Wesleyan University

Marx's Four Histories: An Approach to His Intellectual Development Author(s): Walter L. Adamson Source: History and Theory, Vol. 20, No. 4, Beiheft 20: Studies in Marxist Historical Theory (Dec., 1981), pp. 379-402 Published by: Blackwell Publishing for Wesleyan University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2504789 Accessed: 28/08/2009 20:38
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MARX'S FOUR HISTORIES: AN APPROACH TO HIS INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT

WALTER L. ADAMSON

It would seem that no aspect of Marx in recent decades has received more attention than his intellectual development. The debates about the relationship of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 to later work, the attention currently being lavished on the Grundrisse, and the recent interest in unraveling the (Hegelian?) "logic" of Capital have all contributed to our sense of the diversity of Marx's work, of the "fits and starts" in which he pursued his writing, and of the possibility of "breaks" in his development, or at least changes in his intellectual strategy.' Yet the general tendency of recent books on Marx is to find a unity in the apparent diversity. Such unity, however, takes a variety of forms: we have Marx the technological determinist, Marx the materialist neo-Hegelian, Marx the philosopher of "organic totality" or of "internal relations," Marx the political millenarian, and several others.2 Such variety is perhaps to be expected in a thinker of Marx's range and complexity. More disturbing than the variety itself is the increasing rarity of confrontations between rival views. The thesis of a "break" between an early "humanist" and a late "scientific" Marx, propounded in two of its major forms by Althusser and Colletti in the 1960s, has of course been widely and severely attacked, if not absolutely discredited. But in the aftermath of these debates, many writers have preferred to avoid declaring themselves on Marx's intellectual development as a whole, or to give it only very summary treatment. Instead the tendency has been to select as the central object of study some purported "master text": the Grundrisse, the 1859 Preface to the
1. The young vs. mature Marx debate is so voluminous that I make no effort at full reference here. For recent inquiries into the Grundrisse, see Carol Gould, Marx's
Social Ontology (Cambridge, Mass., 1978) and Roslyn W. Bologh, Dialectical Phenom-

enology, Marx's Method (Boston, 1979); for work on the "logic" of Capital, see Roman
Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx's 'Capital', transl. P. Burgess (London, 1977);

J. Zelen', The Logic of Marx, transl. T. Carver (Oxford, 1980); Karel Kosik, Dialectics
of the Concrete, transl. K. Kovanda with J. Schmidt, in Boston Studies in the Philosophy

of Science, ed. R. Cohen and M. Wartofsky, Vol. 52 (Dordrecht, 1976); and Terrell Carver,"Marxand Hegel's Logic," Political Studies 24 (1976), 57-68. 2. See for an example of each: William H. Shaw, Marx's Theory of History (Stanford,
1978); Gould, Marx's Social Ontology; Melvin Rader, Marx's Interpretation of History

(New York, 1979); Bertell Oliman, Alienation (London, 1971); and Robert C. Tucker,
Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge, Eng., 1961).

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L.

ADAMSON

Critique of Political Economy, and Capital have each had their devotees. After it has been closely examined, other aspects of Marx's work may be briefly considered, usually to be assimilated to the master text either as "precursors" or even simply as "other texts."3 This does not seem to me to be a very satisfactory state of affairs. We cannot hope to gain a fuller appreciation of what Marx was doing (and of the possible contradictions, anomalies, and turns in what he was doing) unless the problem of his intellectual development is faced squarely. It is fortunate, then, that there are some notable recent interpretations of Marx's intellectual career. There is, first of all, the interesting thesis formulated by Habermas, and further pursued by Wellmer and the late Alvin Gouldner, which may be summarized in Gouldner's phrase as the thesis of the "two Marxisms." According to Habermas, when Marx developed the notion of praxis in 1845, he tended to conflate the activities of work and social interaction (or roughly, the technical and the practical). In his subsequent "categorical" statements, praxis appears to be reduced to "instrumental action," though a more complex notion was still deployed in Marx's "material investigations." For Habermas, this compromised Marx's original impulse to develop a "critique" of capitalist society and made him vulnerable to positivistic (and, Wellmer adds, "technocratic" and "Leninist") misinterpretations.4This conception of an ambivalence or confusion in the later Marx between "critique" and "science" has led Gouldner to the much stronger thesis that Marx, from the beginning, operated with two contradictory images of his project which, far from being reconciled, were never adequately acknowledged.5 While this thesis calls attention to a very real tension in Marx's work, one may doubt whether his intellectual development is fully captured in this overly neat picture of two contradictory Marxes joined together like black and white Siamese twins. Other more complex pictures of Marx's intellectual development which seem to me still more promising have been drawn by students of his theory of history What they suggest is that Marx expressed at least three different theoretical positions, or better, made at least three different theoretical departures. Of course it may be that to single out Marx's theories of history
3. See, for example, G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Tlheory of History: A Defence (Princeton, 1978), 142-150. 4. See Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Hiunan Interests, transl. J. Shapiro (Boston, 1971), 52-53, and Thzeory and Practice, transI. J. Viertel (Boston, 1973), 195-252; and Albrecht Wellmer, Critical Theory of Society, transl. J. Cumming (New York, 1971), 67-119, especially 74-75 and 117-118. 5. Alvin Gouldner, Thze Twto Marxisins: Contradictions and Anoomalies inl thle Delvelopinent of Theory (New York, 1980), 33 and passim. 6. See Helmut Fleischer, Marxism and History, transl. E. Mosbacher (London, 1973), especially 11-37; Philip J. Kain, "Marx's Dialectic Method," History and Tlheory 19 (1980), 294-3 12; and Zelen', Logic of Marx, 165-179.

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and his related ideas about method is to present him at his most disparate and discontinuous. Marx's political vision and fundamental political convictions, one might suppose, were far more unified.7 A theory of history presents problems of a much more abstract and intellectually intricate order, and it would be surprising indeed if Marx had satisfied himself about a solution to them in one fell swoop. I propose in this paper to pursue the question of Marx's intellectual development with particular regard to his theory of history. In selecting this particular case I do not hope to resolve the question of intellectual development. My intention is simply to shed further light on it from a single, though very important, perspective. My procedure will be, first, to consider the thesis of Marx's three histories as developed by Helmut Fleischer. Second, I shall turn to what Marx says about history in the somewhat neglected 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse, a text Fleischer does not consider. It offers a fascinating historiographical perspective different in important respects from Marx's earlier discussions.8 Finally, I shall consider the interrelationship of all four histories and will comment on it in light of certain other discussions of Marx and his intellectual development.
I

In Marxism and History, Fleischer seeks to explain the many divergences within Marx interpretations by focusing on the "fragmentary" nature of the original texts. Within these texts, he discerns three different "approaches" to history which he terms the "anthropological," the "pragmatological," and the "nomological." In the anthropological approach, found above all in the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx invested history with a "universal meaning." History is the playing-out of a "process of humanization" which is inherent in the "nature of the human species" itself. In later works of an anthropological character, Fleischer argues, Marx expresses this idea in a more "naturalistic" way: "history becomes the 'humanization of the ape,' the genesis of a new species." In August 1844, Marx met Engels in Paris, and when he turned that fall to the drafting of his section of The Holy Family, Marx was evidently much under the influence of Engels's more empirical and less metaphysical attitudes. The resulting "pragmatological" approach to history becomes full-blown in
7. This, however, would not be true with Marx's ideas about proletarian political strategy.See, for example, the classic study of Stanley Moore, Three Tactics (New York, 1963). 8. Kain's discussion of this text, though not of course the first, is pioneering in its effort to relate it to Marx's earlier work. For a fuller discussion in English, see Karl
Marx: Texts ol Method, ed. Terrell Carver (Oxford, 1975), 3-158.

