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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Among the very many questions we might wish to ask of any particular science, two of them concern the nature of the objects of the science and the character of the laws which describe the behaviour of those objects. What I wish to do is to raise those two questions about historical materialism. That is, I want to ask what it is that one studies in Capital for example, and in what ways of behaving does the nomic or lawlike behaviour of those objects consist. Both are ontological questions of a sort, and, in particular, questions about what I call social ontology, although it is usual to restrict the term ‘ontological’ to the former question alone. The first question asks about the objects to whose existence historical materialism is committed; the second asks about the characteristic ways of behaving of those objects.
1 Marx, Karl, Preface to a Contribution to A Critique of Political Economy (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 21.Google Scholar
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5 I take methodological individualism, in so far as it is an ontological doctrine, to be the thesis that statements which appear to refer to any social things can be translated without remainder into statements which actually refer to material individuals and ascribe to those individuals social properties. Methodological individualism in this sense seems to me to be a very plausible doctrine. I think that the poor repute into which it has fallen in Marxist circles can be explained by its conflation with a far less plausible thesis, that statements which appear to refer to social entities can be translated without remainder into statements which actually refer to material individuals and ascribe to those individuals non-social (physical or material) properties. Thus the interesting division between methodological individualists and holists, at least on ontological rather than explanatory questions, seems to me to be over the question of whether there are social entities or only social properties of material entities. Either we double the kinds of objects or the kinds of properties in the world. For my part, I prefer to keep my cosmic furniture simple and to complicate only the colours I can paint it, but this seems to be the sort of ontological question that can be decided only by tracing out all the metaphysical and epistemological consequences each of the two choices has in philosophy. There is a strange, unremarked tension within much of Marxist theory between materialism and a predilection for methodological holism. Whatever precisely materialism is, one would have assumed it to be anti-Platonic, sceptical of the possibility of non-material things. Yet, methodological holism appears to be a variety of Platonism in its ontological commitments. One would have supposed that materialism and methodological individualism went together.
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7 ‘This system presents everywhere an obstacle to the real capitalist mode of production and goes under with its development’ (Capital, III (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), 334).Google Scholar
8 ‘Like all its predecessors, the capitalist process of production proceeds under definite material conditions …’ (Capital, III, 818–819).Google Scholar
9 ‘The capitalist mode of production is, for this reason, a historical means of developing the material forces of production …’ (Capital, III, 250).Google Scholar
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13 Godelier, Maurice, Rationality and Irrationality in Economics (London: New Left Books, 1972).Google Scholar
14 Ibid., 146. Subsequent page references are to this book.
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25 Well-known examples include Popper, Karl, The Open Society and Its Enemies, II, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 183–189Google Scholar, and Lakatos, Imre, ‘Science and Pseudo-Science’, BBC talk for the Open University, 1973.Google Scholar
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28 Mackie, J. L., The Cement of the Universe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 34–35 and 63Google Scholar. Since Mackie's description of the causal field includes such qualifications as ‘this block of flats as normally used and lived in’, I cannot see how interesting reference to a causal field improves upon the statement of the regularity with no mention of causal field but with a good, old-fashioned ceteris paribus clause. ‘As normally …’ seems merely an alternative way of saying the same thing.
29 Mandel, Ernest, Late Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975), 19–20.Google Scholar
30 Oldenquist, Andrew provides an excellent summary of these paradoxes in ‘Self-Prediction’ in The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, VII, (New York and London: Macmillan, 1972), 345–348.Google Scholar
31 I wish to thank G. A. Cohen, G. H. R. Parkinson and R. M. Sainsbury, whose comments on earlier drafts of this paper have made it better than it would otherwise have been.
