Marx's sociology of such forms is sketchier than his critique of the economic categories, he clearly identifies both the individualization of people within the private' world of civil society', and the complementary formation of a ‘public’ realm, the political state', as part of this same nexus of relationship. He also locates key figures of bourgeois discourse – notions of individual freedom, human rights, formal equality, all of which have as their dual reference points the abstract citizen and the ideal community – in this same repertoire of social forms (see Corrigan and Sayer, 1981; Sayer, 1985).
Other sociologies have picked up on this complementarity of individualization and state formation, and the connection of both with capitalism, and in some cases elucidated its phenomenology more thoroughly than does Marx. I think of Foucault and Elias, as well as Weber and Durkheim. Marx's distinctiveness lies in rooting the totality in. people's 'materialistic connection' (though, I have argued, characteristically as forms of this connection itself, rather than as its epiphenomenal or secondary consequence). Weberian themes of the pertinence of individualist Protestantism to the bourgeois ethos, or the development of rational law and bureaucracy, or the more general cultural configuration of Zweckrationalität in the modern West – formal, instrumental rationality, whose paradigm (as Weber is explicit) is the capitalist market – can evidently be addressed within this problematic. So can Durkheim's concerns with the moral foundations of social order in organic' societies, the pre-contractual conditions of contract, or the relation between state formation and the sanctification of the human individual as the moral subject of the modern world order. Likewise Simmel's wide-ranging and insightful phenomenology, in The Philosophy of Money, of the lived world of commodity-exchange, and its connections with - to quote Siegfried Kracauer – ownership, greed, extravagance, cynicism, individual freedom, the style of life, culture, the value of the personality, etc.' (Frisby, 1984: 93-111). But I digress.
The main point I wish to stress here is that what was argued above for Marx's economic' categories – 'labour', value, capital, and so on - applies with equal force to his ‘sociological' concepts. I have provided ample evidence throughout this book to show that Marx himself was well aware that ‘simple’ sociological abstractions – individual, class, economy, polity, state – were no more devoid of historical anchorage and reference than a concept like labour'. In ‘the specific character of their abstraction' these too are historical categories. In one sense, just as with labour', the very abstractness of these concepts indeed does enable them to illuminate antecedent forms of society. We may, for instance, use the concept of class as developed for capitalism to illuminate what is involved in serfdom. Like the wage-relation, the latter is a relation in which direct producers are exploited, contrary to its appearances as a relation of reciprocal patriarchal obligation founded in natural or God-given hierarchy. But this is not to identify the two, or to say that a feudal estate is a class in the same sense as the modern bourgeoisie (Godelier, 1984).
Once we make this identification, we lose sight of the specificity of both forms of society, and the essential difference' between them. For Marx the bourgeoisie is the first true ruling class in history, and this is a very important fact about it, telling us much about what its social power comprises and the forms in which that power is constituted. In this sense Laslett may be quite right to describe precapitalist England as a one class society', as he notoriously did, to much Marxist ire (1973). His concern was not to deny the fact of inequality or exploitation, but to point to the absence of classes in the modern sense of the word. Likewise with the state. Of course, in a general sense, we can find similarities between governance in all societies. Marxists would concur that in most cases political’ power is exercised by those who command surplus labour. But it remains true, and it remains important - if, that is, we are to understand how real societies actually work - that neither feudal monarchies, nor the ancient polis, nor Asiatic' despotisms, were states in the same sense as the bourgeois polity is. We are dealing, in fine, with entirely different relations, which take different phenomenal forms, and demand appropriate and specific historical categories for their analysis.
We need, then, to carry out the same sort of critique of the simple abstractions' of sociology (or political science, or jurisprudence) as Marx himself did in Capital of the elementary categories of political economy. We need to disentangle what is genuinely abstract and transhistorical in such concepts from what merely generalizes from the phenomenal forms of bourgeois life, and we need to be as sensitive to the possible illusoriness of the latter as was Marx himself. There is ample indication in Marx's work that this was his intention, even if his focus narrowed after the 1840s. Indeed, it is abundantly clear that he regarded the conceptual fundamentals of what have since become other bourgeois ‘social sciences’ as quite as fetishized and ‘idealistic' as the abstractions of political economy. He was suspicious, in particular, of the related abstractions of the natural individual’ (whom we encounter in economics as the sovereign consumer, in politics as the voting citizen, in sociology as the meaninggiving actor, and in jurisprudence as the legal subject) and the ideal community' (polity, society, law). Elsewhere (Frisby and Sayer, 1986: ch. 5), I have argued that Marx attempted to transcend the individual/society dichotomy fundamental to most sociology on exactly these grounds.
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THE HISTORICITY OF CONCEPTS
THE HISTORICITY OF CONCEPTS
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