When lecturing on the philosophy of history in the early 1820s, German
philosopher Georg Hegel remarked astutely that with regard to historical development,
theory always comes late to the party.
Hegel’s point, which he explained as a metaphor about a German owl
leaving for its nightly hunt hours after dusk, was that the construction of a
theoretical model of history always looks backward. Hegel has been called the ‘most materialist
philosopher of idealism’ by some, but his perspectives on historical agency and
theory became the foundation of world-history according to Ranajat Guha. As demonstrated by later scholars and
philosophers—including Marx, Dunyavskaya, Braudel, Wallerstein, Lughod,
Arrighi, and Chakrabarty—a historically materialist conception of history does
not necessarily have to remain “economically materialist” in the most strict
sense. World-history is driven by a series
of material and ideal factors; including, but not limited to, the expansion of
world-economic systems from material bases of society as well as the
cultivation of national identities, the permeation of culture and belief, as
well as social ideologies to conform with material conditions. The strengths of certain models and theories
can naturally synthesize to demonstrate, as Jairus Banaji has argued, that
theory must reflect the history as opposed to merely explain and frame it. Synthesizing models can further develop a 21st
century materialist conception of history that accepts the dynamism of cultural
and social movements while retaining a strong emphasis on the material base of
society.
Economic materialism, also known by other variants such as structuralist
Marxism, had its roots in Marx’s early philosophical writings on historical
causality and the anarchist writings of Proudhon. Elaborated on lightly in philosophical essays
from the 1840s, Marx exemplified his class analysis of history with The Communist Manifesto and examined the
economic relationships of class in Capital
Volumes I-III. In Capital, Marx discussed crises of
historical development, which extend from economic contradictions in
production, exchange, and the reproduction of daily life. Pinpointing such tendencies such as the
necessity for productive expansion as well as a falling profit rate over time,
Marx concluded that capitalism created its own boundaries and limits. This perspective contributed to much
discussion on the role of class as the vehicle by which history is driven, on a
road where the nation-state passes by as another actor. One of the most influential world historians
to follow in the footsteps of Marx also favored deconstructing Hegel’s
statehood thesis, Fernand Braudel.
When discussing the importance of a new avenue of studying history that
expands beyond the nation-state, Braudel emphasized that his longue durée was a reworking of Marx’s
early perspectives on history. Long
durations, and the examination of material bases, Braudel contended, was Marx’s
‘just milieu’. Braudelian schools of thought expand on the
Hegelian conception of world-history by negating Hegel’s statehood thesis—the
notion that a nation, or a state, provides the only foundation for the prose of
historical argument. In detracting from
this approach, Braudel is what Raya Dunayevskaya would later describe as a
humanist. For Braudel, world-history
emphasized geographic space and the interconnection of peoples across said
space. Braudel’s seminal work on The Mediterranean extrapolated this
perspective by examining a geographic region and the socioeconomic centers of
Southern Europe, Western Asia, and Northern Africa.
Two main strengths can be identified from Braudelian approaches, the
first being the break with the model of Eurocentrism established by Hegel’s
statehood thesis. Dunayevskaya would
later call for a ‘return to Hegelian theory’ in the 1980s, but using the logic
of Braudel: for her, Braudel synthesized the positive aspects of Hegelian dialectical
theory while negating the unnecessary and superficial identities of statehood
as a condition for historical agency.
The second major strength of Braudelian approaches to world-history is
the emphasis on people and trade; these forms of history unearth levels of
analysis that would be unimaginable in an examination of the history of a
state. This more humanist approach
necessitates a longue durée and the
histories of smaller elements; such as specific commodity production, economic
power shifts, as well as the ongoing role of cities in the modern period. As would be expected, however, no approach to
world-history is perfect.
The largest deficiency in Braudelian approaches to world-history is
applicability in the classroom. Thomas
Bender explained quite well that to abandon the nation as holding a central
role in world-history is to make the same mistake as focusing agency only on
the nation. Particularly in the
contemporary period, the nation-state plays a fundamental role in the
enforcement and production of national ideologies, defense and war-making, and
enforcement of trade agreements. As
demonstrated by both Bender as well as other scholars such as Giovanni Arrighi,
the 20th century would be an incomplete history without an analysis
of the role and influence of nations.
Students of history would have a hard time dealing with the broad
conceptualizations across geographic space while ignoring the national and
cultural identities shared by the peoples discussed. A less important, but still noteworthy,
deficiency in Braudelian theory is the lack of an overall model or framework
for contextualizing world-history—which extends from abandoning the Hegelian
model but not replacing it. It did not
take long, however, for newer ideas to synthesize out of Braudelian schools to
produce such models.
Immanuel Wallerstein’s theory of world-systems attempted to build on
Braudelian thought to contextualize a framework for historical development,
with an economic base. Acutely focused
on capitalism as a world-economic system, Wallerstein set out to analyze the
formation of what he termed the ‘modern’ world-system with the rapid
advancement of agricultural technology in the late 15th and 16th
centuries (dubbed the Long 16th Century). The model which emerged by the 17th
century was a hegemonic system with a capitalist Core, located in Northwestern
Europe, a precapitalist semi-peripheral located in Western Asia and the
Americas, and a semifeudal periphery in the colonizing Third World. At first glance, Wallerstein’s work appears
to be an intellectual reworking of Marx’s materialist conception of history;
which also emphasized the origin of capitalism with agriculture in the 16th
century. Upon closer note, however,
Wallerstein does not utilize a strict class analysis nor does he rely on what
Sam Gindin called the fallbacks of traditional Marxism: falling rates of profit, and necessity for
productive expansion. Instead,
Wallerstein identified economic pressures as the incentives for historical
change. The limitations of feudal
production in the 14th and 15th centuries, for example,
did not hurt the lower classes the most; instead, it most economically
disadvantaged the well-to-do peasants and landowners, who then found incentive
to invest in agricultural technology and expand the physical and productive
capacities of their economic systems.
