{"id":190698,"date":"2018-05-20T06:33:38","date_gmt":"2018-05-20T01:03:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=190698"},"modified":"2018-05-20T06:33:38","modified_gmt":"2018-05-20T01:03:38","slug":"karl-marx-the-social-sciences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/karl-marx-the-social-sciences\/","title":{"rendered":"Karl Marx & The Social Sciences"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Jayadeva Uyangoda<\/a> –<\/b><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Prof. Jayadeva Uyangoda<\/p><\/div>\n

In this bicentennial year of Karl Marx<\/a>\u2019s birth, there has been a great deal of celebration of his work and ideas. Many essays appeared in the global media during the first week of this month \u2013Marx was born on May 05, 1818 \u2013 emphasized the relevance of his critique of capitalism even today. The sharpening world crisis, which we have been witnessing for some time now, has been precipitated by economic globalization. Globalization and neo-liberal reforms have pushed the world into an unprecedented degree of uncertainty at the social, political, moral and existential levels. Some commentators see signs of the return of \u201can age of anger\u201d with unpredictable consequences.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It is against such a dystopian backdrop that many commentators in the West as well as the non-West have begun to return to Marx\u2019s work to find intellectual tools to simply come to grips with what is happening in the world and where it is heading. One point that even Marx\u2019s critics agree is that no other thinker, before or after him, had examined and analyzed capitalism, its dynamics and destructive consequences so sharply and penetratingly as Marx did.\u00a0 <\/span>Tributes and backhanded complements that have been paid two weeks ago to the old master even in the bourgeois press in London, which pilloried him during the second half of the 19th<\/sup> century, tell us that it is time for us also to re-read at least the Volume I of Das Kapital<\/i>.<\/p>\n

This essay attempts to outline another important contribution that Marx made to expand the horizons of human knowledge about the world \u2013 social science methodology and theory.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Backdrop<\/b><\/p>\n

Marx had an extremely active intellectual life for about forty years, starting from the early 1840s and ending in 1884. Poverty, exile and ill health did not prevent him from reading and writing on an amazingly regular basis. He read volumes and volumes of books, newspapers and periodicals and wrote, mostly in German, on themes in a range of fields \u2013 philosophy, economics, politics, history, social change, social theory and of course, capitalism, working class struggles, revolution, and socialism. He was a newspaper columnist too.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The period of five decades that covered Marx\u2019s intellectual life was also the period during which one of the most important developments of human knowledge occurred in Europe, that is, the birth of modern social sciences<\/i>. A contemporary French thinker and philosopher, August Comte, who was twenty years senior to Marx, inaugurated this \u2018scientific turn\u2019 of the study of human society. Comte wrote his famous The Course in Positive Philosophy<\/i> during 1830 and 1842 as a series of small texts. It is Comte\u2019s The Course<\/i> that laid the foundations and arguments for a new \u2018science of society.\u2019 His aim was to establish a new discipline, the mandate of which was to produce reliable and true knowledge about society, that can be used for social engineering and reforms in the crisis ridden post-Revolutionary France. 1840s were the formative years of Marx\u2019s intellectual life.<\/p>\n

Comte\u2019s key epistemological argument, which came to be quickly shared by a host of German and French thinkers, ran as follows: It is only when social thinkers produce reliable knowledge that their ideas can be meaningfully used to design social policy. The enlightenment tradition of critique and philosophizing produced only speculative and dubious knowledge about society that could hardly guide social reforms and state policy. If social thinkers were to produce useful knowledge, they should adopt an entirely new methodological approach in order to see society as it is. Comte saw such an approach already being employed in the fields of physics, astronomy and other natural sciences.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Comte believed that by adopting the same methodological approach, which had been so effectively used in the natural sciences to produce major breakthroughs in knowledge, the study of human society could also become a \u2018science\u2019, fundamentally different from philosophical speculation. In fact, Comte proposed a new system of social knowledge, calling it\u00a0 <\/span>\u2018sociology,\u2019 meaning, \u2018the science of society.\u2019 It was to be based on a new methodology. He called the latter \u2018positive philosophy\u2019 or \u2018positivism.\u2019\u00a0 <\/span>Comte\u2019s positivist method was the application of empiricist method of the natural sciences in the study of human society. This is how the modern positivist social sciences originated.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Marx\u2019s Search<\/b><\/p>\n

