Arguments Within English Marxism

1

Historiography

The opening sections of The Poverty of Theory are addressed to certain general issues of historiography as a discipline. Three distinct problems are explored by Thompson, which can be formulated as follows: (i) what is the particular nature and place of evidence in any historical inquiry? (ii) what are the appropriate concepts for the understanding of historical processes? (iii) what is the distinctive object of historical knowledge? In each case, Thompson evokes and rejects what he takes to be Althusser’s answer, and proposes his own solution. He begins his case with the charge that Althusser’s epistemology exhibits a radical indifference towards the primary data which make up what it terms Generalities I: no explanation or attention is ever given to either the character of these data, or their origins—chief among which is ‘experience’. Althusser’s cavalier attitude towards empirical facts is confirmed by his account of Generalities II, or the process of cognition itself, which in effect assumes that any scientific theory can define and produce its own facts by self-validating protocols, without recourse to external appeals. Thompson argues that this is an abusive extension of the very limited and exceptional procedures of mathematics or logic, that is wholly illegitimate if applied to either the social or physical sciences, where the controls of evidence are always central. The result is that no genuine new knowledge can emerge in Althusser’s Generalities III (its ostensible site), since Generalities II has already pre-packaged the data of Generalities I anyway—there is an epistemological circle. The result is ‘exactly what has commonly been designated, in the Marxist tradition, as idealism’¹—that is, ‘a self-generating conceptual universe which imposes its own identity upon the phenomena of material and social existence, rather than engaging in continual dialogue with them’.²

What is the justice of these charges? In my view, a great deal. Althusser’s theory of knowledge—both of science and of ideology—is, as I have argued elsewhere, directly tributary to that of Spinoza.³ It is not surprising that an epistemology with this metaphysical background should be incompatible with the canons of modern science. Lucio Colletti once remarked: ‘One could say that there are two main traditions in Western philosophy in this respect: one that descends from Spinoza and Hegel, and the other from Hume and Kant. These two lines of development are profoundly divergent. For any theory that takes science as the sole form of real knowledge, there can be no question that the tradition of Hume-Kant must be given priority and preference over that of Spinoza-Hegel’.⁴ The broad truth of this claim is incontrovertible. In the case in hand, there is no doubt whatever that Althusser displays no interest in the (diverse) origin and nature of Generalities I, within his schema. In one respect Thompson even goes too far towards him, when he casually supposes that ‘sense-perception’ is not ‘knowledge’.⁵ In fact, certain kinds of perceptual experience—the sense-data with which radical empiricism from Hume onwards has always been so preoccupied—do not need transformation by any Generalities II to yield knowledge: they constitute an elementary form of knowledge in themselves, without further ado (for example, what is the weather like?). Althusser’s system wrongly assimilates knowledge to science tout court—an inaugural slip far from trivial in its consequences: the ultimate sources of his insensibility towards evidence lie here. Thompson is certainly right to indict this. On the other hand, his bracing attack on the notion that primary historical facts are in some sense typically ‘rigged’ or ‘pre-selected’ by the intention of those who left them behind⁶ is germane to Popper, who has advanced this absurd contention, but not to Althusser, who has never done so. An argument salutary in itself is here misused to suggest guilt by association. Similarly, Thompson condemns with every justification two English sociologists, Hirst and Hindess,⁷ for their dictum that ‘facts are never given, they are always produced’, but fails to note that the work from which he quotes precisely attacks Althusser for ‘empiricism’, and hence can scarcely be regarded as a stand-in for the latter.

