I’ve been working on a multi-year project to closely read and comprehensively annotate significant writings in the history of philosophy up to the end of the 20th century. Being able to teach this material at a high level, and to critically evaluate and engage with contemporary critical theory, are the two attractors at which this project is aimed, so writings outside of the traditional western analytic canon of philosophy have been included (from Adorno to Zhuangzi).
However, in the last few months I’ve come to realize that what is missing from this attempt at a comprehensive engagement with the history of philosophy is a historical lens that can help situate these thinkers and their writings in their material, historical contexts. By reading these thinkers mostly chronologically, I’m at a vantage where I can see how many of these thinkers are in dialogue with their predecessors, but this alone is insufficient for understanding their intellectual production and thought, since it misses how such production might be the outgrowth of the particular material conditions permeating their existence. (I’m thinking here of Adam Smith theorizing about an already nascent capitalism; John Locke theorizing about liberalized monarchies after the English revolution of England, etc.)
So this set me in search of complementary material histories that I could pair with the various periods within my project. Materialist histories like Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century, E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, The Long 19th Century (Hobsbawm), and even this reddit post which sums up how the Holocaust can be effectively explained by a marxian approach; all of these clearly back-up Marx’s bold claim found in the title of this post, at least for the last five centuries.
However, I have yet to find anything quite as accomplished or detailed for the preceding millennia (something like “A People’s History of the World” would be a vulgar approximation; and Graeber and Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything seem to intentionally sidestep a marxist account of pre-history in favour of an anarchist flavour).
My question is – why? If historical materialism bears so much explanatory fruit, why isn’t there an accomplished comprehensive account of all hitherto existing society? Plate tectonics, for example, was a theory that gave us an entire history of the earth; evolution, an entire history of life; where is the marxian retrospective? Is it a problem of evidence? A limitation of the medium (i.e. history is too complex and particular to be distilled into one book or one series)? Where is the compendium for the immortal science?
A limitation of the medium (i.e. history is too complex and particular to be distilled into one book or one series)?
Pretty much yeah, its really a huge topic (the entirety of world history) and not possible to even fully research, much less distill. There’s tons of really good marxist histories and general materialist histories; but they tend to be more specific. The broadest book I’ve seen is Broodbanks The Making of the Middle Sea which only covers the mediterranean from its formation to the onset of the classical era. It isn’t a Marxist text, but imo the text itself is the best demonstration of all history being the history of class struggle
Regarding Dawn of Everything, how do you feel it sidesteps a marxist account? I haven’t read it yet myself, but what I’ve heard about their takes on prehistory have fallen generally in line with what a marxist analysis gets you (i.e. extremely diverse and complex societies until the urban monocultures begin swallowing them up)
Thank you for your response!
What I meant was that their analysis felt like it complicated traditionally marxist positions, eschewing the deterministic trajectory of history (not a bad thing) and being concerned more with the characteristics of individual freedom within early societies rather than more causal ‘class-like’ elements that constrain or enable that freedom. While their problematization of centralized hierarchical states does seem to echo the more utopian visions of a post-socialist, communist society, in our given time and in the context of problems of a global scale, it seems appropriate to be skeptical when these past observations start to turn into present prescriptions for adopting ‘flexible and creative’ forms of organization that have, in the last century, been ineffective at challenging power or ushering in meaningful and lasting alternatives. If you do have a chance to read it, though, I would recommend it.
