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Karl Marx's Theory of History
First published in 1978, this book rapidly established itself as a classic of modern Marxism. Cohen's masterful application of advanced philosophical techniques in an uncompromising defense of historical materialism commanded widespread admiration. In the ensuing twenty years, the book has served as a flagship of a powerful intellectual movement--analytical Marxism. In this expanded edition, Cohen offers his own account of the history, and the further promise, of analytical Marxism. He also expresses reservations about traditional historical materialism, in the light of which he reconstructs the theory, and he studies the implications for historical materialism of the demise of the Soviet Union.
430 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1978
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About the author
G.A. Cohen
28 books113 followersGerald Allan Cohen FBA, known as G. A. Cohen or Jerry Cohen, was a Canadian Marxist political philosopher who held the positions of Quain Professor of Jurisprudence, University College London and Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, All Souls College, Oxford.
Born into a communist Jewish family in Montreal, Quebec, on 14 April 1941, Cohen was educated at McGill University (BA, philosophy and political science) in his home town and the University of Oxford (BPhil, philosophy) where he studied under Isaiah Berlin and Gilbert Ryle.
Cohen was assistant lecturer (1963–1964), lecturer (1964–1979) then reader (1979–1984) in the Department of Philosophy at University College London, before being appointed to the Chichele chair at Oxford in 1985. Several of his students, such as Christopher Bertram, Simon Caney, Alan Carter, Cécile Fabre, Will Kymlicka, John McMurtry, David Leopold, Michael Otsuka, Seana Shiffrin, and Jonathan Wolff have gone on to be important moral and political philosophers in their own right, while another, Ricky Gervais, has pursued a successful career in comedy.
Known as a proponent of analytical Marxism and a founding member of the September Group, Cohen's 1978 work Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence defends an interpretation of Karl Marx's historical materialism often referred to as technological determinism by its critics. In Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, Cohen offers an extensive moral argument in favour of socialism, contrasting his views with those of John Rawls and Robert Nozick, by articulating an extensive critique of the Lockean principle of self-ownership as well as the use of that principle to defend right as well as left libertarianism. In If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? (which covers the topic of his Gifford Lectures), Cohen addresses the question of what egalitarian political principles imply for the personal behaviour of those who subscribe to them.
Cohen was close friends with Marxist political philosopher Marshall Berman.
Cohen died on 5 August 2009.
Born into a communist Jewish family in Montreal, Quebec, on 14 April 1941, Cohen was educated at McGill University (BA, philosophy and political science) in his home town and the University of Oxford (BPhil, philosophy) where he studied under Isaiah Berlin and Gilbert Ryle.
Cohen was assistant lecturer (1963–1964), lecturer (1964–1979) then reader (1979–1984) in the Department of Philosophy at University College London, before being appointed to the Chichele chair at Oxford in 1985. Several of his students, such as Christopher Bertram, Simon Caney, Alan Carter, Cécile Fabre, Will Kymlicka, John McMurtry, David Leopold, Michael Otsuka, Seana Shiffrin, and Jonathan Wolff have gone on to be important moral and political philosophers in their own right, while another, Ricky Gervais, has pursued a successful career in comedy.
Known as a proponent of analytical Marxism and a founding member of the September Group, Cohen's 1978 work Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence defends an interpretation of Karl Marx's historical materialism often referred to as technological determinism by its critics. In Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, Cohen offers an extensive moral argument in favour of socialism, contrasting his views with those of John Rawls and Robert Nozick, by articulating an extensive critique of the Lockean principle of self-ownership as well as the use of that principle to defend right as well as left libertarianism. In If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? (which covers the topic of his Gifford Lectures), Cohen addresses the question of what egalitarian political principles imply for the personal behaviour of those who subscribe to them.
Cohen was close friends with Marxist political philosopher Marshall Berman.
Cohen died on 5 August 2009.
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August 25, 2022
I recall a piece of Cold War-era propaganda I saw during my undergraduate studies that instructed patriotic Americans on How to Spot a Communist. One tell-tale sign, the narrator explained, is that communists have no sense of humour. I suspect that he never met G.A. Cohen who, besides being an advocate of Marxist communism for much of his career, may very well have been the funniest, wackiest, and most utterly unhinged thinker in all of Western philosophy. He also happens to have written one of the best pieces of Marx scholarship I am aware of.
