History of Political Economy

History of Political Economy 20:l

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Karl Marx as a historical materialist historian of

political economy

Patrick Murray

Karl Marx was an early and original historian of political economy. His
discussion of political economists-concentrated in Theories of surplus
value and scattered throughout his writings-constitutes his most sus-
tained work as an intellectual historian. But the originator of what came
to be known as historical materialism was no ordinary historian. In this
essay, I will explore the characteristic features of Marxs history of political
economy and determine what historical materialism meant to that work.
Central to Marxs investigations is his Hegelian attention to method and
how method relates to economic puzzles and to deep-seated political mat-
ters. In characterizing Marx as a historian of science, I reject the orthodox
Marxist notion of historical materialism and show how Marx challenges
the orthodox positivists exclusion of the historical dimension of science.
Historical materialism is in no way a science of history; it does not
provide an all-purpose set of categories to be applied to a given phenom-
enon-say, political economy-in order to explain it. The fact that Marx
spent so much time berating Hegel, various Young Hegelians, Proudhon,
and Lassalle for merely applying prefabricated categories to actual phe-
nomena makes that mechanical view implausible. Rather, historical ma-
terialism is a propaedeutic to actual historical work; it is a polemic against
that idealism which turns history into a parade of thoughts and thinkers,
while dehistoricizing practical, material life. Marx was more interested in
Correspondence may be addressed to the author, Dept. of Philosophy, Creighton University,
Omaha NE 68 178.
1. Marx developed this line of criticism in his treatment of Hegels use of logical cate-
gories in the Philosophy of right. Marx writes: He [Hegel] develops his thinking not out
of the object, rather he develops the object in accordance with ready-made thinking put
together in the abstract sphere of logic. Karl Marx, Critique of Hegels Philosophy of
right, trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph OMalley (Cambridge, 1970), 14. And Marx criti-
cizes Proudhons substitution of abstract generalities for actual historical understanding in
this passage: The division of labor is, according to Mr. Proudhon, an eternal law, a simple,
abstract category. Therefore the abstraction, the idea, the word, must also suffice for him
to explain the division of labor in different historical epochs. Castes, corporations, manu-
facture, large-scale industry must be explained by the single word divide, and you will
have no need to study the numerous influences which give the division of labor a determi-
nate character in each epoch. Karl Marx, The poverty of philosophy, in Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels, Collected works 6 (New York, 1976), 179. Note that throughout the
article I have often revised the translation of texts from Marx.

95

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breaking down the dualism of being and consciousness, base and super-
structure, than in simply inverting idealism.
Though it provides no philosophers stone for understanding history,
Marxs historical materialism deserves close examination by historians and
philosophers of science. Surveying the fifth volume of the influential Min-
nesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science shows that many philosophers
of science find history irrelevant.2This judgment is a foreseeable conse-
quence of the received view in the philosophy of science, which splits the
context of discovery from the context of ju~tification.~ The context of
justification purports to provide the philosopher with a fixed measuring
stick impervious to the vagaries of history. The context of discovery, left
to the historians, treats the actual development of science and includes
psychological, political, economic, and religious factors. There is a high
moral purpose in making this distinction, namely, to free scientific truth
from the irrationalities of personality, politics, and religion. Marx shares
this purpose, but he finds this dehistoricizing distinction ultimately more
hindrance than help. The end of ideology proposed by the distinction may
only be the end of ideology ideology.
Marxs distinctive approach to the history of science begins with his
dissertation, On the difference between Democrituss and Epicuruss phi-
losophies of nature. His notes include these remarks on the proper ap-
proach to writing the history of science:
It is not so much the business of the philosophical writing of history
to fasten upon the personality, even that which pertains to the spiritual
in a philosopher, as if it were the focus and the formation of his
system; even less to the point is taking a stroll through psychological
trifles and smart-alekery. Rather, the philosophical writing of history
has to separate in each system the determinations themselves: the
thoroughgoing, actual crystallizations of the proofs from the;justifi-
cations in discourse, and from the presentations of the philosophers
insofar as they know themselves; the mutely progressing mole of ac-
tual philosophical knowing must be separated from the talkative, ex-
oteric, variously behaving phenomenological consciousness of the
subject, who is the vessel and energy of those development^.^
Writing history philosophically to advance that mute mole of science might
seem to elevate historical material into the sublime context of justification.
2. See vol. 5 of the Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science: Historical and
Philosophical Perspectives of Science, ed. Roger H. Stuewer (Minneapolis, 1970). This
entire volume was devoted to the issue of the relationship between the philosophy and the
history of science, and it featured essays by many prominent philosophers and historians of
science.
3. See Hans Reichenbach, Experience and prediction (Chicago, 1938), 6-7.
4. Karl Marx, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, Erganzungsband (Berlin,
1973), 247.

