Course: Social Theory - II (4670)

Semester: Spring, 2020

Assignment no:
2
Submitted by:
Samina Zahoor
Submitted to:
Tahir Raza Shah
Roll no:
Bs554523
Semester:
4th
Subject Code:
4670

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 Course: Social Theory - II (4670)
Semester: Spring, 2020
Assignment No. 2
Q.1 Ibn Khaldun propounded that prestige lasted at best four generations in one lineage. What is the
justification for this claim of Ibn Khaldun? Elaborate with arguments.

Some consider the Italian philosopher Vico (1668-1744) to have been the founder of philosophy of history; others
give the credit to the French philosopher Montesquieu (1689-1755). In fact, the Arabic philosopher and historian
ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) was the first pioneer to discover that history, like any other science, required research. “It
is the science of circumstances and events and its causes are profound, thus it is an ancient, original part of wisdom
and deserves to be one of its sciences.”In his The Introduction (1377), ibn Khaldun also wrote, “History is an art of
valuable doctrine, numerous in advantages and honourable in purpose; it informs us about bygone nations in the
context of their habits, the prophets in the context of their lives and kings in the context of their states and politics,
so those who seek the guidance of the past in either worldly or religious matters may have that advantage.”
Ibn Khaldun’s theory divided history into two main parts: the historical manifest and the historical gist. According
to him, history should not limit itself to recording events, but should examine environments, social mores and
political bases: “True history exists to tell us about human social life, which is the world’s environment, and the
nature of that environment as it appears from various events. It deals with civilisation, savagery and tribalism, with
the various ways in which people obtain power over each other, and their results, with states and their hierarchies
and with the people’s occupations, lifestyles, sciences, handicrafts and everything else that takes place in that
environment under various circumstances.”
Ibn Khaldun’s method relied on criticism, observation, comparison and examination. He used scientific criticism to
analyse accounts of historical events, the sources of these accounts and the techniques used by historians,
examining and comparing various different accounts in order to get rid of falsifications and exaggerations and
obtain some objective idea of what had actually happened. Many accounts contained lies because they had been
written to flatter some ruler or to further the interests of some sect, the newsmakers and storytellers deliberately
cheating and falsifying things for their own purposes. Ibn Khaldun, therefore, urged the historian to become
erudite, accurate in observation and skilled in comparing text with subtext in order to be capable of effective
criticism and clarification.Although ibn Khaldun strongly believed in God, he never mentioned any celestial aim
for history, or any divine end at which history would come to stop. He states, in fact, the “past is like the future,
water from water”, which seems to imply that human history has no end. Ibn Khaldun went further to criticise
other historians for imposing metaphysical ideas upon historical events to make the latter appear subordinate to the
gods or to divine providence, turning history, properly a science, into something more closely akin to the arts and
literature.
As a result, some Muslims and Westerners seized his concept of history to denounce ibn Khaldun as an atheist, a
charge of which he was innocent; his point was that the science of history was not subject to metaphysics and could
not be made so. Ibn Khaldun never questioned the existence of God. His work, according to him, was “inspired by
God, pure inspiration”, which should be evidence enough of his belief in God.However, his views on prophecy are
crystal clear, unlike those of certain of his predecessors in Muslim philosophy, in particular Alfarabi (870-950) and

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 Course: Social Theory - II (4670)
Semester: Spring, 2020
Avicenna (980-1037). As an experimental philosopher he was interested in the holy experiments of the Prophet
Mohammed (570-632), which means he cannot have seen history as having no end. If the existence of God is
regarded as an absolute fact and His prophets and their religious experiments as proof of this fact, then the
statement that in history the past is just like the future must mean it consists of a continuous series of events not
stopping with any nation, but continuing in cycles.
Ibn Khaldun believed even the minutest of facts should be scrutinised in analysing historical events, since these
were not simple phenomena, but complex. He regarded history as far from easy to study, being “the knowledge of
qualitative events and their causes in depth.” Since metaphysical theories of history were in his view irrelevant, Ibn
Khaldun imported the idea of causality from the theoretical field of philosophy into the practical arena of history
by concentrating on the worldly ‘causes and reasons’ of historical events. His method was directly inductive,
relying on the senses and the intellect without referring to any other norm. There was, in his view, a yawning void
between the abstractive and the experimental, the first being based on logic and second on the reality of the
sensible world. The subject of divine knowledge was an invisible spirit unable to be subjected to experimentation
and of which there was no sensory evidence, so there could be no certain proof of it in this world. Since the
sensible and the non-sensible thus had no terms in common, ibn Khaldun banished the abstractive or divine world
from his logical syllogisms. This is precisely the approach taken by modern positivism, and even pragmatism
followed in ibn Khaldun’s footsteps during its early stages.
In his diagnosis of “the causes of lies in history”, ibn Khaldun identifies a number of reasons, such as:
sectarianism, misplaced trust in the sources, ignorance of some hidden purpose and the wish to flatter rulers.
Hence, many historians, copyists and tellers have made the mistake of accepting untrue accounts or recording
events that did not take place because they have relied on report alone, without bothering to research its sources
closely for truth or falsehood, compare it with anything else or apply their own intelligence to it. In this they have
showed themselves to be poor historians. For example, al-Mas’udi and various other Arab historians accepted that
the Israelite armies led by the Prophet Moses numbered 600,000 or more men aged twenty and upwards. If we
examine this tale carefully it is clearly false. When Jacob and his kinsmen entered Egypt there were only seventy of
them. Only four generations separated Jacob and Moses. Where, then, did Moses get this huge multitude of youths
and men? The Israeli themselves, moreover, reported that Solomon’s army numbered 12,000 and his horses 1400,
while calling his kingdom the vigour of their state and an expansion of their reign.
