{"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":"96 / 97","pdf_page":54,"physical_index":54,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"468252cc4b6450191cebede2b24684b20f2094e67c3839a1fef299fbe36f1881"},"chapter":"The Violence of Abstraction","content":"In the final analysis the relation between social being and social consciousness can only be elucidated historically, over time, through empirical investigation of – in Marx's words - exactly how people make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are confronted' (1852: 103).\n\nAmongst these ‘given and inherited circumstances', I would add, the cultural legacy of the past must be reckoned a powerful material constituent of the present, framing present experience, informing phenomenal forms'. Societies exist in time, and cannot be made sense of otherwise. Erscheinungsformen equally have an historical dimension, even if it is never independent of people's materialistic connection'. Forms of consciousness cannot adequately be analysed statically or synchronically. We cannot begin to understand, for instance, the phenomenal forms of the modern' English state without invoking the traditions symbolized and materialized in Magna Carta, Parliament and the common law, without remembering that England is an old Protestant country, or even – some would argue – without comprehending the long reach of the cultural and institutional heritage of Anglo-Saxon England (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985). It is not irrelevant to the aetiology of social forms of consciousness in England that, for instance, county boundaries were with few exceptions continuous from before the Norman Conquest to 1974. Counties are not just names on maps, they are real repositories of historical experience. Such traditions' - themselves contested (think of the centuries-long myth’ of the Norman yoke (Hill, 1954) or the differential meanings of 'English liberties' (Thompson, 1968: ch. 1) – are formative of individuals' social identities, of, precisely, their social forms of consciousness’ and self-consciousness.\n\nThe ‘arising' of ‘superstructures', in short, cannot be directly comprehended through some structural (or functional) logic. It needs rather to be painstakingly and empirically traced through time, as without doubt constrained, but also without doubt active, social formation – to give that usually static term a more historical nuance than it is usually granted. Theory alone, no matter how elegantly formulated, provides no short-cuts here to knowledge. This caution should be borne in mind in all that follows. It is essentially that I drew from Engels's testament’ in chapter 1. Base and superstructure are in the end metaphors, and what Marx had to say about them in the\n\n1859 Preface was never intended to be any more than a ‘guiding thread'.\n\nV\n\nIt is time to substantiate these arguments. I shall take Marx's analysis of those two closely linked institutional realms which for Cohen are superstructures par excellence, state and law. We may begin once more in the 1840s. E.P. Thompson (1978a: 247 ff.) has argued that Marx's texts of this period are significantly wider in the scope of their historical sociology than his later, supposedly more mature' writings, and that his critical focus on political economy in the 1850s and 1860s brought losses as well as gains. Certainly this case can be persuasively made for Marx's 1840s analysis of state and law. Marx himself acknowledged in the 1860s that ‘the relations of the different state forms to the different economic structures of society’ was something he did not deal with adequately in Capital, and others might find it difficult to do on the basis provided there.⁸\n\nEarly in 1845, Marx signed a contract with the Darmstadt publisher Leske for a work whose proposed title – an instructive one - was The Critique of Politics and Political Economy'. He never delivered. But his plans for his ‘economics' included a ‘book' on the state at least until 1862 (see Sayer, 1985). Had such a book materialized, it might have amplified on a pregnant remark of 1843:\n\nThe establishment of the political state and the dissolution of civil society into independent individuals – whose relations with one another depend on law, just as relations of men in the system of guilds and estates depended on privilege – is accomplished by one and the same act. (1843c: 167)\n\nMarx says much the same in another manuscript of the same year, using slightly different terms:\n\nThe political constitution as such is brought into being only where the private spheres have won an independent existence. Where trade and landed property are not yet free and have not yet become independent, the political constitution too does not yet exist ... The abstraction of the state as such belongs only to modern times, because the abstraction of private life belongs only to modern times. The abstraction of the political state is a modern product. (1843b: 32)\n\n96\n\nIDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES\n\nIDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES\n\n97","previous_page":53,"next_page":55}