When Karl Marx referred to his system as ‘historical materialism’ he was signalling his indebtedness to two important intellectual traditions. First, to the French Enlightenment with its emphasis on the determination of social attitudes and behaviour by material forces such as climate and the economy: intended initially to undermine established religious ways of thinking, this became the basis of a more positive method of systematic economic analysis. Second, to the German reaction against the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on the value of all modes of thought when understood within their original historical contexts: intended initially to defend inherited religious ways of thinking, this became the basis of a more general method of sympathetic cultural understanding Though many later historians first encountered economic determinism and cultural historicism through the writings of Marx, these approaches did not originate with him and even their combination into historical materialism had been anticipated by Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith who had developed their own accounts of the stages of social development. Marx himself was well aware of this and in his famous letter to Weydemeyer rejected any claim to have discovered the existence of classes and class struggle in history and emphasized that his own contribution was to show that ‘the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat’ (1852). Thus while Marx has become the best known purveyor of historical materialism, the specifically Marxist element within this was his argument that, just as feudalism had unintentionally given rise to the bourgeoisie and its revolutionary transformation of society, so the economic development of capitalism would necessarily give rise to a united proletariat and its revolutionary expropriation of the means of production from the bourgeoisie.
For fifty years after his death in 1883, Marxist historical work was largely restricted to the writings of left-wing activists attempting to justify their political strategies by compiling material on the recent economic development of capitalism. However, the interwar depression and the rise of fascism, combined with the apparent success of socialism in me Soviet Union, made Marxism more plausible in the west and it began to pass into the mainstream of historical debate, particularly through the work of Maurice Dobb and Ernest Labrousse. Dobb was a Cambridge economist who became involved in history through his pioneering work on the Russian economy under the Soviet regime. More importantly, Dobb’s (1946) essays on the economic development of capitalism set the agenda for research into the transition from feudalism to capitalism and into the economic formation of the modern working class which was to guide the next generation of British Marxist historians. Labrousse was a historian at the Sorbonne whose studies of economic cycles in eighteenth-century France were intended to uncover the precise material causes of the outbreak of the Revolution of 1789 (Labrousse 1943). More importantly, his pioneering application of sophisticated quantitative methods had a significant influence on the shift towards more rigorous demographic and econometric history among the next generation of French historians around the journal Annales.
The period after the Second World War therefore saw flourishing schools of Marxist historians in the western universities, focusing mainly on the analysis of the material structures underlying political developments. Important work on the origins of the English Revolution in the seventeenth century, on the development of the British labour movement in the nineteenth century, and on the economic and social history of the French départements in the early-modern and modern periods has since faced major challenges but has made a permanent contribution to the establishment of a more problem-oriented approach in place of the older narrative style of historical writing. This is best understood as part of a wider movement towards economic history which had equally important roots in radical-liberal work on the British Industrial Revolution beginning with Arnold Toynbee (1884), and in democratic work on material factors in US history beginning with the ‘frontier thesis’ of Frederick Jackson Turner (1893). Moreover, even at the moment of its apparent triumph, Marxist history was increasingly subject to internal tensions, particularly following the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. This embarrassing failure of the major socialist regime raised questions about the political teleology which had underpinned the Marxist approach to history, and led to a re-examination of the confident economic determinism and a re-emphasis on the elements of cultural historicism in Marx’s writings. This was particularly marked in Britain, with its strong native tradition of ethical and idealist socialism; one of the most influential contributions was Edward Thompson’s (1963) study of the early-nineteenth-century English working class. This emphasized political and religious traditions as much as economic structures, and interpreted them in their own terms rather than with the advantage of hindsight, producing the famous manifesto about rescuing even those who had followed backward-looking or Utopian ideas ‘from the enormous condescension of posterity’. While undoubtedly leading to fresh insights into the experiences of ordinary people, this kind of work also launched Marxist history into an attempt to reconcile economic determinism and political agency, class structure and the autonomy of culture, within which it began to lose its coherence as a system.
The next great depression in the 1970s and 1980s then undermined rather than reinforced Marxism, as western labour movements suffered reverses at the hands of reactionary regimes and the Soviet Union was completely discredited as a viable political alternative to liberal democracy.
Those historians in the Marxist tradition who were still concerned with concrete historical analysis moved away from the old teleological framework through the deconstruction of key materi-alist categories such as class, and the inclusion of the impact of state activity within their range of social forces. As a result, their work became increasingly reabsorbed into the liberal mainstream. Those historians in the Marxist tradition who attempted to maintain a distinctive unifying focus tended to emphasize the determining impact of language on consciousness, and, where this went beyond a suggestive new approach to popular movements and became the basis of a critical approach to historical method, it sheared away not only the old materialist teleology but also any falsifiable approach to the analysis of cultural contexts. Ironically, then, many of those historians who still professed loyalty to the critical heritage of Marx began to propose an increasingly ungrounded version of historicism.
Alastair J.Read
University of Cambridge
References
Dobb, M. (1946) Studies in the Development of Capitalism, London.
Labrousse, C.E. (1943) La Crise de l’Économie française à la fin de l’Ancien Régime, Paris.
Marx, K. (1852) ‘Marx to Weydemeyer, 5 March 1852’, in K.Marx and F.Engels, Collected Works, vol. 39, London.
Thompson, E.P. (1963) The Making of the English Working Class, London.
Toynbee, A. (1884) Lectures on the Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century in England, London.
Turner, F.J. (1893) ‘The significance of the frontier in American history’, Report of the American Historical Society.
Further reading
Hobsbawn, E. (1978) ‘The Historians’ Group of the Communist Party’, in M.Cornforth (ed.) Rebels and their Causes, London.
Prost, A. (1992) ‘What has happened to French social history?’, Historical Journal 35.
