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Patrick Murray
Karl Marx was an early and original historian of political economy. His
discussion of political economists-concentrated in Theories of surplus
value and scattered throughout his writings-constitutes his most sus-
tained work as an intellectual historian. But the originator of what came
to be known as historical materialism was no ordinary historian. In this
essay, I will explore the characteristic features of Marxs history of political
economy and determine what historical materialism meant to that work.
Central to Marxs investigations is his Hegelian attention to method and
how method relates to economic puzzles and to deep-seated political mat-
ters. In characterizing Marx as a historian of science, I reject the orthodox
Marxist notion of historical materialism and show how Marx challenges
the orthodox positivists exclusion of the historical dimension of science.
Historical materialism is in no way a science of history; it does not
provide an all-purpose set of categories to be applied to a given phenom-
enon-say, political economy-in order to explain it. The fact that Marx
spent so much time berating Hegel, various Young Hegelians, Proudhon,
and Lassalle for merely applying prefabricated categories to actual phe-
nomena makes that mechanical view implausible. Rather, historical ma-
terialism is a propaedeutic to actual historical work; it is a polemic against
that idealism which turns history into a parade of thoughts and thinkers,
while dehistoricizing practical, material life. Marx was more interested in
Correspondence may be addressed to the author, Dept. of Philosophy, Creighton University,
Omaha NE 68 178.
1. Marx developed this line of criticism in his treatment of Hegels use of logical cate-
gories in the Philosophy of right. Marx writes: He [Hegel] develops his thinking not out
of the object, rather he develops the object in accordance with ready-made thinking put
together in the abstract sphere of logic. Karl Marx, Critique of Hegels Philosophy of
right, trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph OMalley (Cambridge, 1970), 14. And Marx criti-
cizes Proudhons substitution of abstract generalities for actual historical understanding in
this passage: The division of labor is, according to Mr. Proudhon, an eternal law, a simple,
abstract category. Therefore the abstraction, the idea, the word, must also suffice for him
to explain the division of labor in different historical epochs. Castes, corporations, manu-
facture, large-scale industry must be explained by the single word divide, and you will
have no need to study the numerous influences which give the division of labor a determi-
nate character in each epoch. Karl Marx, The poverty of philosophy, in Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels, Collected works 6 (New York, 1976), 179. Note that throughout the
article I have often revised the translation of texts from Marx.
95
breaking down the dualism of being and consciousness, base and super-
structure, than in simply inverting idealism.
Though it provides no philosophers stone for understanding history,
Marxs historical materialism deserves close examination by historians and
philosophers of science. Surveying the fifth volume of the influential Min-
nesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science shows that many philosophers
of science find history irrelevant.2This judgment is a foreseeable conse-
quence of the received view in the philosophy of science, which splits the
context of discovery from the context of ju~tification.~ The context of
justification purports to provide the philosopher with a fixed measuring
stick impervious to the vagaries of history. The context of discovery, left
to the historians, treats the actual development of science and includes
psychological, political, economic, and religious factors. There is a high
moral purpose in making this distinction, namely, to free scientific truth
from the irrationalities of personality, politics, and religion. Marx shares
this purpose, but he finds this dehistoricizing distinction ultimately more
hindrance than help. The end of ideology proposed by the distinction may
only be the end of ideology ideology.
Marxs distinctive approach to the history of science begins with his
dissertation, On the difference between Democrituss and Epicuruss phi-
losophies of nature. His notes include these remarks on the proper ap-
proach to writing the history of science:
It is not so much the business of the philosophical writing of history
to fasten upon the personality, even that which pertains to the spiritual
in a philosopher, as if it were the focus and the formation of his
system; even less to the point is taking a stroll through psychological
trifles and smart-alekery. Rather, the philosophical writing of history
has to separate in each system the determinations themselves: the
thoroughgoing, actual crystallizations of the proofs from the;justifi-
cations in discourse, and from the presentations of the philosophers
insofar as they know themselves; the mutely progressing mole of ac-
tual philosophical knowing must be separated from the talkative, ex-
oteric, variously behaving phenomenological consciousness of the
subject, who is the vessel and energy of those development^.^
Writing history philosophically to advance that mute mole of science might
seem to elevate historical material into the sublime context of justification.