Al-Mas’ud also succeeded in ignoring physical reality. How exactly was this huge army squeezed into the maze?
How could so massive a force have been lined up and moved in so limited an area of land? In the area of historical
knowledge al-Mas’ud did no better. Historically each kingdom was manned by a certain number of garrisons
according to its size. A kingdom having six hundred thousand or more fighters would have had borders far
exceeding the limits of the ancient kingdom of Israel.In his prescription of “requirements for a historian”, ibn
Khaldun stated that several things were essential if a historian were to be qualified to deal with historical events
and stories:
 Course: Social Theory - II (4670)
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1. An understanding of the rules of politics and the nature of people.
2. Knowledge of the natural environment and how it differs according to time and place.
3. Acquaintance with the social environments of the various different nations in terms of way of life, morals,
incomes, doctrines and so forth.
4. An understanding of the present time and an ability to compare it with the past.
5. Knowledge of the origins and motives of states and sects, their declared principles, their rules and major events
in their histories.
To achieve a critical understanding of historical events, then, the historian must study the general circumstances of
the period with which he is dealing and compare the particular events in which he is interested. He should then
explore any similar events that have taken place at other periods along with the general circumstances of these
periods. When he has completed these two main stages he should be able to recognise events as reasonable and
probably true, or unacceptable and almost certainly false. Certain events need only be studied separately, along
with the general circumstances of their periods, to know which parts of them must be true or false.
In his analysis of ‘the intellect’, ibn Khaldun believes the intellect has limits it cannot exceed and that these prevent
it from reaching a complete understanding of God and His attributes. This is its reality, and man cannot upgrade it
or increase its level of capability. Ibn Khaldun insisted that the intellect could not be aware of “the reality of the
soul and the divine” or of anything else existing in the higher world, because it was incapable of reaching, knowing
or proving it. We can be aware only of what is material; if a thing is immaterial we can neither prove it nor base
any proof upon it.
Ibn Khaldun offered the intellect little encouragement to dwell on metaphysics, preferring to emulate Algazel
(1059-1111), by dealing a final and near-fatal blow to philosophical thought by the Arabic-Islamic intellect.
Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that in closing one door ibn Khaldun threw open to the human mind an
entirely new one: the sociology and philosophy of history.
Since the 18th century, the western world has taken ibn Khaldun seriously, especially as his scientific ideas were
very much like those that were to develop much later on in human history. He has, however, still not taken his
rightful place as the founder of philosophy of history and the pioneer of sociology, although translations of his
historical and social treatises have helped to some extent.

Q.2 What is the traditional metaphysical view of Hegel’s philosophy? Elaborate in detail.

Given the understanding of Hegel that predominated at the time of the birth of analytic philosophy, together with
the fact that early analytic philosophers were rebelling precisely against Hegelianism so understood, the
interpretation of Hegel encountered in discussions within analytic philosophy is often that of the late nineteenth-
century interpretation. In this picture, Hegel is seen as offering a metaphysico-religious view of God qua Absolute
Spirit, as the ultimate reality that we can come to know through pure thought processes alone. In short, Hegel’s
philosophy is treated as exemplifying the type of pre-critical or dogmatic metaphysics against which Kant had
 Course: Social Theory - II (4670)
Semester: Spring, 2020
reacted in his Critique of Pure Reason, and as a return to a more religiously driven conception of philosophy to
which Kant had been opposed.There is much that can be found in Hegel’s writings that seems to support this view.
In his lectures during his Berlin period one comes across claims such as the one that philosophy “has no other
object but God and so is essentially rational theology” (Aes I: 101). Indeed, Hegel often seems to invoke imagery
consistent with the types of neo-Platonic conceptions of the universe that had been common within Christian
mysticism, especially in the German states, in the early modern period. The peculiarity of Hegel’s form of
idealism, on this account, lies in his idea that the mind of God becomes actual only via its particularization in the
minds of “his” finite material creatures. Thus, in our consciousness of God, we somehow serve to realize
his own self-consciousness, and, thereby, his own perfection. In English-language interpretations, such a picture is
effectively found in the work of Charles Taylor (1975) and Michael Rosen (1984), for example. With its dark
mystical roots, and its overtly religious content, it is hardly surprising that the philosophy of Hegel so understood
has rarely been regarded as a live option within the largely secular and scientific conceptions of philosophy that
have been dominant in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
An important consequence of Hegel’s metaphysics, so understood, concerns history and the idea of historical
development or progress, and it is as an advocate of an idea concerning the logically-necessitated teleological
course of history that Hegel is most often derided. To critics, such as Karl Popper in his popular post-war The
Open Society and its Enemies (1945), Hegel had not only advocated a disastrous political conception of the state
and the relation of its citizens to it, a conception prefiguring twentieth-century totalitarianism, but he had also tried
to underpin such advocacy with dubious theo-logico-metaphysical speculations. With his idea of the development
of spirit in history, Hegel is seen as literalising a way of talking about different cultures in terms of their spirits, of
constructing a developmental sequence of epochs typical of nineteenth-century ideas of linear historical progress,
and then enveloping this story of human progress in terms of one about the developing self-conscious of the
cosmos-God itself.
