Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx. by Scott MeikleReview by: Milton FiskNoûs, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Sep., 1988), pp. 477-479Published by: WileyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2215717 .

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MEIKLE'S MARX 477

Scott Meikle, Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx, Open Court, La Salle, IL, 1985, pp. xii, 195, $26.95.

MILTON FISK

INDIANA UNIVERSITY

There is nothing really remarkable about the appearance of yet another interpretation of the philosophical underpinnings of the thought of Karl Marx. Each period uses its own orthodoxy to reinterpret his thought. There is a Kantian background in such different interpretations as those of Eduard Bernstein and Georg Lukacs. Sidney Hook's interpretation makes Marx a pragmatist. Louis Althusser blended both post-war positivism and struc- turalism into his influential interpretation. And now the analytic tradition of the U.S. and Britain has fashioned a Marx without dialectic who will be palatable to their social-science colleagues.

Nonetheless, Scott Meikle's Marx has a decided advantage over all the others since his is a Marx to be taken at his word about his debt to Hegel and to Aristotle. Like Hegel and Aristotle, Marx insisted on the importance of considering reality in holistic terms. Had he been part of the modern empiricist tradition, he was guilty of constantly misleading his readers about his holist tendencies. In fact, he was thoroughly opposed to the atomism of modern empiricism. In economics, for example, he re- jected the view that the social product could be viewed as an aggregation of the separate contributions of land, labor, and capital; it was from the start the unitary product of cooperative effort that was to be divided into various shares only through the class struggle. Yet the analytical Marxists of today try to treat Marx as though this and other strands of his on- tological thought were merely so much excess baggage from an inferior education.

G.E. Cohen, to take only one case, provides us with an interpretation of Marx's theory of history within the framework of atomistic empiricism. The basic unit of investigation is the event rather than a system with in- ternal complexity. The basic connections are regularities between events. This type of interpretation is carried out without reference to the obvious fact that for Marx explanations took place against the background of social systems, apart from which events by themselves were not even conceivable. In addition, Cohen's analytical interpretation runs roughshod over Marx's conception of scientific law, not as a regularity unsupported by anything, but as a tendency based in the internal complexity of systems.

Meikle provides an alternative that not only takes Marx's roots seri- ously but also shows how Marx's explanatory program makes sense. If there is to be historical explanation at all, its background cannot be an atomistic conception of the social world. Against such a background, everything is accidental and our curiousity about how things happened has to be satisfied by extended historical narratives. An explanatory pro- gram makes sense only if social systems exert a guiding influence over

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478 NOUS

the course of their development. For there to be such an influence, those systems must possess a complexity that limits the accidental. As distinct from the atomist view, this view of social systems attributes an essence to them that is the basis for necessity. (Meikle points out that the necessity of the essential development of social systems is not a matter of inevitability but rather of tendencies that may be thwarted due to accidental circumstances.)

Though Meikle's essentialist Marx is a far more plausible and fruitful Marx than the Marx of competing interpreters, it has to be pointed out that there are two ways of reading essentialism itself. Meikle calls his own version of essentialism an organicism. The other version of essentialism may be called a contextualism. Meikle's organicism is the sort of thing Althusser rejected when he claimed to reject essentialism. It is a view ac- cording to which essences take the systems with them through all the stages of their development, through all their forms. On the contextualist view, essences leave greater scope for agency. That is, a system develops its various forms through the effects that a variety of agents have on it. Of course, the agents are not unrestricted in regard to the effects that they can have on such a system, since the essence of the system functions to define what effects those agents can have. From the contextualist perspec- tive, the organicist mistake is to have made essences into agents, when in fact they only limit agents.

Meikle's treatment of Marx on money illustrates the difference. He supposes that in Capital I Marx assumed a social order whose essence was that within it products had the form of exchangeable values. From their exchangeability Marx derives, toward the end of Chapter I, the existence of the form of money under which the same products appear. Meikle gives an organicist interpretation of this derivation. So for him, Marx is saying that the system whose essence is the exchangeability of products undergoes a real development, as a result of this essence, that leads to the institution of money.

The limitation of this interpretation is that it fails to make clear why a system of exchange will of itself develop a money form. It is certainly true that without money the circulation of commodities might be threatened for a variety of reasons. In response to these threats, there must be at- tempts to stabilize commerce with money. This is not the same, though, as the self-development of the essence of asociety with commerce. Rather, specific people and groups have, for a variety of reasons, taken initiatives that resulted in the use of money. The essence-exchangeability-was merely the background against which these initiatives did in fact result in the use of money. This contextualist interpretation of essentialism reduces the burden put on essences, and at the same time it makes more sense of the derivation Marx makes of not just money but also capital in Capital I.

Meikle takes up this problem with organicism only very briefly (pp. 103-104). In doing so he attempts to leave room for agency in the develop- ment of economic relations. But this raises the danger that agency may come into conflict with organicism. If there are really self-developing essences, then genuine agency is not compatible with them. Instead, he

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KITCHER'S AMBITION 479

claims that the content of essence just is the activity of individuals. This conflation of agency with essence effectively does away with the threat that agency poses to organicism. Unfortunately, it does away with agency too.

Marx did not limit himself to the derivation of economic categories. He was also concerned with major historical changes, such as the change from feudalism to capitalism. Meikle provides illuminating narratives about such changes, but it is not made completely clear how organicism applies in these cases. On the one hand, Meikle says that class relations are an "outgrowth" of a given stage in the development of productivity, and hence that productivity is primary in respect to class relations. On the other hand, he says that he wants to avoid the view "according to which productive forces simply develop all on their own without refrence to humans." At this point Meikle draws back somewhat from his organicism, but without substituting an alternative.

The merit of this searching philosophical treatment of Marx is that it establishes the tradition in which Marx wrote as that of essentialism rather than that of empiricist atomism. Only by placing Marx in the essen- tialist tradition can sense be made of his talk about contradiction, dialec- tic, and scientific laws. Meikle's book does reveal just how different these ideas are from what has been made of them in the atomist tradition. What remains to be done is to discuss the relative advantages of contextual and organicist essentialism, not only in regard to the interpretation of Marx but also in regard to ontology generally.

Philip Kitcher, Vaulting Ambition (MIT Press, Cam- bridge, Mass.), 480 pp., $27.50 hardcover, $12.50 soft cover.

CLAUDIA MURPHY

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW VORK AT ALBANY

This very important contribution to the philosophy of biology develops two central theses. First Kitcher thoroughly debunks most of what has been written on human sociobiology. Second Kitcher argues that there is nevertheless room for the development of what he calls "a careful sociobiological research programme.

Kitcher gives a very detailed and thorough critique of what he calls pop sociobiology. Kitcher's main lines of argument fall into two kinds. First, he gives many detailed critical analyses of particular sociobiological explanations, and in each case he attempts to show the errors in these

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