Main Currents in Sociological Thought: Volume One by Raymond Aron

Author:Raymond Aron [Aron, Raymond]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9780429839740
Google: DCBtDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

IV

Why does Marx’s historical sociology of capitalism permit so many different interpretations? Why is it so ambiguous? Leaving aside accidental, historical, posthumous reasons–among them the destinies of movements and societies which have called themselves Marxist–the essential reasons for this ambiguity seem to me twofold. For one thing, the Marxist conception of capitalist society, and of society in general, is sociological, but this sociology is related to a philosophy; and a number of interpretative difficulties arise from the relation of a philosophy to a sociology. In addition, according to Marx, it is in terms of economic knowledge that a society as a whole is understood; but the relations between economics and sociology, or between economic phenomena and the social entity, are also ambiguous.

Let us start with a proposition that seems to me incontestable, or at least made obvious by all the texts. Marx came to political economy from philosophy by way of sociology, and until the end of his life he remained in a certain sense a philosopher. He always considered that the history of mankind, as it unfolds through the succession of regimes and culminates in a nonantagonistic society, had philosophical significance. It is through history that man creates himself. The culmination of history is at the same time a goal of philosophy. Through history, philosophy–by defining man–fulfills itself. The nonantagonistic, postcapitalist regime is not merely one social type among others; it is the goal, so to speak, of mankind’s search for itself.

You will remember that I began my account of Marx with the mature works, or at least with those works written since 1847–1848. But there is a Marxian canon previous to this date, and I must now say a few words about the relation of Marxist thought to its philosophical origins.

Marx’s thought is traditionally explained in terms of the conjunction of three influences, and it was Engels himself who named these three influences as decisive: German philosophy, English economics, and French history. This list of influences seems banal enough and is therefore scorned today by the more subtle interpreters. Let us begin with interpretations which are not subtle, that is, with what Marx and Engels themselves said about the origins of their thought.

According to them, they were in the tradition of classic German philosophy, retaining one of the main ideas of Hegelian thought, namely, that the succession of societies and regimes also represents the stages of philosophy and the stages of mankind.

Moreover, Marx studied the English economy; he availed himself of the ideas of the English economists; he adopted some of the accepted theories of his day: for example, the labor theory of value or the law of the falling tendency of the rate of profit. He believed that by adopting the concepts and theories of the English economists he would give a scientifically accurate formulation of capitalist economy.

As for the French historians, from them he borrowed the notion of the class struggle, which in fact was to be found almost everywhere in the historical writings of the

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