-human structures or fetishes to dominance over actual human beings, that is, seen as forces that appear to be equal or superior to human beings in terms of power, identity and personality. A theology supporting an omnipotent god is one such reification, as identified by Feuerbach. The glorification of an absolutist monarchy is another; a national myth is another; a coercive economic system like capitalism with its fetishism of commodities is yet another. Historical materialism examines the determinism of such systems in the light of their reification, and from the point of view of those who face various social and political systems as the oppressed and exploited, for it is obscurantist and bourgeois-liberal, and betrays the working people to overlook or neglect determinisms in history on the basis of not accepting the determinism of history. Because historical materialism not only does not overlook or neglect such determinisms, it is tarred by its liberal/conservative adversaries with the determinist brush – a tactic deployed when it is more convenient ideologically to overlook or ignore the determinism put in train by capitalism. But historical materialism is precisely the opposite to that which its enemies claim for it: it is a praxis of overcoming all determinisms. Theories of historical development in the humanities are both determinisms and intellectual reifications, predicated upon the reifying tendency to believe that eternal ideas (such as Comte’s quite unprovable or unfalsifiable tripartite structure) govern history and determine its course. On this basis every such theory is a form of reifying idealism: precisely that which historical materialism was formulated to combat. Historical materialism is the praxis of human liberation from such fetishes, and that includes theory fetishes. The common ground shared by historical materialism and science is praxis. Science is posited upon the praxis of human mastery over objects; historical materialism on the praxis of human mastery over and thus liberation from reified objects and reified thought which ramify and justify oppression. On this basis the two may inform one another. Historical materialism is empirical. And so, it is concerned primarily with historical capitalism on synchronic and diachronic levels, because that is a system which is now globally embracing if it is true that, in the words of Immanuel Wallerstein: “we are now close to the commodification of everything”. [viii] Discussing, in his conclusion, the crisis in culture, Wallerstein writes: “The re-opening of intellectual issues is on the one hand therefore the product of internal success and internal contradictions. But it is also the product of the pressures of the movements, themselves in crisis, to be able to cope with, fight more effectively against, the structures of historical capitalism, whose crisis is the starting-point of all other activity.” [ix]

6. It is quite in line with the outlook of historical materialism that it will suffer a severe loss of intellectual prestige inside academia when the praxis it embodies is politically weakened by the depletion of cohesive and significant working class infusion from without – a working class still in the process of re-identifying itself vis-à-vis the advancing capitalist mode of production of today. Periods of triumphal reaction in relation to working-class defeat suit the kind of “academic Marxism” that can maintain itself in respectability only by mimicking or living off the latest in bourgeois theory which, in the absence of working class action “for itself”, will be in the intellectual ascendancy. (We have already seen this in the academicism of “Austrian Marxism” at the turn of the 20^th century.) By the same token, rightwing manifestations - and I include the basics in postmodernism in this - are likely to flourish academically in a period of triumphal global capitalism, whatever weaknesses and internal contradictions may be obscured by the “triumph”. Thus do ideas and the movements embodying them function in history, but this ramifies an historical materialist outlook rather than detracting from it. Bourgeois intellectual consciousness especially in the present circumstances of late capitalism must be lived as fashion, in an overall bourgeois context in which commodities, “lifestyles” and even people in the form of “celebrities” are judged on the ultimate criteria of the fashionable or the unfashionable. It is desperately important in our economics of waste that things be thrown away. What is throwaway in terms of commodities is throwaway in terms of ideas and theories. This too is dictated “in the last instance” (as Engels might say) by the economic (including status) needs of intellectual purveyors. Even where some purveyors believe that their own objects of study are unfashionable (and perhaps don’t mind if they are), they must endeavour to revive them for fashion if they are to obtain research grants, the life’s blood of the academic. The “free market” in ideas is, literally, that. It matters little whether the theory or idea in question goes on being fashionable, once the income or the tenure has been obtained.  Of course it is impossible virtually by definition for anything to “go on being” fashionable. Historical materialism in a broad era of defeat for working people will, in some of its academic manifestations, participate in the fashion mode – and that has to mean theoretical. It is vital for any theory not that it be unfalsifiable but that it may have the capacity to become unfashionable. Poverty, exploitation, misery, disease and starvation are too persistent for fashion, though they sometimes dip in and out of fashion. And the more apparent and looming they become, the more necessary it becomes for the ruling system to cloak them or obscure them: step forward, then, the purveyor of a new theoretical distraction. Historical materialism is not fashionable but relevant, whether for a time here and there it enjoys the blandishments of fashion. It is also continuously evolving and developing, which is not quite the same thing as the zig-zag “progress” of fashion, determined by the anxieties of a certain intellectual bankruptcy in the bourgeoisie that Lukacs identified as long ago as 1923 in History and Class Consciousness. We will have to keep our eyes open to judge whether or not the ceaseless critiques amongst historians leading to consensus and then on to further controversies – adumbrated here in Thesis One – is generated in this or that instance by the internal movement of historical study to reach mastery of an object or by the demands of the hungry within arts and humanities faculties that various fashionable considerations be made unfashionable:  promulgation for the sake of change and career enhancement or security. My suspicion is that historians in as much as they are not too hampered by the nomenclature and theoretical distancing of sociology will engage in historical discourses primarily on the basis of new evidence turned up along with new historiography to deal with it.

