The Colonial System and Algerian Nationalism.

“[A]nd each day hundreds of new orphans, Arabs and French, awakened in every corner of Algeria, sons and daughters without fathers who would now have to learn to live without guidance and without heritage”

– Albert Camus, ‘The First Man’.

In the early months of 1958, Hneri Alleg’s La Question was published in France and caused an immediate scandal for its first-hand description of torture by the French military in Algeria. For Alleg, the scourge of institutionalized torture not only afflicted the native Algerians, but functioned as “a school of perversion for young Frenchman”. In the long course of the war (1954-1962), dehumanization of the enemy led to increasingly brutal manifestations of violence. Albert Camus bemoaned the war for its extreme tactics and for severing two interconnected communities. However, these two communities, the indigenous and the European, had never constituted an organic whole. Part of the strategic logic of Nationalist terrorism was to provoke a heavy-handed French response that illuminated and reinforced the schism between the French setter and the suspect ‘Arab’, thereby provoking greater collective self-consciousness. The instance of Algerian nationalism, of the struggle for independence can be interpreted as an instance of social imagination postulating a new societal form. In a limited sense this is accurate, but in the stronger sense employed by Cornelius Castoriadis it is not. Algerian nationalism was determining, but it was also determined, and it yields to rational explanation. To understand the violence of the Algerian war, the birth of Algerian nationalism, one must understand the logic of colonialism and the Algerian experience of colonial domination.

The Stranger: Luchino Visconti adaptation of Albert Camus's novel

Great Novel, good film.


Marcello Mastroianni as Arthur Meursault.
Anna Karina as Marie Cardona

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062310/

Ideology and Symbolic power: Between Althusser and Bourdieu.

Western Marxism has often laid considerable stress upon the ideology of modern capitalist societies. This focus upon ideology stems from the failure of proletarian revolution to have either occurred, or establish socialism within Western Europe. The exact nature and function of ideology became paramount in Marxian explanations of the continued stability of Western capitalism after the Great War and Great Depression. Marxian conceptualizations of symbolic domination (under the notion of ideology) remain in the realm of consciousness and intellectual frameworks. Pierre Bourdieu developed a paradigm for understanding symbolic power and domination through his theory of dispositional practices that breaks with the concept of ideology and it basis in the tradition of ‘Kantian intellectualism’. This theoretical model both deepens and broadens the sociological understanding of symbolic power and domination, through the acknowledgment of non-intellectual and bodily elements in the dynamics of symbolic power mechanisms. The theory of ideology advanced by Louis Althusser, with its assertion of the materiality of ideology, despite some tenuous overlap with the theory of dispositional practices provides a good counter-example to Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power, violence and domination.

Like Bourdieu, Althusser endeavor to understand symbolic domination was derived from the problem of social production and reproduction of stratified social structures. That is, for Althusser, the perpetuation of a class system inimical to the very interests of those who comprise the majority and unwittingly carry on their subordinated class position. Marxian analyses of the class system have often noted the repressive function of the state apparatus. Lenin unambiguously argued that the state was a product of “irreconcilable class antagonisms” and an organ for the hegemony of ruling class and their domination of other classes. The violence inherent in the state apparatus is augmented in the Marxian analysis by the subtle coercion of ideology. Althusser was concerned with the nature of ideology and its materiality both within individuals and within the so-called “ideological state apparatuses”.

The conception of ideology developed by Althusser differed in some respects to prior theoretical expositions of the concept, but it still retained essential elements common to Marxian analyses. In the German Ideology, Marx and Engels defined ideology as an assemblage of ideas that distort and mystify consciousness about the nature of human relations . This distortion of consciousness always represents a class position. The class whom controls the means of production, are often said to control the means of intellectual production and therefore, the hegemonic ideas of a society are those of its ruling class . Althusser concluded that “ideology represents the imaginary relations of individuals to their real conditions of existence”.

An archetypal example Althusser offered was the “divine right” of Kings. The notion that the relationship between the serf, the aristocrat and the King was established by the imaginary dictate of God and not to be found in the historical development of class relations and political organizations. Ideological conceptions have the distinctive feature of a seemingly trans-historical nature. The monarchy or capitalism is presented through ideology as the end of history and the eternal law. Bourdieu definitely breaks with Althusserian theory, for him, constitutions and law are obeyed more from custom and habituation than the “misrecognition of the arbitrariness which underlines it”. In Bourdieu’s view, the law and state are not heavily dependent upon intentional mystification, but docile dispositions. This is one central difference between the notion of ideology and dispositional practices. Ideology concerns thought and consciousness, whilst Bourdieu’s symbolic power functions through non-conscious embodied reactions.

Althusser did postulate that ideology had a material existence and a “modality” of “materiality”. Ideology derived its materiality from it existence within the subject and moreover the formation of the subject by ideology transmuted via the ideological state apparatuses (families, educational institutions, etcetera…). However, Althusser is still concerned with consciousness and its imaginary dimension even if seated within the individual subject. Althusser paid little to no attention to the body and its reactions, his assertion of the materiality of ideology seem to be more motivated by a defense of metaphysical materialism than the extent of inculcation. Bourdieu offers a theory that breaks with what he calls the intellectualism of the Kantian tradition in drawing attention to non-conscious and automatic bodily reaction in the mechanisms of symbolic power.

The physical and non-conscious reaction to symbolic power and the acquiescence to symbolic violence and domination are grounded in the imbedded dispositions that individuals acquire through interaction in social fields. Dispositions, or what Bourdieu calls their “habitus”, are durable structures that form generative principles that underpin practice. These generative principles are primarily the product of the family and educational system, but are not passively absorbed. There is an active component in individual practice. Central to the development of dispositions was the “socially elaborated” nature of “desire”; Bourdieu hypothesized a tentative thesis based upon a distinctly Freudian framework of the transition from ‘libidinal’ narcissism to the investment within the social field.

The transition from libidinal energy invested in bodily desire to investment within the social field and social reaction constitutes a crucial transitional point in which symbolic capital and therefore symbolic domination become a reality through the “search for recognition”. The individual develops a looking-glass self, by which is meant the individual start to evaluate itself via other people’s perception of him or her self. This search for recognition and self-evaluation via others becomes the source of satisfaction for what Freud called our primary narcissism, but it can also engender problems for individuals. Bad evaluations can elicit feelings of guilt and shame and individuals can develop phobias and complexes from repeated negative judgments upon themselves. There is also a lack of social capital or social regonition in the form of “glory, honour, credit, reputation, fame” etcetera and these common evaluative schemas allow for the symbolic domination of those with minimal symbolic capital.

“Symbolic violence”, wrote Bourdieu “is the coercion which is set up only through the consent that the dominated cannot fail to give to the dominator”. Symbolic power is constructed through the common evaluative schema that are habituated and inculcated within individual throughout their life, by the primary institutions of socialization and the constant re-socialization throughout day-to-day symbolic activities. The reaction to symbolic power is not initialized in the realm of consciousness, but is prereflexive and expressed as bodily reaction or emotional responses. In this sense, Bourdieu argues we are the outcome of a long process of “autonomization”. This automization take the form of a “quasi-bodily involvement in the world” and is not a process of conscious calculation. To exemplify his position on symbolic power, Bourdieu uses the example of orders and preformative utterances and linguistic exchanges in general.