2. See vol. 5 of the Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science: Historical and
Philosophical Perspectives of Science, ed. Roger H. Stuewer (Minneapolis, 1970). This
entire volume was devoted to the issue of the relationship between the philosophy and the
history of science, and it featured essays by many prominent philosophers and historians of
science.
3. See Hans Reichenbach, Experience and prediction (Chicago, 1938), 6-7.
4. Karl Marx, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, Erganzungsband (Berlin,
1973), 247.
5 . Karl M a n , Writings of the young Marx on philosophy and society, ed. and trans.
Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H . Guddat (Garden City, N.Y., 1967), 61.
ism. A line from the final Paris manuscript, Logic is the money of spirit,
suggests this Hegel interpretation.(j What is important for us to see is that
seeking out the accommodation in the basic makeup of a science-in order
to progress beyond it-applies to Marxs history of political economy as
well. When Marx turns to Ricardo, he scrutinizes his basic logic: his meth-
ods and concepts, rather than muckraking for dubious dealings with the
bankers and brokers of the day.
Two features of the role of history in the progress of science stand out,
then, in Marxs notion of historical materialism. First, progress in science
depends upon studying past and existing sciences with a view toward their
inner limitations. Thus, Marx adopts Hegels concept of determinate ne-
gation (Aufiebung), i. e. , more advanced thinking incorporates as well as
negates prior science. History of science is done with present progress in
mind, and science is handicapped when it ignores its history. Second, the
critical study of the history of science is linked to the wider study of history
by the need to disclose the specific social forms embedded in science.
Here Marx revises Hegels notions of logic and Zeitgeist, the spirit of an
age. These two convictions concerning the history of science underlie two
distinguishing aspects of Marxs history of political economy. First, his
historical studies and his creative work in political economy are insepa-
rable. He advances political economy by means of an immanent criticism
of the tradition. Second, he relates the defects and contradictions of clas-
sical political economy to the peculiar fetishism that characterizes capital-
ist society.
In order to make an immanent critique, Marx distinguishes classical
from vulgar political economy. Vulgar political economy, an apologetic
collection of common-sense views, fails to rise to the level of science,
which recognizes the difference between the essence and the appearance
of things . 8 Classical political economy probes the essence of capitalism
and is able to explain the appearances in terms of that essence. Ricardos
Principles of political economy and taxation, the paradigm of the classical
school for Marx, sets forth the law of value and applies it to various eco-
nomic phenomena.
This distinction between the vulgar and the classical can be related to
the two levels of accommodation Marx found in Hegel. Fitting ones sci-
9. See Thomas S . Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolutions, 2d ed., enlarged (Chi-
cago, 1970).
10; Actually, both Smith and Ricardo held the view that the long-run tendency of the
profit rate was to fall, but in Marxs view their explanations of why that should happen
were incomplete or inaccurate, and they interpreted the tendency in a naturalistic way,
rather than seeing it as the mark of capitalism as a specific historical mode of production.
second concerns the nature of the relationship between essence and ap-
pearance, and a third turns on the distinction between historically general
and historically specific categories.
Like Hegel, Marx distinguishes abstract from concrete categories; for
example, the categories value, money, and capital are increasingly con-
crete-like point, line, and surface, in plane geometry. Two mistakes
which the political economists repeatedly make have to do with losing
track of this distinction. The first mistake takes two forms itself reduction
and inflation. The fallacy here lies in either equating a concrete category
with a more abstract one-reduction-or conversely, equating a relatively
abstract category with a more concrete one-inflation. Let me cite an
example of this fallacy in which Marx takes Smith to task:
As Adam Smith resolves surplus value not only into profit but also
into the rent of land-two particular kinds of surplus value, whose
movement is determined by quite different laws-he should certainly
have seen from this that he ought not to treat the general abstract form
(surplus value) as directly identical with any of its particular forms.