7. If it is true that historical materialism combats an inherently deterministic theory of history of any kind, it must therefore be thoroughgoingly empirical: there is no other intellectual option. But it is empiricism as praxis for liberation, not empiricism as a fetish for “facts”. No one on either Right or Left disputes Marx’s virtually lifelong dedication to a revolutionary cause on behalf of a working class: his empirical work was grounded in his praxis. But a misunderstanding of science as “neutral” leads to the view that Marx could not have been a scientist precisely because of the fact that he laboured intellectually for a cause. But what scientist does not labour for the cause of mastery? Marx’s approach is reasoning based on two interrelated sources: (1) the need in all praxis to interpret evidence in order to gain mastery over unearthed material (and for Marx “unearthing new material” was never-ending), and (2) critique of theories and other interpretations that are fundamentally against the working class or working-class interest. Marx’s work is a blend of induction from empirical findings and critique. Marxism is “weak” on theory – that is, on any theory of history per se. The base-superstructure model outlined in the 1859 Preface has been dismissed as being no more than a metaphor. In the Preface Marx wrote of “the materialist conception of history” not as theory but as “the guiding thread to my studies” – that is, more in the nature of a hypothesis. The late letters of Engels, which protest the imputation of economic determinism in the works of Marx and speak of the determining role of economics only “in the last instance” – are considered woefully inadequate by such theorists as Althusser, who elaborated a structuralist theoretical discourse out of his own conception of Marxism. But this supposed incompetence of Engels is not an expression of weak theory but of anti-theory. In much the same way, we have seen Elton criticised (see above) for being insufficiently theoretical when his whole point was an anti-theoretical thrust. Historical materialism will identify the study of history itself with this anti-theoretical thrust, even as it is quite capable of detailing the history of theory per se. Marx and Engels warn in the German Ideology that

 ‘definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into … definite social and political relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production’. (1846) Had Marxists taken this seriously they could never have advanced the kind of universal theory of this connection of the sort developed by [G.A.] Cohen from the 1859 Preface or by Althusser from Engels’ letters. And Marx makes the same kind of statement over thirty years later to the Russian journal of 1877 [the quotation pouring scorn on ‘super historical theory’]. [x]

Sayer refers to a still-unpublished 1500-page chronology of world history which Marx compiled near the end of his life. “The painstakingly empirical tenor of such an enterprise is worth remarking in this context.” [xi]

8. The following may be taken by some readers as derogatory of the women’s movement, but this is not intended. Historical materialist historians would surely incorporate women in history with the oppressed masses championed by the historical materialist perspective, and would seek to identify – and identify with - the struggles involved. However, feminist theory may have counterproductive results when utilised by feminist historians to ascribe a feminist consciousness as such to an era where there are few provable emanations. This has proceeded on the grounds that it is historiographically feasible to introject back the consciousness of the 1970s into previous ages in order to place a gloss of women’s consciousness upon such events and movements as the French Revolution and Chartism. In other words, as Butterfield says, to infer “from the particular organisation that we have given our knowledge.” A consciousness is read into past events and actions which has not been derived from studying them, but from present-day “gender theory”. One might as well posit a children’s consciousness as a factor in the French Revolution. After all, children undoubtedly took part in it in their own way, and children too have been oppressed and neglected as subjects of history. Had there been a major children’s consciousness movement in the 1970s we might have seen just such a reading-back into past historical events. This is a deductive method which makes no attempt to prove its premises. If, however, little if any evidence of mass behaviour conforming to 1970s “gender theory” can be found for, say, the 1790s or the 1840s, then the procedure comes to resemble that of the somewhat Idealist-inclined Lukacs in History and Class Consciousness: that is, where there are no overt manifestations of proletarian consciousness to be historically adduced from the evidence, then the consciousness that should have formed part of the objective situation is “ascribed”. Just as we may have ascribed proletarian consciousness, so we may have ascribed feminist consciousness even if it did not actually manifest itself. This kind of “women’s history” has proved so untenable that it has been merged or amalgamated into “gender history”, which includes both sexes. At that point it seems to lose its former raison d’etre, since the whole point was, originally, to highlight women’s consciousness historically, thereby giving history a new or newly-uncovered subject. If, however, both sexes are now covered, not only is the emphasis taken off male exploitation of female; we see two oppressed genders, and since there are no other, this begs the question as to what – outside 100% of the human race – can be oppressing them. The logic of this must therefore be that nothing was oppressing them, and therefore conflict is expunged from the historical record. Since that may be deemed undesirable, it would follow that historical materialism must be re-introduced to provide the basis for a praxis in historical writing and research that liberates through mastery. Historical materialism will indeed take up the women’s cause, for there can be no doubt of their oppression, which continues. But it will place it within the context of considerations prematurely deemed by pioneers in women’s history to have been old hat: back to class struggle again, in other words. Yet, ever following empirical demands, historical materialism will identify such concrete manifestations as 18^th-century food riots and in the 19^th century religious revivalism, abolitionism and temperance – especially the last of these uniting women in a common cause that was a matter of gender specifically because of the objective social conditions women found themselves in – vis-à-vis men in combination with those who reaped profits from selling alcohol to men. Women’s studies can be and are potent and fruitful, but not on the basis of objectifying or reifying gender perceptions, whether for the 1840s or of the 1970s.