As the bottom line of such an account concerned the evolution of states of a mind (God’s), such an account is
clearly an idealist one, but not in the sense, say, of Berkeley. The pantheistic legacy inherited by Hegel meant that
he had no problem in considering an objective outer world beyond any particular subjective mind. But this
objective world itself had to be understood as conceptually informed: it was objectified spirit. Thus in contrast to
Berkeleian subjective idealism it became common to talk of Hegel as incorporating the objective idealism of
views, especially common among German historians, in which social life and thought were understood in terms of
the conceptual or spiritual structures that informed them. But in contrast to both forms of idealism, Hegel,
according to this reading, postulated a form of absolute idealism by including both subjective life and the objective
cultural practices on which subjective life depended within the dynamics of the development of the self-
consciousness and self-actualisation of God, the Absolute Spirit.
Despite this seemingly dominant theological theme, Hegel was still seen by many as an important precursor of
other more characteristically secular strands of modern thought such as existentialism and Marxist materialism.
 Course: Social Theory - II (4670)
Semester: Spring, 2020
Existentialists were thought of as taking the idea of the finitude and historical and cultural dependence of
individual subjects from Hegel, and as leaving out all pretensions to the Absolute, while Marxists were thought of
as taking the historical dynamics of the Hegelian picture but reinterpreting this in materialist rather than idealist
categories. As for understanding Hegel himself, the traditional metaphysical view remained the dominant
interpretative approach of Hegel scholars throughout much of the twentieth century. In the last quarter of the
century, however, it came to be vigorously questioned, with a variety of interpreters putting forward very different
accounts of the basic nature of Hegel’s philosophical project. While a number of interpretations of Hegel have
emerged during this period in an effort to acquit him of implausible metaphysico-theological views, one prominent
tendency has been to stress the continuity of his ideas with the “critical philosophy” of Immanuel Kant.
Least controversially, it is often claimed that either particular works, such as the Phenomenology of Spirit, or
particular areas of Hegel’s philosophy, especially his ethical and political philosophy, can be understood as
standing independently of the type of unacceptable metaphysical system sketched above. Thus it is commonly
asserted that implicit within the metaphysical Hegel is an anti-metaphysical philosopher struggling to get out—one
potentially capable of beating the critical Kant at his own game.
More controversially, one now finds it argued that the traditional picture is simply wrong at a more general level,
and that Hegel, even in his systematic thought, was not committed to the bizarre, teleological spirit monism that
has been traditionally attributed to him because he was free of the type of traditional metaphysical commitments
that had been criticized by Kant. Prominent among such interpretations has been the so-called post-Kantian
interpretation advanced by North American Hegel scholars Robert Pippin (1989, 2008, 2019) and Terry Pinkard
(1994, 2000, 2012). From an explicitly analytic perspective, broadly similar views have been put forward by
Robert Brandom (2002, 2014, 2019) and John McDowell (2006, 2018). Thus while the traditional view sees Hegel
as exemplifying the very type of metaphysical speculation that Kant successfully criticised, the post-Kantian view
regards him as both accepting and extending Kant’s critique, ultimately turning it against the residual dogmatically
metaphysical aspects of Kant’s own philosophy.
In Hegel, the non-traditionalists argue, one can see the ambition to bring together the universalist dimensions of
Kant’s transcendental program with the culturally contextualist conceptions of his more historically and
relativistically-minded contemporaries, resulting in his controversial conception of spirit, as developed in
his Phenomenology of Spirit. With this notion, it is claimed, Hegel was essentially attempting to answer the
Kantian question of the conditions of rational human mindedness, rather than being concerned with giving an
account of the developing self-consciousness of God. But while Kant had limited such conditions to formal
abstractly conceived structures of the mind, Hegel extended them to include aspects of historically and socially
determined forms of embodied human existence.
Not surprisingly, the strong post-Kantian interpretation of Hegel has been resisted by defenders of the more
traditional approach, who have argued against the plausibility of attempting to rehabilitate Hegel’s philosophy by
divesting it of any purportedly unacceptable metaphysical claims (see, for example, Beiser 2005 and Horstmann
 Course: Social Theory - II (4670)
Semester: Spring, 2020
2006). Proponents of the post-Kantian view, it is commonly said, are guilty of projecting onto Hegel views they
would like to find there rather than what is actually to be found. However, the strong post-Kantian interpretation
has also been challenged by a somewhat different version of the metaphysical reading by interpreters who, while
recognizing the influence of Kant’s critical philosophy of Hegel, emphasize Hegel’s critique of Kant and affirm the
irreducible role played by a form of metaphysics in Hegel’s philosophy. Nevertheless, they share the post-
Kantians’ attempts to separate Hegel’s views from the extravagant views traditionally ascribed to him and
generally argue for the broad acceptability of Hegel’s views from the perspective of the present. Here one tends to
find interpreters attributing to Hegel some type of conceptual realism, sometimes appealing to
contemporary analytic metaphysics for the legitimacy of metaphysics conceived as inquiry into the fundamental
features or structures of the world itself. Among the interpreters advancing something like
this revised metaphysical view might be counted Stephen Houlgate (2005b), Robert Stern (2002, 2009), Kenneth
Westphal (2003), James Kreines (2006, 2008) and Christopher Yeomans (2012).
