A textbook about the materialist conception of history certainly speaks to widely-held, long-harbored desires. I cannot judge whether this book fulfills this desire. I can only remark that it has come into being out of my endeavour to satisfy this need – a need that the teachers find as necessary as the pupils. My decades-long teaching with a diverse array of learners, including those who taught Marxist thought, as well as workers, intellectuals and students not directly involved in Marxist activity, and other groups, has enabled me to develop a focused perspective on the sociological and political meaning of Marxism and the theory of historical materialism, of which this is the first volume. And this teaching activity has not been restricted to the confines of my home in Vienna and in Austria. It has also led me to Germany, Denmark, Holland, Switzerland, and Czechoslovakia. As more or less in-depth, thought-provoking discussions ensued in all these meetings, an abundance of lively material was engendered from these encounters, where the many layers of meaning imparted by Marxism were exposed. Since these discussions ranged from those intellectuals highly versed in Marxism to those who had less knowledge, one will find many arguments taken up which those learned intellectuals will view as resolved, yet they must be taken up here because of the lack of clarity, failure of concepts, and the prejudices held by other intellectuals and laypersons. And even the many who think of themselves as knowledgeable already in the Marxist conceptual terminology are only too often guilty of holding concepts that require more thought as “self-evident”.
This book will suffer its own fate – as many will say that it offers “nothing new”. But this is not the goal of a textbook; it does not take up a theory, over eighty years old now since its establishment and seek to expand on it. It is sufficiently “new” if I succeed in ultimately releasing this theory from all the old and seemingly ineradicable misconceptions in which it is cloaked in ever new ways and bind it indissolubly with the perspectives of epistemological thought, still new for all too many people. That I take this approach is no surprise; for the past twenty-five years my work has been disseminated in university lectures, journals and books, as well as extended courses of instruction, so that the fundamental ideas of my interpretation Marxism have gradually established themselves across wide circles. In fact you can find the essential elements of the following text in my previous books (Causality and Teleology, 1904, Marx as a Thinker, 1908, and Marxist Problems, 1914). Of course, over the years my thought has become more worked out, from the epistemological perspective on one hand and from the sociological perspective on the other, arriving at a better conceptualization of political problems as well since the outbreak war, as it was only during and after the war that the full ramifications of Marxism in relation to societal-state development can be recognized.
The relationship of this book to my earlier work also explains why I only began working on this textbook rather late. For years, I have constantly been asked to write this book but always said no, because I had already said enough in my other books. One need only read these carefully and put it altogether. But that is not the everyday practice of most, as I have learned from certain wise critics especially. This is particularly true of those beginners who take up Marxist thought – workers and proletarian as well as academic youth. They cannot easily consolidate all my earlier writing. I would have preferred that someone else took on the task of systematically elaborating the key lines of thought I had already developed into a system of the materialist conception of history, but it fell to me.
One word on the style of my presentation. The cornerstone idea underpinning the whole work is to show that Marxism is not a sociology, it is the sociology. Naturally, that does not mean Marxism is the completion of sociology, especially since sociology has barely begun as a discipline. Marxism is the most significant and highest stage of the social scientific conception up to today. Indeed, in the light of this factual strength of Marxism, I might have chosen to present the content and meaning of the historical materialist conception of history without a single citation from Marx and Engels, as this radical approach would have definitively silenced the attack of most critics in saying that Marxism is nothing but the expression of party politics. I’d also avoid providing ammunition to those empty heads and malicious critics who see Marxists as mere worshippers of words. This process of using Marxist knowledge without Marxist words is already deployed by some academic authorities, who know how to heighten the effect in introducing new grandiloquent terminology. We hence witness the comical spectacle of these authors being highly praised by their colleagues for the same insights they fervently repudiated in Marx’s original words as the zenith of party-political ignorance. However, I cannot abstain from reference to Marx and Engels. As well as wanting to establish the authorship of many sociological insights that are already recognized today in many ways rests with Marx, I also need to show that my identification of causal sociology with Marxism is not merely my own capricious interpretation, as if it were “Adlerism” not “Marxism” as some have said, but that my interpretation is thoroughly suffused with the sense, and in most cases even the exact wording, of Marx and Engels. The citations alone, however, do not make my case. The citations are never the limit for what I show to be the line of its implications and methodological relevance. As I’ve explained, we should consider these numerous citations as the birth certificate of sociology. Marx and Engels were the discipline’s first significant compilers because as intellectuals and leaders of the proletariat, they did not need to flinch from its conclusions but were able to pursue social laws over and above the bourgeois world.