The 1840s was also the time when Marx as a young doctoral degree holder in Philosophy in Germany had begun a hugely ambitious search for an entirely new philosophy, social theory and methodology to understand the world and of course to change it. Marx\u2019s writings do not indicate that he was part of the intellectual groups of academic philosophers and social thinkers who were influenced by Comte\u2019s work. Rather, his sources of inspiration were initially Hegel, and then radical social activists and working class leaders. The latter were also trying to propose a different project of social engineering, that is, radical social reforms that would benefit the victims and left-outs of Europe\u2019s raging industrial capitalism and its prosperity for the few. But Marx went beyond the project of social reform and invented the goal of social transformation and replacement of capitalism by socialism through revolution.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, Marx defined, conceptualized and articulated his own intellectual project, with its strong radical orientation, within the traditions of European philosophy and science. As his writings of the 1840s indicate, he spent his entire youth, to study, critique and, as Luis Althusser has shown in For Marx <\/i>and Reading Capital<\/i>, to settle accounts with the dominant tradition of European philosophy and social thought. Kant and Hegel had been the major figures in the modern European philosophy, which Marx critiqued as a philosophy of idealism. One of Marx\u2019s goals during his youth was to discover philosophical foundations for a new paradigm of social inquiry. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Marx\u2019s critique of contemporary European philosophy and social thought had a number of elements. One of its key aspects is that he was looking for an alternative paradigm of \u2018knowing the world\u2019, or a new epistemology. Epistemology is that branch of philosophy, which deals with questions about the means, ends and justifications of human knowledge about the natural and social world. Since Francis Bacon of the 17th<\/sup> century, epistemology had acquired another dimension of meaning \u2013 methodology and methods of gaining knowledge. As a mid- nineteenth century philosopher-cum-social thinker, Marx was also looking for a new \u2018science of society\u2019 that differed from philosophical metaphysics, enlightenment rationalism as well as idealist epistemologies.<\/p>\n

Science and Method<\/b><\/p>\n

This is where the question of science and \u2018scientific method\u2019 entered Marx\u2019s thought as well. As much as Comte and his disciples were keen to produce a new social science<\/i>, Marx also was busy with exploring the possibilities of a new social science<\/i> during the 1840s and early1850s. As adulatory writings on Marx by Engels, Marx\u2019s co-thinker, and Lenin and Trotsky, Marx\u2019s eminent disciples, show, Marx thought of himself as the founder of a new \u2018science.\u2019 In fact, Engels thought that Marx\u2019s theory of historical materialism was as important a scientific discovery as was Darwin\u2019s theory of evolution. Both, according to Engels, were epoch making discoveries that revolutionized the human understanding of the natural and social worlds.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, as a self conscious \u2018scientist\u2019 of society, Marx had to tread a particular path of discovery available within the European traditions of philosophy and science. Realizing that the \u2018idealist\u2019 tradition of the philosophical mainstream was of no help to construct methodological tools to understand the social \u2018reality,\u2019 Marx turned to a minor tradition, which he called the \u2018materialist philosophy\u2019 of the ancient Greeks and post-medieval philosophers. That is how Marx came to appreciate \u2018English empiricism\u2019 the founding philosopher of which was Francis Bacon. It was Bacon\u2019s book, Novum Organum <\/i>(\u2018New Instrument\u2019), originally published in Latin in 1620, which laid the epistemological foundations for the modern natural and social sciences. The way in which Marx settled accounts with English empiricism warrants at least a brief discussion at this point.<\/p>\n

Bacon and Method<\/b><\/p>\n

Before that, a brief explanation of why Francis Bacon is relevant to our discussion on Marx and the social science methodology is warranted. It was Bacon who in his Novum Organum<\/i> and other writings invented the philosophical system, and also the myth, about the \u2018scientific method\u2019 which provided the epistemological and methodological scheme for modern natural and social sciences.\u00a0 <\/span>In the classical and medieval Europe, there were two dominant epistemological traditions and both were varieties of metaphysics. In constructing his new scheme, Bacon thoroughly rejected both these pre-existing traditions.<\/p>\n

The first was the Aristotelian tradition of rationalism and syllogism. Its key epistemological position was that the authentic means to producing correct knowledge was the existing knowledge claims and propositions already developed by philosophers by means of deductive reasoning. Christianity and the Church provided the other path of knowledge.\u00a0 <\/span>According to this theological epistemology, the faith in the divine revelation, divine prophecy and their infallibility were the sole means to justify and accept knowledge claims about the world.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

By this time, as Edgar Zilsel, an \u00e9migr\u00e9 Marxist historian of scientific thought of Austrian origin, living in exile in New York, showed during the 1940s, there was an alternative tradition of knowledge production in practice among artisans, technicians and scientific workers. It was the method of experimentation. Artisans and technicians, say when building chariots, furniture, and even roads and bridges, found divine revelation and scholastic dogmas of no use in the production of their professional, technical knowledge. Experiment, trial and error, and observation — in other words, \u2018experience\u2019 \u2013 constituted their method of producing knowledge.\u00a0 <\/span>It was this method that professional scientists in European academies improved on and effectively employed to make astounding scientific discoveries in physics and astronomy. For justifiable reasons, it was this method of scientific knowledge production by means of experimentation and experience, as opposed to metaphysics of both the Christian theological and Aristotelian scholastic traditions, that came to be known in European philosophy of science as the Galilean model of scientific reasoning, named after famous Galileo.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Empiricist Method<\/b><\/p>\n

