Karl Marx's Theory of History

"Yes. I totally hated this book. This is another Oxford phenomenon. There’s a definite connection with Isaiah Berlin, again. Berlin had a lot of respect, undue respect in my view, for British logical positivism — he engaged with a technical kind of philosophy that wasn’t in his tradition. Cohen was part of the Oxford political philosophy milieu, and a protégé of Berlin’s, although his logical positivist philosophical training was alien to what Berlin knew about, and that may have been some of the attraction. Jerry, as he liked to be known, worked on a project for quite a long time, in the late 1950s and on into the 60s, of subjecting Marx to the tests of logical positivism. He took very selective and quite isolated out-of-context passages of Marx as texts and subjected them to propositional analysis. He asked: are they constructed as propositions that would have truth conditions, and what are these truth conditions? He took them to be propositions about history that could be subject to historical tests, and therefore true or false. “Much of what Marx was doing has similarities with what we do in political writing today, which also involves a lot of parody and satire” I thought this was entirely misconceived as a way of reading Marx, although you can see it as an intellectual project, if you believe in logical positivism’s tenets. That was not my background, and I thought this was reductionist and arid, as well as decontextualizing. They were never written by Marx to be treated in this way and if you are going to do that sort of thing to these propositions, then, in my view, it would be fairer to everyone if you removed Marx from the picture. If you look at the political contexts within which Marx wrote those texts and made those statements, it was utterly unlike this type of scientific propositional testing. I could never see that there was any historical case that Marx could possibly have meant the writing in this way, though it does, in a sense, follow from Engels’s positivism. If you project Engels’s positivism as Engels himself did, back on Marx, then it begins to look a bit more like Cohen’s project. My understanding of Cohen’s background was that he grew up in the Communist Party in Canada and would have imbibed a form of Engels-Marxism which would have been positivist and scientific-minded. Biographically that fits together. Cohen took certain sections of Marx’s writings, isolated them, and said he was going to find the ‘theory of history’, presuming there is such a thing, and that again, as a project, goes back to Engels. Engels invented the phrase ‘the materialist interpretation of history’ or ‘materialist conception of history’ in 1859 when he was first popularising Marx to what was supposed to be a mass audience. Very few people read Engels’s book review of Marx, which he planted in the press in 1859, but it can be traced back to August of that year, and that’s where the phrase occurs. Marx talks about an ‘outlook’ or a ‘conception’ but doesn’t really nail it down, ever. I found Cohen’ exercise de-politicising (unless you think that scientistic Marxism is a workable politics, which I never did), and I felt it was doomed to fail. My view about historical investigation is that it’s interpretative rather than some kind of empirical test as to whether things are true or false or not. Cohen’s approach involved a very elaborate reconstruction surrounded with a very reductionist philosophy and would never work: and that’s the conclusion that he actually came to. I was unsurprised by that. It ended up that way. I suppose Jerry always thought that he would defend it on the basis of an empirical test. That was always going to fail. It reminds me now of Strauss’s The Life of Jesus — this is going back to the 1830s when David Friedrich Strauss, as a committed Christian, decided to go through the Gospel accounts and find the historical Jesus. Using a philological and historical methodology, he thought he could go through the accounts and sift out the actual facts, and then show that these facts were true, and then we would have a factual basis for Christianity which would be a useful addition to the faith. Famously, Strauss’s projects didn’t work out. The more he got into it the more the Gospels were revealed to be overlapping fictions written in a style that isn’t amenable to historical testing as there’s nothing historical in them independent of themselves and independent of other Biblical writings which they copy. So Strauss went away a very disappointed man, and a pantheist. Lots of people hated his book. But he’d set out to defend something on the basis of scientific, historical, and philological criteria and it failed. Maybe Cohen’s project is a bit like that. Cohen went on to investigate other topics which have a less obvious and less direct relationship to Marx, Marxist texts, and Marxist writing: a more social democratic project investigating the concepts and practices of equality, equalisation and justice within a social democratic framework."