Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Sax, Benjamin C

Titel

Marxism and history: the current debate (Book Review)

Ist Teil von

• History of European Ideas, 1985-01, Vol.6 (4), p.483-486

Ort / Verlag

Oxford: Pergamon

Erscheinungsjahr

1985

Quelle

Elsevier Journal Backfiles on ScienceDirect (DFG Nationallizenzen)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• A review essay on G. A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton: Princeton U Press, 1978); D. Ross Gandy's Marx and History: From Primitive Society to the Communist Future (Austin: U of Texas Press, 1979); James Miller's History and Human Existence: From Marx to Merleau-Ponty (Berkeley & Los Angeles: U of California Press, 1979); Melvin Rader's Marx's Interpretation of History (Stanford: Stanford U Press, 1978); & E. P. Thompson's The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: The Merlin Press, 1978 [see listings in IRPS No. 35]). These studies on the foundations of historical materialism are recommended for their interpretive & technical sophistication. G. A. Cohen uses the methods of analytic philosophy as an aid in understanding the nature of productive forces, the relation between infra- & superstructure, & the difference between use-value & exchange-value. D. Ross Gandy, a historian of ideas, argues for a nonreductive, nonfundamentalist approach to historical materialism. James Miller demonstrates the importance of twentieth-century Marxist humanists to both the interpretation of Karl Marx himself & to the present-day intellectual respectability of Marxist theory. The American philosopher Melvin Rader looks at Marx's approach to history as a much more flexible interpretation of Marxism. G. A. Cohen's student, William Shaw, has developed a new definition of technology to investigate the operation of what Marx terms "productive forces." The social historian E. P. Thompson re-examines the historical-causal power of Marx's analysis of productive forces & has constructed his own notion of "experience" as a central category in the understanding of all social transformations. All these studies have avoided a discussion of historical materialism as a form of "historicism" & of Marx's view of history as a "philosophy" of inevitable development. Instead they have insisted on a clearer understanding of Marx's historical practices & a more thorough comprehension of his methodology. S. McAneny