9. See Fleischer, Marxism, 11-13ff.

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the Theses on Feuerbach of 1845 and The German Ideology of 1845-1846. According to Fleischer, this approach treats history as nothing other than "the concrete historical conduct of mankind." Its meaning is limited to whatever generalizations may be made, or conclusions drawn, from the set of concrete outcomes "of the actions of individuals and groups." Such actions are seen as being impelled by "needs" experienced in the situations in which actors find themselves, and the outcomes are "more blind than the results of any tendency to a specific goal." Human needs, then, are the motor of history in this view, and such needs are to a large extent variable, that is, situationally defined. Much later in his intellectual development, after a deeper inquiry into political economy as the "anatomy of civil society," Marx arrived at still another view of history, based centrally, according to Fleischer, on "the logic of objective historical structures and processes." In this "nomological" view, history is "regarded as a natural process taking place in accordance with definite laws." Fleischer finds the locus classics of this view "in the muchquoted phrases of his introduction to the Critique of Political Economy," later supplemented by key statements in the introduction and epilogue to Capital.10 In Fleischer's view, then, Marx began with a broadly metaphysical conception of a universal history, the subject of which is the human essence dialectically unfolding toward its realization in a communist society. This rather Feuerbachian vision was discarded in 1845 in favor of a strictly empirical conception of history as the set of concrete acts of individuals and groups in response to felt needs. Later, as Marx became more concerned with larger social and economic structures, he recognized that much of what was most crucial in history could not be fully captured as the activity of men pursuing their aims, but had to be regarded in large measure as a set of objective processes governed by laws which operate independently of human will. Yet, surprisingly, Fleischer does not cease to speak of "the Marxist concept of history." He argues that these "different approaches each reveal a different aspect and impose a different accent" but "are not mutually exclusive, indeed they are legitimate only to the extent that they complement each other." He concedes that "if there is a break anywhere in his [Marx's] philosophical development," it lies between 1844 and 1846, between his first statements of the anthropological and pragmiatological views.11 Yet much of the rest of the book is, in effect, a defense of the centrality of the pragmatological view and of the commensurability of the other "aspects" and "accents" with it. I do not consider this a plausible argument. It represents not what Marx actually wrote but what Fleischer believes Marx should have believed and wishes he had explicitly written. He will begin to see that this is so even as
10. Ibid., 13, 29. 11. Ibid., 12, 13, 16.

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we consider the evidence for the three different approaches to history that Fleischer presents. There seems to be little question that Fleischer's "anthropological approach" is a reasonable and accurate characterization of Marx's view of history up to and including the 1844 Manuscripts. There, Marx does seem to treat human alienation under capitalism as a necessary, negative phase in the "return of man to himself." When he writes that "the human essence must be reduced to this absolute poverty so that its inner wealth may be, born of it," we are indeed reminded of the old metaphysical idea that "the road to the kingdom of heaven runs through a vale of tears."12Marx does speak in this period of the "task of history" and of certain occurrences as being "in the service of history," hypostatizations that will later be dropped. Fleischer's evidence is convincing and it is supported by other recent commentators as different as Althusser and Seigel.13 Fleischer is much less convincing in his assertion that a weaker version of the anthropological approach reappears in the 1859 Preface. The central piece of evidence he cites is Marx's "laconic statement" that with the capitalist social formation "'the prehistory of human society' has been concluded." Fleischer concedes that the idea of history as a process of "humanization" or "human realization" embodied in this reference is being expressed in a more "contingent" fashion and without the necessitarian implications of 1844. Yet he does not see this as an "essential difference."14This, however, is extremely dubious. The idea of history as the dialectical realization of the human essence is the central defining characteristic of the anthropological approach. Without the necessitarian implications of the concept of essence, statements about "humanization" in future "history"- as against "prehistory"- are nothing but general indications of the future communist society likely to follow present capitalism. Marx made constant references to a communist Authebung of the present, and there is no reason to associate them exclusively with any one of his approaches to history. Moreover, there is a second reason to suppose that Marx was not thinking in terms of the anthropological approach when he made his 1859 history/ prehistory reference. The 1859 Preface is his most succinct statement of that doctrine subsequently known as "historical materialism," the key concepts of which include productive forces, productive relations, legal and political
12. See ibid., 14. For a discussion of the long metaphysical tradition of the "great circle" in which Marx was here participating,see M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York, 1971), 141-312 and 313-316. The latter pages are on Marx himself in relation to this tradition. 13. See Louis Althusser, For Marx, transl. B. Brewster (New York, 1969), 33-35; and Jerrold Seigel, Marx's Fate: The Shape of a Life (Princeton, 1978), 128, 130-131,
143.

14. Fleischer, Marxism, 18, 20.

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superstructure, and forms of social consciousness.All of these concepts and their essentialinterrelationships, however, were well developedby Marx already in The GermanIdeology of 1846, the text which Fleischer takes as central to the "pragmatological" view. Given that the latter view is diametricallyopposed to the anthropological, and that each view representsa highlycomplex,interrelated set of claims amountingto a Weltanschauung, it appearshighly unlikelythat Marx would in effect have been assertingcommitmentsto each of them in the same shorttext. But is Fleischerrightto thinkthat Marxheld somethinglike the pragmatological view in 1845-1846? Again, I find the evidencecited to be persuasive. Fleischer'spragmatdlogical category is an exact reflectionof the main historical themes in The GermanIdeology: (1) that "historyis nothing but a succession of generationseach of which exploits the material, capital and

productive forcestakenoverfrom all its predecessors"; (2) thathistorical

developmentoccurs because "the first satisfiedneed, the action of satisfying it and the instrument for satisfyingit that has now been acquiredleads to new needs - and this productionof new needs was the first historicalact"; and (3) that at every stage of history there is "a material outcome, a sum of
productive forces . . . [that] on the one hand is modified by the new genera-

tion but on the other itself prescribesits own living conditions and imposes on it a definite development,a special characterof its own - so that, in other words, circumstancesmake men just as men make circumstances."'5 The emphasishere is on conceivingparticular historicalstages concretelyand empirically, ratherthan graspingthe "universal meaning"of history.History is an open process,the set of outcomesof humanactorssatisfyingtheir needs, and one in whichpracticalsubjectivity plays a prominentrole. Two points should be obvious even from the limited discussionso far. First, it appearsat the very least quite farfetchedto speak of the anthropological and pragmatological approachesas commensurable. The one offers a bold philosophicalinterpretation of the meaning of history, for which empirical investigationis nearly superfluous; the other provides only a philosophical framework withinwhich empiricalinvestigation may be carriedout, but from whichit is entirelypossiblethat no universalmeaningwill ever emerge. Second, it seems clear that the possibility of a much more objectivistic conceptionof history is alreadyembeddedin the pragmatological approach. Not only has Marx alreadydeclaredthat much of the historicalsituationfor any particulargenerationis given and inalterable,he has also begun to mix the moreobjectivelanguageof historicalmaterialism (for example,productive forces) with the subjectivepragmatological languageof needs. Nowhere does he affirma wholly objectivisticview in this period, and Fleischer'scritique
15. Cited in ibid., 21-22.

