{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed","title":"The Violence of Abstraction The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0631153187","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed","id":"df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed","uuid":"df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed","title":"The Violence of Abstraction The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism","normalized_title":"theviolenceofabstractiontheanalyticfoundationsofhistoricalmaterialism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0631153187","isbns":["0631153187"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":93,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/The%20Violence%20of%20Abstraction%20The%20Analytic%20Foundations%20of%20Historical%20Materialism","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed/search"},"page":{"printed_page":"10 / 11","pdf_page":11,"physical_index":11,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"97eca55f4f1972ad4411fc36059d18da0fcb5ea1b121672c594fa9ac05703d9f"},"chapter":"The Violence of Abstraction","content":"For Cohen, these are in the end little more than obfuscations and evasions. On one level, I am inclined to agree, at least so far as the theoretical contortions of Althusser and his followers are concerned. Such conceptual acrobatics recall the equants and epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy in the face of the Copernican challenge, attempts frantically to buttress an outmoded theory in the face of anomalous phenomena. But though I wish to argue against going down this road of ever more elaborate theoretical schemata, I think that the problems to which it is a response - in many cases, those of applying traditional Marxist categories like Cohen's to the analysis of non-capitalist societies4 - are real enough, and much that is illuminating has been unearthed in the attempt. In particular, Marxist historians' and anthropologists' realization of the need to extend the category of relations of production beyond its traditional ‘economic' boundaries is a big step forward. I shall return to this in later chapters. But for the moment, I want to draw a rather different set of emphases from Engels's testament'. These points tell equally against traditional historical materialism' and Althusserian-style revisionism.\n\nWhat is overlooked in most recent commentary, and entirely ignored in modern attempts theoretically to systematize Engels's intuitions', is the way his letters repeatedly, and emphatically, underline the limitations of any general theory or model when it comes to analysing particular historical events, processes or societies. In the letter to Bloch, for instance, Engels concedes that he and Marx must take the blame for having laid more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We have to emphasize the main principle over and against our adversaries, who denied it'. Such polemical one-sidedness was pardonable, given a historiographic context dominated by philosophical idealism. Engels then goes on to argue: but when it came to presenting an era of history, i.e., to making a practical application, it was a different matter and there no error could be permitted' (1890b: 78). This echoes his complaint to Conrad Schmidt of 5 August of the same year: our conception of history is above all a guide to study’ – recall here Marx's description of his 1859 summary as a ‘guiding thread' - not a lever for construction after the manner of the Hegelians. All history must be studied afresh . . . But instead of this too many of the younger Germans simply make use of the phrase historical materialism (and everything can be turned into a phrase) only in order to get their own relatively scanty historical knowledge ... constructed into a neat system as quickly as possible.' He adds, sourly: It often seems as if these gentlemen think anything is good enough for the workers' (1890a: 73-4). The phrase' accusation (also used in the letter to Bloch, above, p.6) has a long pedigree in Marxist invective. The same jibe figured frequently in Marx's attacks on the Young Hegelians''theoretical bubble-blowing'(1846a: 53), their penchant for speculative construction'(1844a: 57 ff.), in the 1840s.⁵ The echo of those early critiques is instructive.\n\nThese quotations amount to a general warning against a certain pre-emptive use of theory, and a plea for empirical, and in particular for historical, study. This is a more general theme in Marx's work, and not just an afterthought on the part of the ageing Engels. Unfashionable as such ‘empiricism’ may be in some philosophical quarters, Marxism's founders' protestations of it are too numerous, and too consistent, to be credibly dismissed as mere ‘rhetoric (Callinicos, 1985).6 In The German Ideology – their first, joint ‘manifesto' of the materialist conception of history - Marx and Engels argue, in pretty uncompromising terms, the primacy of people's ‘materialistic connection' in historical development, just as the 1859 Preface does. Nevertheless they go on to warn that:\n\ndefinite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into . . . definite social and political relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production. (1846a: 36)\n\nHad Marxists taken this seriously, they could never have consistently advanced the kind of universal theory of this 'connection' of the sort developed either by Cohen from the 1859 Preface or by Althusser and others from Engels's testament’.\n\n10\n\nPROLOGUE: MARX'S 'GUIDING THREAD'\n\nPROLOGUE: MARX'S 'GUIDING THREAD'\n\n11","previous_page":10,"next_page":12}