The “symbolic force” or the illocutionary power of an utterance such as an order is said to derive from the previously acquired disposition of the body. Acquiescence to the order, for Bourdieu, is “automatic” and appears mechanical in its process. This symbolic force also depends upon the position of the speaker and their possession of authority invested in them by social institutions and their linguistic practices. Bourdieu utilized the example of judges to explain the importance of institutions and symbol of power. The judge can sentence someone to prison, not because of his intrinsic qualities, but because his speech is backed by social institution, manifested by the symbols of power and authority, the robe and gavel. Interpersonal linguistic exchanges are also sites of symbolic power and domination.

Linguistic exchanges are often conducted by individuals with an uneven distribution of linguistic capital, competence and expressive styles. This unequal distribution of linguistic recourses is often linked to both the condition under which it was acquired and the market (the receivers of linguistic products) under which it finds it conditions of use. The condition of primary acquisition of linguistic habitus is often highly related to economic capital and class position. Education imbues the individual with both linguistic dispositions and a bodily hexis. Different classes are said by Bourdieu to be characterized by different form of expression and hold their body in different ways. These characteristics are often tailed toward different social fields. When an individual from one class is placed within a social field that his or her upbringing had not prepared them for, they often find it harder to compete for social capital with those whose linguistic expression was formed for the field. This can manifest itself in nervousness and hesitant delivery in linguistic exchanges between those with different levels of cultural capital.

The conceptualization of symbolic power put forth by Pierre Bourdieu breaks with the conceptualization of ideology advanced within the Marxian tradition and Althusser’s work in particular. Althusser sought to understand the production and re-production of stratified social system in terms of ideology and its power over individual consciousness. Bourdieu identified this as a continuation of the tradition of Kantian intellectualism that privileged conscious thought over the body and ignored bodily reactions and habituation in the development of dispositions and symbolic power. Symbolic power and domination are therefore much broader concepts than ideology, despite Althusser’s assertion of the materiality of ideology. Bourdieu’s conception of symbolic power is given an interpersonal dimension with its focus upon the uneven distribution of symbolic capital and the conflict over symbolic profits. Bourdieu’s conception of symbolic power is therefore, both deeper and broader then that of ideology, while also breaking with its intellectualist bias.

Written by Mathew Toll.

Bibliography.

 

Althusser, Louis, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: (Notes Towards an Investigation)”, Lenin and Philosophy: and Other Essays, trans Ben Brewster, (1971, New York: Monthly Review Press).

Bourdieu, Pierre, Pascalian Meditations, Trans Richard Nice, (1997, Stanford: Stanford University Press).

Bourdieu , Pierre, The Logic of Practice, Trans Richard Nice, (1990, Oxford: Polity Press).

Bourdieu , Pierre, Language and Symbolic Power, Edited John B. Thompson, Trans Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson, (1991, Cambridge: Polity Press).

Lenin, V.I, The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution, (1999, Sydney: Resistance books).

Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, “The German Ideology: A Critique of the Most Recent German Philosophy as Represented by Feuerbach, B. Bauer, and Stirner”, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, Trans and Edited Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat, (1967, New York: Anchor Books), pp. 403-473.

Neoclassical Economics and the Problem of Realization.

The Neoclassical School of economic theory emerged from a dissatisfaction with classical political economy and the labour theory of value. Critics of capitalism, from the Marxian tradition, had hijacked the precepts of the classical school to analyze the historical tendencies of capital accumulation and the stumbling blocks inherent within the process. In a maneuver which ostensibly undermined the Marxian conception of exploitation and therefore capitalism, the neoclassical school sought to explain economic systems in terms of markets and the arbiter of economic allocation, the price mechanism. From this focus, the neoclassical economists developed the theory of general equilibrium, under which the price mechanism (within a condition of perfect competition) is conceived of as self-regulating, self-adjusting and therefore a stabilizing apparatus. In diametrical opposition, the Marxian tradition of political economy characterizes capitalism in terms of instability, structural contradictions and disequilibrium. The current financial crisis and burgeoning recession provide the empirical material necessary to weight and contrast the contrary claims of these two competing schools on the stability of the capitalist economy.

Before a comparison with Marxian theories of capitalism is possible, the nature of neoclassical economics needs to be further delineated. In essence, neoclassical theory is a re-articulation of Adam Smith’s notion of the “invisible hand” and the self-regulating nature of markets in a “system of nature liberty”, distinguished however by the abandonment of Smith’s labour theory of value. Instead, neoclassical theory based itself upon a conceptualization of individuals and market forces augmented with the theory of marginal utility. The crucial nexus of these ideas is the neoclassical assessment of individual psychology.

The simple psychology of neoclassical economics is akin to the rational-calculations of the Machiavellian prince. The ultimate goal of the individual is the optimal satisfaction of their interests. Smith prefigured this psychological impetus when he argued that benevolence was not the prime-mover of economic production, but rather the individual’s gratification of their own interests . This selfish motivation and rational calculation underpins the neoclassical principle of marginal utility.

In contrast to the labour theory of value, the utility of a good or service was not determined by the amount of labour employed in its production, but rather from the benefit derived from the last unit purchased. Alfred Marshal noted that while wants maybe unlimited, each particular wants has a definite limit. Marginal utility diminishes with each extra addition of a product. If an individual acquires a chair, the utility of that single unit is higher then if he or she acquires ten. The first chair allows him to sit and each subsequent chair he acquires becomes less valuable given his main need for one is sufficed. The decline in marginal utility for each subsequent unit decreases the desire for another unit and is manifested in the reduced willingness to buy a given unit at prices unreflective of the decease in demand.

The relationship between supply and demand within the market is the crux of the price mechanism and the nexus which is said to converge towards equilibrium. The principle of marginal utility highlights the importance of supply and demand in determining the utility and therefore the price of a commodity. If a product is over-supplied than its marginal utility will be reduced and therefore the price will also be reduced. Conversely, if a product is under-supplied in relation to strong demand its marginal utility will be high and therefore it will command a high price on the open market. The point at which demand and supply meet is said to be the equilibrium price, but as Marshall noted the market is rarely static. For Marshall and the neoclassical school in general, the market is not stable in the sense of being motionless, but rather the market exhibits a tendency towards equilibrium. This tendency towards equilibrium is the sense in which capitalism, or the free market, is said to be stable by the neoclassical school of economics.

In sharp contrast to neoclassical economics, the Marxian school of political economy developed a conception of capitalism that asserts its fundamental structural contradictions, disequilibrium and tendency towards insatiability and crisis. For Marx and Engels, capitalism was marked by its instability and uncertainty deriving from the “constant revolutionizing of production”. This process, whereby capitalism continually renews and develops its productive capacities has been called “creative destruction” by Joseph A. Schumpeter. Whilst Schumpeter thought the basis of creative destruction was technological innovation and the search for profit by entrepreneurs, Marx emphasized push factors inherent in the process of capital accumulation and intra-capitalist conflict for the realization of surplus-value.