Karl Marx’s Theory of History (1978) is a landmark of what is now called Analytical Marxism. Using the methods of analytic philosophy, Cohen reconstructs Marx’s historical materialism as a set of perfectly respectable empirical hypotheses. The first of these is what he calls the Primacy Thesis: that the level of development of a society’s productive forces determines its production relations and that these, in turn, determine the shape of its important legal and political institutions. The second is the Development Thesis: that productive forces tend, as a matter of fact, to develop throughout history.
Taken together, these two theses entail that historical materialism amounts to a kind of functional explanation. Changes in production relations have the function of better exploiting developments in the productive forces and changes in the political superstructure have the function of better stabilizing these very relations. This allows history to be read teleologically—not on the basis of some metaphysically extravagant postulate like the Judeo-Christian God or the Hegelian World Spirit, but simply because human beings, being at least somewhat rational, will usually seek to maximize their productivity when possible.
Analytical Marxism has always struggled to find an audience. Marxists themselves largely dismissed it for espousing the methods of mainstream analytic philosophy and social science. As it turns out, logic and critical thinking merely reproduce the “one-dimensionality” of bourgeois capitalist ideology—which is, of course, a great excuse when you failed intro to logic. This is unfortunate. Marx's own personal slogan was "Question everything," yet those who claim to follow him so often eschew careful examination of his thought in favour of empty sloganeering and mindless dogmatism.
Karl Marx’s Theory of History (1978) is a landmark of what is now called Analytical Marxism. Using the methods of analytic philosophy, Cohen reconstructs Marx’s historical materialism as a set of perfectly respectable empirical hypotheses. The first of these is what he calls the Primacy Thesis: that the level of development of a society’s productive forces determines its production relations and that these, in turn, determine the shape of its important legal and political institutions. The second is the Development Thesis: that productive forces tend, as a matter of fact, to develop throughout history.
Taken together, these two theses entail that historical materialism amounts to a kind of functional explanation. Changes in production relations have the function of better exploiting developments in the productive forces and changes in the political superstructure have the function of better stabilizing these very relations. This allows history to be read teleologically—not on the basis of some metaphysically extravagant postulate like the Judeo-Christian God or the Hegelian World Spirit, but simply because human beings, being at least somewhat rational, will usually seek to maximize their productivity when possible.
Analytical Marxism has always struggled to find an audience. Marxists themselves largely dismissed it for espousing the methods of mainstream analytic philosophy and social science. As it turns out, logic and critical thinking merely reproduce the “one-dimensionality” of bourgeois capitalist ideology—which is, of course, a great excuse when you failed intro to logic. This is unfortunate. Marx's own personal slogan was "Question everything," yet those who claim to follow him so often eschew careful examination of his thought in favour of empty sloganeering and mindless dogmatism.
February 12, 2019
Review of G. A. Cohen’s Karl Marx Theory of History: A Defense
Because of my contempt for “analytic Marxism,” I approached this book with some trepidation, expecting mostly to be irritated. After all, so much of Marx is about how he does things. If someone rejects dialectics, the labor theory of value, aspects of fetishism, and holism, then we might wonder if the “analytics” have not altogether swallowed the “Marxism.” Somehow, I read on. Mind you, I managed to retain my disdain for a school that forsakes dialectics as “sloppy” and adopts methods tied instead to logical positivism, rational choice, and the ontological and methodological individualism of neo-classical economics – all elements that constituted my formal graduate school training. Nevertheless, I ended up liking Cohen’s narrative voice and found the book immensely useful.
Cohen’s narrator is a good guide because: he doesn’t hide anything about his politics or his methods; because he tells us if he thinks that Marx (or Hegel, or anyone) is wrong; because he is dedicated to lucidity (a value I hold dear); because he can take the most difficult Marxian concepts and present them plainly in a paragraph, in a chart/table, and often in just one sentence; because he is willing to admit that Marx is working with a vision of human nature, and therefore that he employs trans-historical categories; because he is does not hide the fact that Marx thought of capitalism’s historical mission as progressive; because his defense of “functional explanations” is bold, brave, and necessary (he comes close to defending teleology itself); because in the additional chapters of the 2000 edition (the book was first published in 1978), he confesses where he was wrong; and, because he seems committed to process -- you can feel and see him work out things. I highly recommend this book but it is difficult going. It took me a full week to get through it.
