Historical Materialism
2 total works
Looking at Marx as an anthropological theorist, Mattick compares his critique of political economy with Evans-Pritchard's analysis of Azande witchcraft. Just as the British anthropologist attempted to explain Azande ideas and rituals in terms of their place in native life, Marx wished to explain the continued faith in economics - despite its striking weakness as a science - in terms of the central role played by this system of ideas in the daily lives of natives of capitalist society. This comparison leads to the questions about the nature of scientific thinking and its relation to our everyday knowledge of social reality that are the subject of this book.
Second edition, with a new Preface by the author. The first edition was published in 1986 by Hutchinson, ISBN 9780091654603.
Theory as Critique, while discussing many central issues of Marxian theory, has two main emphases: First, as the title suggests, it takes seriously Capital's claim to be a critique of economic theory, rather than a contribution to political economy. Understanding what this means, it shows, goes far to unravelling many difficulties traditionally found in Marx's book, from the nature of his theory of class to the 'transformation problem'. Secondly, Mattick's volume carefully explores how to bridge the gap between the extreme abstraction of Marx's ideas and the complex reality that they are intended to help us understand.