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have argued that the central nexus of Marx’s analysis of the necessarily expansionary character of capital is the “quantitative relationship between worker as producer and power as consumer of commodities”. Marxian theory fundamentally asserts the asymmetry of class relations between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. This is manifest in production and consumption. In order to accumulate capital and realize a profit the capitalist must extract surplus-value and complete the capital circuit by selling the product of production. Surplus-value is only realized if the price of the commodity outstrips the cost of production. Labour-power is but one component of the cost of production, but it falls upon the working-classes to buy and consume commodities that cost more than their wages to sustain capitalist profit and capital accumulation. Therefore, there is a structural disequilibrium between production and consumption within the process of capital accumulation.

The problem of realization in the guise of under-consumption is but one of a multiple of Marxian theories of capitalism’s instability and crisis. David Laibman outlined five different forms of capitalist crisis, whilst Simon Clarke has argued that there are no comprehensive “Marxist” theories of crisis. However, it is clear that the Marxian conception of Capitalism’s inherent instability is at obvious variance with the general theory of equilibrium and school of neoclassical economics. The reasons for the divergence between Marxian and neoclassical school of thought are manifold: ideological inflection, scope of inquiry and methodological approach all markedly different.

Methodologically, the neoclassical school is grounded in abstract modeling, while Marxian conceptualization are often more sociological and historical in their prejudices. Marxists and Neo-Marxists have often criticized the ahistorical and abstract nature of neoclassical theories and moreover asserting that it does not reflect actual economic conditions. Milton Freidman has argued in turn that it is not the assumptions of a model that are important, but rather its significance rests in the accuracy of its predictions. The current financial crisis and global recession provides a basis for the evaluation of each school upon the stability of capitalism.

The major proximal cause of the current financial crisis and credit crunch was the sub-prime crisis of early 2007. Interest rate increases caused an increased rate of defaults upon subprime mortgages. In turn, this lead to the collapse of many mortgage brokerages and banks faced with overwhelming bad assets. Of course, a spark without a powder keg is a non-event – an interest rate increase was not the course of the financial collapse –the roots of the financial crisis lay much deeper. Ultimately, the financial crisis is the result of a credit glut caused by structural imbalances in the world-economy and unsound banking practices designed to profit from an excess of cheap credit. For neoclassical economics in the proper sense, the current financial crisis is merely a severe market correction. Mortgage backed assets and collateralized debt obligations were over-priced by the market and firms which over-valuated their worth. From this point of view, there is really no crisis in purely economic terms, but a market correction. Marxian economics, which its focus upon the structural imbalances would see the current turbulence within the world-economy as validation of their general paradigm. Debt played a central role in the current crisis, and this can be construed as deriving from capitalisms fundamental asymmetry and instability. In order to propel the growth and capital accumulation of the years preceding the crisis, debt was acquired by many house holds and individual to bridge the gap between their livelihoods and the price of commodities. The problem of realization, therefore, is at the forefront of the current goal financial crisis.

The current financial crisis seemly give credence to Marxian claims about the instability of process of capital accumulation. Neoclassical economics give no explanation of crisis in terms of its endogenous character; this is because neoclassical economics limits itself to the analysis of price-mechanisms and the importance of supply and demand for market equilibriums. The financial crisis in view of this school is not a crisis, but rather a market correction. Neoclassical economics presents a rather myopic view of social dynamics given the limited basis of its analysis. Marxian political economy on the other hand seeks to understand economic instability in terms of inherent structural imbalance. This does not necessarily imply that capitalism’s collapses is inevitable, but does contradict the notion that free markets tend toward equilibrium. Both schools of thought have valuable insights to offer on the nature of markets and capitalism, but the Marxian analysis is better suited to understanding economic instability and crisis.

Written by Mathew Toll.

References.

Robin Blackburn, “The Subprime Crisis”, New Left Review, No. 50, (March-April 2008)

James Devine, “Marx’s Theory of Crisis”, Science & Society, Vol. 60, No. 1, (1996).

Frank A. Fetter, The Principles of Economics: With Applications to Practical Problems, (1911, New York: The Century Co.).

John Bellamy Foster and Fred Mgdoff, “Financial Implosion and Stagnation: Back to the Real Economy”, Monthly Review, Vol 60, No. 7, (December 2008).

Daniel R. Fusfeld, The Age of The Economist, 8th Ed, (1999, Boston: Addison-Wesley).

Frank Hahn, “General Equilibrium Theory”, Crisis in Economic Theory, edited Denial Bell and Irving Kristol, (1981, New York: Basic Books, Inc).

Steve Keen, “Madness in their Method”, Economics As A Social Science: Readings in Political Economy, edited George Argyrous and Frank Stilwell, (2008, Melbourne: Pluto Press Australia), pp. 140-145.

David Laibman, “Capitalism as History: A Taxonomy of Crisis Potentials”, Science & Society, vol 63, no. 4, (winter 1999/2000), pp. 478-502.

Bill Lucarelli, “The United States Empire of Debt: The Roots of the Current Financial Crisis”, Journal of Australian Political Economy, No. 62. (December 2008), pp. 16- 38.

Alfred Marshall, “Demand, Supply and Equilibrium”, Economics As A Social Science: Readings in Political Economy, edited George Argyrous and Frank Stilwell, (2008, Melbourne: Pluto Press Australia), pp. 120-123.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party”, Selected Works: In Two Volumes, Volume I, (1950, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House), pp. 32-61.

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire, (2000, Cambridge: Harvard University Press).

Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd Ed, (1950, New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers).

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, (1991, London: Everyman’s Library).

Frank Stilwell, Political Economy: The Contest of Economic Ideas, (2008, Melbourne :Oxford University Press).

The Logic of Existential Meaning

“When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.”

- Charles Darwin (1).

Darwin of course was unjustified in his belief; fear seems to be the most universal of emotions both for human beings and the greater animal kingdom. This emotion though is not simply reserved in human life in the struggle for existence; we feel fear and anxiety when we make choices about the direction of our lives. This is our struggle for meaning. The current piece will focus on discourses of and relevant to that struggle and concepts surrounding it. Linking discourses diverse as logic and the Abrahamic religions to find the structure of this struggle.

In ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’ Wittgenstein argued that: “Propositions cannot represent the logical form: this mirrors itself in the propositions” (2).Thus the logic of a symbolism be it language or mathematics cannot be found outside of that symbolism. Because the logic of that symbolism is its very structure, its schema. The “propositional sign cannot be contained in itself” (3) but a “sign determines a logical form only together with its logical syntactic application” (4).

Language is according to Wittgenstein a series of atomic propositions about the world; its symbolism is a picture of the world, of reality and everything that is the case. The truth-argument which a proposition makes is its picture of the world; the truth-value is determined by the ability to provide proofs for the validity of the picture.

Further argument put forward in the Tractatus, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (5), therefore in following this argument so far Wittgenstein conceives a linguistic limit in our understanding of the world. But he further stipulates that “For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed. The riddle does not exist.”(6) I.e. if you have a question there is an answer, “most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language…And so it is not to be wondered at that the deepest problems are really no problems” (7).

During the second part of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein turns his attention from logical symbolism and the rules by which philosophy must separate sense from senselessness to questions about the meaning of life, ethics and religious mysticism.

