Essay
On the Differences between the Classical and the “Western” Marxist Conceptions of Science
Zeyad el Nabolsy
Pages 193-217| Published online: 27 Jan 2022
El Nabolsy, Zeyad. 2022. “On the Differences between the Classical and the “Western” Marxist Conceptions of Science.” Marxism & Sciences 1(1):193–217. https://doi.org/10.56063/MS.2201.01109.
ABSTRACT
This essay aims to provide an account of the differences between what I call the “Classical Marxist” conception of science which was adhered to by Marx and Engels and further developed by Boris Hessen and others on the one hand, and the conception of science which characterizes “Western Marxism” as it developed through the work of the theorists of the Frankfurt School on the other hand. I argue that Western Marxists such as Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer did not in fact successfully criticize the logical positivist account of the modern natural sciences. Instead I argue that they implicitly accepted the positivists’ characterization of the modern natural sciences (as they interpreted it) and then proceeded to devalue the modern natural sciences on this basis. I also show that Marcuse and Horkheimer, even though they presented themselves as revolting against the alleged “economism” of Classical Marxism, ended up endorsing a view of science which is functionally equivalent to a reductive economistic conception of science. I argue that the Classical Marxists’ conception of science is far richer and far more interesting than either a stereotyped “economistic” conception of science or the Western Marxist conception of modern science as merely an element in a historical process centered on the oppressive universalization of instrumental reasoning.
Keywords: History and philosophy of science, Marxist philosophy of science, Hegel, Marx, Engels, Western Marxism.
REFERENCES
Agassi, Joseph. 2008. Science and its History: A Reassessment of the Historiography of Science. Dordrecht: Springer.
Ajl, Max. 2021. A People’s Green New Deal. London: Pluto Press.
Anievas, Alexander. 2014. “Reassessing the Nazi War Economy and the Origins of the Second World War: An Introduction to a Symposium on Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction.” Historical Materialism 22(3–4): 281–297. https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-12341375
Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso.
Arthur, Richard T.W. 1977. “The Empiricist Account of Scientific Knowledge—A Polemical Evaluation.” Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of Science and the Humanities 3(1–4):125–141. http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/poznan3.html
Beiser, Fredrick. 2011. The German Historicist Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Berendzen, J.C. 2017. “Max Horkheimer.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Last modified August 30, 2017. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/horkheimer/
Blanning, Tim. 2010. The Romantic Revolution. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Bloch, Ernst. 1971. On Karl Marx. Translated by John Maxwell. New York: Herder & Herder.
Bunge, Mario. 2012. Evaluating Philosophies. Dordrecht: Springer.
Catana, Leo. 2013. “Philosophical Problems in the History of Philosophy: What are they?” In Philosophy and its History: Aims and Methods in the Study of Early Modern Philosophy, edited by Mogens Laerke, Justin E.H. Smith, and Eric Schliesser, 115–133. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ciccotti, Giovanni, Marcello Cini, and Michelangelo de Maria. 1976. “The Production of Science in Advanced Capitalist Society.” In The Political Economy of Science: Ideology of/in the Natural Sciences, edited by Hilary Rose and Stephen Rose, 32–58. London: The Macmillan Press.
Collin, Finn and David Budtz Pedersen. 2015. “The Frankfurt School, Science and Technology Studies, and the Humanities.” Social Epistemology 29(1): 44–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2013.782588
Delanty, Gerard and Neal Harris. 2021. “Critical Theory and the Question of Technology: The Frankfurt School Revisited.” Thesis Eleven 166(1): 88–108. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F07255136211002055
Drake, Stillman. 1973. Copernicus–Philosophy and Science: Bruno-Kepler-Galileo. Norwalk, Conn.: Brundy Library.
