SC 715: Classical Social Theory
Department of Sociology Theory Proseminar I
Fall 2001
O’Neill 255
Monday 3:00-5:30

Syllabus
Section A
Section B
Section C
Section D1, D2
Section E
Section F
Section G1, G2
Section H1, H2
Section I
Section J
Section K
Section L
Section M
Other sections will appear as the semester progresses.

Section D1, D2
Karl Marx1818-1883 (and Friedrich Engels 1820-1895)
Philosophy, Social-psychology, Political-economy, and the Future

Adam Smith and G. W. F. Hegel were Marx's two major intellectual forebears. While Smith wrote before Hegel and Feuerbach, Hegel and Feuerbach show up more prominently in Marx's early writings as his foils.

If Hegel considered history under the control of the Absolute Spirit, and Feuerbach considered history under the control of the human species-being; Marx considered history under the control of classes. Hegel was an idealist, Feuerbach a voluntarist, Marx was a materialist. By this we should never mean that Marx considered crass material motives to be the driving force of history. Rather, as a materialist, Marx believed that the laws of motion of history were based on the dynamics of class interests as determined by the dialectical progress of modes of production.

Feuerbach's major criticism of Hegel was that Hegel alienated to the Geist what should properly be attributed to the goodness and creativity of the human species. Feuerbach's de-alienating strategy was to point out and examine this fundamental inversion with the result that humans would self-consciously assume their direction of history. At the level of feeling, people always persisted in giving the proper priority to human agency in their religion. However the dominant theoretical reflection on religion--that is, theology--removed this agency and granted it to God.

Marx appreciated Feuerbach's initial criticism and remarked that all of us must pass through the "fiery brook" of Feuerbach's initial purification of Hegel. But ultimately Marx saw Feuerbach as offering a misguided solution, indeed one that was perverse. By rejecting the Hegelian totality, Feuerbach had also presented an ultimately alienating position. In fact, by appearing to bring humans back into history, Feuerbach may be even more distorting than Hegel. What Hegel clearly missed and Feuerbach, despite some steps in the right direction, failed to see was that the march of history was based not on the increasing self-conscious correspondence of individuals and society with the all encompassing Spirit (Hegel) or the increasing self-appropriation by the human species of their rightful place as subjects of history. Marx, in contrast argued that yes, history was unfolding with a teleology (Hegel) and human beings were the agents of history (Feuerbach), but this unfolding of history did not occur automatically under the influence of the Spirit or by self-awareness of those agents. Rather it occurred as a result of the historical contradiction (in each mode of production) between the relations of production and the forces of production that created classes, material class interests, objective historical forces that led to growing contradictions within a mode of production, and the enactment of a class struggle to overcome those contradictions.

In order to depict one aspect of my current thinking about Hegel and Feuerbach I offer the following paragraphs from a paper I am working on, "The Sense and Sensibility of Religion: Retrieving Spiritual Experience as an Authentic Sociological Variable."

Marx’s Materialist Synthesis
If, among the Young Hegelians, Feuerbach is the antithesis of Hegel, Marx is the synthesis, a creative tertium quid emerging from the point, counter-point of the previous controversy. Marx recapitulated much of the progressive, evolutionary, and teleological perspective of both Hegel and Feuerbach. At the same time, Marx ardently chastened his two predecessors for the same sin: they substituted speculative contemplation for social contention. For Hegel and Feuerbach, the antidote to misguided history was comprehending their ideas. By doing so, people would be (re)aligned to the pulse of history and advance its flow. If for Hegel and Feuerbach, the aphorism is "read ideas, learn, and be transformed" for Marx it was "read history, learn, and transform."

Hegel understood that humans create history, but saw his role and the role of philosophy as striving to "to recognize the content, the reality of the divine Idea, and to justify [explain] the spurned actuality; for Reason is the comprehension of the divine work" (pp. 47-48). Marx, of course, focused on the comprehension of the historical conditions of class relations, but only in order to direct the praxis of liberating struggle in order to change history. Still, Marx never abandoned his Hegelian heritage. For despite all his rejection of idealism (in which comprehension was the primary road to actualization) Marx retained a world-historical overview in which origin and destiny, genesis and telesis, were mutually endogenous.

It is much the same story with Feuerbach. In calling Feuerbach the "fiery brook" of understanding, Marx applauded the former’s Copernican revolution that fixed the human species at the core of the social solar system. But despite the fact that Feuerbach had correctly returned the human species to center stage, Feuerbach remained trapped within an idealist social strategy. For Marx, the key was not just to correctly contemplate history, but to change it. Yes, Feuerbach caught the historical inversion of subject and object, but he was not correct about its materialist origins. The mistaken centering of religion was not due to a mistake in consciousness, as Feuerbach insisted, and could not be corrected by undoing that cognitive error. Rather, the religious "halo" elevating God and subordinating humanity arose from the desire of the superordinate class to justify its exploitative ways, and the need of the subordinate class for the consolation of meaning-giving hope. Neither religion nor its theologians were to blame for the indefatigability of hegemonic theodicy. The culprit was exploitative class relations.