In constructing an eloquent and necessary general defence of the historian’s craft, Thompson in effect too often proceeds to an amalgamation of individual positions, each of them deficient, but in significantly different degrees and ways. Thus Althusser does indeed reply improperly on logico-mathematical protocols of proof as models of scientific procedure. His theory of knowledge, dissociated from the controls of evidence, is untenably internalist: above all, it lacks any concept of falsification. Vice versa, however, the strength of Popper’s philosophy of science—one is not sure whether Thompson realizes how strong it is—has always lain precisely in its insistence on falsifiability, a principle crucially qualified by Lakatos and others, but uncompromised by Popper’s egregious illusions about historical records. The hostility which Thompson senses in the two philosophers to the practice of the historian has opposite origins—approximately, over-confidence in the paradigms of mathematics and of physics respectively; and opposite outcomes—denial of any laws of motion in the random course of history, and affirmation of them in the implacable machinery of the Darstellung. The familiar argument that extremes meet is not one that survives closer inspection. Far more pertinent and substantial is Thompson’s analytic demolition of Althusser’s maxim that ‘the knowledge of history is no more historical than the knowledge of sugar is sweet’. In a spirited demonstration, he exposes the sophistry of the comparison, which he points out would have to read ‘chemical’ for ‘sweet’ to be sustained—and in so doing would cancel its own pretension.⁸ The intention of Althusser’s formula, of course, was to dramatize the distance between the ‘real object’ and the ‘object of knowledge’. Ironically, the ambiguity of the word ‘historical’ in it produces exactly the confusion it is designed to avoid. For alone among the sciences, history as a term—unlike astronomy or sociology, linguistics or biology, physics or chemistry—designates at once the process and the discipline that seeks to grasp it. Failing to locate the danger of conflation where it genuinely arises, in this ordinary usage, Althusser reproduces it in the very form of his gesture against it.

Thompson’s own affirmation of the irreducible, independent reality of historical evidence, and of the various ways in which it can be interrogated, is in general a model of good sense. Some of the distinctions he draws—as between ‘value-bearing’ and ‘value-free’, or ‘lateral’ and ‘structural’, types of evidence—are perhaps less clear-cut than he suggests. But few writers, or reflective readers, of history would dissent from his description of the ‘historian’s workshop’ here. The difficulties really begin on the other side of his enumeration of the different kinds of questionnaire that can be employed in looking at primary evidence. This is sharply brought home when Thompson recommends the ‘reality rule’ of J.H. Hexter, that the historian should seek out ‘the most likely story that can be sustained by the relevant existing evidence’, as ‘helpful’—only to have to regret immediately afterwards that ‘it has been put to work by its author in increasingly unhelpful ways, in support of a prior assumption that any Marxist story must be unlikely’.⁹ But, of course, the banality of the formula is precisely the guarantee of its disutility: who is to determine what is relevant, or for that matter what constitutes a story? We are immediately referred back to the thornier problem of historical concepts. Thompson does not attempt to expound or justify the specific set of categories that defines historical materialism—an abstention with important consequences later in his essay. He suggests in passing, with perfect propriety, that ‘there are other legitimate ways of interrogating the evidence’¹⁰ than those which have formed the major patterns of inquiry for Marxist historians. Rather than dwell on the particular canons and procedures typical of Marxist historiography, he emphasizes the common ‘test of historical logic’¹¹ to which they along with all others must submit. In a fine paragraph, he then represents the general verdict of the discipline thus: ‘The court has been sitting in judgement upon historical materialism for one hundred years, and it is continually being adjourned. The adjournment is in effect a tribute to the robustness of the tradition; in that long interval the cases against a hundred other interpretive systems have been upheld, and the culprits have disappeared downstairs. That the court has not yet found decisively in favour of historical materialism is not only because of the ideological parti pris of certain of the judges (although there is plenty of that) but also because of the provisional nature of the explanatory concepts, the actual silences (or absent mediations) within them, the primitive and unreconstructed character of some of the categories, and the inconclusive determinacy of the evidence.’¹²

The forms of appeal that the court of the historical discipline allows are dual: ‘evidential’ and ‘theoretical’. Evidence, as Thompson notes, he has already sufficiently discussed. What of theory? Here appeal must be to ‘the coherence, adequacy and consistency of the concepts, and to their congruence with the knowledge of adjacent disciplines’.¹³ Wherein, then, does the force or fallibility of Marxist historical concepts lie? Thompson does not address himself directly to this issue. Instead, he poses a wider question: what is the distinctive nature of historical concepts in general—Marxist or non-Marxist? His answer is that they are ‘expectations rather than rules’, for they possess a ‘particular flexibility’, ‘necessary generality and elasticity’, a ‘coefficient of mobility’¹⁴ due to to the quicksilver nature of the historical process itself. The ‘categories change as the object changes’.¹⁵ Once this is understood, it can be seen that while historical materialism is distinguished ‘by its stubborn consistency (alas, a stubbornness which has sometimes been doctrinaire) in elaborating such categories, and by its articulation of these within a conceptual totality’,¹⁶ for similar reasons it is also perpetually imperilled to a greater degree than non-Marxist historiography by the danger of a rigid and static conceptualization that is radically inappropriate to historical eventuation. ‘It is the misfortune of Marxist historians (it is certainly our special misfortune today) that certain of our concepts are common currency in a wider intellectual universe, are adopted in other disciplines, which impose their own logic upon them and reduce them to static, a historical categories. No historical category has been more misunderstood, tormented, transfixed, and dehistoricized than the category of social class … It is not, and never has been, the business of history to make up this kind of inelastic category.’¹⁷