El Nabolsy, Zeyad. 2019. “Aristotle on Natural Slavery: An Analysis Using the Marxist Concept of Ideology.” Science & Society 83(2): 244–267. https://doi.org/10.1521/siso.2019.83.2.244
———. 2020. “Hegel’s Proto–Modernist Conception of Philosophy as Science.” Problemata: Revista Internacional de Filosofia 11(4): 81–107. https://doi.org/10.7443/problemata.v11i4.52207
Engels, Friedrich. 1934 [1890]. “Four Letters on Historical Materialism.” New International 1 (3): 81–85. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/ni/vol01/no03/engels.htm
Freudenthal, Gideon and Peter McLaughlin. 2009. “Classical Marxist Historiography of Science: The Hessen-Grossmann-Thesis.” In The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution: Texts by Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossmann, edited by Gideon Freudenthal and Peter McLaughlin, 1–40. Berlin: Springer.
Furbank, P. N. 1992. Diderot: A Critical Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Fritzsche, Peter. 2004. Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gay, Peter. 2001. Weimar Culture: The Outside as Insider. New York: W.W Norton & Co.
Gould, Stephan Jay. 1996. The Mismeasure of Man. (2nd Edition). New York: W. W. Norton & Co.
Gramsci, Antonio. 2016. “The Modern Prince.” In The Modern Prince and Other Writings, edited and translated by Louis Marks, 135–188. New York: International Publishers.
Grosfoguel, Ramon. 2009. “A Decolonial Approach to Political Economy: Transmodernity, Border Thinking and Global Coloniality.” Special Issue, Epistemologies of Transformation: Kult 6:10–38.
Grossmann, Henryk. 2009. “The Social Foundations of the Mechanistic Philosophy and Manufacture.” In The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution: Texts by Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossmann, edited by Gideon Freudenthal and Peter McLaughlin, 103–156. Berlin: Springer.
Grove, Richard H. 1995. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1990. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Translated by Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Haggag, Ali. 2019. “The Frankfurt School at Egyptian Universities.” Contemporary Arab Affairs 12(4): 104–120. https://doi.org/10.1525/caa.2019.12.4.104
Hegel, G.W.F. 1900. The Philosophy of History. Translated by John Sibree. London: The Colonial Press.
———. 1969. Science of Logic. Translated by A.V. Miller. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, Inc.
———. 1995. Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume 3: Medieval and Modern Philosophy. Translated by E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Herf, Jeffery. 2012. “Dialectic of Enlightenment Reconsidered.” New German Critique 117: 81–89.
Honneth, Axel. 2005. “Bisected Rationality: The Frankfurt School’s Critique of Science.” In Continental Philosophy of Science, edited by Gary Gutting, 295–305. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Horkheimer, Max. 1992 [1941]. “The End of Reason.” In The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, edited by Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, 26–48. New York: Continuum.
———. 2002 [1932]. “Notes on Science and the Crisis.” In Critical Theory: Selected Essays, Max Horkheimer, translated by Matthew J. O’Connell, 3–9. New York: Continuum.
———. 2002 [1937]. “Traditional and Critical Theory.” In Critical Theory: Selected Essays, Max Horkheimer, translated by Matthew J. O’Connell, 188–252. New York: Continuum.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Howard, Don. 2003. “Two Left Turns Make a Right: On the Curious Political Career of North American Philosophy of Science at Midcentury.” In Logical Empiricism in North America, edited by Gary Hardcastle and Alan Richardson, 25–93. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Kautzer, Chad. 2017. “Marx’s Influence on the Early Frankfurt School.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory, edited by M. J. Thompson, 43–65. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lenin, V.I. 2021. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. London: Wellred Books.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1955. Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
———. 1992 [1941]. “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology.” In The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, edited by Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, 138–162. New York: Continuum.
———. 1992 [1965]. “On Science and Phenomenology.” In The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, edited by Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, 466–476. New York: Continuum.
Marx, Karl. 1975a. “The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.” In Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
———. 1975b [1867]. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin.