In his negation of Feuerbach’s negation Marx was less accusatory than Feuerbach of religion. He was, however, equally steadfast about removing religion from the list of authentic independent variables. Religious feelings and institutions, even when they act as relatively autonomous culprits, are at worst historically derivative intermediate variables, and at best inconsequential epiphenomena. Although some Marxists may disagree, Marx contends that religious life isn’t causally potent enough to be the source of alienation, much less the source of liberation. We must keep attuned to the laws of historical materialism whereby theoretically informed praxis pursues the class struggle rather than the task of understanding. An individual taking religious experience seriously, then, may not be the cause of exploitative relations of production, but keeping political economists and the working class struggle from taking religion seriously is the noble goal of scientific socialism.

In regard to Smith, Marx's criticism took three directions. The first was Marx's incorporation of the Hegelian and Feuerbachian romanticism and progressivism. Smith was sober about two things. The first was that human beings, while corrigible, tended toward pursuing their self interest and would thus reach only certain qualified levels of virtue. Second, capitalism, while progressive, was a fairly stable and ultimately middling historical form. There was in Smith, little vision about an impending idealistic horizon of a new mode of production and a new human being. Human nature and society, while corrigible, were not perfectible. Marx's first move beyond Smith, then, concerned an appropriation of a romantic teleology.

The second theoretical break with Smith was Marx's rejection of Smith's assumptions about self-regulating economic relations. Smith assumed that capitalism supplied enough liberty for individuals and firms that competitive relations would never allow one actor or class to dominate another. If this did occur, the government should step in and rectify the imbalances of power by restricting monopoly. Marx, in contrast to Smith, believed that by its very nature, every historical mode of production (including capitalism) was a setting not for equality of power in the market but the setting for relations of domination. Despite the theory and despite its earlier forms, capitalism naturally became a social formation of unequal power between the classes. And the state, far from rectifying this imbalance, actually contributed to it because the dominant class always gained control of the state. Capitalism was by nature exploitative in the sense that capital would always appropriate the surplus value produced by labor.

The third break with Smith concerned something quite technical. Smith, you will recall, enunciated the labor theory of value. But Smith rejected the notion that one could derive prices from the underlying value of labor embedded in goods and services. Marx, in his later work, went further than Smith and claimed that it was not only possible to document the qualitative fact that surplus was extracted from labor but to actually measure the quantitative extent of such exploitation. Such quantitative measurement would thus enable Marx to claim a scientific methodology whereby he was able to estimate the level of exploitation and to estimate mathematically the social processes whereby capitalism became immersed in crisis and increasingly unable to reproduce itself as a mode of production.

Now, in all this, Marx was never one to deny or ignore the role of consciousness either in embedding the relations of domination or in overcoming them. Hence, we find Marx thoroughly imbued with a dialectical consciousness in which contradictions in the substructure also were played out at the level of superstructure as contradictions in consciousness, politics, religion, and philosophy.

Week 1

Question
What is the essence of Marx’s historical materialism as it emerges in his early writings? More specifically, what aspects of Hegel and Feuerbach’s theory and method did Marx incorporate and which aspects did he criticize and transcend.

Assigned Reading:

George Ritzer. Chapter on "Karl Marx."

Karl Marx: Selected Writings. David McLellan (Ed.)
Readings (by editor's number)
[page numbers are given where the entire reading is not assigned]
—page numbers in regular type are from first edition;
—page numbers in italics are from the second edition.]
1.
4. 26-27 [32-33]
7. 63-68 [71-top77]
8.
9.
12. 134-144 [148-158]
13.
14. 159-185; 190-191 [175-201; 207-208]
16. 197-198 [214-215]
18.
30

Week 2

Question
Review the logic of Marx's later economic writings indicating how, in contrast to Smith, capitalism inherently embodies relations of domination, how these relations give rise to major social, economic and political contradictions, and how these contradictions generate both a crisis and an opportunity for transformation.

Assigned Reading:
Karl Marx: Selected Writings. David McLellan (Ed.)
Readings (by editor's number)
[page numbers are given where the entire reading is not assigned]
—page numbers in regular type are from first edition;
—page numbers in italics are from the second edition.]
30
12. 131-133 [145-148]
31. 411-414 [447-450]
29. 345-358; 360-365 [379-393; 395-400]
32. 415-443; 455-483; 488-492; 506-507 [452-481; 492-521; 526-530; 544-545]
33. 511-522 [550-561]
36.
38