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of Althusser'sinterpretation of the sixth Thesis on Feuerbachstrikes me as fundamentally sound, though I shall not review his logic here. By the same token, one cannot treat the 1859 Preface as an instance of the nomological view without recognizingthe origin of its fundamentalcategories and theses in the earlier,pragmatological work. Yet this unfortunately is justwhatFleischerdoes. He makes a sharpseparation between the 1845-1846 and 1859 views without any acknowledgment

that the latter view is alreadylargely embeddedin the former. However, if we now ask whether the later, more nomological writings reveal an uncompromisingly nomological approachto history, Fleischer's answer is far from unambiguous. He insists that, in these writings Marx held that the productive relations into which men enter "are necessary and inevitable and of their will."1'6 He also takes with great seriousnessMarx's use independent of a naturalistic languagein the 1867 Introduction to Capital.The development of economic forms, Marx says there, is a "processof naturalhistory" that has its "naturalphases of development"which follow "naturallaws." Yet Fleischeralso believesthat Marx is not attempting to "establisha universal and positive concept of history as a naturalprocess"but "only to apply the idea to the formulationof capitalist society (as the 'economic' society par excellence) *"17 The lawlikeand apparently determined character of human behavioris a special featureof the capitalistsocial formation,not a property of humanhistory as a whole. Nonetheless,Fleischerdoes concede that Marx himself furtheredthe contraryinterpretation when, in his 1873 epilogue to Capital, he quoted the long passage from his Russian reviewer N. Sieber, which clearly justified thinking of the entire "history of civilization"as a not convinced "processof naturalhistory."1'8 Fleischer,however,is apparently that one oughtto take Marx'scitingof the Sieberreferenceliterally. Fleischer's,then, is a precariousbalancingact. He does not wish to deny a sharpdifferencebetween the nomologicaland pragmatological approaches. Yet he also does not wish to characterize these views in any way that would make them ultimatelydifficultto reconcile. I am sympatheticto the first of these arguments, even though I see a much closer link between the concepts and categoriesof the 1846 and 1859 texts than does Fleischer.In my view, they might well be thought of as variants of a single theory of historical materialism. Nonetheless,these variantsare, at least to some extent, at odds with one another.Even Fleischer,despite his own argumentto the contrary, cannot really avoid this implication,since he concedes that Marx's nomological approachtreats human behavior as lawlike and determined,at least
16. Ibid., 29-31. 17. Ibid., 33. For the original passage in Marx, see The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York, 1978), 294-298. 18. Ibid., 33-34. Again for the original passage in Marx, see Tucker, ed., 300.

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under capitalism, while his pragmatological approach treats history as always nothing but the outcome created by individual and collective human actions. And, given the many references in Marx to the power of impersonal economic and social forces which render contrary human action either useless or irrelevant, it may well be that the incompatibility is far greater than Fleischer admits. Consider, for example, the well-known sentence from the 1859 Preface in which Marx asserts that the "relations of production . . . correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces."19 Cohen has argued that this, along with several other key Preface sentences, offers convincing evidence that Marx held a "primacy thesis," that is, that "the nature of the productive relations of a society is explained by the level of development of its productive forces." As I have argued elsewhere, Cohen's contention is persuasive for the Preface, though not necessarily for Marx's other writings.20But if this is so, then Marx did hold, in 1859, at least a weak form of productive-force determinism, which clearly undercuts a pragmatological approach to history. I say "weak form" because Cohen does not deny that Marx provides for some reciprocal influence of productive relations on productive forces. Nonetheless, there are points in the Preface in which even this qualification does not appear to be observed. "The bourgeois relations of production," Marx declares, "are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production. . . At the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. The social formation brings, therefore [!], the prehistory of human society to a close.' If such views are most forcefully and carefully asserted in the Preface, they are also often apparent in other texts. In the section of the Grundrisse, for example, in which Marx discusses machinery and automation, he observes that "the worker's activity . . . is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker's consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself."22Not only does this suggest that the worker's behavior is entirely determined from without, it also at least implies, with its references to machinery and science, that such determinism would operate in all industrial and not merely capitalist societies. Moreover, as Gouldner has pointed out, Marx not only frequently referred to the "inexorability of capitalism's
19. Tucker, ed., 4.
20. See Cohen, Marx's Theory of History, 134, and my review of Cohen, History and

Theory 19 (1980), 197-198. 21. Tucker, ed., 5.

22. Ibid., 279.

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'pitiless laws,'" but he also sometimes maintained that the entire course of history is determined by "material conditions" and that the "natural phases of evolution" which they set simply cannot be overstepped.23 This, of course, is only a small sample of the evidence which could be cited. Yet it suffices to indicate how very radically Marx could sometimes state the assumptions of his nomological approach. It may well be, as I have already suggested, that the pragmatological and nomological approaches represent two different versions of (or "accents" on) a theory of historical materialism. But they are sharply inconsistent versions, and both are at odds with Marx's earlier anthropological approach. To attempt to reduce these differences to schematic formulation, I would say that the anthropological and nomological approaches share a propensity for determinism (more metaphysical in the first instance, more sociological in the second), which the pragmatological rejects; that the pragmatological and nomological share an empirical emphasis, as against the metaphysical concern with "universal meaning" in the anthropological; and finally, that the anthropological and pragmatological share a human-centeredness, which contrasts with the nomological predisposition toward larger collective forces.
II

The 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse represents a fourth such view, one just as distinct as the others, but less given to comparison with them. Even summary characterization of the view is difficult. For the focus here is not on depicting, or constructing a model of, the historical process itself, but on articulating historiographical underpinnings.24 Never before and never after this text was Marx so intensely concerned with the relationship of history as the events themselves, to history as the art or science of writing about them. The historiographic view he expresses clearly bears on the theory of historical materialism in interesting ways, but it also goes well beyond it. To see what is distinctive about this text, we may begin with what Marx Says here about his relationship to Hegel. In most of the other writings in which Marx comments on this relationship, he does so in terms of the idealistmaterialist opposition, or some closely related opposition like state-civil society or thought-praxis. The terms of discussion here are not unrelated, but the point of departure is quite different. Hegel, Marx claims, has failed to grasp the logic of historical inquiry. Historical reconstruction and the historical events as they originally occurred are simply not homologous, as Hegel naively assumed. We must start instead from the recognition that the
23. Gouldner, Two Marxisms, 223, 66. 24. This is both continually evident and at one point explicit in the text. See Carver, ed., Karl Marx, 83.

