Marx The Sociologist

WE HAVE now to do a thing which is very objectionable to the faithful. They naturally resent any application of cold analysis to what for them is the very fountain of truth.

But one of the things they resent most is cutting Marx’s work into pieces and discussing them one by one. They would say that the very act displays the incapacity of the bourgeois to grasp the resplendent whole, all parts of which complement and explain one another, so that the true meaning is missed as soon as any one part or aspect is considered by itself.

We have no choice, however. By committing the offense and next taking up Marx the sociologist after Marx the prophet, I do not mean to deny either the presence of a unity of social vision which succeeds in giving some measure of analytic unity, and still more a semblance of unity, to the Marxian work, or the fact that every part of it, however independent intrinsically, has been correlated by the author with every other. Enough independence remains nevertheless in every province of the vast realm to make it possible for the student to accept the fruits of his labors in one of them while rejecting those in another.

Much of the glamour of the faith is lost in the process but something is gained by salvaging important and stimulating truth which is much more valuable by itself than it would be if tied to hopeless wreckage.

This applies first of all to Marx’s philosophy which we may as well get out of our way once and for all. German-trained and speculative-minded as he was, he had a thorough grounding and a passionate interest in philosophy. Pure philosophy of the German kind was his starting point and the love of his youth. For a time he thought of it as his true vocation. He was a Neo-Hegelian, which roughly means that while accepting the master’s fundamental attitudes and methods he and his group eliminated, and replaced by pretty much their opposites, the conservative interpretations put upon Hegel’s philosophy by many of its other adherents.

This background shows in all his writings wherever the opportunity offers itself. It is no wonder that his German and Russian readers, by bent of mind and training similarly disposed, should seize primarily upon this element and make it the master key to the system. I believe this to be a mistake and an injustice to Marx’s scientific powers. He retained his early love during the whole of his lifetime. He enjoyed certain formal analogies which may be found between his and Hegel’s argument.

He liked to testify to his Hegelianism and to use Hegelian phraseology. But this is all. Nowhere did he betray positive science to metaphysics. He says himself as much in the preface to the second edition of the first volume of Das Kapital, and that what he says there is true and no self-delusion can be proved by analyzing his argument, which everywhere rests upon social fact, and the true sources of his propositions none of which lies in the domain of philosophy. Of course, those commentators or critics who themselves started from the philosophic side were unable to do this because they did not know enough about the social sciences involved. The propensity of the philosophic system-builder, moreover, made them averse to any other interpretation but the one which proceeds from some philosophic principle. So they saw philosophy in the most matter-of-fact statements about economic experience, thereby shunting discussion on to the wrong track, misleading friends and foes alike.

Marx the sociologist brought to bear on his task an equipment which consisted primarily of an extensive command over historical and contemporaneous fact. His knowledge of the latter was always somewhat antiquated, for he was the most bookish of men and therefore fundamental materials, as distinguished from the material of the newspapers, always reached him with a lag. But hardly any historical work of his time that was of any general importance or scope escaped him, although much of the monographic literature did. While we cannot extol the completeness of his information in this field as much as we shall his erudition in the field of economic theory, he was yet able to illustrate his social visions not only by large historical frescoes but also by many details most of which were as regards reliability rather above than below the standards of other sociologists of his time. These facts he embraced with a glance that pierced through the random irregularities of the surface down to the grandiose logic of things historical. In this there was not merely passion. There was not merely analytic impulse. There were both. And the outcome of his attempt to formulate that logic, the so-called Economic Interpretation of History, 1 is doubtless one of the greatest individual achievements of sociology to this day. Before it, the question sinks into insignificance whether or not this achievement was entirely original and how far credit has in part to be given to predecessors, German and French.

The economic interpretation of history does not mean that men are, consciously or unconsciously, wholly or primarily, actuated by economic motives. On the contrary, the explanation of the role and mechanism of non- economic motives and the analysis of the way in which social reality mirrors itself in the individual psyches is an essential element of the theory and one of its most significant contributions. Marx did not hold that religions, metaphysics, schools of art, ethical ideas and political volitions were either reducible to economic motives or of no importance. He only tried to unveil the economic conditions which shape them and which account for their rise and fall.

The whole of Max Weber’s 2 facts and arguments fits perfectly into Marx’s system. Social groups and classes and the ways in which these groups or classes explain to themselves their own existence, location and behavior were of course what interested him most. He poured the vials of his most bilious wrath on the historians who took those attitudes and their verbalizations (the ideologies or, as Pareto would have said, derivations) at their face value and who tried to interpret social reality by means of them. But if ideas or values were not for him the prime movers of the social process, neither were they mere smoke.

If I may use the analogy, they had in the social engine the role of transmission belts. We cannot touch upon that most interesting post-war development of these principles which would afford the best instance by which to explain this, the Sociology of Knowledge. 3 But it was necessary to say this much because Marx has been persistently misunderstood in this respect. Even his friend Engels, at the open grave of Marx, defined the theory in question as meaning precisely that individuals and groups are swayed primarily by economic motives, which in some important respects is wrong and for the rest piteously trivial. While we are about it, we may as well defend Marx against another misunderstanding: the economic interpretation of history has often been called the materialistic interpretation. It has been called so by Marx himself. This phrase greatly increased its popularity with some, and its unpopularity with other people. But it is entirely meaningless.

Marx’s philosophy is no more materialistic than is Hegel’s, and his theory of history is not more materialistic than is any other attempt to account for the historic process by the means at the command of empirical science. It should be clear that this is logically compatible with any metaphysical or religious belief—exactly as any physical picture of the world is. Medieval theology itself supplies methods by which it is possible to establish this compatibility.4