Hoisted from the Archives: Why Everybody Should Be Short Louis Althusser and His Intellectual Children
Hoisted from the Archives: Why Everybody Should Be Short Louis Althusser and His Intellectual Children https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/06/why_everybody_s.html: William Lazonick (1982), "Discussion of Resnick and Wolff, Feiner, Jensen, and Weiss," +Journal of Economic History_, 42:1 (March), pp. 83-85 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-0507%28198203%2942%3A1%3C83%3ADORAWF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G: "I find the title of this session—'Marxist Approaches to Economic History'—to be inappropriate.... First, what we have heard here are not "approaches" but one approach repeated four times.... Second... the approach presented here... relates not to economic history... not even an approach to the actual study of social history.... It is philosophical thinking about how one might develop an analytical framework for studying feudalism, capitalism, and so on...
...Third... the extent to which the approach is "Marxist."... [Is] historical interpretation [to be]... a mere reflection of one's theoretical constructs... [or] must theoretical conceptions, if they are to have any practical relevance... emerge from historical analysis[?]... The crucial isdue in the utilization of a Marxist persepctive... is not who has the "right" to appropriate the "Marxist" label.... It is the substance of the approach to history... that is important....
What transformed Marx from a philosopher into a social scientist... was his study of history to develop a theory of history... he studied the history of capitalist development in Britain in order to construct a theory of capitalist development.... on the basis of a detailed historical analysis of a particular historical epoch.... Even Marx's basic philosophical and ideological orientations were influenced by his confrontation with historical facts... his observation that peasants did not have the right to gather wood... was instrumental in his transformation from Hegelian idealism to historical materialism....
Marx's theory... was made up of a series of testable (and hence refutable) hypotheses that he himself sought to support with empirical evidence.... One can apply the historical materialist methodology to Marx's own ideas... thereby discover not only what parts of Marx's theoretical framework are right... [and] are wrong.... I view the Marxian framework as merely a starting point.... One must go beyond Marx historically... [and] theoretically....
[We] so-called empiricists—and I include Marx—lay the basis for intellectual discourse.... By way of contrast... Resnick, Wolff, Feiner, Jensen, and Weiss... isolate themselves.... They try to interpret the world without studying it. To elaborate upon Marx, philosophers have thus far interpreted the world; the point is to understnad its historical development, and to change it....
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