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real differs from our appropriation of the real. A rough paraphrase of Marx's opening argument in the Introduction's third section will indicate how and why this is so.25 Suppose our object is to grasp the nature of modern political economy. We may then be tempted to write what amounts to a history of the bourgeois mode of production. To do this we may think it appropriate to begin with population, a "concrete concept." But, in fact, this may well lead us astray. For we are then apt to make the mistake, which Marx takes to be that of the "seventeenth-century economists," of simply analyzing population, that is, breaking it down into simpler concepts like the classes of which it is composed and then, in turn, into capital, wage-labor, and so forth. Yet to end there would be to leave the main job of understanding undone. For the still more important task, as Marx credited the "eighteenth-century economists" with having perceived, is one of synthesis. The relations among all the simple concepts must be grasped in order that the rich ("concrete") totality - population as a whole - can be fully reconstructed. Hegel, who had studied the eighteenth-century economists, had no problem with the method of synthesis; indeed, he was undoubtedly its greatest philosophical exponent. His error was not in method per se, but in a naive application of method. Hegel, Marx believed, falls into the illusion of understandingthe real as the result of self-summarizing, self-engrossing,self-motivatingthinking, whereas the method of ascending from the abstractto the concrete is merely the way for thinking to appropriatethe concrete, to reproduceit as mental concrete. However, this is in no way the process of originationof the concrete itself."26 Hegel's dialectic is simultaneously a method and a description of the "origination of the concrete itself." But such a formulation, for Marx, confuses the movement from abstract to concrete which is "abstract" (in the everyday sense of being simply a "mental concrete" or thought reconstruction "in the head") with the movement from abstract to concrete which is "concrete" (that is, the actual concrete itself). The distinction is crucial. For while the logical development of a thought-whole always proceeds from abstract to concrete (or, roughly, from simple to complex and mediated), the development of the actual concrete sometimes follows this pattern but sometimes does not. Thus, to recall Marx's examples, the historical movement from possession to property, and from money to capital, have exhibited the simple-tocomplex pattern in all historical cases up to now. However, as Inca civilization demonstrates, complex economic forms such as "cooperation" or a "devel25. What follows is not intended to compete with or to challenge Carver's excellent and much fuller commentary in Karl Marx, but only to advance a particular argument. 26. Ibid., 73.

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oped division of labor" have sometimes existed before simpler forms like the reversepattern. money,thus producing Partly because of such reversals,we cannot fruitfullyreconstructhistory in its forwardmotion, as Hegel does, but must proceed,in effect, backwards. "In the anatomyof man there is a key to the anatomy of the ape," Marx writes in an oft-quotedline, yet one cannot reliablymove from ape to man. evoluMoreover, there are other reasons for rejectingany straightforward tionary approach.Theoreticalcategories always have their origin in some specific mode of production.Within this mode of productionthey are internallyrelatedto all othercategories.It follows that it would be uncriticalto assume that they remain the same in later modes of production,where the elements to which they are internallyrelated may be very different.The categoryof labor meansone thingin feudal society, quite anotherin capitalist society. The feudal mode of production,of course, need not disappearentirely befrom all capitalistsocieties.A social formationmay be called "capitalist" not always will this mode yet production, mode of cause this is its dominant This fact offers still anotherreason for proceeding be the only one present.27 from man to ape. A categorymay change,even thoughthe other elementsto whichit is internallyrelatedappearunchanged,because the mode of production to which it belongs moves from a dominantto a subordinate,or from to a dominantpositionwithinsociety. a subordinate Marx concludes from this that the order of succession of the categories which they have to one anotherin shouldbe "determined by the relationship modern bourgeois society," a relationshipwhich is "exactly the reverse of with natureor that which thatwhichappearsas theirsuccessionin accordance Yet two caveats to the order of their historicaldevelopment."28 corresponds are in order.To say that the methodof synthesismust take its initialbearings from the contemporarysocial formation, and must therefore proceed in On the contrary, fashion,is not to say that it is unhistorical.29 reversehistorical the method has been so constructedprecisely in order to render it more and error. Far from properlyhistorical,to rid it of historical simplification in terms of genesis and denyingthe importanceof a social understanding that to grasptheir real natureone must proceed Marxis arguing development, backwardstoward origin and not forwardsfrom it. Paradoxically,there is no concretestartingpoint for gainingknowledgeabout genesis and developmentotherthanwhat presentlyexists.
27. Ibid., 74. Antonio Gramsci would later express this idea in a more full-blown archaeological metaphor. See the Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Q. Hoare and P. Nowell Smith (New York, 1971), 324. 28. Carver,ed., 81. 29. Carver also briefly makes this point (151), but not, in my judgment, strongly enough. It is Hegel not Marx who is insufficientlyhistorical.

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Secondly, to say that the method of synthesis is merely a method, and that the stages through which historical reality and scientific thought unfold may be quite distinct from (even the opposites of) one another, is not necessarily to claim a dualism of matter and mind, or world and thought. Nowhere in this text does Marx deny that all thought (including that concerning proper historical method) is connected to praxis.30As we will see shortly, however, he does seek to establish a more complex relationship between them than he had in earlier writings. What, then, are the implications of this methodological critique of Hegel? I consider three to be especially significant. First, and perhaps most striking, Marx seems to be suggesting that there is no "logic" immanent in the totality of historical events themselves, no single and necessary pattern of historical development from primitive to "higher" forms of civilization. The only reason in history is the reason in historical writing. Of course, it remains possible to devise a series of stages of historical development through which particular societies appear to have moved up to the present, and one may be able to offer some qualified kinds of generalizations on this basis. But all such analysis is radically dependent on one's present standpoint. Hints about man may be found in the ape only if man is already understood. It follows that as man comes to be understood differently, because of the continual reconstitution of the present, we may find new hints in the past and reshape our dialectical visions accordingly. Three hundred years from now, men may find it more plausible and interesting to state history's overall dialectical movement not as ancient-Christian-modern or feudalism-capitalism-socialism, but as naturalsocial and earthbound-interplanetary. The two other implications are already apparent from this one. On the one hand, Marx breaks decisively with the linear, evolutionary conception of time so central to the Hegelian world-view (and complemented there only by the idea of an "eternal present").31 For Marx, not only may societies develop according to very different temporal logics, but men in different modes of production may themselves conceive of time, and develop practices involving time, which vary markedly from one another. Historical writing must take this into account and cannot simply impose a single scale.32 On the other hand, Marx here is clearly embracing Hegel's "owl of Minerva," a gesture he
30. Indeed, there are points in which this is affirmed.See ibid., 79. 31. On this point, at least, it seems to me that Althusser has been right. See Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, transl. B. Brewster (New York, 1970), 94-96. 32. Marx seems to have had this firmly in mind when writing Capital. Those who choose to stress the "odyssey" metaphor as the parallel underlying structure of Capital and Hegel's Phenomenology should qualify their view in this light. See, for example, Karel Kosik, Dialectics of the Concrete, 110-112, and Jean Hyppolite, "On the Structure
and Philosophical Presuppositions of Marx's Capital," in Studies oil Marx and Hegel, ed.

and transl. J. O'Neill (New York, 1969), 126-149.