“The world and life are one” (8), we would be mistaken if we thought Wittgenstein felt the sense of the world and therefore life was found inside the world and life. That the Schema of the world would be found in the totality of its particulars, this logic would correlate with the rules set out for a logical symbolism. But we cannot gain from Wittgenstein such consistency of logic.

“The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value - and if there were, it would be of no value.” (9)

It is in this sense that Wittgenstein dissolves the question of meaning in life, opting out by two common techniques used in inadequate philosophical systems. Firstly to look for life’s meaning outside of life and in conjunction with or separately neglects the internal logic of the philosophical system to render meaning meaningless. It is with this respect that Wittgenstein has similarities with both the theologian and the absurdist, in strake contrast to his grammatical theory of meaning.

The impulse of the theologian or mystic is to seek otherworldly explanations for worldly questions. Karl Marx famously summarised this impulse as such during the introduction of his “Critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right”:

“Religious suffering is the expression of real suffering and at the same time the protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, as it is the spirit of spiritless condition. It is the opium of the people” (10).

Marx goes further to assert that “abolition of religion as people’s illusory happiness is the demand for their real happiness” (11). According to this view of religion it functions as a mere placebo-worldview, where one finds substitutive satisfaction in sacrificing this world for the sake of the after-world. Sigmund Freud went as far to characterise religion as a mass delusion or social neurosis. “Neurotics” he wrote “create substitutive satisfaction for themselves in their symptoms, but these either create suffering in themselves or become sources of suffering by causing the subjects difficulties in their relations with their surroundings and society” (12). From the angle of aesthetics, whether an individual chooses to engage in such delusion is completely their own choice as western secularisation has largely removed the state’s powers of coercion in such affairs. Recently, with the growth of Pentecostalism though, and other fundamentalist Christian sects, there have been renewed pushes to reclaim those powers for religious application. With the aim of correctly understanding Human life the religious view is a misdirection of analytical focus and thus damaging in our pursuit of answers to our riddles.

In response to this Agnosticism or Atheism is the application of Occam's razor, “if a sign is not necessary then it is meaningless” (13). The existence or non-existence of god is irrelevant from the standpoint of human life. If we engaged in the entertainment of such abstractions we place ourselves on a metaphysical treadmill, ‘what comes before alpha?’ only to redefine alpha and ask the question yet again.

Therefore religious faith offers up no answers for the inquisitive mind. Søren Kierkegaard, a Christian himself, defined faith as absolute belief in the absence of reason on the basis of the absurd. “For he who loves god without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves god in faith reflects on god” (14). Abraham believed in the absence of all evidence that god would spare his Isaac upon the mount of Moriah. He first sacrificed his critical capacity along with his ethic duty to Isaac and his own emotional bond as father to son. Choosing to follow his duty to god, thus we have the archetype of the religious man. One surely recognises this condition in the modern suicide bomber.

On all grounds the religious impulse is a condition of poverty offering no answers, just resignation to an unseen father figure and a supposedly loving relationship founded upon silence. Leaving behind the road to Damascus we come upon the second failing of Wittgenstein and that of inadequate philosophical systems. This is to deny the logic of a system to render meaning as meaningless. Philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and the absurdists are guilty of this failing.

According to early work of Sartre consciousness is immaterial thus the rules of cause and effect that govern in the material world have its causation chain broken when an individual’s volition is in play. Man is the embodiment of freedom, man chooses his path with a free will and therefore determinism is just an incoherent philosophic attitude of self-deceivers.

The anti-determinism of the existentialist leads to their advocacy of subjectivism. Individuals with their immaterial consciousness interpret objects of the intersujective world and then act upon them. Because human action is subjective there is no objective human nature and no objective meaning thus life is intrinsically meaningless. Subjective meaning is affirmed on life by the action of the individual. Thus man’s existence precedes his essence:

“If indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one’s actions by reference to a given and specific human nature: in other words, there is no determinism- man is free, man is freedom” (15). With this in mind the Existentialist declares “I am thus responsible for myself and for all man, and I am creating a certain image of man I would have to be. In fashioning myself I fashion man”.

The existentialist states that because man is responsible for himself (and humanity) he is in anguish. He is in anguish because as soon as he commits to any act he feels the responsibility for himself and humanity. The existentialist does not claim to have moral authority over humanity his subjectivism doesn’t allow objective virtue; he declares “if I regard a certain course of action as good, it is only I who choose to say that it is good and not bad” (16). There is nothing for the existentialist to reference in the process of choosing right or wrong; the choice falls to what he can live with by being responsible for its results on him and humanity.

Humanity during the reign of terror sent alleged royalists to climb the scaffolds. Jean-Paul Marat felt his actions were that of a philanthropist, cutting off five or six hundred heads for the benefit of humanity. In the philosophical system of the Existentialist the moral merits of this action are neither objective nor universal. What Sartre does judge though is whether or not the action is authentic or in bad faith. If one blames others for their own action and denies responsibility that action is inauthentic or done in bad faith.

The Existentialist sees that human condition is that of free commitment. God doesn’t exist therefore humanity is in a state of abandonment with no transcending beings or priori’s to guide us. Sartre commits to the notion of individual freedom as the only human priori but denies that there is any human nature as a priori because there is only a “human universality of condition” (17). This is a sceptical argument like ‘the sun rises every morning but how will we know if it will rise tomorrow’ or in our case ‘Man acts in certain pattens but how do we know he will tomorrow? ” Thus because of the uncertainty of our condition human-beings live not only in anguish but in despair, ‘if I take action in support of a goal, how do I know others will act in support?” This means that despair is the emotion that man feels because he acts without hope. To summarise, the point of Sartre’s existentialism is to give humanity its divinity as its own creator and along with this divinity its responsibility.

There is a certain contradiction in this thought, that of a false objective subjective dichotomy. The actions and experiences of every particular individual never seem to add up to the totality of what is the human experience. If each individual is tied to the concept of existence precedes essence it becomes an objective fact of human experience, not simply a subjective phenomena. The Existentialists are right in saying that man lives in anguish, because we have choices and responsibility for those choices. For whom he is in relation to the external forces. But they are wrong to preclude the idea of an objective meaning of life. If each particular individual’s life is made up of a series of choices about the values to which they affirm and live for then the root purpose of humanity in the objective sense is the struggle for purpose - for our meaning.

Part of this failure by the Sartrean existentialists is that their ontological inquiries were carried out under a kind of bad faith, under the illusion of a particular semi-moralistic theory of authenticity and bad faith. Their conceptualisation of causality in relation to the individual could not touch upon the notion of conditioning or the zone of proximal development because any such thing would negate individual responsibility as part of our nature of being. Individual agency is a component of the human condition but not to the extent envisioned by the French existentialists, death for one is normally a decisive decision but not one we make.

The inevitability of death futures highly in discourses surrounding the notions of human life and it’s meaning. In “At the Gravesite” Kierkegaard likened the nature of death's influence on life to scarcity in economics. If a merchant dumps a shipment of products at sea because the market is already saturated with a high supply it creates an artificial scarcity which increases the price of the remaining product. If we did not die and life was infinite, then life according to Kierkegaard would be of little value. This adds an extra dimension to our anguish because our ability to affirm life and what we consider worthy values is finite and scarce. Camus believed that this was not our first concern; firstly we must concern ourselves with whether or not the value in life is valuable at all.

