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Practice and Some Muddles about the Methodology of Historical Materialism1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Frank Cunningham
Frank Cunningham*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

Along with the rest of his Critique de Ia Raison Dialectique, which it introduces, the “Question de Méthode” (widely read by English-speaking students of Marx as Search for a Method) takes an important place in the development of Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophical and political thought. However, the Search is also a challenge to Marxists either to defend or abandon certain of their views, and as such I think it raises some crucial issues. It is the purpose of this essay not to produce a systematic critique of Sartre's influential work, but rather to explore and sharpen some principles of the methodology of historical materialism by critically examining a selection of interrelated misconceptions about Marxism exhibited in the Search and shared by many friends as well as foes of the historical materialist approach to the study of human society.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , December 1973 , pp. 235 - 248
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1973

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Footnotes

1

An earlier version of this paper was read at the 1971 annual meeting of the Canadian Philosophical Association, at St. John's, Newfoundland. I am grateful for helpful criticisms of that version, especially those of Leslie Mulholland (commentator on the paper) and Dan Goldstick.

References

2 By “Marxism” I mean what is generally attacked as “orthodox Marxism”, the core of which is to be found in the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Critics of orthodox Marxism very often misinterpret the content of this core, I believe, and one manifestation of this misinterpretation is a wholly unwarranted, but wide-spread, theory that Marx's views were quite at variance with those of Engels and Lenin. Since I believe that the burden of proof lies on the shoulders of those who hold this theory (and has not yet been born by such as S. Avineri and N. Rotenstreich), I shall refer indifferently to Marx, Engels, Lenin, and also Mao, in the following. My own inclination, should anyone prove them to be at variance on significant points, would be to exclude from “orthodox Marxism” just those views which are false, regardless of which of the classical Marxist advanced it.

3 Sartre, Jean-Paul Search for a Method, trans. Barnes, Hazel (Vintage Books, 1968), p. 42Google Scholar, originally a preface to Critique de Ia Raison Dialectique Vol. I (Librairie Gallimard, 1960), all references will be to the English language publication.

4 Some of these senses are sorted out by Ernest Gellner, “Holism Versus Individualism”, and May Brodbeck, “Methodological Individualisms: Definition and Reduction”, both in Brodbeck, May ed., Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (New York, 1968), pp. 254–268Google Scholar and 280-303 respectively; although I think Gellner sometimes equates what are listed below as senses 1 and 4.

5 Lenin, V. I. What the “Friends of the People” are and How they Fight the Social Democrats (Moscow, 1966), pp. 13–14.Google Scholar

Lenin, V. I. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (Moscow, 1964), pp. 303ff.Google Scholar

Marx, Karl & Engels, Frederick The German Ideology (Moscow, 1964), pp. 36–7Google Scholar, 63-4.

Marx, Karl & Engels, Frederick The Holy Family (Moscow, 1956), p. 53Google Scholar:

The question is not what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat at the moment considers as its aim. The question is what the proletariat is, and what, consequent on the being, it will be compelled to do.

Engels, Frederick Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in Marx, Karl & Engels, Frederick Selected Works (Moscow, 1968), pp. 622–3Google Scholar

In the history of society … the actors are all endowed with consciousness, are men acting with deliberation or passion, working toward definite goals; nothing happens without a conscious purpose, without an intended aim. But this distinction between society and nature, important as it is for historical investigation particularly of single epochs and events, cannot alter the fact that the course of history is governed by inner general laws. For here, also, on the whole, in spite of the consciously desired aims of all individuals, accident apparently reigns on the surface. That which is willed happens but rarely; in the majority of instances the numerous desired ends cross and conflict with one another, or these ends themselves are from the outset incapable of realisation or the means of attaining them are insufficient. Thus the conflicts of innumerable individual wills and individual actions in the domain of history produce a state of affairs entirely analogous to that prevailing in the realm of unconscious nature.

6 Marx, Karl Capital, Preface to the first edition (Moscow, 1961), p. 8Google Scholar;

Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the natrual laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity toward inevitable results.

See also Marx's praise of a deterministic account of his method in the Afterward to the Second Edition, pp. 17–19.

Marx & Engels, German Ideology, p. 41; and see the marginal note by Marx there:

Men have history because they must produce their life, and because they must produce it moreover in a certain way; this is determined by their physical organization; their consciousness is determined in just the same way.