Here, however, Thompson is under a misapprehension. His argument in effect amounts to a claim for a legitimate laxity of notions that would be the peculiar privilege of the historian. But the nature of the historical process warrants no such special licence. The fact that its object continually changes no more relieves the discipline of history of the duty of formulating clear and exact concepts for its comprehension than it does meteorology—a physical science whose data notoriously change rather more swiftly and mercurially than those of history itself. If the weather remains largely unpredictable (and uncontrollable), the meteorologist does not resign himself to professions of the inherent approximation of his study: he seeks to push back the limits of our knowledge by further scientific investigation, which will involve not less but more conceptualization, of wider ranges of evidence. So it is in every other science. History is no exception. Brecht once remarked that if human behaviour appears unpredictable, it is not because there are no determinations, but because there are too many.¹⁸ The historian’s necessary duty of attention to the particular event or the concrete custom is not to be discharged by bending or stretching general concepts around them. It can only be acquitted by reconstructing the complex manifold of their actual determinations, which will always demand further—more rigorous—conceptualization. Thompson tends to see concepts as models or diagrams of a reality that never quite behaves itself, in an alternation of the ‘abstract’ and the ‘particular’ which forgets this central injunction of Marx: ‘The concrete is concrete because it is a synthesis of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse … the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought’.¹⁹ If categories are to be categories at all, they demand precise and unequivocal definition. To capture the processes of change which indeed characterize history, historical concepts have to be very carefully formulated and specified: but they will only be concepts if they fix some structure of invariance, however much internal variation such a structure may allow—in other words, however wide its morphology. Does this condition of intellectual cogency preclude an adequate grasp of any diachronic history? In no way. On the contrary, far from being especially liable to a schedule of unduly static concepts, as Thompson contends, Marxism preeminently possesses concepts that both theorize the possibilities and limits of historical change as such (contradiction), and explore the dynamic of particular processes of development themselves (the laws of motion of capital). Its repertory remains, of course, partial and provisional—in a sense mere overtures to the composition of a plenary history. The absences and insufficiencies of its explanatory instrumentarium to date are not in doubt: Althusser emphasizes them as much as Thompson. But they are reason, not for retreating from theoretical endeavour, but for advancing towards fuller analysis. In other words, the realities of social diversity and historical flux oblige the historian to be more exacting and more productive of concepts, not less. For all his great distance from the practice of the historian, it must be said that Althusser has seen this exigency more clearly than Thompson. But it was Marx who originally inscribed it in the programme of historical materialism.

Thompson, however, contests that history is a science at all, and might therefore discount any comparison with other disciplines. ‘The attempt to designate history as a science,’ he argues, ‘has always been unhelpful and confusing’,²⁰ because historical knowledge is of its nature provisional, incomplete and approximate. ‘The older, amateurish, notion of History as a disciplined Humanity was always more exact’.²¹ Now, to quarrel over terms would in itself be idle. But Thompson’s refusal of the title of a science to history in fact rests on a serious substantive misunderstanding of the nature of the sciences in general, which leads him to create a false extra-territoriality for history. For he goes on to assert: ‘In this sense it is true (we may agree here with Popper) that while historical knowledge must always fall short of positive proof (of the kinds appropriate to experimental science), false historical knowledge is generally subject to disproof.’²² The contrast postulated here is an imaginary one, however, which suggests a rather limited acquaintance with contemporary philosophy of science. For Popper, of course, has always maintained that conclusive verification of scientific hypotheses—in physical or any other branches of knowledge—is axiomatically impossible: the cornerstone of The Logic of Scientific Discovery was precisely his rejection of the ‘verification principle’ of logical positivism.²³ In its stead, he put the falsification principle—that hypotheses were scientific only in so far as they could be falsified, by pertinent empirical testing. What Thompson thus takes to be the exceptional condition of history is, in fact, the normal status of all science. Provisionality, selectivity and falsifiability are constitutive of the nature of the scientific enterprise as such. Even lack of experimental controls is not confined to historiography: astronomy permits of no laboratory tests either. The most important recent philosophy of science, that of Lakatos, has shown the limits of even Popper’s account by demonstrating that a scientific theory can survive a number of falsifications, and must be judged by the long-run development or deterioration of its ‘research programme’, rather than by its immediate pattern of disconfirmations or failures.²⁴ In other words, the prolonged ‘adjournment’ of the verdict on historical materialism, in Thompson’s memorable metaphor, is very close to a description of the ordinary circumstances of any scientific theory.