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does not make, so far as I know, in any of his other texts.33 Though the necessitarian aura of its Hegelian formulation is lacking, Marx seems to be committed still more radically than Hegel to a conception of historical presentism. Together these implications add up to an historical vision strikingly at variance with what Marx says elsewhere, and with what is usually thought to be what he believed.34Certainly he is never farther from an anthropological view of history as the "progressive realization of a human essence," even if the man-ape metaphor gives the idea of history as a "process of humanization" an unusual, reverse twist. Marx is emphatic in 1857 that the dialectic is a method, nothing more. Moreover, the idea of the radical dependence of the category of time on specific modes of production, and the nonevolutionary, discontinuous temporal perspective this opens up, is also partially at odds with the pragmatological view of history. For while pragmatological history is essentially situational and largely devoid of teleological trappings, Marx does proceed in The German Ideology to draw generalizations about successive modes of production in a straightforward evolutionary manner. Finally, the idea that historical knowledge is radically bound by our present standpoint would seem to be directly at odds not only with nomological conceptions of history that predict the future on the basis of historical "laws," but with the still more common and deeply ingrained tendency of Marx's thought to envision at least the large outlines of a future beyond capitalism. Yet before we proceed to consider, in the final section of this paper, what the relationships among Marx's four histories might be, we need to say more about two of the central distinctions of the Introduction; namely, those between mental concrete (or concrete-for-thought) and actual concrete (or the real), and between thought and "practical-mental" activity (praxis). The first of these distinctions needs less discussion than the second, for it is widely recognized that Marx makes a distinction between mental concrete and -actual concrete, and that this distinction is fundamental to his position. We have seen that his critique of Hegel depends on it. By the same token, I do not think there is any warrant for believing Marx intended an ontological dualism. Althusser goes much too far when he asserts that "the real is one thing . . . , thought about the real is another." To maintain, as he does,
33. Seigel has put the point this way: "This conclusion [that the simplest abstraction only achieves practical truth in modern society] gave an extra twist to one of Hegel's famous metaphors. The owl of Minerva was a night bird; only at the end of day could her special eyes see clearly" (Marx's Fate, 326). I am not sure, however, that there is really any "new twist" here since the modern continually redefines itself, and we have by no means arrivedat any true "end of day." 34. For the contrary claim, see Zelen', Logic of Marx, 179, who, however, does not offer much argumenton its behalf.

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that "thought about the real and this real" is only a "relation of knowledge" and "not a real relation," is less an anti-empiricism than a sterile scholasticism.35 Marx definitely takes theoretical knowledge as a knowledge of the actual concrete and, as such, an aspect of reality. Indeed, we have already seen that all mental categories are specific to a particular mode of production and dependent on reality in this sense.36 In advanced capitalism, moreover, theoretical knowledge is one of the most fundamental productive forces.37 What Marx means to suggest with this distinction is that scientific thought properly conducted ought not to model itself uncritically after the historical development of the actual concrete. The concrete-for-thought which proper science is can therefore be analytically distinguished from the actual concrete. But this is above all a weapon against Hegel and the idealists. There is no reason to think that Marx intended the distinction as a denial of the real relation of theory and practice, of theory and material reality, or of science and society.38 There is some evidence, however, that Marx did intend a distinction between "thought" and "practical-mental appropriation." "The whole, as it appears in the head as a thought-whole, is a product of the thinking head which appropriates the world in the only mode possible for it, a mode which is different from the artistic, religious, and practical-mental appropriation of that world."39 As Carver reads this sentence, he finds a "contrast between thought unaccompanied by action (e.g. working out logical relations) and practical activities involving forethought (e.g. 'taking in' the facts of a practical situation). "40 This seems a plausible reading at first sight, but it is not, I think, exactly what Marx intended. For "thought" as well as "practical-mental" activity involves a "taking in" or appropriation of the world. "Thought" is neither conducted in a private language nor, strictly speaking, is it merely dreamed up or "worked out."
35. Althusser, Reading Capital, 87. See also his For Marx, 183-186. For a sharp critique of this view, see Pier Aldo Rovatti, Critica e scientificita in Marx (Milan, 1973), especially 11 and 28. 36. See Marx in Carver, ed., 78.
37. On this point, see Melvin Rader, Marx's Interpretation of History, 27-34.

38. For a similar position, which, however, stops short of asserting that the mental concrete may function as an aspect of reality, see Kain, 298 and 307-308. It seems to me quite unlikely, as Kain asserts, that Marx believed - in the Grundrisse or anywhere else - that scientific theory plays no role in the actual concrete. If this were true, Marx's whole political and theoretical enterprise as well as his personal raison d'etre would make little sense. 39. Carver, ed., 73. 40. Ibid., 134. Althusser attempts to read such sentences in terms of a distinction between the "productionof knowledge" and "knowledge effects." He insists on the absolute separation of the latter from the former, just as he insists on the absolute division of mental and actual concrete. Such Manichean divisions, however, have less to do with anything Marx said or meant than with Althusser's own idiosyncratic desire to establish the purity of "science"in terms of its radical separationfrom the external world.

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A more plausible reading of the sentence would have to focus on the concept of appropriation. There are, we might venture, at least two modes of appropriating the world. In one mode, we are concerned only to accomplish some particular project or practical task. Our thinking is instrumentally related to that task and, thus, situation-specific. It is apt soon to become irrelevant, forgotten, or lost (that is, not transcribed onto an objective record). If it is retained, it is likely to be recorded in some purely documentary way (as architectural plans, inventory statements, receipts, and so on). I shall call this simple appropriation. In the other mode, we are never merely concerned with instrumental action. We will be engaged in a task or practical activity, but our thinking will not be confined to what is at hand but will be aimed at putting what is at hand into some larger perspective or framework. It is thus not apt to become quickly irrelevant, and it may well be remembered and/or recorded. Moreover, such records will probably be more than mere documents. They will embody some "worklike" aspects which will leave them open to continual reinterpretation. Appropriation in this second sense, then, has a much more complex type of temporality built into it.41 I shall refer to it as complex appropriation. The difficulty with this reading is that its distinction between modes of appropriation does not correspond exactly to the two halves of the sentence in Marx's text. Artistic and religious appropriations of the world are usually not merely instrumental, situation-specific, and documentary in character. Nor would there seem to be any reason why the artifacts and documents of simple appropriation should not later be subjected to a complex interpretation or "thought." Yet I think the reading can be made plausible with one further stipulation. Appropriation, Marx seems to be saying, can be not only simple or complex, but also first-order or second-order. First-order or original appropriation is practical activity proper, whether simple or complex. Second-order appropriation is "thought" about first-order appropriation. Such "thought" can involve original praxis of the simple type, but is still more likely to involve originally complex praxis, which, as it were, invites further "thought." Thought, then, is connected with practical-mental activity but at one remove from it. This interpretation may seem somewhat grandiose, given its origin in a single, and perhaps passing, remark. Yet I believe that it is supported by Marx's famous discussion of Greek art and epic with which the 1857 Introduction closes.42 Marx notices there that "high" or "great" forms of art do not correspond to the most recent societies (which are presumed to be at least
41. For'the distinction between the "documentary" and the "worklike"being employed here, see Dominick La Capra, "Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts," History and Theory 19 (1980), 245-276. A remarkably similar discussion is also to be
found in Kosik, Dialectics of the Concrete, 79-80.