See also, Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, pp. 172ff; And Engels, Anti-Dühring (New York, 1966), pp. 125–6.Google Scholar

7 It is on these grounds that Engels often criticizes the fragmentation and mutual isolation of the sciences by empiricists in his Dialectics of Nature (Moscow, 1966); e.g.,

In nature nothing takes place in isolation. Everything affects and is affected by every other thing, and it is mostly because this manifold motion and interaction is forgotten that our natural scientists are prevented from gaining a clear insight into the simplest things. (p. 178)

See also in the same work, pp. 42, 70, 249-250, and Lenin's, “Philosophical Notebooks”, Collected Works (Moscow, 1963), Vol., 38, pp. 148–164.Google Scholar (It is also for reasons advanced above that I believe those Marxists are mistaken who, interpreting some inconclusive passages in Engels and Lenin, hold to a form of epi-phenomenalism regarding the mind—thus creating what are sometimes called “nomological danglers” in their theory.

For a Marxist critique of this epi-phenomenalism see Goldstick, D. “The Marxist Concept of Matter”, Horizons, No. 28 (Winter, 1969), 72-84.)Google Scholar

It should also be noted that in adhering to “qualitative complexity” while also holding that reduction is possible, historical materialists are differentiated from mechanical materialists (of both the atomistic or psychologistic variety such as behaviourists and those such as Leslie White who believe in irreducible “emergent levels” in society) who typically assume that the possibility of “reducing” one subject matter to another, in one or more of the senses listed above, is incompatible with there being qualitative differences between them.

8 Engels, “Speech at the Graveside”, Works, p. 435.Google Scholar

9 Lenin, Friends, pp. 14, 24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Engels, “Letter to Mehring, July 14, 1893”, Works, pp. 700–1.Google Scholar

11 Marx, “Preface to A contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”, Works, pp. 182–3.Google Scholar

12 Engels, “Letter to Bloch, Sept. 21, 1890”, Works, p. 692.Google Scholar

13 Sartre, pp. 91ff.

14 Ibid., pp. 85, 86, 87, respectively.

15 Ibid., p. 83.

16 Engels, Dialectics of Nature, p. 219.Google Scholar

17 Sartre, pp. 91ff, 168ff.

18 Ibid., p. 14.

19 See Tse-Tung's, Mao On Practice (Peking, 1968)Google Scholar; the Marx passage is from his “Preface to A Contribution”, op. cit.

20 Sartre, pp. 91ff, 130 ff, 146ff.

21 Ibid., pp. 96ff.

22 Ibid., p. 99.

23 This position is most clearly stated by Engels in Anti-Dühring and The Dialectics of Nature. While it is popular now to claim that there is a basic difference between Marx and Engels on this point, it is clear to me that they held the same view. The notes that finally made up The Dialectics of Nature were developed by Engels in correspondence with Marx (as is evidence by Engels' first statement of the idea in a letter to Marx, May 30, 1873). Marx read and approved of the entire manuscript of Anti-Dühring (even contributing a chapter), and indeed, Engels' treatment of the transformation of quantity to quality in nature there (pp. 134ff) is offered in defense of a statement by Marx in Capital (Vol. I, p. 309, n.1).

24 Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Works, p. 385Google Scholar:

Again, our agnostic admits that all our knowledge is based upon the the information imparted to us by our senses. But, he adds, how do we know that our senses give us correct representations of the objects we perceive through them? And he proceeds to inform us that; whenever he speaks of objects or their qualities, he does in reality not mean these objects and qualities, of which he cannot know anything for certain, but merely the impressions which they have produced on his senses. Now, this line of reasoning seems undoubtedly hard to beat by mere argumentation. But before there was argumentation there was action. lm Anfang war die Tat. And human action had solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity invented it.

See also, Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, pp. 55ff, 123ffGoogle Scholar. And The German Ideology, p. 147.

25 Lenin, Materialism, pp. 117ff.Google Scholar

26 Sartre, pp. 168ff.

27 See Engels, Dialectics of Nature, pp. 202–5Google Scholar, Anti-Dühring, p. 93.

28 Another way of putting this is that (for all but the Positivist) it is one thing to give meaning to the basic concepts of a theory and another to explain features of an actual subject-matter by means of the theory—a distinction which I believe Louis Althusser fails to make in his criticism of Engels' explications of what are here called holism sense 2, holism sense 3, and the ultimately decisive role of economic factors. Althusser, Louis For Marx (London, 1969), pp. 122–123.Google Scholar1