The first question of a rational person in Camus’s mind was to be or not to be, the question of suicide. He very tactfully at the start of ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ stated his belief that life should be lived and that suicide is absurd in itself, lest some unlucky soul become connived of the correctness of his arguments before fully completing the text. To understand Camus's ideas we must understand he detested being called a “philosopher of the absurd”. Expressing his motivation and in ‘The Enigma’ Camus wrote “Thus one becomes a prophet of the absurd. Yet what did I do expect reason about an idea with I found in the streets of my time?”(18). As one understands now Camus’s work function more as a meditation and open debate then a complete system of thought. He linked ‘absurd reasoning’ with that of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology in that it “declines to explain the world, it wants to be merely a description of actual experience” (19). The Absurd is best characterised as a mood of a nihilistic nature marred by the disunity of universal and particular. This disunity is the same objective (universal)-subjective (particular) dichotomy which rendered life’s meaning in the existentialist systems meaningless.

It was an idea that captivated a generation, but unlike Kierkegaard they found faith deficient, not accepting it as an answer to the question of absurdity. Like Nietzsche who found god dead upon his throne, behind the stone walls of heaven, Camus sought a way beyond the crisis of “our darkness nihilism” (20). If an individual finds absolutely no meaning in life then from some perspectives they should kill themselves. But suicide would be an absurd answer, to choose death is to affirm a value in absolute nihilism and thus commit a self-contradicting act. There is no absolute nihilism as such a thing is non-existent. Equally there is no eternal absolute meaning like that of the Hegelian dialectic in the nature of life which unifies and dictates both objective and subjective meaning - there is no ‘objective’ standard of subjective values such a thing is absurd. Camus true to his inconsistent logic of the absurd chose to ‘rebel’ against the meaninglessness by asserting his own relative value, all of course equally absurd. If we are to judge Camus’s conclusions I’m not sure that we could fault him. His premise was not to explain our nature of being in the objective sense but rather actual experience, though he almost achieves it all the same. From the stand point of understanding our ontological condition as human beings, he shows the absurdity of nihilism while also the inconsistency of eternal abstractions. But Absurdism misses the simple addition of the subjective conditions into its universal commonality of condition, or its mega-structure.

To miss this mega-structure, to find the notion of life’s meaning incomprehensible is to do so upon the notion of its inventible incomprehensibility. In actuality we have a great body of empirical data, the annals of history and our own personal experience with which to answer the question, what is the meaning of life? Its answer is situated within the structure of empirical data; the meaning of life is imbued in the very structure of life. It is the very struggle for purpose and the affirmation of values, whether or not one individual agrees with another’s subjective affirmations is irrelevant from our perspective of ontological investigation, from objective meaning. For our nihilistic mood we shall turn to psychoanalysis for some elucidation. According to the theory of Jacques Lacan during clinical practice the patient supposes a secret knowledge on the analyst. During the processes of analysis the subject starts to ‘de-suppose’ the analyst, realising they have no secret knowledge. Losing faith in their dependency on the analyst they are forced to realise their own unconscious desire to remain dependent on the neurosis. The patient is therefore forced to recognise the place of personal agency in pursuit of mental health. Whatever reservation one has in regards to Lacanian psychoanalysis, the concept helps to illustrate the nature of our question, that there is no secret knowledge, we already know but merely have to assert our agency to resolve the existential crisis and the mood of absurdity. If, of course, that is what we want at all.

Written by Mathew Toll.

Notes.

1)“The Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin, (Penguin, London 1985), page 129.
2)“Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” by Ludwig Wittgenstein, (Dover, Mineola 1999), proposition 4.121, page 53.
3)Ibid, proposition 3.332, page 42.
4)Ibid, proposition 3.327, page 42.
5)Ibid, proposition 5.6, page 88.
6)Ibid, proposition 6.5, page 107.
7)Ibid, proposition 4.003, page 45.
8)Ibid, proposition 5.621, page 89.
9)Ibid, proposition 6.41, page 105.
10)“Writings of the young Marx on Philosophy and Society” (Anchor Books, Garden City 1969), page 250.
11) Ibid.
12)“Civilization and its Discontents” by Sigmund Freud, (Penguin, Suffolk 2004), page 56.
13)“Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” by Ludwig Wittgenstein, (Dover, Mineola 1999), proposition 3.328, page 42.
14)“Fear and Trembling” by Søren Kierkegaard, (Penguin, St Ives 2003), page 66.
15)“Existentialism is a Humanism” by Jean-Paul Sartre, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm.
16)Ibid.
17)Ibid.
18)“Selected Essays & Notebooks” By Albert Camus, (penguin Aylesbury 1979), page 144.
19) “The Myth of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus, (penguin Aylesbury 1983), page 44.
20) “Selected Essays & Notebooks” By Albert Camus, (penguin Aylesbury 1979), page 145.

(written mid 2006).

Polybius, Carthaginian Terror and The Roman Mixed Constitution.

In classical antiquity political theory was often organized around typological analysis of constitutions. Representative of this tradition, Aristotle delineated three types of “straight constitutions”: Kingship, Aristocracy and Polity. That is, rule by one, rule by the few and rule by the majority of citizens. These neat classifications of straight constitutions, considered inherently unstable, had their corresponding deviant forms. For some political philosophers, the threat of decay and decline innate in straight constitutions necessitated mitigating elements. In the classic Aristotelian argument, virtue is a mean between two extremes, and therefore when a state approached goodness in its constitution it was a compromise between two diametrical opposites. Expressed in practical terms, Aristotle’s concept of good governance lay in a compromise between rule by the one and the many, resulting not in a strict aristocratic regime but one tempered by a virtuous demos. Historically, the constitution of the Roman Republic could not easily fit into the typology of straight constitutions. To address this problem, Polybius, a Greek statesman and Historian with connections to the Scipiones, popularized a theory of mixed constitution. He held that Rome’s constitution was a unique blend of monarchic, aristocratic and democratic elements combined to form a particularly resilient structure of government. However, given the highly volatile and fluid nature of the Roman constitution, and moreover Rome’s ardent distrust of monarchic government, Polybius’s thesis is susceptible to numerous criticisms.

Polybius commenced his treatment of Rome’s constitution by rearticulating Hellenistic conceptions of governmental forms and their internal evolutions. Moreover, he asserted as fundamental the notion that states, like biological organisms undergo an evolution from one life-stage to another in a natural cycle. Like Aristotle, Polybius conceived that straight constitutions were particularly disposed towards deformation and therefore good constitutions required a distribution of power which created constitutional balance and canceled out excesses. For Aristotle, this was achieved by the dominance of a middle stratum of society over those who controlled vast amounts of wealth and those who had little, guarding against the respective vices of “hubris” and “rascality”. Constitutional balance, according to Polybius, was not necessarily achieved by the dominance of a particular social class, but attained by composite governmental structure. Whereby, one branch of government counterbalances the power of another, allowing for both stability and adaptability in times of crisis.