42. Carver,ed., 84-87.

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potentially "highest" or "greatest" in most everything else). Rather they are above all characteristic of ancient Greek society, which remains for us "the norm and unreachable standard." The standard is unreachable because certain forms of art (with both "great" and "low" exemplars) can exist only at a generally "low" level of social development. Art is grounded in a perception of nature, which is based in turn on a particular mode of production. The greatness of Greek art depends on its complex interrelation with the world of Greek mythology, a mythology supported by the agricultural economy of the day, but which is no longer possible once the domination of nature is very far beyond this. We are left, then, with a paradox. For it is precisely the organic relation of artistic expression to a determinate mode of production which accounts for the loose and uneven relation between artistic and other human achievements that we see when we consider human history as a whole. Of course, in a sense, there is no reason to single out artistic expression here. It may well be that many other forms of human activity develop according to logics very different from that of the domination of nature. Marx presumably puts the contrast as he does because he takes it for granted that in all other respects besides the artistic, society is undergoing "progress," if not precisely in a linear form.43 Marx indicates in any case that the close relation of art and mode of production is straightforward and unproblematic, and he nowhere disagrees with this in other texts. "The difficulty," he remarks, comes when we realize that Greek art and epic "still give us artistic enjoyment and serve in a certain relationship as the norm and unreachable standard."44And it is his answer to this perplexity which suggests to me that he was operating with an implicit distinction between first- and second-order appropriation, or between practicalmental activity and the reception and reappropriation of it in thought. A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does not the naivete of a child delight him, and must he not himself strive to reproduce its truth again at a higher level? Does not the character of every epoch revive true to its nature in the nature of the child? Why should not the historical childhood of mankind,where mankind is displayed at its most beautiful, exercise an eternal charm as a never-recurringstage? There are naughty children and precocious children. Many of the ancient peoples belong in that category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm of their art for us is not in contradictionwith the undeveloped stage of society on which it grew. Rather, [the charm] is the result of the art and is inseparablyconnected with the fact that the immature social conditions under which it originated,and alone could originate,can never recur.45 We can no longer engage in a first-order appropriation of nature as the Greeks did in making Greek epic and art. But this art invites reflection because of
43. Marx refers directly to "the concept of progress"in Carver, ed., 84. 44. Ibid., 86. 45. Carver, ed., 86-87. The relation between this passage and recent "reception aesthetics"is worthy of a separateessay and cannot be commented on here.

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its complex and "worklike" character. We are able, through reflection upon it, to recognize its greatness and to find in it a charm which arises precisely because we cannot create it ourselves. Presumably, this is true as well of our appreciation of Greek philosophy, which takes its stand against myth in a way no longer alive for us. We might go further to say that this is also what is involved in every exercise of historical imagination, even that involved in Hegel's "original" type. Historians do not literally make history. They reflect on original praxis in order to reappropriate it and, in so doing, to create some new "thought" about it.
III

Historical writing, then, in Marx's 1857 view, is one example of a particular mode of appropriating the world. It involves the reflective reconstruction of original praxis as mediated by the present standpoint of the historian. The logic of history's development is not analogous to abstract mental logic, and we cannot grasp it with a straightforward evolutionary approach. Rather we must proceed backwards from the relationships we establish among the categories within modern bourgeois society to their different relationships in earlier modes of production. It is a cautious, historiographically self-conscious approach, and I will use the word "historiographical"to designate it. Alternatively, one might label the view "presentist," but I prefer the more neutral and less descriptive term in order to indicate the not-quite-directly-comparable nature of this view as against the ones earlier considered. The question to which we may now return is how to think about the relationship of Marx's four histories to one another. When one reflects on the four together, one of the first points to become clear is that the anthropological view seems to stand apart from the other three. However considerable their differences, the other three all share the empirical-descriptive vocabulary of historical materialism, in contrast with the more metaphysical and essentialist vocabulary of the anthropological approach.46 I am inclined to follow Fleischer, Althusser, and others who have noted the sharp turn in Marx's social and historical thinking between 1844 and 1846, though I am not persuaded that Marx abandoned the anthropological view altogether after 1844. The reappearance of the theme of alienation and even the concept of species-being in the Grundrisse is indicative of the attractiveness the anthropological outlook appears to have had for him, perhaps for the support and eschatological vividness it gave to his politics. Such themes, however, do not appear in his post-1844 discussions of history and historical writing.
46. Of course, Marx continued to use a concept of essence and the appearance-essence relationship in his later writings, yet this later usage was much less metaphysical than the earlier ones. For good discussions of this difference, see Kain, 309-310, and Zelen', 21.

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The following discussion will therefore be confined to the relationships among the pragmatological, historiographical, and nomological variants of historical materialism. Unlike the earlier transition from anthropological to pragmatological, the one from pragmatological to historiographical may not appear to represent a "break" in the sense that the latter view implies the falsity or fundamental inadequacy of the earlier one. Not only is the historical-materialist vocabulary the same, but also the 1857 view remains fundamentally pragmatological, since the events of history are still in general conceived as the concrete outcomes of the actions of individuals and groups. And, up to a point, one could argue that the 1857 Introduction represents not a challenge to, but a completion of, the project of The German Ideology, even if the direction it takes could hardly be anticipated from a reading of the earlier text. For Marx in 1845-1846 was only just beginning to sort out what he thought about history itself, and simply did not choose to say much about his method of investigation. Consider, however, the following passage from The German Ideology: Viewed apart from real history . . . abstractionshave in themselves no value of historicalmaterial, whatsoever.They can only serve to facilitatethe arrangement to indicate the sequence of its separatestrata.But they by no means afforda recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimmingthe epochs of history. On the contrary, our difficultiesbegin only when we set about the observation and the - the real depiction- of our historical material, whether of a past arrangement epoch or of the present. The removal of these difficultiesis governed by premises which it is quite impossibleto state here, but which only the study of the actual life-process and the activity of the individualsof each epoch will make evident.47 When Marx says that he has additional methodological premises "which it is quite impossible to state here," he might seem to be acknowledging the gap which the 1857 Introduction later fills. Yet the clause following this one, and the force of the passage as a whole, make clear that this would be a misleading interpretation. Marx is here asserting that historical investigations have no need for prior methodological stipulations. The only appropriate generalizations and abstractions are those which follow from empirical investigation, which seems to require no special orientation at the outset to ensure its proper conduct. As Marx puts the point in a sentence earlier in the same paragraph as those just cited, "When reality is [properly] depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence." The reality of social relations can be deciphered, apparently, from the surface of the events themselves.48 The contrast with the historiographical outlook could hardly be sharper.
47. Tucker, ed., 155. 48. Ibid. This view is stated in many respects still more sharply in Marx's 1847 polemic against Proudhon. See The Poverty of Philosophy, ed. C. P. Dutt and V. Chattopadhyaya (New York, n.d.), 43, 87-107.