Thompson’s disclaimer of ‘scientific’ accuracy for history, on the other hand, proves to be a preamble to a much grander claim for it. For he goes on to write: ‘History must be put back upon her throne as the Queen of the humanities, even if she has sometimes proved to be rather deaf to some of her subjects (notably anthropology), and gullible towards favourite courtiers (such as econometrics). But, second, and to curb her imperialist pretensions, we should also observe that History, in so far as it is the most unitary and general of all human disciplines, must always be the least precise. Her knowledge will never be, in however many thousand years, anything more than approximate.’²⁵ This is certainly a pleasing image. But is it a persuasive one? The answer must surely be no. In what sense is history ‘less precise’ than aesthetics or literary criticism? It is obvious enough that, if we wish to keep these terms, it is far more so. Why should history be incapable of ‘anything more than approximate’ knowledge? Do we suppose that the date of the October Revolution is subject to alteration in the next century? Exact and positive knowledge has never been beyond the powers of history: its vocation, as with its sister disciplines, is to extend it—although the process, as Lenin noted, will always be asymptotic to its object. Any real scrutiny of Thompson’s construction undoes it.

A central question remains, however. What defines the content of history’s ‘unitary and general’ supremacy over all other human disciplines? We arrive here at the final issue of Thompson’s opening discourse on method: what is the specific object of historical inquiry? The problem constitutes the classical conundrum of all theories of history. None has proved so intractable to generations of debate by historians and philosophers. Thompson’s initial answer to it is surprisingly simple. He equates history with the past. ‘ Historical is a generic definition: it defines very generally a common property of its object—appertaining to the past and not to the present or future’.²⁶ At the same time, he contends that ‘the human past is not an aggregation of discrete histories but a unitary sum of human behaviour’.²⁷ The logic of these propositions seems to be that history is the record of everything that has happened—a notoriously vacant conclusion to which virtually every previous thinker on the subject has given a fin de non recevoir. Carr’s criticism of it is famous.²⁸ In fact, Thompson’s slippage towards it is an unpremeditated movement of thought, not his due and deliberate answer to the question—although it is not without significance for another theme of The Poverty of Theory, as we shall see. When he consciously addresses the problem in a later section, in response to the very sharp formulation of it by Althusser, he concedes that ‘if I get up from my desk (as I will do shortly), to take the darned dog for a walk, this is scarcely an historical event. So that what makes events historical must be defined in some other way.’ But in what way? It is striking that Thompson scarcely attempts even the most cursory tour of the problem. He merely writes: ‘Even when we have defined out innumerable events as of negligible interest to historical analysis, what we must analyze remains as a process of eventuation. Indeed, it is exactly the significance of the event to this process which affords the criterion for selection.’²⁹ In a text of two hundred pages, two lines. What do these yield us? A tautology. A historical event is one that is significant to the process of historical eventuation. How do we know whether an event has such significance or not? How do we delimit the eventuation to which it is significant? The two sentences form a single, empty circle.

The reason for Thompson’s lapse here is probably that his polemical attention was so polarized by Althusser’s solution to the problem that he failed to notice how scant was his own. Curiously, his dislike for Althusser’s language is such that he here actually misreads what it is in fact saying. For Althusser does attempt a more substantive definition of the object of history: a historical fact is one ‘which causes a mutation in the existing structural relations’.³⁰ Thompson’s comment is indignant: ‘Process turns out to be, not historical process at all (this wretched soul has been incarnated in the wrong body) but the structural articulation of social and economic formations … The soul of process must be arrested in its flight and thrust into the marble statue of structural immobilism.’³¹ In his ire at the phrase ‘structural relations’, Thompson has overlooked what is the hinge of the definition he is attacking, the term ‘mutation’. Althusser’s formula puts an impeccable emphasis on change, rather than on stability as Thompson imagines it to do. This is not to say that it furnishes a satisfactory solution to the problem. On the contrary, it is undoubtedly too restrictive. Did Marx’s death, for example, cause a mutation in existing structural relations? Scarcely. Yet it remains an eminently historical fact. The actual terrain tilled by the historian lies somewhere between a confinement to structural changes and an infinity of human behaviour. It is not a matter of reproach that neither Thompson nor Althusser should have resolved one of the oldest and most obdurate puzzles in the philosophy of history. But of the two, it must be said that it is the French philosopher rather than the English historian who on this occasion has given us the preferable reply—superior because sufficiently firm and definite to be falsifiable.

