In the Tracks of Historical Materialism by Perry Anderson

Author:Perry Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2016-02-07T16:00:00+00:00

1. The Savage Mind, p. 130.

2. See his declarations in Paolo Caruso, Conversazioni con Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Lacan, Milan 1969, p. 126; for characteristically ingenuous comments on causality, note pp. 105-106. The best discussion of Foucault’s political pronouncements can be found in Peter Dews’s astringent essay ‘The Nouvelle Philosophie and Foucault’, Economy and Society, vol. 8, No 2, May 1979, pp. 125-176.

3. Another case of a similar type was posed by the thought of Ernst Bloch — no less unjustly omitted from my brief survey, because of its constant adjacency to forms of religious Naturphilosophie. For an excellent study of Bloch’s difficult work, written in a spirit of critical sympathy that brings out the originality of his contribution to the Western Marxist canon, see now Wayne Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch, London 1982.

4. ‘Today I value being considered a Marxist’: ‘Interview with Jürgen Habermas’, New German Critique, No. 18, Fall 1979, p.33. The whole tenor of this text, the best biographical account of Habermas’s development, can be profitably compared with Althusser’s asseverations of the same period: see note 26, p. 30 above.

5. Knowledge and Human Interests, London 1972, p.314.

6. Communication and the Evolution of Society, London 1979, p. 120.

7. Theory and Practice, London 1974, p. 169.

8. Zur Rekonstruktion des historischen Materialismus, Frankfurt 1976, p.38. This sentence is omitted in the English translation of the same essay in Communication and the Evolution of Society.

9. Communication and the Evolution of Society, p. 123. Trs. modified.

10. Zur Rekonstruktion des historischen Materialismus, pp.244-245. ‘To the functions of historical research for a theory of social evolution there correspond no tasks that a theory of evolution could take over for historical writing.’ The examples Habermas gives are of the transition to archaic civilizations, with the emergence of the State, and the transition to ‘modernity’, with the differentiation out of a market society and the complementary emergence of a fiscal State.

11. Knowledge and Human Interests, p.314.

12. Ibid., p.314.

13. Communication and the Evolution of Society, p. 186.

14. Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas, Boston 1978, p.282. Habermas has rightly paid tribute to the exceptional quality of McCarthy’s work as a survey of his thought.

15. Writing and Difference, p.280.

16. ‘Within which alone the claims of speech-acts to validity can be settled’: ‘Wahrheitstheorien’, in Helmut Fahrenbach, ed., Wirklichkeit una Reflexion: Walter Schulz zum 60. Geburtstag, Pfullingen 1973, p.216.

17. Legitimation Crisis, London 1976, especially pp. 75-94. For a telling critique of Habermas’s conceptions here, see David Held, ‘Crisis Tendencies, Legitimation and the State’, in John Thompson and David Held, eds., Habermas — Critical Debates, London 1982, pp. 181-195. This volume, which contains a wide range of contributions, starting with a fine essay by Agnes Heller, ‘Habermas and Marxism’, and concluding with a detailed and painstaking reponse by Habermas, is itself an admirable practical example of the discursive principles advocated by him. Note that in his ‘Reply to my Critics’, Habermas confesses that the ‘evidential dimension’ of the concept of truth in his epistemology is ‘badly in need of

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