On a number of points, the proponents of the revised conceptual realist metaphysical interpretation will agree with
advocates of the post-Kantian non-metaphysical approach. First, they tend to agree in dismissing much of the
extravagant metaphysics traditionally ascribed to Hegel. Generally they don’t find in Hegel the type of classical
teleological spirit monism central to, say, Taylor’s interpretation. Next, they stress the importance for Hegel of
Kant’s critique of metaphysics. Both think that Hegel took Kant’s critique seriously, and in turn subjected that
critique itself to a telling meta-critique, showing that Kant himself was not free from the sorts of ungrounded
metaphysical assumptions he criticized in others. However, while the post-Kantians interpret Hegel’s criticisms of
Kant as suggesting that Hegel thereby realized or completed Kant’s critical intention, creating a form of
philosophizing purged of metaphysics, proponents of the revised metaphysical interpretation typically see his
criticism of Kant as involving a rejection of Kant’s anti-metaphysical attitude, and as reestablishing, on a new
basis, a metaphysical program originally derived from Aristotle (e.g., Stern) or Spinoza (e.g., Houlgate).
While it is for the most part clear what sets both post-Kantians and conceptual realists against the traditional view,
it is still not clear which issues dividing them are substantive and which are ultimately verbal. Brandom, for
example, while often classed with the post-Kantians, also construes Hegel as a conceptual realist (Brandom 2019),
while Redding, appealing to the earlier work of J. N. Findlay, attempts to combine the post-Kantian approach with
what he calls an actualist rather than a realist interpretation of Hegel (Redding 2017). In recent work, both Pippin
(2019) and Pinkard (2014), the major representatives of the post-Kantian position, have insisted that their own
interpretations are compatible with many of the Aristotelian features of Hegel to which conceptual realists allude.
In relation to such debates it must be remembered that Kant himself was not critical of metaphysics per se. His
claim was that existing (so-called dogmatic) metaphysics was in a state analogous to that in which, say, physics
had been in before the scientific revolution of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rather than wanting to eliminate
metaphysics, after the style, say, of Hume or the modern logical positivists, Kant had wanted to put metaphysics
itself on a secure scientific basis analogous to what Galileo and Newton had achieved for physics. Thus the very
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Semester: Spring, 2020
idea of an Hegelian metaphysics is in no way straightforwardly incompatible with the project of a post-Kantian
completion of Kant’s critical program.
Q.3 ‘Hegel’s historical method was not an improved mode of empirical research’ is the assertion of the
modern scholars. How far you agree with this assertion? Elaborate.
The concept of history plays a fundamental role in human thought. It invokes notions of human agency, change,
the role of material circumstances in human affairs, and the putative meaning of historical events. It raises the
possibility of “learning from history.” And it suggests the possibility of better understanding ourselves in the
present, by understanding the forces, choices, and circumstances that brought us to our current situation. It is
therefore unsurprising that philosophers have sometimes turned their attention to efforts to examine history itself
and the nature of historical knowledge. These reflections can be grouped together into a body of work called
“philosophy of history.” This work is heterogeneous, comprising analyses and arguments of idealists, positivists,
logicians, theologians, and others, and moving back and forth over the divides between European and Anglo-
American philosophy, and between hermeneutics and positivism.
Another issue that provoked significant attention among analytic philosophers of history is the issue of
“objectivity.” Is it possible for historical knowledge to objectively represent the past? Or are forms of bias,
omission, selection, and interpretation such as to make all historical representations dependent on the perspective
of the individual historian? Does the fact that human actions are value-laden make it impossible for the historian to
provide a non-value-laden account of those actions?
This topic divides into several different problems, as noted by John Passmore (1966: 76). The most studied of these
within the analytic tradition is that of the value-ladenness of social action. Second is the possibility that the
historian's interpretations are themselves value-laden—raising the question of the capacity for objectivity or
neutrality of the historian herself. Does the intellectual have the ability to investigate the world without regard to
the biases that are built into her political or ethical beliefs, her ideology, or her commitments to a class or a social
group? And third is the question of the objectivity of the historical circumstances themselves. Is there a fixed
historical reality, independent from later representations of the facts? Or is history intrinsically “constructed,” with
no objective reality independent from the ways in which it is constructed? Is there a reality corresponding to the
phrase, “the French Revolution,” or is there simply an accumulation of written versions of the French Revolution?
There are solutions to each of these problems that are highly consonant with the philosophical assumptions of the
analytic tradition. First, concerning values: There is no fundamental difficulty in reconciling the idea of a
researcher with one set of religious values, who nonetheless carefully traces out the religious values of a historical
actor possessing radically different values. This research can be done badly, of course; but there is no inherent
epistemic barrier that makes it impossible for the researcher to examine the body of statements, behaviors, and
contemporary cultural institutions corresponding to the other, and to come to a justified representation of the other.
One need not share the values or worldview of a sans-culotte, in order to arrive at a justified appraisal of those
values and worldview. This leads us to a resolution of the second issue as well—the possibility of neutrality on the
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part of the researcher. The set of epistemic values that we impart to scientists and historians include the value of
intellectual discipline and a willingness to subject their hypotheses to the test of uncomfortable facts. Once again,
review of the history of science and historical writing makes it apparent that this intellectual value has effect. There
are plentiful examples of scientists and historians whose conclusions are guided by their interrogation of the
evidence rather than their ideological presuppositions. Objectivity in pursuit of truth is itself a value, and one that
can be followed.