Rome’s longevity and increasing dominance over the Mediterranean world was taken by Polybius as evidence of its institutional strength. The growth of Rome’s constitution was counterpoised with the development of Sparta’s constitution, the supposed brainchild of Lycurgus, by Polybius because Rome developed in a haphazard manner through a process of trail and error. Polybius neglected to outline the evolution of the Roman constitution, vaguely commenting that from the time that Xerxes’ traversed the Hellespont into Greece until the Hannibalic war, Rome’s government passed through “satisfactory modifications” achieving a level of perfection. Given both Polybius’s didactic purpose - the examination of causation in order to determine “the best policy to follow” - and furthermore the stress he lay upon cycles of political change, it appears odd that he would neglect an assessment of such vital material.

The origins and development of the Roman political system, especially from the aristocratic revolution of 509 BC onwards, are indispensable antecedents in a study of the mid-republican constitution which Polybius idealized. While elements of the constitution pre-dated 509 BC, this year marked the foundation of the Roman Republic and ipso facto was a –if not the- key turning point in the development of Rome’s constitution. By ousting the last king Tarquin the Proud, Lucius Brutus had ended the Monarchy, but this resulted in the problem of how to establish constitutional mechanisms that ensured tyranny and despotism could not be reasserted over the people of Rome. The immediate solution to the problem of governance was the formation of the consulship. Adorned in the insignia of the Etruscan kings, the consuls were the element of the constitution which Polybius defined as monarchal in nature. Initially, the first consuls (Brutus being one of the two) had the powers attributed to monarchs, but they held office for one year which ensured a temporal limitation upon their power.

Brutus’s first acts as consul were to provide later generations of Romans with a paradigm for virtuous behavior. Perhaps the most important of his constitutional reforms was his strengthening of the Senate. By replenishing its numbers with members of the equestrian rank he fostered unity between the orders and established a tradition of collective rule. Before the Republican revolution and Brutus’s consulship, the Senate had been a mere advisory body to the Kings. Polybius appropriately argues that the Senate represented an aristocratic component in the political system of Rome. However, there is equivocation on the importance and power of this assembly in his treatment of the constitution. Whilst Polybius considered that the consuls exercised “supreme authority over all public affairs” when not on campaign away from Rome, he neglected to stipulate how exactly the consuls counterbalanced the power of the Senate..

In fact, during the early republican period consuls were strictly members of the patrician order and ergo members of the inner aristocracy. Sallust comments, that even by the late republic, when the patrician monopoly upon high office had been broken, Novus homo (new man, non-patrician and the first in their family to attain a consulship) were only begrudgingly accepted into the high office. Even though Cicero, the new man to whom Sallust referred in his comment, was himself a supporter of the senatorial party. This example underpins the conservatism and in-group exclusivity of the patrician political mentality and moreover the extent to which the consulship was not a monarchal counterbalance to the Senate, but rather a functional mechanism used by the aristocracy for political expediency. On the power of the Senate to offset the power of the consulship Polybius describes numerous means, both formal and informal, by which the Senate asserted its power.

While the Senate was not technically a legislative body it controlled much of the civil administration and its members held all magistrate offices. Members could only hold office at legally determined intervals, if elected, ensuring that individual were dependent upon and responsive to the concerns of the collective assembly. Consuls were thus bound to the concerns of the Senate. Furthermore the Senate decided if a consul’s term could be extended for special circumstances or that new leadership was required, moreover after a campaign was concluded the Senate determined if the commander was worthy of a triumph. The prestige of individual politicians was therefore not only a question of proficiency in office, but of their deference toward the Senate. Further evidence that while the Senate was correctly identified as aristocratic, the consuls were not counterbalanced to but an arm of the aristocratic senate. Polybius acknowledged the aforementioned senatorial means of controlling the consulship, but he considered most important of all the power of the Senate through control of the treasury. This allowed the Senate to stymie any rough magistrates (with the exception of a Consul based in Rome) and more insidiously argues Polybius, to influence the tribal assemblies the legislative and so-called democratic branch of government.

Theoretically, the legislative power of the Roman Republic remained within the hands of the people through the tribal assemblies. In the early republic the notion of a democratic element to the state is farcical, because the combined patrician and equestrian votes could pass a measure. By the mid-republic, there had been a general trend increasing the legal authority of the Plebian order and therefore of the tribal assemblies. Motions past by the concilium plebis (council of the plebs) gained the force of law without respect any other assembly in 287 BC. Polybius argues that this power was limited by a lack of legislative initiative on behalf of the general public, though the Tribute of the Plebs could introduce legalisation. Despite its legal decline though, de facto the Senate actually increased its powers. The expansion of the Roman Empire throughout the Mediterranean increasingly required that Consuls be away from Rome, and therefore the Senate took on more and more of the civil administration into their own hands.

The power of the Senate was for Polybius the defining advantage of the Roman Republic in its war with Hannibal. He postulated that Carthage itself had a mixed constitution, but was undergoing decline, while Rome was increasing its power and constitutional strength. This decline was precipitated by the increasing influence of democratic elements in the constitution. The result of which, according to Polybius, meant that Rome’s policy derived from the considerations of the best men and was therefore superior to the Carthaginian’s overall strategy - despite setbacks in the field. In concluding his analysis of the Roman constitution, Polybius suggests that it was these setbacks in the field which best demonstrate the strength of Rome’s constitution.

Polybius argued that the mixed constitution of Rome functioned like a gestalt when faced with an external threat. Rome’s response to the battle of Cannae, the greatest single defeat suffered by Rome up until the time of the Second Punic war, was taken by him to typify the constitutional strength of the Roman republic. Roman casualties in this battle exceeded 70,000 by Polybius’s own account, one consul was killed and many allies deserted Rome. Despite this, the Senate maintained control and organized Rome’s defenses to face Hannibal, eventually defeating the Carthaginian general and reasserting their control over Italy and gaining hegemony over the wider Mediterranean basis. This, of course, was an example of the Roman Republic under threat from outside forces. The constitution and branches of government did not function so well, when faced with an internal crisis.

A few years after the destruction of Carthage in the third Punic war, Rome was faced with an internal crisis when the Tribute of the Plebs Tiberius Gracchus had announced an agrarian reform bill. For his trouble he was murdered by members of the Senate, Appian in his account of the civil wars which destroy the Republic starts his narrative with this incident. Tiberius Gracchus was said by Appian to be the first man murdered in civil strife in Rome’s long history despite merely trying to reinforce a lapsed law. Sallust later wrote after the death of Julius Caesar, that the Gracchi had been too extreme in their methods. Though, in actuality the Gracchi had been following the constitutional rout to pass a law. It merely contrived the interests of the wealth land owners among the Senate and therefore the Gracchi were murdered by members of the Senate. This aberration is hard to explain given it happened not soon after the period which Polybius had declared the Roman constitution to be near perfect. An explanation to this can be seen in Rome’s relationship to Carthage. The different elements of the government, both aristocratic and democratic, functioned well together when faced with an external threat, but Polybius’s idealized balanced constitution became unstuck when left to its own devices.

