Marx and Marxism by Worsley Peter;

Author:Worsley, Peter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

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Social Evolution

Living in the nineteenth century, Marx and Engels were affected not only by the stirring social ideas of the eighteenth century, by the Enlightenment and the twin Revolutions, but also by the triumphs of natural science: firstly, in the sciences dealing with the inorganic – in mechanics, in chemistry, physics, and geology – and eventually in the life sciences too. It was the Darwinian revolution that stamped the thinking of the Victorians, and its methods were quickly applied to social life. Religious authority had long been practically challenged, and the rationalists had made an intellectual critique even of the Bible, but it was left to Darwin to formulate a theory of the emergence of life within Nature, and of the place of humanity in that process. Marx sent a copy of the first volume of Capital to Darwin, who thanked him politely but only cut open the first 105 of its 122 pages. Moreover, it was not just process, but progress: lower forms, whether of inanimate matter, cellular organisms, or forms of society, gave way to higher ones.

Most thinkers at the time were optimists. They believed, with Comte, that humanity was now capable of using science to satisfy human needs. We were standing on the brink of a new epoch. Such optimism was as readily combined with conservatism as with radicalism: the evolutionary turningpoint could be seen as beginning not in the future, when humanity as a whole would take charge of its own destiny, but now, when intelligent elites could begin to guide social life along the lines indicated by the new social science. Such a doctrine could therefore justify a range of possible arrangements from Hegel’s apologia for the Prussian state to liberal reformism.

So devastating was the impact of Darwinism that procedures of natural science were taken to be the models for scientific method in general, and hence those to be applied in social inquiry too. The canons and procedures of abstraction, testing, verification or disproof – of empirical ‘positive’ research – would now replace mere conjecture or purely logical reasoning. If laboratory experiments might not be possible, they had not been for Darwin either. But Nature itself constituted if not one huge laboratory at least a storehouse of results, as it were, in which simpler forms of life could be studied whether in the form of still-living species or from the fossil record.

Comparative ethnology (which we call social or cultural anthropology today) was similarly considered to provide evidence of successive forms in social evolution which had emerged and become dominant, or been eclipsed and marginalized by adaptation to specialized environmental niches, or had stopped developing altogether or died out. And since Darwin had shown that the emergence of successive dominant forms was not a random process but took place according to the laws of natural selection, the search both for laws and stages of development in human society was now on.

Marx’s conception of law, then, was naturally conditioned by nineteenth-century natural science conceptions of what a

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