Finally, on the question of the objectivity of the past: Is there a basis for saying that events or circumstances in the
past have objective, fixed characteristics that are independent from our representation of those events? Is there a
representation-independent reality underlying the large historical structures to which historians commonly refer
(the Roman Empire, the Great Wall of China, the imperial administration of the Qianlong Emperor)? We can work
our way carefully through this issue, by recognizing a distinction between the objectivity of past events, actions
and circumstances, the objectivity of the contemporary facts that resulted from these past events, and the
objectivity and fixity of large historical entities. The past occurred in precisely the way that it did—agents acted,
droughts occurred, armies were defeated, new technologies were invented. These occurrences left traces of varying
degrees of information richness; and these traces give us a rational basis for arriving at beliefs about the
occurrences of the past. So we can offer a non-controversial interpretation of the “objectivity of the past.”
However, this objectivity of events and occurrences does not extend very far upward as we consider more abstract
historical events: the creation of the Greek city-state, the invention of Enlightenment rationality, the Taiping
Rebellion. In each of these instances the noun's referent is an interpretive construction by historical actors and
historians, and one that may be undone by future historians. To refer to the “Taiping Rebellion” requires an act of
synthesis of a large number of historical facts, along with an interpretive story that draws these facts together in
this way rather than that way. The underlying facts of behavior, and their historical traces, remain; but the knitting-
together of these facts into a large historical event does not constitute an objective historical entity. Consider
research in the past twenty years that questions the existence of the “Industrial Revolution.” In this debate, the
same set of historical facts were first constructed into an abrupt episode of qualitative change in technology and
output in Western Europe; under the more recent interpretation, these changes were more gradual and less correctly
characterized as a “revolution” (O'Brien and Keyder 1978). Or consider Arthur Waldron's sustained and detailed
argument to the effect that there was no “Great Wall of China,” as that structure is usually conceptualized (1990).
Q.4 Marx for the first time introduced human aspect in capitalism. Elaborate how Marx has introduced
human aspect in capitalism?
Karl Marx (1818–1883) is best known not as a philosopher but as a revolutionary, whose works inspired the
foundation of many communist regimes in the twentieth century. It is hard to think of many who have had as much
influence in the creation of the modern world. Trained as a philosopher, Marx turned away from philosophy in his
mid-twenties, towards economics and politics. However, in addition to his overtly philosophical early work, his
later writings have many points of contact with contemporary philosophical debates, especially in the philosophy
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of history and the social sciences, and in moral and political philosophy. Historical materialism — Marx’s theory
of history — is centered around the idea that forms of society rise and fall as they further and then impede the
development of human productive power. Marx sees the historical process as proceeding through a necessary series
of modes of production, characterized by class struggle, culminating in communism. Marx’s economic analysis of
capitalism is based on his version of the labour theory of value, and includes the analysis of capitalist profit as the
extraction of surplus value from the exploited proletariat. The analysis of history and economics come together in
Marx’s prediction of the inevitable economic breakdown of capitalism, to be replaced by communism. However
Marx refused to speculate in detail about the nature of communism, arguing that it would arise through historical
processes, and was not the realisation of a pre-determined moral ideal.
It is important to understand that for Marx alienation is not merely a matter of subjective feeling, or confusion. The
bridge between Marx’s early analysis of alienation and his later social theory is the idea that the alienated
individual is ‘a plaything of alien forces’, albeit alien forces which are themselves a product of human action. In
our daily lives we take decisions that have unintended consequences, which then combine to create large-scale
social forces which may have an utterly unpredicted, and highly damaging, effect. In Marx’s view the institutions
of capitalism — themselves the consequences of human behaviour — come back to structure our future behaviour,
determining the possibilities of our action. For example, for as long as a capitalist intends to stay in business he
must exploit his workers to the legal limit. Whether or not wracked by guilt the capitalist must act as a ruthless
exploiter. Similarly the worker must take the best job on offer; there is simply no other sane option. But by doing
this we reinforce the very structures that oppress us. The urge to transcend this condition, and to take collective
control of our destiny — whatever that would mean in practice — is one of the motivating and sustaining elements
of Marx’s social analysis.
Capitalism is distinctive, Marx argues, in that it involves not merely the exchange of commodities, but the
advancement of capital, in the form of money, with the purpose of generating profit through the purchase of
commodities and their transformation into other commodities which can command a higher price, and thus yield a
profit. Marx claims that no previous theorist has been able adequately to explain how capitalism as a whole can
make a profit. Marx’s own solution relies on the idea of exploitation of the worker. In setting up conditions of
production the capitalist purchases the worker’s labour power — his ability to labour — for the day. The cost of
this commodity is determined in the same way as the cost of every other; i.e. in terms of the amount of socially
necessary labour power required to produce it. In this case the value of a day’s labour power is the value of the
commodities necessary to keep the worker alive for a day. Suppose that such commodities take four hours to
produce. Thus the first four hours of the working day is spent on producing value equivalent to the value of the
wages the worker will be paid. This is known as necessary labour. Any work the worker does above this is known
as surplus labour, producing surplus value for the capitalist. Surplus value, according to Marx, is the source of all
profit. In Marx’s analysis labour power is the only commodity which can produce more value than it is worth, and
for this reason it is known as variable capital. Other commodities simply pass their value on to the finished
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commodities, but do not create any extra value. They are known as constant capital. Profit, then, is the result of the
labour performed by the worker beyond that necessary to create the value of his or her wages. This is the surplus
value theory of profit.
