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10
RECONSIDERING HISTORICAL
MATERIALISM
G.A. COHEN
1.
tion is needed.
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2.
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here.
little boy needs something to live in. His uncle then explains
that there exist many different kinds of dwelling, and that it
would be wise for the little boy to examine some of them before
deciding what he wants for himself. A world tour follows, in
ferent countries. But the boy finds each kind of dwelling either
ever they started fromthe book does not say but linguistic
evidence suggests it is Englandthe boy sighs and says, "What
a lot of different ways of building houses!" whereupon, some
what surprisingly, he and his uncle set about building a small
red-brick bungalow. Having finished building, they invite their
nine new friends to see the result, and the friends come with
their wives and animals and they are so impressed that they go
home determined to build houses just like the little boy's house.
But when they get home they change their minds. And now I
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shall quote the last couple of pages of the book, which end with
have to build with ice and snow because there was nothing
else, and M'popo and M'toto saw that they would have to
build with grass and mud because they had nothing else,
and Mr. Michael O'Flaherty thought that if you had a lot
of stones lying about the fields it was a shame not to use
them, and Lars Larsson thought the same about the trees
in the forest.
So
what
do
you
think
they
did?
THEY ALL WENT ON
"It depends . . .
It all depends . . .
It all depends on WHERE YOU LIVE
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Let us think about why the Little Boy's friends decide not to
build red brick bungalows. In at least most cases, they are said
to change their minds for reasons that appear accessible to his
torical materialism: they reject bungalow-building after reflect
ing on features of their physical circumstances. But their rea
sons for carrying on as before could seem favorable to historical
materialism without actually being so. The next to last sentence
says: they all went on building just as they'd always done. And
my present view is that, notwithstanding their sincere and ma
terialist-sounding avowals, they went on building as they'd al
ways done partly just because they had always built in that way,
and they consequently recognized themselves in the ways of life
that went with their dwellings. This is a nonmaterialist reason
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If, then, it all depends on where you live and what you have
to build with, the importance of where you live is not purely
materialist. The way of life where you live counts, as well as
what you have to build with there. People live not by mud and
bricks alone, but also by the traditions from which they draw
their identity, the traditions that tell them who they are.
And now I shall leave the story behind, but I shall presently
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5.
6.
I shall use the phrases "need for a self definition" and "need
for self definition" as abbreviated ways of speaking about "the
need for (a) definition of self," but the shorter forms could give
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cess) in which the self defines itself, in which, that is, the self is
not only what gets defined but also what does the defining. I
shall not employ the hyphenated form, since when I speak of
the need for self definition, I mean the self's need not for the
process but for the result, and I do not mean its need to define
itself, but its need to be defined, whatever may, or must, do the
defining. If self definition, even as I intend the phrase, is nec
essarily due to the activity of the self, and if the self needs that
activity as well as its result, then so be it, but what especially
matters here is the self's need to end up defined.
I do not say that Marx denied that there is a need for self
definition, but he failed to give the truth due emphasis, and
Marxist tradition has followed his lead. The interest in self def
himself that results. And even when the person does gain an
understanding of himself in and through creative activity, be
cause, as Marxist tradition says, he recognizes himself in what
he has made, then his understanding is of what he can do and
A person does not only need to develop and enjoy his pow
ers. He needs to know who he is, and how his identity connects
him with particular others. He must, as Hegel saw, find some
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can be: a person does not supervise his own social formation.
But creation and enrichment of identity can also result from
the agent's own initiatives, from chosen engagements with which
7.
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ciate how the very constraints of role can help to link a person
with others in satisfying community.
"In a communist society," says Marx, "there are no painters
that no one spends all of his active time painting. But less ob
viously and more interestingly it also means that there are not
even part-time painters, where to be a painter is to be identified
as, and to identify oneself as, one whose role it is to paint (even
if one has other roles too). Under communism people now and
then paint, but no one assumes the status painter, even from
time to time.
more than, say, two types of work, so that many talents in each
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8.
tioned.
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10.
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nale.24
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why and how people are able to satisfy that interest. The fact
that humanity is by nature productive enables it to do what
intelligence and rationality would have it do in face of incle
ment circumstances. That people can transform the world, it
might be said, is an implicit premise in the argument of Chap
ter VI of my book.
But this argument for the relevance of the anthropology to
the theory of history is mistaken. For the implicit premise is
not that humanity is essentially productive, but just that, whether
or not this is an essential truth about them, human beings can
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would require.
But it is not pedantic to rejoin that E may not require that
essential activity be performed in a satisfactory fashion. One
might, then, silence the objector by saying that people produce
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NOTES
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3. Stephen Bone and Mary Adshead, The Little Boy and His House
(London: Dent, 1936).
have. See Frank Parkin, Marxism and Class Theory (London: Tav
istock, 1979), especially pp. 94, 114.
11. The German Ideology, in Karl Marx-Frederick Engels, Collected Works,
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KMTH.
19. Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain (London: New Left Books,
1981).
20. No one was keener on nationality than Johann Gottfried Herder,
and yet he hated states. See Isaiah Berlin's "Herder and the En
lightenment," in that author's Vico and Herder (London: Hogarth
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27. Such claims are usually called "teleological", and I have myself
argued that teleological or (as I prefer to consider them) conse
quence explanations are fundamental to historical materialism, but
there follows no commitment to the grandiose idea rejected here.
For defence of the place of consequence explanation in historical
28. Or possible, that is, for people in general, since it is false that
essence-based creativity is never exhibited in history: one person
who exhibited it was John Milton, who "produced Paradise Lost for
the same reason that a silk worm produces silk. It was an activity
32. The view just sketched bears comparison with the following diffi
cult Manuscripts passage:
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self. . . .
457.
Ian Vine, David West, Erik Wright, the editors of Nomos, and,
above all, Arnold Zuboff, who provided many hours of acute crit
icism and constructive suggestion.
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