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Not only does Marx actuallypursuewhat amountsto a straightforward evolutionaryapproach in The GermanIdeology,but he also gives a methodological justification for such an approachwhich is quite the opposite of his train of thoughtin 1857. There, as we have seen, Marx is intenselypreoccupiedwith all the various ways in which investigatorscan be deceived by the surface appearanceof events, and it is in this spiritthat he puts forwardhis methodological directives.When one adds to this the philosophicalbasis of those - historicalreconstruction directives ratherthan a as a concrete-for-thought of the real - one gets a sense of just how far he has simple representation traveled. While an explanationof these differencesinvolves considerations of intellectualbiographywhich are outside present bounds, the differences clearly have somethingto do with his years of disenchantment after the failures of 1848, in which he certainlyreflectedon how deceptive,even illusory, surfaceappearances can be.49 and historiographicalWhat, then, of the pragmatological-nomological nomological relationships?I have already argued, relative to the former, that the objectivisticpossibilitieswhich the nomologicalview fully exploits are alreadyembeddedin The GermanIdeology. The two views are closely related attempts at expoundinghistoricalmaterialismand cannot be neatly separated.At the same time, I have also suggestedthat the two variantsare definitelyat odds with one another,especiallyin their respectiveunderstandings of historicalagency. Sensing this tension, many of Marx's recent interpretershave attemptedto explain it away, and their efforts have not been altogetherfruitless.Thomas, for example, seems correct to argue that, read
in context, Marx's famous reference to "laws . . . working with iron neces-

sity towardsinevitableresults,"is more a trumpetcall for the overcomingof German complacencythan an evidence of determinismor fatalism.50 And those who have tried to show that Marx sometimesconjugated"laws"non- that he intendedthem to be understoodas "tendencies" positivistically and - can certainly find allowed for the appearanceof historical "accidents" passagesto supportsuch a reading.51 But it is also undeniable,as arguedearlier,that Marx sometimesstates his views in highly nomological and deterministicterms. To acknowledgethat the view may be found in weakerformscannotbe to deny that it may also be found in strongerones. Why he used the strongerforms is a difficult,perhaps an impossible question to answer. I would suggest, however, that the Habermas-Wellmer thesis earliersketchedmakes a good deal of sense of the discrepancies between The GermanIdeology and the 1859 Preface.For it is
49. See the discussion of this point in Seigel, Marx's Fate, 302-304, 316-328. 50. Paul Thomas, "Marx and Science," Political Studies 24 (March 1976), 17. For the passage in Marx, see Tucker, ed., 296. 51. See, for example, Kain, 301-302, and Kosik, 1, 32 n.4, and 106-112.

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precisely by reducing praxis to labor as instrumental action that Marx could most easily resolve for himself the tension between the vocabulary of praxis and needs on the one hand, and that of productive forces and relations on the other. Yet it is here that one of the most important reasons for reading the 1857 Introduction becomes dramatically manifest. Habermas and Wellmer, who pay little attention to this text, have failed to notice how closely the two modes of appropriation distinguished there correspond to Habermas's distinction between instrumental and communicative action. Central to Marx's 1857 discussion of Greek art is the clear implication that such works cannot be merely the results of instrumental action. If this were so, it would be difficult to understand how they could still appeal to us. The fact that they do is an indication of the complex appropriation on which they were founded and, thus, the dynamic temporality immanent in them. They are, to use Hannah Arendt's vocabulary, "works," as against the artifacts or other residues of "labor" which tend not to be very long-lasting.52 For the Marx of 1857, the complex and second-order appropriations upon which all true "thought" is based are never explicable except in terms that transcend the instrumental aspects of original praxis; that have to do, in other words, with reflection. Here at least Marx did not reduce praxis to instrumental action, and he displayed a subtle sense of the varieties of human appropriations. Why then was this subtle sense not more manifest in 1859 and afterwards? This too is a difficult question about which I can offer only a very tentative suggestion. Several recent commentators have attempted to explain the relation of the 1857 Introduction to the 1859 Preface, but none has hit on what strikes me as the most plausible explanation.53 When Marx writes in the latter text that "I am omitting a general introduction which I had jotted down because on closer reflection any anticipation of results still to be proved appears to me to be disturbing, and the reader who on the whole desires to follow me must ascend from the particular to the general," he is obviously referring to the Introduction of 1857.54 And the reader who follows the first two sections of that Introduction can hardly fail to appreciate what Marx means by the "anticipation of results still to be proved." His opening sentence announces that the appropriate analytical "starting point is naturally the socially determined production [carried on] by individuals."55He then proceeds repeatedly
52. For a discussion of the relation between Habermas and Arendt, see my "Beyond Reform or Revolution: Notes on Political Education in Gramsci, Habermas, and Arendt," Theory and Society 6 (1978), 440-454. 53. See Rafael Echeverria, "Critique of Marx's 1857 Introduction," Economy and Society 7 (1978), 333-366, and the reply by Terrell Carver, "Marx's 1857 Introduction," Economy and Society 9 (1980), 197-203, with reply by Echeverria,204-217. 54. Tucker, ed., 3. 55. Carver,ed., 47.

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to assert this primacy - as against consumption, distribution, exchange, and so forth - while actually demonstrating the internal relatedness of all such categories. "Production," he says, "is not only immediately consumption and consumption production; yet production is only a means for consumption and consumption a purpose for production. . . . Each of the two creates the other as it is carried out; each is carried out as the other." After such a demonstration, pursued at great length, it seems odd and artificial to be met with yet another claim that "production is the real starting point." Evidently Marx was - or became aware of this artificiality.56By 1859, he seems to have concluded that he had strayed too far from his earlier tendency not to establish abstractions and generalizations prior to empirical investigation itself. While he does not actually revert to the earlier empiricism, and while the presentation of Capital does, for the most part, conform to the ideas about investigation and exposition sketched in 1857, Marx does seem to have forgotten about, if not actually rejected, many of the other theoretical formulations of 1857, such as the distinction of thought and practical-mental activity. In any case, the tone of most of his work after 1859 is much more like that of 1846 than of 1857.57 This is an important point, one which has gone virtually unnoticed in recent studies. All too often such studies assume uncritically that all of Marx's mature economic writings must have been based on a single historical and historiographical outlook.58 No doubt this assumption derives, at least in part, from the longstanding tendency among Marx interpreters to comprehend his intellectual development in terms of "early" and "late" phases. Whatever changes there were in his views are understood to be between phases and not within them. Yet, as we have seen here, the actual development of Marx's historical views was considerably more complex. Prior to 1845, Marx did hold the "early" Feuerbachian position that we have referred to as the anthropological approach. Signs that this was being discarded, however, were already apparent in The Holy Family. By the time of The German Ideology, the very different "early" view, here labeled pragmatological, was quite full-blown. This view remained central to the writings of the next several years and is nowhere contradicted for a whole decade, though the nomological language with which it uneasily coexisted from 1845 onward did occasionally overshadow it. In 1857, however, a methodological view of history was articulated
56. Ibid., 62-63. 57. The Notes on Adolph Wagner is a significantexception here. See ibid., 179-219. 58. Such studies have come in two major forms: those which assimilate all the "late" work to that of 1857 and pay no sustained attention at all to Marx's nomological tendencies, and those so preoccupied with the latter (especially as articulated in the 1859 Preface) that everything else gets assimilated to them. For examples of the first tendency, see Kain, "Marx's Dialectic Method," and Seigel, Marx's Fate; for the latter, see Cohen, Marx's Theory of History, and Shaw, Marx's Theory of History.