It appears to follow from this analysis that as industry becomes more mechanised, using more constant capital and
less variable capital, the rate of profit ought to fall. For as a proportion less capital will be advanced on labour, and
only labour can create value. In Capital Marx does indeed make the prediction that the rate of profit will fall over
time, and this is one of the factors which leads to the downfall of capitalism. (However, as pointed out by Marx’s
able expositor Paul Sweezy in The Theory of Capitalist Development, the analysis is problematic.) A further
consequence of this analysis is a difficulty for the theory that Marx did recognise, and tried, albeit unsuccessfully,
to meet also in Capital. It follows from the analysis so far that labour intensive industries ought to have a higher
rate of profit than those which use less labour. Not only is this empirically false, it is theoretically unacceptable.
Accordingly, Marx argued that in real economic life prices vary in a systematic way from values. Providing the
mathematics to explain this is known as the transformation problem, and Marx’s own attempt suffers from
technical difficulties. Although there are known techniques for solving this problem now (albeit with unwelcome
side consequences), we should recall that the labour theory of value was initially motivated as an intuitively
plausible theory of price. But when the connection between price and value is rendered as indirect as it is in the
final theory, the intuitive motivation of the theory drains away. A further objection is that Marx’s assertion that
only labour can create surplus value is unsupported by any argument or analysis, and can be argued to be merely an
artifact of the nature of his presentation. Any commodity can be picked to play a similar role. Consequently with
equal justification one could set out a corn theory of value, arguing that corn has the unique power of creating more
value than it costs. Formally this would be identical to the labour theory of value. Nevertheless, the claims that
somehow labour is responsible for the creation of value, and that profit is the consequence of exploitation, remain
intuitively powerful, even if they are difficult to establish in detail.
However, even if the labour theory of value is considered discredited, there are elements of his theory that remain
of worth. The Cambridge economist Joan Robinson, in An Essay on Marxian Economics, picked out two aspects of
particular note. First, Marx’s refusal to accept that capitalism involves a harmony of interests between worker and
capitalist, replacing this with a class based analysis of the worker’s struggle for better wages and conditions of
work, versus the capitalist’s drive for ever greater profits. Second, Marx’s denial that there is any long-run
tendency to equilibrium in the market, and his descriptions of mechanisms which underlie the trade-cycle of boom
and bust. Both provide a salutary corrective to aspects of orthodox economic theory.
Furthermore, it is relatively rare for those who introduce new technologies to be motivated by the need to address
scarcity. Rather, under capitalism, the profit motive is the key. Of course it might be argued that this is the social
form that the material need to address scarcity takes under capitalism. But still one may raise the question whether
the need to address scarcity always has the influence that it appears to have taken on in modern times. For example,
a ruling class’s absolute determination to hold on to power may have led to economically stagnant societies.
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Alternatively, it might be thought that a society may put religion or the protection of traditional ways of life ahead
of economic needs. This goes to the heart of Marx’s theory that man is an essentially productive being and that the
locus of interaction with the world is industry. As Cohen himself later argued in essays such as ‘Reconsidering
Historical Materialism’, the emphasis on production may appear one-sided, and ignore other powerful elements in
human nature. Such a criticism chimes with a criticism from the previous section; that the historical record may
not, in fact, display the tendency to growth in the productive forces assumed by the theory.

Q.5 The method by which a society utilizes natural resources and produces the goods by which it lives in is
the mainspring of its existence. Explain this statement through economic determinism of Marx.
Economic determinism is a theory suggesting that economic forces determine, shape, and define all political,
social, cultural, intellectual, and technological aspects of a civilization.
Karl Marx:
Economic determinism is a theory typically attributed to Karl Marx, who lived from 1818-1883, a German
philosopher, sociologist, and economist. Though his father was a Lutheran, Marx became an atheist and famously
said later in life that religion was the 'opium of the people.' Keep in mind that he was not one of the Marx Brothers
(Chico, Harpo, and Groucho), the family comedy troupe famous in the first half of the 20th century.
Instead of comedy, Karl Marx focused on the most serious problem of his era - the poverty of the working class.
Working as a journalist, including ten years as the British correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune, he
observed poverty and began developing his own economic theories. Many business leaders and intellectuals of his
era considered the masses of poor people as a natural component of society, even suggesting that poverty was
divinely ordained as natural. Marx rejected this view and claimed that poverty in the 19th century directly resulted
from capitalism, the right to private property, and the control of the means of production by a bourgeois, elite
minority.
Marx had a unique view of history known as historical materialism. This means that you cannot understand the
past by focusing on its people, politics, wars, legal traditions, philosophy, religion, etc. Instead, according to Marx,
history was shaped by the material conditions, how they changed over time, and the struggles between those in
power and the subjects of their oppression.
Central to understanding historical materialism was Marx's economic theory of history, or economic determinism.
Marx elevated economics as the main force that shaped a civilization. Therefore, economic determinism meant that
society took its shape, or was determined, by the specific economic structures and relationships in place.
Economics defined not just the workplace, but also religion, family, law, and every other component of life at a
particular time.