Many will regret that in individual points of theory I do not engage the entirety of the literature that has addressed these points. I, too, see this as an omission, but a necessary one to keep this compact, cogent textbook. Accordingly this omission doesn’t weigh heavily on me. In the literature concerning historical materialism, the same arguments occur again and again, only in new iterations, each of which I have more thoroughly tackled in my earlier writings. More clarity can be achieved by not overloading my discussion with the density of polemical literature. Moreover, at the conclusion of the second volume a thorough review of the literature will be given.3
Perhaps a justification must be given that in this first volume so much space is given to an examination of philosophical materialism. But it seems to me that it’s unavoidable for a textbook about the materialist conception of history to devote all the greater care and attention to articulating the relationships between Marxism and materialism, given that existing discussions by Marxists of historical materialism, for example those of G. Plekhanov, Karl Kautsky, Lenin and Bukharin, proceed from the inextricable dependence of each system of thought upon the other. The rash combining of Marxism with materialism is the chief culprit behind inherited fundamental misunderstandings of Marxism in its basic economic ideas. Even more, the missing critical separation between Marxism and materialism hinders the correct epistemological and methodological grasp of the essence of social science. Here’s it’s not only appropriate to note that social science cannot proceed using the concepts of natural science, that it is hence different to natural science, but that this difference can only be grasped through the uniqueness of the social matters of fact, only accessible by the epistemological process. It was thus necessary to more thoroughly investigate the materialist problematic as much as the epistemological one, and through this rigorous conceptual differentiation and prepare the ground for a fruitful discussion.
It might seem like this extended discussion of materialism and the perspective of epistemological idealism is a detour from our actual objectives. But in the final analysis, it’s about grasping the essence of Marxism in its theoretical particularity – unadulterated. That means differentiating it from all non-theoretical presentations of the problem, the metaphysical as well as the cultural-political kind. And this is not only a possible, but a necessary, realizable outcome in revealing the true character of Marxism, which will be explicated in the epistemological chapter. In this way, through the epistemological understanding of Marxism, the concept of science will be expanded, just as the almost exclusively natural scientific construction of the scientific concept before Marx was enriched by the social scientific perspective. Much is left to be desired in the conquest of the uncharted theoretical territory until this development of Marxist social science in its full significance is generally recognized, indeed, properly appreciated. Natural science has the technology and the means of societal life rationalized in its methodologies, but social science will enable social life itself to become more conscious, transforming it into a rational process. This book serves as a contribution towards the great work of this Marxist development of the new revolutionary science and its integration into the general consciousness. If I may conclude with this modest thought:
“In magnis voluisse sat est”: In having strived for great things, nothing can be in vain.
Max Adler
Vienna, August 1930
This bibliography was never provided. Only the first part of the second volume, completed in 1932, was published. The second part, completing the plan of the two volume textbook, was posthumously published in 1964 by Europa Verlag, under the editorship of Norbert Leser, titled Die Solidarische Gesellschaft [The Solidarity Society], Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1964. Among its concepts, it offers the Marxist conceptions of the forms of “sociation” which had existed in society, and would exist in the future socialist development of society, as well as a discussion of the emergence of class differences, the meaning of class warfare, an in-depth discussion of the dialectic, and a concluding chapter on Adler’s key epistemological concept of “the formal psychic” in the judgments of historical materialism. Evidently, Max Adler left no thorough bibliography to be published as an appendix. However, one can find such a listing of key texts, as Adler himself states, in his earlier books.