Charles, I have some interlinear comments. My general view, to restate it it, is that historical materialism and Marxian political economy represent scientific approaches in the respectable science of science as empirically guided explanation and prediction of social phenomena. This is not to say that "Marxism" is a "science." "Marxism" doesn't exist. As a movement, Marxism is over. As a theory, it represents a collection of diverse and not-always-compatible ideas , perspectives, and reserach programs.
>
I said:
>Of course real science >is rife
>with disagreements, except about textbook fundamentals, but >there are few
>of these in social science.
>
>About that last claim, do you mean textbook fundamentals or disagreements
>in
>the social sciences?
The latter. As you say, there is little agreement in the social sciences, and few candidates for consensus at any level. In the few science sciences where there is, such as economics, it has been achieved by institutional force and bureaucratic fiat (e.g., by refusing to hire dissidents) rather than by normal debate and convergence.
>Most 'empirical' research in the social
>sciences can't be made sense of unless you share much of the same beliefs
>as
>the people who did the research.
That is true of any science. This is a basic Kuhnian point.
>
>The idea that Marxism is a science could be based on a number of things,
>since the term 'science' has meant at different times different things to
>different people.
Yes. I tried to make this point, and attempted to define at least broadly what I meant by science, see above.
And belief in scientific
>determinism was strong in the 19th century. At a popular level it probably
>still is.
I suppose you bring this up because of the idea that you find in Marx and Engels that socialism is inevitable, and that this inevitability has been scientifically proven. This ia not an idea that has had a lot of currency in Marxist circles lately, outside the former Communist states; and I would guess not even in them through the mid 1970s on. The first formulation of GA Cohen's reconstruction of historical materialism maintained it, but he has backed off from that in the face of criticism. At any rate, determinism, though certainly valid on the level of classical physics (quantum indeterminism is really irrelevant to the behavior of large scale objects), is not a mark of science, but a consequence of certain scientific theories.
>You might say
>Marxism is an attempt to philosophize and rehumanize Social Darwinism (the
>scientific status of the latter many never doubted, right up to the point
>of
>using it to justify genocide).
Well, maybe. I have defended "selectionist" models of historical materialism (see my "Functional Explanation and Metphysical Individualism," Phil. of Science 1995), and Alan Carling has given them a fuller articulation. However, historically speaking, this is an instance of convergence rather than influence, since Marx and Engels formulated historical materialism before 1859, the year The Origin of Species was published. And the models are strictly LaMarrckian rather than Darwinian, because social institutions "inherit" acquired characteristics, while it's the fundamental dogma (so called in biology, this is not an individious characterization) of Darwinism thatw ith biological organism they are not inherited.
All this is irrelevant to determininism, since there is nothing deterministic about any form of Darwinism.
>
>Later Althusser, perhaps the most influential Marxist since Marx, made much
>use of the term 'science', but his ambitious conceptualization transcended
>both empirical science and applied science in technology (proponents of
>which by the way, like Marxism, make strong normative claims).
I think Althusserian "science" is one of the alternative senses of "science" you mentioned. It has nothing much to do with ordinary norms of scientific inquiry of the sort that would be expected in work published in a scientific journal. Likewise with Althusser's "rigor," which has nothing to do with what scientists think of as "rigor," which means something like careful argument whereby the premises are tightly connected with the conclusions, and the experimental tests are preciselt controled.
Althusser saw
>the later Marx as being 'scientific' in the structuralist sense of social
>science, so Marx was as much a scientist as Durkheim, Weber, Saussure or
>Levi-Strauss
Well, that is certainly true. I mean, he is as much of scientist as they, if not more so, at least in his strictly analytical work, notably Capital.
>Scientific determinism in conflict with an inbuilt normative drive in a
>social scientific sense is hardly unique to Marxism.
But determinism is quite irrelevant to norms, unless you fall back on hard determinism, whereby determinism is deemed incompatible with moral responsibility. Compatibilism, which holds that we aree free insofar as wedo waht we like, even if our likes are determined, is arguably at least as plausible a metaphysical view. I don't think this debate has much exercised people in the Marxist tradition. Nancy Holmstom wrote a good piece on in the 1970s. It didn't attract much attention, or help her get tenure at Wisconsin.
More importantly, determinism might be relevant to the idea that certain norms are wrong because their realization is foreclosed by the inevitable outcome of social processes. Here, though, Marxists have had confused ideas. On the one hand they say that the shape of a communist society cannot be predicted, which would suggest that normative debate is very much on the table. On the other hand they have said that it can be predicted, specifically, that communism will be a nonmarket, stateless society, which means that, for example, market socialist and liberal democratic norms cannot be realized. This is a more serious debate, but it should not carried out at the level of whether some sort of historical determisnim is true, but rather at the level of whether the incentives that markets and liberal democracy impart to people are compatible with the realization of socialist norms. In that debate, norms are very much on the table.
Perhaps you are thinking of the old Leninist and Stalinist justifications of terror based on the idea that these are necessary to the realization of an inevitable communism. There is little likelihood that Marxists will ever again be in a position to impose terror on a population, so in that respect the debate is merely of historical interest. Moreover, it's probably true, at least I hope it is, that most Marxist reject these ideas, so in that sense, too the debare is a dead letter. In another sense, there is a still-living debate about whether development can be carried out with primitive accumulation and terror to enforceit. But this debate is now mainly carried out in terms of whether the development of capitalism must be repressive, as you note.
Since the 1980s market
>utopists have been using similar logic because they say they can discern an
>'over-determined' pattern of stages from pre-industrial to fully developed
>and prosperous.
Who are you thinking of?
>In short, we can have economic determinism/economism with or without
>Marxism.
>
Of course. But "economism" isn't the same thing as determinsim. One can hold that the economy is explanatorily primary without thinking that it determines everything.
>I would say that modern Marxism's difficulty in attaining science status is
>really the same difficulty that all fields of inquiry and theorizing about
>the ideological and social realms have.
Yes. I have actually written a paper that makes this point: "The Paradox of Ideology," Canad. J. Phil. 1993.
Marxism, however, starts with its values out front rather
>than as a hidden or unconscious agenda.
>
Neoclassical economics may have them out front as well.
>Nor is it the Marxists alone who want to use the word 'science' so as to
>escape critical inquiry, analysis and deconstruction.
Though of course, this is an abuse of any serious notion of science, the cehntral virtue of which is that it is supposed to subjectedthe claims we are considering to critical inquiry and analysis, if not "deconstruction," whatever that is.
Even those in science
>do this. Look at the BSE and nvCJD outbreak in the UK, . . . even after
>many scientists insisted it
>couldn't happen (because the economic and political fallout was more
>important than any real science they had backing up their claims).
Right, but this is bad science, rather than science being ideological.
>
>My point in all this is that science can't explain everything
Well, what do you mean by this? In one sense of "explain," to explain a phenomenon means to come up with a scientific account of why it occurs. A scientific account needn't take a specific form, such a determinist one. It might involve a probabslistic account or a narrative of a certain sort. But to qualify as scientific it has to be empirically testible, precisely formulated, consistent with whatelse is known, and several other things.
and, when it
>attempts to, it often comes up with determinist patterns and metaphors that
>are as much fiction and superficially explanatory as anything a Marxist or
>free market utopist ever uttered.
Well, what's your alternative to scientific inquiry?
jks (a recovering philosopher of science)
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