> In my own view Alan Carling's selectionist interpretation
> of historical materialism builds upon Cohen's work
> while deemphasizing his technological determinism
> and increasing the scope for the role of contingency
> in the making of history. His approach offers
> a way for understanding the relationship of
> necessity and contingency in history that is
> analogous to the relationship between
> necessity and contingency in Darwinian biology.
>
> www.columbia.edu/cu/polisci/cspt/papers/2002/carling02.pdf
> http://www.scienceandsociety.com/editorial_apr06.html
> http://marx.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2000w43/msg00246.htm
> http://tinyurl.com/64ko2e
> http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/2002-February/017528.
> html
> http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/2002-February/017529.
> html
Thanks, Jim, it's interesting stuff. Have you heard about Howard and King's [2008] book 'The Rise of Neoliberalism in Advanced Capitalist Economies: a materialist analysis' (Palgrave)? If you're into this stuff you might like it. They take Cohen as a reference point, though mainly as a heuristic, or hypothesis, which they challenge in some respects. It ought to be much better known, anyway - it's a great corrective to the usual over-politicisation of explanations for 'neoliberalism' as 'ruling class strategy' or whatever, and really quite original.
I basically agree with Meiksins Wood about Cohen - it's so abstract that it doesn't explain much. The analytical grain needs to be much finer. I think the distinction between 'forces' and 'relations' of production is flawed at the core. Howard and King is the first thing I've read that shows a decent study can be inspired by it.
I'm interested by Carling's evolutionary analogy. Of course it goes an awfully long way back in social theory and economics in particular - Veblen, for instance. I certainly think a lot can be made from the analogy, but there are also major differences between social and biological evolution. Conscious reflexivity and agency being the biggest. Selection mechanisms are necessary to any viable functionalist theory, but social selection mechanisms are pretty different to Darwinism. I'm especially dubious about the idea of selection of whole societies on the basis of productivity, as an analogue for natural selection, the latter having had billions of years and billions of generations of organisms on which to operate. We haven't had too many control cases in human history.
I also think Gould might be more promising than Dawkins if you want metaphors for social evolution - which it seems to me is chock-full of spandrels and without too much evidence of teleological direction.
> As some commentators have noted there is a certain
> underlying similarity between Cohen's understanding
> of Marxism and Althusser's, despite their fundamental
> differences. Indeed, Cohen in the preface to *Karl
> Marx's Theory of History* gave a kind of backhanded
> acknowledgement to Althusser, pointing out that
> he had correctly (in Cohen's view) placed due
> emphasis on Marx's later work, especially,
> *Capital*, as opposed to Marx's earlier
> writings like the *1844 Manuscripts*.
> At the same time, Cohen took Althusser
> to task for the obscurities of his theorizing.
> And yet both Cohen and Althusser can
> be seen as sharing a kind of ahistorical
> approach to the theory of history.
Yeah, well I got a lot out of Althusser - even though I wouldn't defend much of his work wholesale, the questions he raises changed how I thought about society. He certainly suffers from the same problem of over-abstraction - I like the conception of non-linear history, i.e. that different social spheres develop in completely different time frames despite their interrelation, but again the structures need to be thought of in a much finer-grained way.
Cheers, Mike Beggs