9. Summing up. Postmodernism, by denying the subject, militates against either a feminist or any kind of multiculturalist approach to history, though of sufficient resource to obscure such a thing in theoretical sociologisms. And because the discovery of historical event and truth is denied except in the form of fiction, then there cannot, in postmodernist terms, be an historical study of the social construction of gender concepts because such a study will have to be as “fictional” as the concepts themselves. “Postmodernist history” is an oxymoron. Or, perhaps a kind of history along the lines of Michel Foucault is possible: that is, one which denies the necessity of being grounded in evidence because reliance on “evidence” is itself ideologically positivist and therefore not only unnecessary but distorting. (Distorting of what?) The self-fulfilling prophecy of history as fiction is thus realised: there is “only the text” and thus there need be no verifiable research behind it. Research is futile because we cannot know “the thing-in-itself” – that postulation of one of the greatest of our German Idealist philosophers. Thus the futility of any intellection, any action, any praxis whatever, though the feminist historian the late Joan Walloch Scott appears erroneously to have believed that a feminist praxis would follow from her postulations embracing Derrida: Derrida and company provided feminism with its necessary theoretical thrust, and therefore enabled it to supersede Marxism in bringing about the triumph of the women’s cause. But in taking up postmodernism, feminism effectively died as a powerful movement for social and revolutionary change. Instead we got Camille Paglia. The key to grasping that outcome is the seductive relativizing of postmodernism, which is of course determinism with a vengeance (we can never get out of the solipsistic claustrophobia that postmodernism casts us in), and so the praxis of historical materialism must oppose it, because historical materialism specifically opposes determinisms. Meanwhile the postmodernist possibility exists of creating vast historical fictions that can be read like novels and may even be novels a la Simon Schama. This fiction is just as good as history and no less reliable, because nothing can be known or verified anyhow. Perhaps instead of studying history we should devote our higher education to the study of tropes, since there is no history but only tropes. (Hayden White). On the other hand, it has been remarked that the Holocaust was not “a text”, and historians dealing with Holocaust denial find themselves dealing also with history denial. Leaving postmodernism aside, any attempt to show a “social construction of reality” in the case of gender attitudes has to relate and detail the complex social and psychic mechanisms by which this “social construction” came about in the period under scrutiny. Since the detailing of past “psychic mechanisms” is a particularly difficult historical task for lack of historical evidence dealing with masses (as opposed to anecdotal and literary evidence), the feminist historian is perforce required to examine the period scrutinised by recourse to “gender theory” generated in the present day, not by recourse to evidence from the period itself. An entire subject is thus retrospectively conjured up – like the heroes and heroines of historical fiction. Hence a reading of the present into the past in any attempt at a feminist viewpoint on history not dealing directly with historical women – and so we reach the circularity of postmodernism by another route. Postmodernism has now reached the pinnacle and plenitude of its power in Washington D.C., where neocon advisers in the White House and the Pentagon apparently look down their noses upon what they slightingly call “reality-based” decision-making. But then reality was never a strong point in the world of fashion. The reality of 100,000 needless Iraqi deaths at this time of writing has not yet broken through the present fashion barrier

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Notes

[i] Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob: Telling the Truth About History (New York: Norton, 1994) pp. 259-260.

[ii] Maurice Cornforth, Science and Idealism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1955) is particularly instructive here.

[iii] Appleby op. cit. p. 254.

[iv] Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History [1931] (New York: Norton, 1965) p. 22.

[v] GR Elton, The Practice of History (London: Fontana, 1972) pp. 52-3.

[vi] Ibid. pp. 55-6.

[vii] Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Fifty Key Thinkers on History (London: Routledge, 2000) p. 84.

[viii] Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism (London: Verso, 1996) p. 90.

[ix] Ibid. p. 93. Emphasis added.

[x] Derek Sayer, The Violence of Abstraction. The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987) p. 13.

[xi] Ibid.

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