The theory of mixed constitutions which Polybius offered to explain the success of Rome is only a partly accurate picture of Rome’s government. Commencing his treatment of Rome’s constitution from the assumptions of largely platonic Greek philosophy he applied abstract concepts to explain political dynamics with a high degree of irregularity. He misconstrues the nature of the consulship by denoting it as monarchal counterbalance to the senate. The consulship was not a counterbalance to the Senate, it was an office always held by individuals from the Senate and accountable to it. The Senate’s power increased with the expansion of Rome, a fact not captured by the process of legislation. But Polybius, while he gives lip service to the power of the Roman people identifies the dominance of the Senate as curial for Rome’s success against Carthage. Carthage was also an important influence upon Rome’s good government. Fear of it forced cooperation between different sections of the elite and between the orders. Once Carthage had been defeated, that external pressure was alleviated and there was no force to ensure a tightly ordered government. Rome proved unable to moderately govern itself through internal upheavals and this ultimately led to the death of the Republic and its constitution.

Written by Mathew Toll.

Bibliography.

Aristotle, The Politics, Trans T.A. Sinclair, (Suffolk, 1976).

Appian, The Civil Wars, Trans John Carter (London, 1996).

Crawford , Michel, The Roman Republic, (London, 1992).

Fritz, Kurt Von, The Theory of Mixed Constitution in Antiquity: A Critical Analysis of Polybius Ideas, (New York, 1954.

Livy, The Early History of Rome: Books I-V of The History of Rome From its Foundation, (London, 2002.

Polybius, The Rise Of The Roman Empire, Trans Ian Scott-Kilvert (St Ives, 1979).

Sallust, The Jugurthine War/The Conspiracy of Catiline, Trans S.A. Handford, (London, 1963.

Vishnia, Rachel Feig, State, Society and Popular Leaders in Mid-Republican Rome 241-167 BC,(London, 1996).

On the dead and buried: Marx, Structure and Agency.

In The Rebel, Albert Camus locates Karl Marx within a 19th century tradition which attempted to “substitute, everywhere, the relative for the absolute”. For Camus, Marxism represents a revision and re-articulation of Auguste Comte’s evolutionary theory of society. This assessment of Marx characterized his philosophical disposition as an inverted bourgeois positivism. However, Camus’s general interpretation is not without competitors from both Marxists and Non-Marxists alike. There are a myriad of works, which attempt to explain Marx’s social thought and establish his exact position on countless points of controversy. Historical Materialism or the materialist conception of history has been one such point of controversy, especially with regards to the relationship between human agency and social structures implicit within the theory. Within the Marxian tradition itself, two broad perspectives on the structure-agency debate emerged after the suppression of the Budapest uprising in 1956 and the subsequent disillusionment with Stalinism. Marxist humanism sought to emphasize the human actor, whilst Structuralist Marxism laid stress upon the determining nature of social structures. Both intellectual movements asserted their fidelity to the thought of Marx and sought to legitimate their theoretical formulations in reference to Marx’s oeuvre.

There is no direct attempt to form a coherent theory on the relationship between structure and agency within the works of Marx and his collaborator Frederick Engels. Neither of the two were theoretical theoreticians, or pedantic academics, but developed theories to underpin their practical engagements. It was in this vain that Marx declared his aim the: “relentless criticism of all existing conditions”. This spirited endeavor led Marx to a critical engagement with British political economy, French socialism and German philosophy, resulting in a ‘relentless’ critique of the bourgeois mode of production and its class dynamics. The scope of Marx’s intellectual scheme invariably impinged upon issues of structure and agency.

However, Marx’s never formulated the problem of structure and agency in those exact terms. Structure and Agency are terms used in contemporary sociological debate to identify dimensions of social life which at first glance seem paradoxical and diametrically opposed. Agency, defined by Anthony Giddens, is the ability of individuals to intervene into the flow of events with the possibility of affecting the direction of “events-in-the-world”. Structure is often used to denote recurrent patterns of social relations, which seem to mold the individual and their social activity. The paradox can be exemplified in this quote from Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”

Thus at once, human subjects are the authors of society and subjected to conditions independent of their will, not least “the traditions of all the dead generations”. Despite this statement, which acknowledges both structure and agency in the human condition, there is considerable debate over how exactly to situate Marx with regard to human action and social structure. Two divergent and opposed interpretations of Marx’s materialist conception of history and the place of philosophical anthropology within this conception have developed in the second half of the twentieth century. Louis Althusser developed a theoretical position often labeled ‘Structuralist Marxism’, which attributed a pre-eminence to social structure in the thought of Marx. The other interpretation, ‘Marxist humanism’, sought to ascertain the continuity between Marx’s early and later works and establish a conception of Marx’s humanist philosophical anthropology. To avoid the implications of Marx’s early works, Althusser characterized them as non-Marxist and applied the Gaston Bachelard’s concept of “epistemological break” to Marx’s intellectual development.

The thesis of epistemological break, advanced by Althusser, conceived of a shift from Marx’s early philosophical anthropology and humanism to mature works that ceased to be grounded in humanist and idealist notions of “human nature” and “the essence of man”. In place of philosophical anthropology, Marx is said to have made a “scientific discovery” in developing the concepts of the concepts of “social formation, productive forces, relations of production, superstructure, ideologies” and so forth. It is impossible to deny that Marx developed new concept to analyses the nature of society, but these concepts are not incompatible with Marx’s humanism. In fact, Marx’s never repudiated the idea of human nature, though he did stipulate that it was both socially and historically conditioned. Towards the end of Capital volume one, Marx criticizes Jeremy Bentham’s principle of utility for offering an ahistorical and tendentious standard of utility to judge all human endeavors. To correctly apply the principle of utility, Marx argues, one would need to: “first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch”. This reference to human nature is situated after the period Althusser defined as the Marx’s youth, well beyond both the “works of the break” and his “transitional work”, but rather, in the period characterized by Althusser as Marx’s mature period. Given this, Althusser’s thesis of epistemological break is placed in a precarious position, if not completely invalidated.

Marx’s early works and the philosophical anthropology developed therein are therefore legitimate sources for understanding Marx’s intellectual scheme and in particular the relationship between human agents and social structures. In the works of Althusser, human agency is completely eclipsed by structure. The humanist interpretation of Marx, attempted to reintroduce the human agent into the materialist conception of history and therefore defend it against various forms of reductionism and determinism. For many, Marxism constitutes a vulgar economic reductionism: the belief that all of human interaction is fundamentally economic phenomenon. On these grounds Bertrand Russell attacked the application of Marx’s materialist conception of history to the history of philosophy because he felt it reduced all philosophical schools to the given economic conditions. Lord Russell considered this position untenable on several grounds, not least of which is that economic analysis couldn’t adequately contend with the technical content of a philosophical argument. In his later years, Engels acknowledged that both Marx and he neglected to explain the production of ideas, from the perspective of the individual thinkers themselves.

Elsewhere, Engels confessed that he and Marx were partially to blame for the notion that historical Materialism is a form of economic reductionism. Since, Engels says, they had to over-emphasize the importance of economic determinates “vis-à-vis” their intellectual opponents who denied the significance of economic factors in history. This is a central problem in any attempt to interpret Marx’s materialist conception of history and the relative importance he placed upon structure and agency. In combing through Marx and Engels’ collected works, there are numerous exaggerated and overstated claims which are qualified at different points, but nevertheless provide the basis for misinterpretation. Althusser was not unaware of textual criticisms made of his reading of Marx, but dismissed them as vestiges of immaturity that survived after Marx’s epistemological break towards a scientific outlook.