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 History of Political Economy

Murray * Marx as materialist historian 97

The particular discourse and self-awareness of the scientists, their talka-

tive, exoteric, variously behaving phenomenologicalconsciousness, seem
to belong to the context of discovery: grist for the ordinary historian. But
Marxs distinction does not completely dehistoricize science, as does the
distinction between contexts of discovery and justification, for the material
on which the philosophical writer of history works is still historically
specific. Marxs historical materialism differentiates between surjbce lev-
els of historical determination and the deep structures, namely, the specific
forms of consciousness which constitute science.
That Marx does not dehistoricize science altogether is borne out by the
conclusion of his dissertation. For Marx, the principle of the abstract, free,
individual self-consciousness shapes Epicuruss curious doctrine of the
declination of the atom and is at the root of the rest of his philosophy. This
individuality expresses, for Marx, the form of life in the post-Aristotelian
age, in which the subjectivism of individual minds bends away from the
authority of nature and culture.
The parallel between the post-Aristotelian period and his own post-
Hegelian situation led Mam to study Epicurus. And his dissertation notes
make clear that, in turning to study Hegel, he will again look beneath the
superficial influences to the deep structures of collective social formation
in order to push science forward. In this passage, Marx criticizes the Young
Hegelians for accusing Hegel of accommodating the Russian state, that
is, for a failure of conscience, without their exploring the source of that
accommodation in the foundations of Hegels philosophy:
That a philosopher commits this or that seeming inconsistency out of
this or that accommodation is conceivable; he himself may even have
this in his consciousness. However, what he does not have in his
consciousness is that the possibility of this seeming accommodation
has its innermost root in an inadequacy or inadequate fashioning of
his principle itself. Therefore, if a philosopher has actually accom-
modated himself, his students have to clarify this out of his inner,
essential consciousness, that had for him, himsev, the form of an
exoteric consciousness. In this way, that which appeared as progress
in conscience is likewise a progress in knowledge. The particular
conscience of the philosopher is not placed under suspicion, but
rather his essential form of consciousness is reconstructed, raised into
determinate shape, and thereby is at the same time gone b e y ~ n d . ~
Through his study of Hegel, Marx concludes that the foundation of his
philosophy, in particular, Hegels concept of logic and its relation to the
real sciences of nature and spirit, was a refined accommodation to capital-

5 . Karl M a n , Writings of the young Marx on philosophy and society, ed. and trans.
Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H . Guddat (Garden City, N.Y., 1967), 61.

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98 History of Political Economy 20:l (1988)

ism. A line from the final Paris manuscript, Logic is the money of spirit,
suggests this Hegel interpretation.(j What is important for us to see is that
seeking out the accommodation in the basic makeup of a science-in order
to progress beyond it-applies to Marxs history of political economy as
well. When Marx turns to Ricardo, he scrutinizes his basic logic: his meth-
ods and concepts, rather than muckraking for dubious dealings with the
bankers and brokers of the day.
Two features of the role of history in the progress of science stand out,
then, in Marxs notion of historical materialism. First, progress in science
depends upon studying past and existing sciences with a view toward their
inner limitations. Thus, Marx adopts Hegels concept of determinate ne-
gation (Aufiebung), i. e. , more advanced thinking incorporates as well as
negates prior science. History of science is done with present progress in
mind, and science is handicapped when it ignores its history. Second, the
critical study of the history of science is linked to the wider study of history
by the need to disclose the specific social forms embedded in science.
Here Marx revises Hegels notions of logic and Zeitgeist, the spirit of an
age. These two convictions concerning the history of science underlie two
distinguishing aspects of Marxs history of political economy. First, his
historical studies and his creative work in political economy are insepa-
rable. He advances political economy by means of an immanent criticism
of the tradition. Second, he relates the defects and contradictions of clas-
sical political economy to the peculiar fetishism that characterizes capital-
ist society.
In order to make an immanent critique, Marx distinguishes classical
from vulgar political economy. Vulgar political economy, an apologetic
collection of common-sense views, fails to rise to the level of science,
which recognizes the difference between the essence and the appearance
of things . 8 Classical political economy probes the essence of capitalism
and is able to explain the appearances in terms of that essence. Ricardos
Principles of political economy and taxation, the paradigm of the classical
school for Marx, sets forth the law of value and applies it to various eco-
nomic phenomena.
This distinction between the vulgar and the classical can be related to
the two levels of accommodation Marx found in Hegel. Fitting ones sci-

