{"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":"98 / 99","pdf_page":55,"physical_index":55,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"6b070f8898a39f59607180b045f3e18c7baeaf45cdce2384107b75968c7477be"},"chapter":"The Violence of Abstraction","content":"The ‘political state', 'the state as such', is, then, for Marx an historical phenomenon, coterminous with the establishment of a civil society’ of ‘independent individuals' whose mutual relations depend on law. In view of my arguments in the earlier sections of this chapter we should not let pass unremarked Marx's description here of both the state and private life as abstractions'.\n\nIn many of his earliest writings, as here, Marx employed the concept of civil society to refer to what he was in The German Ideology to call ‘forms of intercourse’ (Verkehrsform) and later clarify as relations of production (Produktionsverhältnisse). He took the concept from Hegel, who in turn had it from eighteenth-century French philosophers via Adam Smith (see Frisby and Sayer, 1986: ch. 1). Thereafter, interestingly, the term civil society does not disappear entirely from Marx's lexicon. He uses it in his autobiographical sketch in the 1859 Preface, to refer to the totality of’ the material conditions of life' (whose anatomy',9 he says there, is to be sought in political economy) (1859a). More significantly, perhaps, the concept of civil society surfaces again in The Civil War in France, in connection once more with the analysis of the modern state (1871: 149 and passim). I have suggested elsewhere (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985) that this is part of a wider set of neglected continuities between Marx's 1840s and post-1870 writings, which reinforces Thompson's point about the relative narrowing of focus in the texts of the intervening years, and suggests that any simple dismissal of the 1840s analyses of the state as immature' is ill-considered. The later Marx continued to see civil society and ‘the political state' as coeval phenomena.\n\nAlthough Marx notes in The German Ideology that the concept of civil society is conventionally extended to embrace the social organization evolving directly out of production and commerce, which in all ages forms the basis of the state and the rest of the idealistic superstructure', he makes it clear that civil society is in fact an historical category in both its origins and its specific reference. The term \"civil society\"', he says, ‘emerged in the eighteenth century, when property relations had already extricated themselves from the ancient and medieval community. Civil society as such develops only with the bourgeoisie' (1846a: 48-9). The German term bürgerliche Gesellschaft indeed translates both as civil and as bourgeois society. The 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse extends this argument, and takes further the theme of ‘the dissolution of civil society into independent individuals’.\n\nHere Marx contends that the isolated individuals’ who form the theoretical starting-point both of classical political economy, and of Rousseau's contrat social, which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract', are in fact projections back into an imaginary past of individuals as they appear within modern civil society, in preparation since the sixteenth century and making giant strides towards maturity in the eighteenth' (1857: 83). The error here, for Marx, is exactly the same as Hegel's on landed property, discussed in the last chapter – the treatment of concepts not as historical but rather as eternal categories'(1865a: 615). Indeed, it is but the other side of the same coin, for the process whereby property' is ‘freed’ from its former. political and social embellishments and associations', to achieve its purely economic form', is the same process wherein individuals appear progressively detached from the communities through whose membership they previously became proprietors or possessors of land: family, clan, Herrschaftsverhältnisse. They appear in bürgerliche Gesellschaft for the first time as, precisely, mere individuals, in dot-like isolation'. But 'human beings become individuals only through the process of history. He appears originally as a species-being, clan being, herd animal' (1858a: 496). It is, specifically, the social relations of capitalism - and in particular its social division of labour – which constitute individuals as apparently autonomous, freely contracting subjects: owners either of means of production or labour-power.\n\nBut for Marx – as later for Emile Durkheim (1984) – this appearance of individual autonomy, of lack of dependence on social relations, is ultimately illusory. The more the division of labour which individualizes people expands, the more socially interdependent individuals actually become. Given capitalism's inherent dynamism, ultimately such interdependence becomes global, through the world market. Overt relations of personal dependency give way to general objective dependency-relations' (1858a: 163–4, quoted more fully above, p. 92):\n\nthe epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also that of precisely the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) reiations. The human being is in the most literal sense a zoon politikon, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. (1857: 84)\n\nThis objective interdependence may not be apparent, because of the alienated forms - the fetishized appearance as relations between things (commodities), rather than people - it assumes under capitalism. But it is real. Accordingly, Smith's, Ricardo's or Rousseau's 'Natural Individual' is ‘an ideal' (ibid.: 83) – note again the use of this significant term. Marx had criticized Feuerbach in the same terms ten years earlier: the abstract individual whom he analyses belongs in reality to a particular form of society' (1846a: 57; cf. 1843d: 175).10\n\n98\n\nIDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES\n\nIDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES\n\n99","previous_page":54,"next_page":56}