{"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":"148 / 149","pdf_page":80,"physical_index":80,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"bbaadd443a389b5766892cda97eb6c07b8af4f3327bb7d32e27ac380de63851c"},"chapter":"The Violence of Abstraction","content":"Marxists may feel that this cuts them adrift. A characterization of historical materialism in terms of an object-domain (production and reproduction of real life’) and a method of analysis (empirical history informed by critique) leaves few of the old comforting landmarks intact. The proof of the pudding is left entirely to its eating, and there is little left for the philosophers to do. But I see nothing as being lost, and much to be gained, by this strategy. We cannot after all establish any logical necessity for the primacy of production in the explanation of social life. It must remain hypothetical. Material production - including, I would suggest, production of human beings - is a reasonable starting-point for a sociology, and one which has in the past led to substantive studies which have mightily increased our knowledge of society and history, including those of Marx himself. But we can no more conclude from the undeniable fact that there can be no social life without production, the consequence that the mode of production therefore determines any other area of social life, than we could conclude from the equally true (and equally banal) proposition that there can be no social life without language, the corollary that social structures are determined by the laws of grammar.\n\nNo worthwhile piece of historical materialist sociology, or anthropology, or history would in my view resist methodological characterization in the terms offered here. Indeed, the best and most innovative Marxist work has as often as not been accomplished only by abandoning (or at best paying only lip-service to) the sacred cows of ‘tradition'. Consider Thompson's explicit rejection of the base/superstructure distinction, and ask whether The Making of the English Working Class could have been written otherwise, or think about how far Godelier would have got in his anthropological studies had he not been prepared to jettison the standard conception of an ‘economic structure'. On my interpretation of the fundamentals of historical materialism, we can without contradiction respect Thompson's observations on the pervasiveness of law in eighteenth-century English society, indeed - and the point should really not have to be argued among historical materialists - we can see this for what it actually is, an important gain in our knowledge of the material groundwork' of that phase of English capitalist development, rather than a theoretical embarrassment, an unwelcome anomaly, or (worse) a deviation from the Biblical texts of the Master. To adopt the kind of conceptual hygiene advocated by Cohen, on the other hand, would I fear land us up with no worthwhile Marxist work of any substantive kind at all. For to put it bluntly, the world is not as his theory requires it to be. Thankfully perhaps. As Marc Bloch once remarked, it is no bad thing the facts are there to remind us that society is not a geometric figure.\n\nTheory should be abandoned if it gets in the way of knowledge. In the case of historical materialism, I believe, we are better off without the familiar landmarks, for all too often they turn out to be mere Potemkin villages: impressive façades which block the view. ‘Traditional historical materialism’ all too often theoretically pre-empts what can only be historical questions and should never have been treated as anything else. Marx himself, I believe, would have had little truck with such theoretical bubble-blowing'(1846a: 53) - though that is neither the only, nor the best, reason to leave it behind. But a last reminder of irascible Old Nick's impatience with the poverty of philosophy will not, perhaps, go amiss:\n\nWhen reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development of men. Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history. On the contrary, our difficulties begin only when we set about the observation and the arrangement – the real depiction – of our historical material, whether of a past epoch or the present. (1846a: 38–9)\n\n148\n\nTHE HISTORICITY OF CONCEPTS\n\nTHE HISTORICITY OF CONCEPTS\n\n149","previous_page":79,"next_page":81}