Modes of Production
Throughout history, different economic systems have been in place. Marx called these modes of production. What
united these different systems was that all of them featured a minority of people who were in control. They
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solidified their position of power by owning the means of production. This included all of the technology and
infrastructure necessary to produce the materials in which a people needed to survive. This ruling class owned the
land, machines, and raw materials and used them to control the working class. This ensured the accumulation of
vast amounts of wealth for the privileged few. Marx believed that is why poverty existed within a society.
Capitalism:
the prevailing mode of production in Marx's era, and today is the basis of the United States economy, is an
economic system in which private owners control industry and operate business to turn a profit in a free market
economy. Marx thought this capitalistic system benefited the owners - he called them capitalists - at the expense of
the workers, who he referred to as the proletarian.
Capitalism was not always the dominant economic force, only the most recent. Other modes of production
throughout history included slavery and feudalism, according to Marx. Because of the overwhelming presence of
poverty in society, he believed it was time for capitalism to come to an end, just as the eras of slavery and
feudalism ended before it. The upper class (bourgeois, capitalistic owners of the means of production) and the
lower class (proletariat) would engage in a class struggle. Marx predicted that the proletariat would win this battle
through revolution and establish a socialistic, classless society.
Communist Manifesto:
Marx described this transition in his famous book, The Communist Manifesto, in 1848. In it, he proclaimed, ''Let
the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They
have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!''Marx called on the workers to revolt, overthrow the
capitalists, take over ownership of the means of production, and initiate a new mode of production called socialism,
or communism, which is a common ownership, controlled by the government, of the means of
production.Economic determinism was the foundation of his prediction for the future. A new economic mode of
production would, in Marx's view, fundamentally change society.
Marxism:
Most scholars today suggest that in his theory of economic determinism, Marx was not saying that politics and
people played no role in shaping their civilizations. This was 'reductionist' and took economic determinism too far,
even though Marx sometimes implied this. Instead, Marx allowed that people did have some 'agency,' 'human
autonomy,' or capability to shape their own destiny. Mankind still possessed a free will, and they could
demonstrate it by overthrowing the capitalistic system through revolution.Characterizing Marx as an economic
determinist is based on some textual evidences. Perhaps the clearest and strongest statement of what is taken as
economic determinism occurs in Marx’s “Preface” to his 1859 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:In
the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their
will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive
forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real
foundation on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social
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consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life process
in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being
that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of
society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or -- what is but a legal expression for the same
thing -- with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of
the productive forces these relations turn into fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of
the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such
transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic
conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political,
religious, aesthetic or philosophic -- in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and
fight it out. .... This consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the
existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production. (MER, 5)
This extensive passage contains some key elements for the economic determinist argument. As he
rarely does elsewhere, Marx talks of the “economic structure” and the ideological “superstructure” that
rises on it, and how change in the “economic foundation” leads to a transformation of “the entire
immense superstructure.” He describes social change as a conflict between “material productive forces”
and “existing relations of production.” He insists that the analyst should distinguish between the
“economic conditions of production” and the “ideological forms” that men use to describe their
positions. Economic determinists can argue four possible forms of “determinism” from passages in the
“Preface.” One determinism refers to the level of the individual: the human will is determined -- i.e., its
contents and actions are causally formed by the circumstances in which the person lives. A second
operates at the level of human interactions: in some ways the economic causes the political and the
ideological. A third “determinism” can be independent or can sum and expand the first two: the course
of history itself is inevitable. The fourth “determinism” derives from Marx’s claims that his critique of
political economy is a science. So an economic determinist’s interpretation of individuals in Marx’s
system would assert that Marx’s is a deterministic system because it deprives human beings of agency
or free will: “men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will.”
Marx’s economic laws also seem to leave little scope for freedom, as is suggested in the “Preface,”
above, where “economic conditions of production ... can be determined with the precision of natural
science” or in Marx’s “Preface” to Capital, where he writes of “the natural laws of capitalist
production” (MER, 296). The economic determinist argument about society argues that either the
(technological) “forces” of production or the (more broadly economic) “relations” of production (or
“forces and relations” of production -- determinists differ here) serve as the causal variable in worldly
life, with political and legal structures and ideological formations as the dependent variable, changing
in lockstep with technology or economy. The forces, or forces and relations, of production are the
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locus, then, of all effective change and the cause of all that occurs in human life beyond the realm of
production. Lastly, some determinists argue determinism in history or through science. Some
emphasize the inevitability of predictable or predicted historical change, as suggested in the Manifesto:
“What the bourgeois ... produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the
proletariat are equally inevitable” (CM, I; MER, 483). In private letters Marx could be even more
deterministic: on 5 March 1852 Marx wrote that he proved “that the class struggle necessarily leads to
the dictatorship of the proletariat, ... [and] that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to
the abolition of all classes and to a classless society” (MER, 220). Here Marx seems to be making a
straightforward prediction of what will “necessarily” happen. Others note that Marx frequently parallels
his interpretations to modern natural science, both in the 1859 “Preface” and throughout his works. It
should be noted that determinist arguments can advocate “hard” or “strong” determinism: that, e.g., a
specific set of productive forces “uniquely and directly cause” a specific set of political, legal, and
ideological arrangements. Or there is a “softer” determinism, perhaps arguing that the specific set of
productive forces causes “in the last instance” the superstructural elements. The text of the 1859
“Preface,” as well as other texts, has been used to support a range of determinisms from soft to hard.