World-systems theory emphasizes two central points, both of which have
their strengths and weaknesses. First,
Wallerstein necessitates at least some agency with the state: It is the state, he contends, which
facilitates the means by which capital accumulation can occur. Without laws to protect investments, enforce
rent laws, and patent commodities, there would be ‘no incentive’ for producers
to engage in large-scale production that would produce miniscule profits. This emphasizes Bender’s point about the
inability to negate the state’s role in world-history, but it also binds
world-history to specific forms of nation-states. The ‘modern world-system’ model is ‘modern’
in the sense that it is hegemonic, and that the ‘modern’ European world is in
the commanding heights. Secondly,
Wallerstein also emphasizes a fixed model of world-economies—a three-tiered
hierarchy that can only exist on a world-scale.
This is extremely useful in classroom settings, as it helps to break
down post-French Revolutionary world-history into First, Second, and Third worlds
for students to then explore the input/output pressures between each. It is also a difficult model to accept
because of its perceived inflexibility, which scholars Arrighi and Lughod both
addressed as follow-ups to Wallerstein’s work.
In Lughod’s words, Wallerstein’s formation-based
approach lacks the dynamism of world-history.
Lughod instead preferred a ‘restructuring’ approach to describing the
succession of world-economies.
Eric Hobsbawm developed Marx’s class analysis into an intellectual attempt
to explain the development and supremacy of capitalist class relations following the French Revolution in 1789 and the
English industrial revolution of the 1830s and 40s. To Hobsbawm, the French Revolution succeeded
in ending the formal class relations of the previous era but failed to erect a
new material basis for society. Instead,
coupled with the rise of large-scale industrial production in the 1830s, new
class relationships emerged to fit Marx’s depiction of a bifurcated capitalist
world between proletarians and bourgeoisie.
To explain the causality of said developments, Hobsbawm utilizes Marx’s
‘crises thesis’ as a crux—insisting that shifts in specific relations to
production coincide directly with either an expansion of productive capacity or
the offsetting of lost profit rates.
Charles Breunig criticized Hobsbawm’s approach for lacking alternative
explanations. Hobsbawm’s economic
materialism failed to explain, Breunig contended, the importance of generating
a national identity and ideology to reify and explain the development of new
class relationships. Whereas for
Hobsbawm the failure of the anticapitalist 1848 revolts resulted from the
entrenchment of power by upper classes, Breunig identified the role of ideology
and nationalism as social tools which divided class groups. Michael Adas as well explained the difficulty
in focusing on class, since it ignored the large extent to which ideology and
national consciousness drove the everyday interactions of people within a
society. The strength of economic
materialism lay in its simplistic approach to historical causality; almost as
simple as merely replacing Hegel’s statehood thesis with a “classhood thesis.” In the classroom, it most certainly would
provide an easy model to frame causality.
Its weakness however lay with a tendency to revert to structuralist
explanations for development, and a failure to see the dynamism of class
interaction within a nation.
Scholars of 21st century historical materialism, such as
Banaji, Leo Pantich, Gindin, and David McNally, have since taken cue from
Dunayevskaya to reinterpret the role of the Hegelian dialectic with respect to
world-history. The largest weakness of
the materialist conception of history, according to Pantich and Gindin, is its
tendency to extrapolate theory as laws of historical change—such as insisting
that an end to capitalism necessitates the rise of socialism. According to Banaji, the theories developed
through historical analysis must reflect the socioeconomic material realities
of the periods and people discussed.
Banaji thus takes issue with concrete models such as world-systems and
Hobsbawm’s class analysis; they fail to account for the dynamic composition of
capitalist and peripheral societies, which are made up of more than simply two
class groups, or three economic spheres.
Class analysis, Banaji and McNally both point out, cannot explain the
rise of Islam as a major factor in the development of Western hegemony in the
13th century nor the rise of Locke’s theory of universal monetary
values in 17th century Britain.
This more humanist historical materialism should be seen as a synthesis
of past models and approaches, including examining the importance and dynamism
between economic conditions and political/national ideals, while retaining the
philosophical foundation of materialism.
The largest drawback of 21st century historical materialism
(humanist Marxism) is that it is relatively new. It does not have enough scholars to fill in
the gaps or engage in a revisionist endeavor against previous class-based and
economically materialist works.
World-history is not driven by any one particular factor—class,
statehood, ideology. It is rather a
dynamic sway between the relations of all these agencies. As Dunayevskaya described it, the conditions
of a society set the boundaries for its ideals, but its ideals nevertheless
have the capacity to force individuals to transform their social
conditions. A humanist historical
materialism helps to illuminate this, but the field is burgeoning and
growing. Nevertheless, the Braudelian,
Wallersteinian, and Hobbsian approaches provide a foundation for the ongoing
development of a world historical consciousness and historicity.