6. Marx, Writings, 319.

7 . On the distinction between classical and vulgar political economy see Karl Marx,
Capital, vol. 1 , trans. Ben Fowkes (New York, 1977), 174-75 n.
8. I am thankful to John Stachel for the reminder that Marx did not view vulgar political
economy as having no scientific value. Indeed, Marx writes: Vulgar economy in its early
stages does not find the material fully elaborated and therefore assists to a certain extent in
solving economic problems. Karl Mam, Theories of surRlus-value, Part 111, trans. Jack
Cohen and S . W. Ryazanskaya, ed. S. W. Ryazanskaya and Richard Dixon (Moscow,
1971), 501-502.

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 History of Political Economy

Murray Marx as materialist historian 99

ence to the demands of special interests-the ordinary sense of accom-

modation-was practiced by vulgar economists. Classical political
economy accommodates as well, but in an unwitting way that is rooted in
its basic logic. Classical principles are shared by persons of varied back-
grounds and classes; nonetheless, Marx shows, these principles operate
within the logic of bourgeois consciousness. What makes Ricardos labor
theory of value bourgeois is not the fact that he was a banker; many so-
cialists-even many who call themselves Marxists-have based their pro-
grams upon that theory. Since Marxs primary interest lies with the critique
of the classical tradition, let us consider it in detail.
Using the language of Thomas Kuhn, we can say that Marx often or-
ganizes these investigations in terms of scientific puzzles, many of which
turn out to be crisis-provoking anomalies for classical political e c ~ n o m y . ~
Some of these puzzles were recognized by the economists; for example,
What is the difference between productive and unproductive labor? How
are prices governed? What leads to a falling rate of profit? What is the
value of labor?
What is striking about Marx is the way he teases out the unasked ques-
tions, the puzzles which remained implicit for the tradition. A prime ex-
ample is the concept of surplus value itself. It is with some irony that he
titles his three-volume history of political economy Theories of surptus
value, for the tradition never formulated theories of surplus value. This
lack stemmed from its failure to even recognize puzzles such as the nature
of the value form and the capital form, the nature of the labor that consti-
tutes value, and the relationship between the production process and the
process of capital revaluation. Consequently, classical political economy
did not recognize the anomalies provoked by the solutions to the various
puzzles. These anomalies include: (i) that the apparent fair play of the
contract between capitalist and wage laborer covers up a relationship of
exploitation; (ii) that the rule of bourgeois appropriation-that I have a
right to what I produce-turns itself upside down under conditions of
capitalist production; (iii) that overproduction and commercial crises are
endemic to capitalism; and (iv) that the long-term tendency of the rate of
profit is to fall, even with increasing productivity.*O
In solving the puzzles which lead to these anomalies, Marx works with
Smith and Ricardo, within the classical paradigm. For example, Marx
shows that the divergence of value from price of production follows from

9. See Thomas S . Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolutions, 2d ed., enlarged (Chi-
cago, 1970).
10; Actually, both Smith and Ricardo held the view that the long-run tendency of the
profit rate was to fall, but in Marxs view their explanations of why that should happen
were incomplete or inaccurate, and they interpreted the tendency in a naturalistic way,
rather than seeing it as the mark of capitalism as a specific historical mode of production.