Now, what Bacon did in two influential texts, Novum Organum<\/i> and Advancement of Learning, <\/i>was the systematization, within a framework of philosophy, of this experience \u2013 based approach to the production of scientific knowledge. Bacon delivered a scathing attack on the Scholastic and Theological metaphysics, accusing them of producing \u2018false knowledge.\u2019 By doing so, Bacon also laid out a scheme for an experience-based procedure for the production of scientific knowledge.\u00a0 <\/span>It is this scheme that later came to be known as the scientific method in natural and social sciences, which even today Sri Lanka\u2019s A\/L students mechanically learn in their Logic class, without any instructions on its historical and philosophical background. It is also known as the \u2018empiricist method.\u2019 \u2018Empiricist\u2019 or \u2018empirical\u2019 means \u2018based on sensory experience.\u2019 Experience in the philosophy of science means experimentation and observation.<\/p>\n

It was this Galilean – Baconian method that had been employed by the natural scientists which Comte proposed for the study of human society as the most authentic means to producing reliable knowledge on society. And Bacon was the inaugurator of English empiricist philosophy, which was later followed, developed, and refined by philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, David Hume and John Stuart Mill. It was this tradition of science and epistemology that was becoming an intellectual fashion among social thinkers in Europe during the 1840s and 1850s. And obviously, Marx had to deal with it too.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Marx\u2019s Critique<\/b><\/p>\n

Why did Marx have to deal with the empiricist tradition so seriously? Because, it had contributed to epoch making advancements in the understanding of the natural world and therefore the argument that the natural science method was the natural path to knowledge about human society, was too formidable to resist. But the goal of Marx\u2019s intellectual project was radically different from his contemporary philosophers and thinkers. As he formulated it in his famous Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, \u2018philosophers had only described the world; the task now is about how to change it.\u2019<\/p>\n

The kind of philosophy, epistemology ad social theory that Marx was looking for had to be one that enabled the seeker of knowledge to see beyond the appearance by penetrating through the veil of religion, ideologies, myths, false beliefs and metaphysics. It had to be a science in the sense that it was critical knowledge about the world, not superficially empirical observations that helps the seeker to grasp the \u2018social reality\u2019 and also provide intellectual capacity and guidance to change the world. In other words, to be truly scientific, social inquiry should be praxis-based and praxis-oriented, not simply empiricist.<\/p>\n

As a \u2018scientist\u2019 in the European tradition of science and enlightenment, Marx also sought to discover \u2018universal laws\u2019 about the social world and human history.\u00a0 <\/span>In this sense, he was also partly Hegelian, although he abandoned the idealism and philosophical mysticism of Hegel, who was his philosophical hero during his youth when studying at the university. Actually, Marx considered his theory of historical materialism a universal law that could explain the dynamics of human society and history independent of time and space. It also sought to map out a common path of progress for the entire human society. Here, Marx and Engels were more in the tradition of European enlightenment thought than empiricism and positivism of Comte. No wonder that ex-Marxist post-modernists attacked Marx severely, a few decades ago.<\/p>\n

There is a brief, yet insightful, discussion in The Holly Family<\/i> (1845) jointly written by Marx and Engels on the limits of Bacon\u2019s legacy of English empiricism and materialism. While identifying themselves with the materialist tradition of European philosophy, Marx and Engels showed a great deal of respect for English materialism that Bacon inaugurated. However, they were also quick to highlight the philosophical limitations of Bacon and English materialism. They dismissed the English materialism of Bacon and Hobbes for its theological confusions, idealist pitfalls and mathematical abstractions devoid of any real relevance to understanding of human society in its concrete terms.<\/p>\n

Now, Marx as a philosopher and social theorist was more of a materialist than an empiricist. That is why he could stay way from the empiricist and positivist schools of social sciences that began to develop in Europe after the 1850s. In the hands of the Austrian School of Economics, and Emile Durkheim and positivist sociologists, positivism became the new epistemology and methodology of the new science of human society. It introduced the scientific method, as first philosophized by Bacon in the 17th<\/sup> century and later refined by Hume and Mill, as the only reliable and authentic method of social science knowledge production.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A major reaction to this scientization of social knowledge came from European humanists in the form of phenomenology and hermeneutics. Marx and Marxists were never excited by these idealist revolts against empiricist reductionism in the social and human sciences. As we noted above, Marx was never an empiricist in his philosophy and social theory; rather, he was a materialist. Thus, Marx was the founder of a non-Empiricist social science methodology and social theory, which was to develop in the twentieth century as the most radical branch of post-positivist social sciences. It remains an influential paradigm in social science research and knowledge production even today, despite occasional distractors.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Four key assumptions of the alternative social science methodology that Marx inaugurated can be summarized as follows:<\/p>\n