With all later bourgeois economists, as with Adam Smith, lack of
theoretical understanding needed to distinguish the different forms of
economic relations remains the rule in their coarse grabbing at and
interest in the empirically available material. l 3
This case may be thought of either as the reduction of profit and rent to
surplus value or as the inflation of surplus value into profit and rent. As
we shall see, this particular collapsing of categories is linked to a faulty
model of the relationship of essence and appearance.
Another example of this first kind of muddling of abstract and concrete
categories involves Smiths two solutions to a puzzle which dominates the
first volume of Theories of surplus value, namely, how to distinguish pro-
ductive and unproductive labor. This puzzle ties in with the theory of
surplus value inasmuch as productive labor-productive in the bourgeois
sense-is labor which exchanges directly with capital, which is only an-
other way of saying that productive labor is surplus-value-producinglabor.
Smith defines productive labor in this way, and Marx concurs. However,
Smith also defines productive labor simply as labor which produces a com-
modity. This equivocation reveals a methodological weakness: Smith can-
not keep straight the different levels of concreteness between categories
like capital and commodity.l4
Equivocation is Smiths stock and trade. Marx finds two types of expla-
nation in Smith: one grasps the inner essential connections; the other stays
13. Karl Marx, Theories of surplus-value, Part I, ed. S . Ryazanskaya and trans. Emile
Burns (Moscow, 1963), 92.
14. See Marxs discussion in Theories, 1:155-74.
does the essence appear as something other than itself? The pre-Hegelian
model views essence as a kind of a thing, which happens not to appear.
No internal connection between essence and appearance is recognized by
empiricism. Hegel, on the contrary, sees an internal, a necessary connec-
tion between essence and appearance. It does not just happen that essence
appears as something other than itself; essence must so appear. The fact
that essence appears in something other than itself reveals its nature: it is
a category of reflection. It is no natural, immediately observable thing
which happens to be caught, like Descartes matter, without its sensuous
clothing.
This Hegelian approach to the relationship between essence and appear-
ance lays the foundations for twin criticisms of political economy made
by Marx. I refer to its inability to penetrate the value form and its inability
to spell out the relationship between surplus value and its forms of ap-
pearance. Since it neither asked why value appears as something other
than itself, namely, money, nor bothered itself about the polar nature of
the expression of value, political economy never dug deeper into the nature
of value itself, never distinguished abstract from concrete labor, and never
realized that value is no immediate, natural property of human products,
but rather results from a specific social mediation. l 7 Consequently, politi-
cal economy could not recognize that the deviations of market price from
value follow from the social mediation which constitutes value. Even less
could it grasp why value and average market price diverge, for this follows
from the necessary difference between surplus value and its forms of ap-
pearance.
The inadequacy of political economys model of essence and appearance
leads us to Marxs third criticism. This concerns the failure to distinguish
historically specific categories from general ones. This failure plagued the
classical theory of value itself, precisely because it never drew the distinc-
tion between concrete labor-which produces use values and is general-
and abstract labor-which produces value and is historically specific.
17. As Marx puts it, It is one of the chief failings of classical political economy that it
has never succeeded, by means of its analysis of commodities, and in particular of their
value, in discovering the form of value which in fact turns value into exchange-value. Even
its best representatives, Adam Smith and Ricardo, treat the form of value as something of
indifference, something external to the nature of the commodity itself. The explanation for
this is not simply that their attention is entirely absorbed by the analysis of the magnitude
of value. It lies deeper. The value-form of the product of labor is the most abstract, but also
the most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production; by that fact it stamps the
bourgeois mode of production as a particular kind of social production of a historical and
transitory character. If then we make the mistake of treating it as the eternal natural form
of social production, we necessarily overlook the specificity of the value-form, and conse-
quently of the commodity-form together with its further developments, the money form,
the capital form, etc. Marx, Capital, 1: 174 n. Since the relationship between surplus value
and its forms of appearance must be included under Mams etc., we can see that these
twin criticisms are linked to the classical economists naturalization of capitalist forms.
This is a revised version of a paper read at the Marx Symposium of the Boston Colloquium
for the Philosophy of Science in February 1983. I am thankful to Professor Robert S. Cohen
and Professor Marx Wartofsky for the invitation that gave me the occasion to write this
article. I also appreciate the helpful comments of Professor Thomas Nitsch.