Marx’s work is fertile ground for textual contortions; nevertheless he does form definite ideas about the nature of history, society and invariably the relationship between structure and agency. In contrast to the philosophy of Hegel, and the post-Hegelian philosophers of his time, Marx sought to ground his conception of society in the material existence of individual human beings. Not as abstract entities, but rather as they expressed themselves through their productive activities which constitute a definitive mode of life. Marx’s individual was not defined a priori, like the autonomous Kantian subject, but enmeshed within actual social relations.

In an argument reminiscent of Aristotelian sentiments, Marx asserted that: “the creation of society – is the actual nature of man”. This creative nature is itself a process of self-creation, the expression of humanity’s species essence. Marx’s reasoning led him to the conclusion that: “world history is only the creation of man through human labour and the development of nature for man”. Human life is therefore a product of human agency situated within a given set of material conditions. The interaction of human productive capacities and the prevailing conditions constitutes a definitive mode of life. Material condition are a determining element in social systems, the form of productive activity and therefore the form mode of life that individual engage in is dependent upon the given set of material conditions. The mode of life an individual lives has a definite bearing upon their form of consciousness because as Marx argues: “consciousness can never be anything other than conscious existence”. This point that consciousness is always conscious existence seems self-evident, but Marx takes the argument one step further and claims that all form of ideological expression (morality, religion, metaphysics, and etcetera…) has no history independent of the material conditions of life.

The base-superstructure model is often the juncture point that Marx is declared to be an economic determinist and therefore highly weighted in favour of structural determinates over human agency. But this interpretation neglects the subtle difference between necessary and sufficient causes. The production of literature within the capitalist mode of production is not necessarily the production and expression of bourgeois ideology, but it does presuppose a level of economic surplus which allows individuals the time and means to pursue activities that don’t directly pertain to the production of the means of subsistence. In was this distinction between necessary and sufficient causation that lead Joseph A. Schumpeter to argue that the whole of Max Webber’s arguments about the elective affinity of Protestantism with Capitalism could be subsumed under Marx’s broader paradigm.

The problem of interpreting Marx’s general paradigm has itself become a perennial problem within sociological theory. Michel Foucault has called Marx (along with Freud) a founder of “discursivity”. Discursivity is characterized by the establishment of “an endless possibility of discourse”, whereby the legitimacy of theoretical postulates are derived from the foundational text of the discourse. Both Marxist Humanism and Structural Marxism exhibit a tendency towards discursivity. The humanist interpretation of Marx is more successful in defending his works against several forms of reductionism and determinism. However, Humanist reliance upon early philosophical works for the mainstay of their interpretation is contested by more ‘orthodox’ forms of Marxism.

Despite disagreement over interpretations, thorough textual analysis of Marx’s body of work is not completely futile. He provides the contemporary sociologist with several conceptual tools and a general guideline for the analysis of social and historical dynamics. Marx did not address the structure and agency debate directly and for its own sake, but he did address issues of human nature and necessity in social structures. Human nature however adaptable to historical specifics was for Marx: intrinsically productive, creative and active. The material conditions which prevail constitute a key determinate in mode of life that individuals could take on. This does not mean that all forms of human expression and creativity are reducible to economic causation, but rather that economic development is a constraint or means that enables or disables rather than causes human expression. For contemporary sociology then, it is important to recognize the subtly in Marx’s analyses of society, but also its limitation in addressing contemporary theoretical debates. Marx never put forth a total theory of historical causation; in fact he argued different historical event need to be studied in themselves to understand the key to their development, the supreme virtue of a “grand historico-philosophical theory” Marx said would be its “supra historical” character. Though demonstrably antithetical to the views of Marx, it is important not to fall into the trap of discursivity, an endless self-referential discourse with no chance of a last word. As Marx would have it: “let the dead bury their dead”.

Written by Mathew Toll.

Bibliography.

Archer, Margaret S., “Morphogenesis Versus Structuration: On Combining Structure and Action”, The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 33. No. 4. (December, 1982), pp. 455-483’.

Althusser, Louis, For Marx, (1971, London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press).

Althusser, Louis, “The Humanist Controversy”, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, Trans G.M. Goshgarian, Edited Francois Matheron, (2003, London: Verso), pp. 221-305.

Bell, Daniel, “The “Rediscovery” of Alienation: Some Notes Alone the Quest for the Historical Marx”, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 56, No. 24. (November 1959), pp. 933-952

Camus, Albert, The Rebel, Trans Anthony Bower, (1971, London: Penguin Books).

Craib, Ian, Modern Social Theory: From Parsons to Habermas, (1992, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf).

Engels, Frederick, “Engels to F. Mehring, July 14, 1893”, Selected Correspondence, (1953, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House), pp. 540-544.

Engels, Frederick, “Engels to J. Bloch, September 21-22, 1890”, Selected Correspondence, (1953, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House), pp. 498-500.

Forbes, Ian, Marx and the New Individual, (1990, London: Unwin Hyman).

Foucault, Michel, “What is an Author?”, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault: 1954-1984, Edited James Faubion, Trans Robert Hurley and others, (2000, London: Penguin Books), pp. 205-224.

Fromm, Erich, Marx’s Concept of Man, (1972, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co.)

Germov, John and Poole , Marilyn, “The Sociological Gaze: linking private lives to public issues”, Public Sociology: An introduction to Australian Society, edited John Germov, Marilyn Poole, (2006, Crows Nest: Allan & Unwin), pp. 3-20.

Giddens, Anthony, “Agency, Structure”, Contemporary Sociological Theory, second edition, edited Craig Calhoun, Joseph Gerteis, James Moody, Steven Pfaff, Indermohan Virk, (2008, Carlton: Blackwell Publishing), pp. 231-242.

Korsch, Karl, “Leading Principles of Marxism: A Restatement”, Three Essays on Marxism, (1971, London: Pluto Press), pp. 11-38.

Marx , Karl and Engels, Frederick, “The German Ideology: A Critique of the Most Recent German Philosophy as Represented by Feuerbach, B. Bauer, and Stirner”, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, Trans and Edited Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat, (1967, New York: Anchor Books), pp.403-473

Marx, Karl, “Theses on Feuerbach”, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, Trans and Edited Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat, (1967, New York: Anchor Books), pp. 399-402.

Marx, Karl, “Marx to Otechestvenniye Zapiski, November 1877”, Selected Correspondence, (1953, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House), pp.376-379

Marx Karl, “Economic and Philosophical manuscripts of 1844”, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, Trans and Edited Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat, (1967, New York: Anchor Books), pp.283-337

Marx, Karl, “An Exchange of Letters”, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, Trans and Edited Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat, (1967, New York: Anchor Books), pp.202-215.

Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, volume one, trans Samuael Moore and Edward Aveling, edited Fredrick Engels, (1986, Moscow: Progress Publishers).

Marx, Karl, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”. Selected Works: In Two Volumes, Volume I, (1950, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House), pp. 211-311.

Russell, Bertrand, History of Western Philosophy, (2006, London: Rutledge).

Schumpeter, Joseph A., Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd Ed, (1950, New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers).

Thompson, E.P., The Poverty of Theory: and Other Essays, (1976, London: Merlin Press).