To sum up: Thompson’s definition of the object of history is casual and circular; his prescription for historical concepts, in a traditional emphasis on the approximate character of the discipline, is finally uncompelling; but the opening sections of The Poverty of Theory eclipse these shortcomings in their superb vindication of historical evidence, and of its authority over historical materialism. The lack of empirical controls which Thompson rightly perceives in Althusser’s work in fact forms part of a wider pattern within Western Marxism, as I have argued elsewhere, from whose speculative slide only Gramsci escaped. The period of that long proclivity is passing today, as a sounder and more inquisitive socialist culture has started to emerge in the 70s. The eloquence of Thompson’s admonitions should henceforth stand between it and the temptation of any return to the past.

1. PT , p. 205.

2. PT , p. 205.

3. Considerations on Western Marxism , pp. 64-65.

4. ‘A Political and Philosophical Interview’, first published in New Left Review 86, p. 11, now in Western Marxism—A Critical Reader , London 1977, p. 325.

5. PT , p. 224.

6. PT , p. 218.

7. PT , p. 218.

8. PT , p. 387.

9. PT , p. 387.

10. PT , p. 387.

11. PT , 236.

12. PT , p. 237.

13. PT , p. 237.

14. PT , pp. 237, 249, 248.

15. PT , p. 248.

16. PT , p. 242.

17. PT , p. 242.

18. ‘Die Unberechenbarkeit der kleinsten Körper’, from Me Ti—Buch der Wendungen , in Gesammelte Schriften , Vol 12, Frankfurt 1967, p. 568.

19. Grundrisse , London 1974, p. 101.

20. PT , p. 231.

21. PT , p. 387.

22. PT , p. 232.

23. The Logic of Scientific Discovery , London 1960, p. 40: ‘Theories are, therefore, never empirically verifiable. If we wish to avoid the positivist’s mistake of eliminating, by our criterion of demarcation, the theoretical systems of natural science, then we must choose a criterion which allows us to admit to the domain of empirical science even statements which cannot be verified. These considerations suggest that not the verifiability but the falsifiability of a system is to be taken as a criterion of demarcation.’ For Popper, of course, the problem of demarcation was that of the frontier between ‘the empirical sciences on the one hand, and mathematics and logic as well as metaphysical systems on the other’ (p. 34).

24. Imre Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes , Cambridge 1978, especially pp. 31-47.

25. PT , p. 262.

26. PT , p. 223.

27. PT , p. 232.

28. What is History? , London 1961, pp. 5-6.

29. PT , pp. 281-282.

30. Reading Capital , London 1970, p. 102.

31. PT , p. 281.

2

Agency

The second major theme of The Poverty of Theory is no longer procedural—what is the nature of historiography?—but substantive: what is the part of conscious human choice, value, action in history? Readers of William Morris or The Making of the English Working Class will be aware that this is the key organizing theme of Thompson’s entire work. The passion he has brought to it over twenty-five years transpires from every page of what now takes its place as his most extended theoretical statement of the problem. His argument essentially runs as follows. Althusser’s cardinal sin is his repeated assertion that ‘history is a process without a subject’,¹ in which individual men and women are ‘supports of relations of production’.² Although presented as the last word in contemporary Marxism, ‘this is a very ancient mode of thought: process is fate’.³ Today, far from being a proposition of historical materialism, it is in tune with the most reified and decadent bourgeois ideology, which must be resisted by every committed socialist. For, on the contrary, both the genuine heritage of Marx’s theory and the actual findings of historical research teach us that men and women are the ‘ever-baffled and ever-resurgent agents of an unmastered history’.⁴ No one saw this or expressed it better than Morris, when he wrote: ‘I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name’.⁵ History is not a process without a subject: it is ‘unmastered human practice’,⁶ in which each hour is ‘a moment of becoming, of alternative possibilities, of ascendant and descendant forces, of opposing (class) definitions and exertions, of double-tongued signs.’⁷ The crucial medium in which men and women