This book is one of several published in recent years dealing with issues in the philosophy of social science so basic as to call into question the very possibility of such a form of knowledge. It differs from most of these books in that it examines some of these issues with an eye to their appearance in the context of a particular theory, Marx’s critique of political economy. This reflects both my interest in this theory for its own sake, and my feeling that it is at least in part the absence of discussion of the problems raised by actual social theory that gives much philosophy of social science its peculiarly sterile flavour.
On the one hand, arguments for the impossibility of scientific study of one or another realm of phenomena are in general dubious. The development of new methods may always open hitherto closed areas to scientific analysis. On the other hand, proofs of the mere possibility of a science (as exemplified by Ernst Nagel’s defence of the social sciences in The Structure of Science) can be nearly as uninteresting. Marx’s Capital, meanwhile, contains the statement of a theory constructed on a sufficiently large scale to be comparable to interestingly general theories in other domains. It meets the main requirements for a scientific theory: on the formal side, it proposes a set of principles for the explanation of observable realities and the prediction of definite trends; it is falsifiable, though it is in fact quite well confirmed. This example, however, has only rarely been discussed in the literature of the philosophy of social science. To begin with, Marx’s work is not recognised by the mainstream of academic social science with respect to his own estimate of its importance: as a theory of capitalist accumulation and crisis. Even among those social scientists who style themselves radical or Marxist, the majority do not accept Marx’s own theory as an accurate representation of social reality. From the point of view of the philosophy of social science this is doubly unfortunate: not only because Marx’s work represents the outstanding example of a social theory, but also because it includes, as part of its basic framework of ideas, explicit attention to problems of interest to philosophers – while raising a new one: the curious inability of social theorists to accept the validity of Marx’s analysis of capitalism despite its remarkable scientific strength.
My own interest in the philosophical questions with which this book is concerned developed while teaching college courses on Capital. The greatest barrier to students’ understanding Marx’s ideas, I discovered, was their difficulty in seeing these ideas as formulated from a point of view outside of the academic disciplines of economics, sociology, or political science. The basis task I faced was to explain what Marx meant when he described his theory as a critique of political economy rather than as a contribution to economics. Explaining this involved discussing Marx’s conception of economics as not just a theory but a systematisation of ideas that help define as well as explain the forms of behaviour constituting capitalist social life.
In this way I was led to the classic anthropological problem of the relation between the cultural insider, the native for whom reality is defined by culturally developed forms of experience and thought, and the outsider, the scientific investigator who wishes both to grasp and to explain the native’s way of life. The problem is posed to the extent that there is conflict between the anthropologist’s and the native’s understanding of the latter’s world: what, if anything, can justify the scientist’s claim to provide an explanation of native customs superior to the native’s own, while doing justice to the role played by culture in the very construction of experience as well as in its comprehension?
I found it useful to introduce Marx’s anthropological treatment of his own culture with a short discussion of E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s analysis of Azande witchcraft beliefs and practices. Just as Evans-Pritchard attempted to explain Azande ideas and rituals in terms of their place in native social life, Marx wished to explain the continued faith in economics – despite its striking weakness as a science – displayed by the natives of his (and our) own culture in terms of the central role played in capitalist society by this system of ideas. This comparison proved helpful for my students; it led me to the questions, about the nature of scientific thinking and its relation to our everyday knowledge of social reality, and about the nature of that reality itself, discussed in this book.
While I believe that Marx’s theory provides a starting point from which these questions can be answered, the present essay is neither an introduction to nor a full-scale discussion of Marx’s conception of science and its realisation in his work.31 The basic question it confronts is an abstract one: how is scientific knowledge of social life possible? That an answer to this question does not merely depend on general philosophical considerations but requires reference to the particular historical circumstances of the development of social theory will emerge from simultaneous consideration of a sister question: why does such knowledge seem impossible, despite some two hundred years of intellectual effort? My argument, in a few words, is that the difficulties of the social sciences have been due not to the inherent resistance of social life to scientific explanation, but to the culturally determined inability of would-be social scientists to subject their own categories for social experience – those of capitalist society – to the cross-cultural comparison on which the possibility of scientific understanding of social life depends. It was by his ability to look at capitalism from the perspective of its eventual abolition that Marx succeeded both in explaining the limits of bourgeois social theory and in constructing a scientific alternative.
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Even so short a book as this one is a product of the intellectual work of many people besides the author. My thinking on the topics here explored reflects years of discussion with other members of the group Root & Branch, and especially with Elizabeth Jones Richardson. By inviting me to teach with him, Fred Moseley made possible the shared study of Capital in the course of which the comparison of economics and witchcraft first occurred to me. Hilary Putnam supervised the dissertation from which this book has developed, in the process kindly discouraging me from chasing a number of philosophical red herrings. Rochelle Feinstein and Ilse Mattick read the penultimate draft with care; their suggestions led to many improvements. Finally, anyone who knows his writings will recognise how much I owe to my father, Paul Mattick. From him I learned not only how to understand Marx but why it is important to do so: that the point of understanding the world really is to change it.
The book is dedicated to my teacher and friend Frans Brüggen.
[For a discussion, more than introductory but less than complete, see my Theory as Critique (2018), especially Chs. 2 and 11.]