———. 1986. “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.” In Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 29. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1976a. “The German Ideology.” In Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
———. 1976b. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” In Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 6. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
McNulty, Jake. (forthcoming). “From Analytic Pragmatism to Historical Materialism: Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the Quine-Duhem Thesis.” Journal of European Philosophy.
Miller, Richard W. 1983. Analyzing Marx: Morality, Power and History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Novalis. 1996. “Christianity or Europe: A Fragment.” In The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics, edited by Frederick Beiser, 59–79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Okasha, Samir. 2000. “The Underdetermination of Theory by Data and the ‘Strong Programme’ in the Sociology of Knowledge.” International Studies in Philosophy of Science 14(3): 283–297. https://doi.org/10.1080/026985900437782
Omodeo, Pietro D. 2016 “After Nikolai Bukharin: History of Science and Cultural Hegemony at the Threshold of the Cold War.” History of the Human Sciences 29(4–5):13–34. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0952695116667866
Ray, L.J. 1979. “Critical Theory and Positivism: Popper and the Frankfurt School.” Philosophy of the Social Science 9: 149–173. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F004839317900900202
Reisch, George A. 2005. How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2014. “When Structure Met Sputnik: On the Cold War Origins of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” In Science and Technology in the Global Cold War, edited by Naomi Oreskes and John Krige, 371–392. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
———. 2017. “Pragmatic Engagements: Philipp Frank and James Bryant Conant on Science, Education, and Democracy.” Studies in East European Thought 69: 227–244. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-017-9289-6
Richardson, Alan. 1997. “Towards a History of Scientific Philosophy.” Perspectives on Science 5(3): 418–451.
Rose, Hilary and Stephen Rose. 1976a. “The Problematic Inheritance: Marx and Engels on the Natural Sciences.” In The Political Economy of Science: Ideology of/in the Natural Sciences, edited by Hilary Rose and Stephen Rose, 1–13. London: The Macmillan Press.
———. 1976b. “The Incorporation of Science.” In The Political Economy of Science: Ideology of/in the Natural Sciences, edited by Hilary Rose and Stephen Rose, 14–31. London: The Macmillan Press.
Sachs, Carl. 2020. “Why Did the Frankfurt School Misunderstand Logical Positivism?” Journal of Intellectual History Blog, August 5th: https://jhiblog.org/2020/08/05/why-did-the-frankfurt-school-misunderstand-logical-positivism/
Saito, Kohei. 2017. Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Schlegel, Friedrich. 1841. Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern from the German of Frederick Schlegel. New York: J & H.G. Langley.
Sedgwick, Peter. 1966. “Natural Science and Human Theory: A Critique of Herbert Marcuse.” The Socialist Register 3: 163–192: https://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5972
Sheehan, Helena. 2017 [1985]. Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History, 2nd ed. London: Verso.
Smith, Justin. E. H. 2017. The Philosopher: A History in Six Types. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Viola, Enrico. 2013. “The Specificity of Logical Empiricism in the Twentieth-Century History of Scientific Philosophy.” HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 3: 191–209. https://doi.org/10.1086/670135
Vrahimis, Andreas. 2020. “Scientism, Social Praxis and Overcoming Metaphysics: A Debate Between Logical Empiricism and the Frankfurt School.” HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 10: 562–597. https://doi.org/10.1086/710184
———. (forthcoming). “Neurath’s Debate with Horkheimer and the Critique of Verstehen.” In The History of Understanding in Analytic Philosophy: Before and After Logical Empiricism, edited by Ákos Sivadó and Adam Tamas Tuboly. London: Bloomsbury.
Weber, Max. 2002 [1905]. The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism, and Other Writings. Translated and edited by Peter Baehr and Gordon Wells. London: Penguin.
Wiredu, Kwasi. 1980. Philosophy and an African Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wootton, David. 2015. The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution. New York: Harper.
Zuidervaart, Lambert, 2015. “Theodor W. Adorno.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Last modified October 26, 2015. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2015/entries/adorno/