But economic determinism in Marx’s thought is a myth. I argue against the economic determinist
argument in three ways in this and next sections. One way of arguing, which I shall try to avoid most
(but not all!) of the time, is to hurl quotations at your opponents hoping they have the power of Zeus’s
lightening-bolts. Battles between opposing quotations rarely solve any disputes (or, rather, any disputes
they solve have been long settled), if only because a quotation (like any fact or piece of evidence)
requires an interpretive context if it is to understood and placed with other quotations (and their
interpretations) into a larger theory. I do want to suggest, therefore, some interpretive issues related to
the economic determinist interpretation of the 1859 “Preface.” The determinist’s claim that Marx’s
system undermines free will seems argued only in a limited manner. Two arguments stand out, but on
examination neither seems able to bear the weight of determinism. One suggests that human beings live
in circumstances that exist independent of (and prior to) their will. But this seems to me to be a
sociological truth for social theorists of all ideological stripes: we live in a world whose institutions,
practices, and languages are pre-constituted by those who have lived before us, a constitution that is
independent of our wills and that shapes our wills. Marx stated as much (but with a different emphasis
from the “Preface”): “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do
not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given
and transmitted from the past” (18thB, I; MER, 595). Marx seems to be suggesting that the already-
constituted social world provides a context that limits the ways in which we can make our own history;
he does not seem to be saying that the already-constituted social world so causally determines each one
of us that, instead of making history, we are merely reacting to external causes that drive us. The
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second argument for determinism, which builds on Marx’s statement about life determining
consciousness, overlooks that statement’s peculiar twist. Marx engages frequently in a kind of
contrapuntal statement, where he denies a left-wing Hegelian slogan and then presents his view as the
reverse. But Marx’s aphorism -- “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on
the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” -- presents its assertion
asymmetrically. Having denied the left-wing Hegelian stance that consciousness determines being,
Marx reverses the terms but adds “social” -- and “social being” is not defined but seems to be more
extensive than merely forces (or forces and relations) of production and indeed as “social” likely
includes consciousness Marx’s starker statement in The German Ideology -- “life is not determined by
consciousness, but consciousness by life” (MER, 155) -- does not add “social” but does present its own
asymmetry. The left-wing Hegelians, pace Marx, think that consciousness determines life, as though
consciousness were something independent of life, standing apart from it (like an individualized Geist-
like spirit) and shaping it. But Marx in this section rejects the view of consciousness as independent of
life (so that he goes on to reject that philosophy can be “an independent branch of knowledge”). Rather,
he is trying to make consciousness a part of human life. So, when “life determines consciousness,”
Marx is tautologically asserting, as part of his on-going argument, that life (a totality including
consciousness) determines consciousness (because it is a part of life). As he himself writes, when we
see that “life determines consciousness,” “the starting point ... is real living individuals themselves, and
consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness” (MER, 155). So these statements do not
deny free will so much as they put human consciousness into an intimate relation with other aspects of
human life. Some determinist interpreters insist that in Marx the economic -- the forces, or forces and
relations, of production -- determines political, legal, and ideological institutions and structures. Indeed,
it is important to Marx to emphasize (against philosophers and others who would ignore) the
importance of the economic; and so it should be expected that Marx will mention frequently and give
weight to economic factors. But giving weight to economic factors is far from determinism as causality,
especially far from strong causality. And some of his mirrored statements also suggest how far from
unidimensional causality Marx is: “circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances”
(MER, 165). The words that Marx uses should indicate how far from causality he is. The English
translation conveys the feel of the German, and in a set of places where Marx could use “cause” (were
he giving a monocausal, strongly causal, or even partially causal explanation of how economics causes
non-economic factors), he uses instead “rises,” “correspond,” “conditions,” and “is ... transformed.”
When the legal and political superstructure “rises,” “definite forms [note the plural] of social
consciousness” “correspond” to it. Despite the frequent treatment of this paragraph of the 1859
“Preface” as deterministic, its language does not prima facie demand the theory of economic
determinism. Marx does suggest, I think, that forms of consciousness such as ideology are limited in
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what can be thought -- perhaps in parallel to the way that the circumstances into which we are born
limit how we make history. Marx wishes to “explain” consciousness “from the contradictions of
material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of
production” (MER, 5). What human consciousness does is to try to understand the world. When social
life is calm, so are ideologies; when class conflicts come into existence, so too do competing ideologies
and conscious statements (CM, I; MER, 481); and only when a revolutionary class arises can
revolutionary ideas come into being (MER, 173). To suggest limitations, however, seems very different
from asserting causal connections. Marx gives a fascinating specific example of limitation when he
discusses the equality of value in commodities. He praises Aristotle for having clearly enunciated a
number of basic principles about the money-form, value, and the requirement that exchange take place
with equality and commensurability. Aristotle has attained many insights necessary for Marx’s
economics. There was, however, an important fact which prevented Aristotle from seeing that, to
attribute value to commodities, is merely a mode of expressing all labour as equal human labour, and
consequently as labour of equal quality. Greek society was founded upon slavery, and had, therefore,
for its natural basis, the inequality of men and of their labour-powers (CI, 59-60).
So Aristotle could not see the equivalence of human labour -- and that equivalence cannot be
discovered “until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice”
(CI, 60). Aristotle’s range of thinking is limited by the practices of his society. But to me such
limitation is far from determinism.