* Explaining Technical Change. Cambridge University Press 1983. Pp. 273: Making Sense of Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985. Pp. xvi + 556

1 Cohen, G.A. Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence: (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1978)Google Scholar; Roemer, John E. A General Theory of Exploitation and Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar - cf. Roemer's, Analytical Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miller, Richard W. Analyzing Marx: Morality, Power and History (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press 1984)Google Scholar. Elster is in continual dialogue in MSM with Cohen and Roemer. Miller is in dialogue with Cohen, but differs from all these other writers in operating from an emphatically anti-positivist position in the philosophy of science.

2 See the judicious discussion of this point by Mackie, J.L. in his The Cement of the Universe: A Study of Causation (Oxford: The Clarendon Press 1974), 34, 36.Google Scholar

3 Since ‘the development of the productive forces’ might include the multiplication of current capital equipment - more blast-furnaces - it does not go without saying (without stipulating) that ‘the development of the productive forces’ is equivalent to ‘technical change.’ Moreover, if we follow (as I do here) Elster (most explicitly, ETC 158, 217; MSM 148, 260; elsewhere implicitly) in treating them as equivalent, we avoid the difficulties raised in the ‘Cambridge’ controversies about measuring ‘capital’ (of which Elster is aware [MSM 99, footnote] only to fall into difficulties about measuring ‘technical level.’ We cannot simply help ourselves to the idea of a measure, which is presupposed in Elster's assumption that the presence or absence of optimal rates of development can be discerned (MSM 289). However, I shall carry on, in Elster's wake (ETC 92), with the presupposition unjustified.

4 Here I begin drawing upon the contributions of Peter K. Schotch and Bryson Brown to a project on the logic of social change, in which the three of us are collaborating under a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

5 He makes some use of it in a fine paper, originally delivered with admirable defiance under the walls of the Kremlin, ‘Négation Active et Negation Passive: Essai de Sociologie lvanienne,’ Archives Europeennes de Sociologie, 21 (1980) 329-49.

6 Elster, Logic and Society (Chichester & New York: Wiley, 1978)

7 Hamblin, C.L. ‘Quandaries and the Logic of Rules,’ Journal of Philosophical Logic 1 (1972) 74–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 For the general case, a somewhat more complicated formula is needed to take into accounts's that take less time than t.

9 E.g., von Wright, Georg Henrik Norm and Action: A Logical Enquiry (London: Routledge 1963)Google Scholar, which despite various failings, remains unsurpassed in its analysis of the components of rules. For the point at issue here, see especially 144, taken in conjunction with 56-60 and the foundation in von Wright of actiondescriptions on propositional logic.

10 (Note by P.K. Schotch). How the principle ‘ought implies can’ is to find formal expression is central to the debate on whether or not deontic logic should allow for ‘conflicts of oughts.’ O(p) U ∼ 0 ∼ (p) is the formalization which occurs to most writers who interpret the formula ∼ 0 ∼ (p) as ‘p is permitted.’ This, however, is easily seen to rule out conflicts of oughts and hence to be stronger than is realistic. In spite of talk of implication in the informal statement of the principle, its content might be rendered better as: ‘Nobody can be obliged to bring about something impossible.’ To get the weakest form of the principle, interpret the possibility here as logical possibility. The principle can now be formalized as: ∼ 0 (?), where ? represents an arbitrary logical contradiction. Technical details may be found in: Jennings, R.E. & 0Schotch, P.K. ‘Coherence classes of frames,’ forthcoming in Studia Logica (1985).Google Scholar

11 Elster knows of paraconsistent logic, too (MSM 43, footnote, with reference to work by Routley), but he thinks of it as having to do only with propositions, not with rules, and he seems to think it a mere sport in propositional logic (MSM 43).

12 O'Connor, James The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin's Press 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, is a source of this argument for Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State, John Keane, ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1984), and mas, Jürgen Haber Legitimation Crisis, Thomas McCarthy, trans. (Boston: Beacon Press 1975).Google Scholar

13 This essay has benefitted from discussions of a draft of it not only with Brown and Schotch, but also with S.A.M. Burns, another Dalhousie colleague in philosophy, and with John Cornwall, of the Dalhousie department of economics. (Note added March, 1986: I have since discussed the essay with G.A. Cohen, and in response to one of his comments I have made a small clarifying amendment to the passage on the irrelevance or relevance of contradictions that may go on indefinitely. Cohen has also persuaded me that Elster got van Parijs's point about the causal operation of the level of productive forces wrong; but here my argument against Elster's own position stands, and adjusting the argument to correct for my part the mistake about van Parijs would require an undue amount of additional typesetting, though the adjustment is easy enough to accomplish in principle.)