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which, while sharing many of the principles and categories later designated "historical materialist," differed markedly from both the pragmatological and nomological approaches. By 1859, this view gave way to a nomological approach, which remained the dominant one from then on. Whether these four approaches can be correlated with four discrete phases of intellectual development is open to serious doubt and, in any case, is not a question which can be answered on the basis of Marx's historical views alone. But the manifest existence of these approaches does suggest the inadequacy of all the conventional interpretations, whether we think of those which stress continuity or those which posit some sort of simple early/late divide. Moreover, it suggests that those who have challenged the conventional interpretations - writers like Seigel, Kain, Habermas, Wellmer, and Gouldner - have not gone far enough. In conclusion, I would like to indicate briefly how the present results stand in relation to one other interpretation which has challenged not only the conventional understanding of Marx but of all other nineteenth-century historians as well. In his well-known Metahistory, Hayden White aims to unearth "the deep structure of the [nineteenth-century] historical imagination."59 To do so he draws on an imposing arsenal of structuralist and other philosophical and literary-critical tools: Vico's four tropes, Pepper's four world-hypotheses, Frye's four forms of emplotment, and Mannheim's four basic ideological positions. His hope is to show that all historians (and philosophers of history) must have recourse to a precritical paradigm which is generally poetic, and specifically linguistic, in nature. Thus, for example, Hegel is shown to have operated in accordance with a "synecdochic" trope, an "organic" mode of argument, a "comic" form of emplotment, and a "conservative" ideology, while De Tocqueville was "metonymic," "mechanistic," "tragic," and "radical." Such labels are sometimes qualified, usually well-supported, and invariably interesting. Marx, however, gives White special trouble. White recognizes the possibility of intellectual development in his subjects and often portrays it. Thus, "Tocqueville began in an effort to sustain a specifically Tragic vision of history and then gradually subsided into an Ironic resignation," while Michelet began in romance, moved through a tragic phase, and "came to rest" in a "mixture of sublimated Romanticism and overt Irony."60 On the matter of commitment to a trope, however, historians are not expected to develop, for the tropes represent the deepest (usually unconscious) ways of prefiguring the historical field. There will always be some "dominant tropological mode" in every historian.6' Thus Marx is repeatedly
59. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973), ix. 60. Ibid., 192. 61. Ibid., xi.

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declared to have "apprehended the historical field in the Metonymical mode."62 At one point, however, White concedes that Marx "attempted to combine the Synecdochic strategies of Hegel with the Metonymical strategies of the political economy of his time."63 In another place, he goes still further to assert that Marx "utilized two fundamentally different linguistic protocols, Metonymical on the one hand and Synecdochic on the other."64 Perhaps because the tensions and countervailing tendencies in Marx's view of history are unusually deep-seated, White shies away from entering into the disputes about his intellectual development.65 Rather than attempt to show how Marx's writings on history and historiography utilize now one form of argument, now another, White prefers to focus on the tensions immanent within particular writings. Thus he argues, for example, that The German Ideology, The Communist Manifesto, and the 1859 Preface are all characterized by similar combinations of organic (or dialectical) and mechanistic (or causal) modes of argument.66 In the case of the 1859 Preface, White makes the extremely unusual claim that Marx "conceived the processes of the Base of society mechanistically and the processes of the Superstructure
organistically.
"67

It is not my present purpose to take issue with White's interpretation of Marx. What I do wish to suggest is that the results of the present inquiry, when translated into White's terms, show an interesting and unexpected pattern. The anthropological approach is clearly "organic" in its mode of argument. The pragmatological seems to be "formist" in its empirical and more dispersive emphasis. The historiographic approach of 1857 is contextualist in its presentism, as well as much more ironic in both tone and substance than Marx's other historical writings.68Finally, the nomological approach is clearly mechanistic, or as mechanistic, at any rate, as Marx ever is. I have already expressed a sense of caution about portraying his intellectual development on the basis of these approaches, but tentatively at least, we might think of the overall pattern which emerges as follows. Marx first expressed his historical views in the organic mode of argument he inherited from Hegel and Feuerbach. He rebelled against this under Engels's influence in 1844-1845; the result was a polar opposite strategy of formism in which an alternate mechanistic vocabulary was submerged. By 1857, Marx was showing doubts about his new approach, and for a brief moment he embraced an ironical perspective and a contextualist strategy. But his impatiently revolutionary
62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. Ibid., 281. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 310. Ibid., 283. Ibid., 303-305, 306, 310-311, 327-328. Ibid., 286. Contextualismand irony are judged by White to have an "elective affinity."

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nature proved inconsistent with irony and contextualism, and he turned in his last phase to a more single-mindedly mechanistic interpretation of history than he had ever before adopted. There are, of course, elements of speculation, and perhaps of oversimplification, in this pattern as I have just reconstructed it. And although it has a certain logic, we should note that it is not the logic White usually finds when he uncovers tropological patterns. That logic moves instead from the formist, to the organic, to the mechanistic, to the contextualist. Yet whether Marx's development represents an important exception to the usual progression, or a reason to be suspicious of the existence of any such progression, is not a question to be dealt with here. It is perhaps not even a very important question. Clearly, White's categories offer an interesting fit with the development of Marx's historical views. If, in addition, they suggest that Marx's views of history recapitulate in a significant way the totality of possibilities open to all historical writing, then perhaps the question we should ask is what moral to draw from White's general conclusion about the historical imagination when we are thinking about Marx. "The aged Kant was right," concludes White, "we are free to conceive 'history' as we please, just as we are free to make of it what we will."69Though I do not think we should conclude that we are free to conceive Marx's intellectual development as we please, it may well be that, given the enormous range of possibilities for history which he himself entertained, we are closest to his historical spirit when we feel free to draw from it what we like and, in that sense, to make of it what we will. Emory University
69. Ibid., 433.