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100 History of Political Economy 20:l (1988)

the labor theory of value. Nevertheless, Marxs solutions to puzzles both

known and unknown to the tradition relativize political economy to a
theory of bourgeois wealth. These anomalies undermine the classical theo-
rists naturalization of the economic and political categories of capitalism.
For example, the anomalous tendency of the rate of profit to fall draws the
following comment from Mam:
It comes to the surface here in a purely economic way-i.e., from
the bourgeois point of view, within the limitations of capitalist under-
standing, from the standpoint of capitalist production itself-that it
has its barrier, that it is relative, that it is not an absolute, but only a
historical mode of production corresponding to a definite limited ep-
och in the development of the material requirements of production. *
That Marx organizes his criticism of the economists around puzzles pre-
sent in the classical tradition shows his determination to advance science
through internal means. And the fact that the solution to these puzzles
outlines the specifically bourgeois horizon of this science is likewise what
we would expect on the basis of Marxs historical materialism.
We might wonder why the political economists failed to solve the puz-
zles they recognized; this only leads to the question: Why did they fail to
even become aware of the puzzles which, in Marxs hands, led to a crisis
for the whole paradigm? To answer this question we must turn to one of
the most distinctive features of Marxs work as a historian, namely, his
attention to method. Of particular relevance here are Hegels criticism of
scientific empiricism and his understanding of the logic of essence (Wes-
enslogik). In his Encyclopedia logic, Hegel faults empirical science as
follows:
The fundamental illusion in scientific empiricism is always this, that
it uses the metaphysical categories of matter, force, those of one,
many, universality, also infinity, etc. Furthermore, it extends impli-
cations along the thread of such categories . . . and in all this it does
not know that it itself carries on and contains metaphysics and uses
those categories and their connections in a fully uncritical and uncon-
scious manner.
Marx generally links the economists failure either to recognize a puzzle
or to solve it to the shortcomings of ordinary empiricism. Their method
fails to consider the content and interrelationships of the categories with
which it operates. To elaborate, I will specify three of Marxs criticisms:
one involves the distinction between abstract and concrete categories, a
11. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 , ed. Frederick Engels (New York, 1967), 259.
12. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegels Logic (Part One of the Encyclopedia of the philosophical
sciences, 1830), trans. William Wallace (Oxford, 1975), #38, p. 62.

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 History of Political Economy

Murray Marx as materialist historian 101

second concerns the nature of the relationship between essence and ap-
pearance, and a third turns on the distinction between historically general
and historically specific categories.
Like Hegel, Marx distinguishes abstract from concrete categories; for
example, the categories value, money, and capital are increasingly con-
crete-like point, line, and surface, in plane geometry. Two mistakes
which the political economists repeatedly make have to do with losing
track of this distinction. The first mistake takes two forms itself reduction
and inflation. The fallacy here lies in either equating a concrete category
with a more abstract one-reduction-or conversely, equating a relatively
abstract category with a more concrete one-inflation. Let me cite an
example of this fallacy in which Marx takes Smith to task:
As Adam Smith resolves surplus value not only into profit but also
into the rent of land-two particular kinds of surplus value, whose
movement is determined by quite different laws-he should certainly
have seen from this that he ought not to treat the general abstract form
(surplus value) as directly identical with any of its particular forms.
With all later bourgeois economists, as with Adam Smith, lack of
theoretical understanding needed to distinguish the different forms of
economic relations remains the rule in their coarse grabbing at and
interest in the empirically available material. l 3
This case may be thought of either as the reduction of profit and rent to
surplus value or as the inflation of surplus value into profit and rent. As
we shall see, this particular collapsing of categories is linked to a faulty
model of the relationship of essence and appearance.
Another example of this first kind of muddling of abstract and concrete
categories involves Smiths two solutions to a puzzle which dominates the
first volume of Theories of surplus value, namely, how to distinguish pro-
ductive and unproductive labor. This puzzle ties in with the theory of
surplus value inasmuch as productive labor-productive in the bourgeois
sense-is labor which exchanges directly with capital, which is only an-
other way of saying that productive labor is surplus-value-producinglabor.
Smith defines productive labor in this way, and Marx concurs. However,
Smith also defines productive labor simply as labor which produces a com-
modity. This equivocation reveals a methodological weakness: Smith can-
not keep straight the different levels of concreteness between categories
like capital and commodity.l4
Equivocation is Smiths stock and trade. Marx finds two types of expla-
nation in Smith: one grasps the inner essential connections; the other stays
13. Karl Marx, Theories of surplus-value, Part I, ed. S . Ryazanskaya and trans. Emile
Burns (Moscow, 1963), 92.
14. See Marxs discussion in Theories, 1:155-74.

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102 History of Political Economy 20:l (1988)

at the level of economic phenomena. For example, Smith offers a labor

theory of value and bases his analysis of profit, wages, and rent on value,
but then he reverses himself and makes wages, profit, and rent the inde-
pendent variable out of which the value of commodities is constituted. I 5
Ricardo, on the other hand, places both feet inside the door of modem
science and rigorously holds to the type of explanation which gets at es-
sential connections. While Marx congratulates him for his consistent
method, he points up certain methodological failings on Ricardos part,
including a second type of mistake which muddles the abstract and the
concrete. Marx states:
On the one hand Ricardo must be reproached for not going far
enough, for not carrying his abstraction to completion, for instance,
when he analyses the value of the commodity, he at once allows him-
self to be influenced by consideration of all kinds of concrete condi-
tions. On the other hand, one must reproach him for regarding the
phenomenal form as immediate and direct proof or exposition of the
general laws, and for failing to develop it (the phenomenal form). In
regard to the first, his abstraction is too incomplete; in regard to the
second, it is formal abstraction, which in itself is wrong.I6
Ricardo is not abstract enough insofar as he lets concrete categories such
as profit get mixed up in the definition of the abstract category of value.
From a methodological point of view, this puts the cart before the horse,
since Ricardo uses his concept of value to explain more concrete categories
such as profit and rent. This garbling of the abstract and the concrete in
defining a category is the second way of losing track of the distinction
between abstract and concrete categories.
Yet Ricardo is also too abstract; he moves too quickly to relate forms of
appearance such as profit and rent to the essential concept of value. Ri-
cardo is so anxious to explain how the law of value governs wages, profits,
and rents that he fails to articulate the conceptual differences and relation-
ships between phenomena and essence. This failure relates to Marxs sec-
ond methodological criticism-the one concerning the model of essence
and appearance.
At this point Hegels logic of essence influences Marx. Ricardo, the best
representative of the classical school, operates with a pre-Hegelian model
of essence and appearance. Science based on this model juggles appear-
ances to bring them in line with essence, and this is Ricardos procedure.
He works with appearances-profit, wages, rent-to get them to conform
to the law of value. What this model never does is raise the question, Why
15. See Marx, Theories, 1 :92-95.
16. Karl Marx, Theories of surplus-value, Part II, ed. and trans. S. Ryazanskaya (Mos-
cow, 1968), 106.

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Murray Marx as materialist historian 103

does the essence appear as something other than itself? The pre-Hegelian
model views essence as a kind of a thing, which happens not to appear.
No internal connection between essence and appearance is recognized by
empiricism. Hegel, on the contrary, sees an internal, a necessary connec-
tion between essence and appearance. It does not just happen that essence
appears as something other than itself; essence must so appear. The fact
that essence appears in something other than itself reveals its nature: it is
a category of reflection. It is no natural, immediately observable thing
which happens to be caught, like Descartes matter, without its sensuous
clothing.
This Hegelian approach to the relationship between essence and appear-
ance lays the foundations for twin criticisms of political economy made
by Marx. I refer to its inability to penetrate the value form and its inability
to spell out the relationship between surplus value and its forms of ap-
pearance. Since it neither asked why value appears as something other
than itself, namely, money, nor bothered itself about the polar nature of
the expression of value, political economy never dug deeper into the nature
of value itself, never distinguished abstract from concrete labor, and never
realized that value is no immediate, natural property of human products,
but rather results from a specific social mediation. l 7 Consequently, politi-
cal economy could not recognize that the deviations of market price from
value follow from the social mediation which constitutes value. Even less
could it grasp why value and average market price diverge, for this follows
from the necessary difference between surplus value and its forms of ap-
pearance.
The inadequacy of political economys model of essence and appearance
leads us to Marxs third criticism. This concerns the failure to distinguish
historically specific categories from general ones. This failure plagued the
classical theory of value itself, precisely because it never drew the distinc-
tion between concrete labor-which produces use values and is general-
and abstract labor-which produces value and is historically specific.
17. As Marx puts it, It is one of the chief failings of classical political economy that it
has never succeeded, by means of its analysis of commodities, and in particular of their
value, in discovering the form of value which in fact turns value into exchange-value. Even
its best representatives, Adam Smith and Ricardo, treat the form of value as something of
indifference, something external to the nature of the commodity itself. The explanation for
this is not simply that their attention is entirely absorbed by the analysis of the magnitude
of value. It lies deeper. The value-form of the product of labor is the most abstract, but also
the most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production; by that fact it stamps the
bourgeois mode of production as a particular kind of social production of a historical and
transitory character. If then we make the mistake of treating it as the eternal natural form
of social production, we necessarily overlook the specificity of the value-form, and conse-
quently of the commodity-form together with its further developments, the money form,
the capital form, etc. Marx, Capital, 1: 174 n. Since the relationship between surplus value
and its forms of appearance must be included under Mams etc., we can see that these
twin criticisms are linked to the classical economists naturalization of capitalist forms.

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104 History of Political Economy 20:l (1988)

Keeping straight the differences between the general, use-value dimension

of capitalism and the historically specific, value dimension of capitalism
is one of the unique achievements of Marxs Capital. Political economys
failure to do as much gives rise to a raft of criticisms on Marxs part. These
include the tendency of economists: to confuse the technical composition
of capital with the organic composition, to confuse the distinction between
constant and variable capital with that between fixed and circulating capi-
tal, and to confuse the means of production with capital.
Classical political economy gets beyond the gross fetishism of mercan-
tilism, which identifies wealth with precious metals, and gets beyond the
Trinitarian Formula of vulgar political economy, which identifies the
means of production (which it identifies with capital) as the source of
interest and land as the source of rents.18Nonetheless, the classical school
naturalizes the capitalist form of production by failing to see the historical
specificity of value, capital, wage labor, profit, interest, and rent. When
we looked at the equivocation in Smiths definition of productive labor, I
noted that productive referred to capitalism. But this distinction between
productive in the capitalist sense and productive in a general sense gets
lost in a theory which takes capitalist forms to be absolute. As Marx com-
ments:

Only bourgeois narrow-mindedness, which regards the capitalist

forms of production as absolute forms-hence as eternal, natural
forms of production-can confuse the question of what is productive
labor from the standpoint of capital with the question of what labor
is productive in general.l9

Marx is extremely sensitive to the political implications of these three

methodological defects. Failures-to consider the content of the economic
forms themselves-resulting in reduction and inflation, and muddled def-
initions, the inadequate model of essence and appearance, and the confu-
sion of historically specific with general categories-all serve to naturalize
the capitalist mode of production and to obscure the contradictions en-
demic to it. Classical political economy is a theory of bourgeois wealth
which poses as a theory of wealth per se; it is an accommodation to capi-
talism.
But if classical political economy is ultimately an apology for capital-
ism, it is not a crass one. Its accommodation stems from shortcomings in
the specific form of consciousness that shapes modem thought. And the
classical political economists were no more cognizant of this than was
Epicurus or Hegel aware of the historical nature of his fundamental prin-
18. On this point, see Marx,Theories, 3500.
19. Marx, Theories, 1:393.

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Murray Marx as materialist historian 105

ciples. In bourgeois society, abstractions appear as independent things and

social mediation appears as a natural force. This fetishism recurs in its
intellectual production, which treats economic forms as if they were nat-
ural givens rather than social products.
Marxs critique of classical political economy, then, is immanent: it
seeks out the internal conflicts which were sometimes felt by the econo-
mists but never clearly resolved; it reveals the political economists accom-
modation to capitalism; and it shows that this accommodation is rooted
not in bad faith, but in the bourgeois horizon of their intellectual produc-
tion. Marxs critique does not place their conscience under suspicion;
rather it reveals the historical shape of their consciousness and so nudges
the mole of science forward. This is the sense in which Marxs account of
the political economists is historical materialist.
Marxs approach to the history of science strives to enhance, not deni-
grate, science by attacking the received views separation of the context
of discovery from the context of justification. For Max, the autonomy of
science is better achieved by disclosing the ways in which science is em-
broiled in society, than by insisting that it is not. To twist Otto Neuraths
metaphor, since there is no shore outside history on which to berth the
ship of science, repairs must be made at sea. There is no substitute for the
self-criticism of the scientific community with respect to its own historical
conditioning.

This is a revised version of a paper read at the Marx Symposium of the Boston Colloquium
for the Philosophy of Science in February 1983. I am thankful to Professor Robert S. Cohen
and Professor Marx Wartofsky for the invitation that gave me the occasion to write this
article. I also appreciate the helpful comments of Professor Thomas Nitsch.

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