It begins with a very clear account of the differences between Hegel and Marx: Hegel provides the biography of the world spirit, the self comes to know itself via encounters with the otherness of the world and others; Marx, instead, founds his work on human beings as a creative producers who keep changing their relationship with nature. Chapter 2 takes us to the core formulation of historical materialism: productive forces determine productive relations which determine super-structural elements such as culture, law, ethics, aesthetics, ideology, etc. That is: human history shows a tendency for technological development (the human relationship with nature becomes something that humans begin to control and dominate); the specific “stage” (my word) of economic development determines the economic relations which determine what we might call culture. Of course, there is also a feedback loop so that these relations are not reductionist, but the larger tendency is for a kind of technological determinism. This is what Cohen sets out to defend.
One thing that struck me is that Cohen does not embed Marx’s historical materialism in the Scottish Enlightenment’s “Four Stages Theory” of history – as do, for example, Ronald Meek and Maurice Dobb. In a way, this absence cannot be surprising since one of the effects of a methodological commitment to individualism, micro-foundations, and the priority of logic is that one looks primarily at text and not context. Consider that most economics departments do not have even one person devoted to the history of economic thought. On the other hand, how could someone as erudite as Cohen fail to comment on the relationship of Marx theory of history with that of, say, Adam Smith’s. If Hegel can be included as part of Marx’s context, why not the Scottish Enlightenment and classical political economy?
The second edition has a series of additional chapters that I found juicy and exciting. Specifically, chapter 13 is excellent. There Cohen retreats from his earlier defense of historical materialism and concludes that Marx overstated his case, and that we also need Hegel’s theory of history. His new position, which he calls a “restricted historical materialism” allows for a more direct inclusion of identity, religion, culture, and ideas to a materialist theory of history.
Here are two quotes that give a taste of his new positions:
“My charge against Marxist philosophical anthropology is that, in its exclusive emphasis on the creative side of human nature, it neglects a whole domain of human need and aspiration, which is prominent in the philosophy of Hegel. In [the 1978 version of the book] I said that for Marx, by contrast with Hegel, 'the ruling interest and difficulty of men was relating to the world, not to the self. I would still affirm that antithesis, and I now want to add that, to put it crudely, Marx went too far in the materialist direction. In his anti-Hegelian, Feuerbachian affirmation of the radical objectivity of matter, Marx focused on the relationship of the subject to an object which is in no way subject, and, as time went on, he came to neglect the subject's relationship to itself, and that aspect of the subject's relationship to others which is a mediated (that is, indirect) form of relationship to itself. He rightly reacted against Hegel's extravagant representation of all reality as ultimately an expression of self, but he over-reacted, and he failed to do justice to the self's irreducible interest in a definition of itself, and to the social manifestations of that interest” 346-347.
And,
“A person does not only need to develop and enjoy his powers. He needs to know who he is, and how his identity connects him with particular others. He must, as Hegel saw, find something outside himself which he did not create, and to which something inside himself corresponds, because of the social process that created him, or because of a remaking of self wrought by later experience. He must be able to identify himself with some part of objective social reality: spirit, as Hegel said, finds itself 'at home with itself in its otherness as such'” 347-348.
This opening allows such identity creating elements as religion, nationalism, race, and gender to play a larger role in Marxism.
Another result of this opening is that Cohen finds temporal nuance in Marx’s theory of history: “It is the creative side of human nature, the side emphasized by Marxist philosophical anthropology, which finds fulfilment in free cultural activity both before and after the communist revolution” (379, emphasis added).
This is crucial for me because it shatters the temporal walls by which Marx often seals stages of history from each other. This shattering allows temporal overlap. It means that creativity and humanity exist prior to communism and therefore that previous stages of development have something to offer. Here, Marx and Cohen, are closer to Karl Polanyi and Ashis Nandy.
Last but certainly not least is Cohen’s superb appendix on Marx’s science. Cohen first explains and then critiques Marx’s claim that science is only necessary when there is a gulf between reality and appearance. Cohen calls this “subversive science” but adds that there can also be “neutral science”:
“Marx's dictum must be abandoned….we may say that scientific explanation always uncovers a reality unrepresented in appearance, but that it only sometimes discredits appearance. Let us call science subversive when it does the latter, and neutral when it does not." 412
Cohen develops a middle ground between the view that science perceives a reality unknown to that those living their everyday lives and hence that the scientist/therapist/expert knows what is best. And the view that theory must not alienate or negate the experiences of those it is meant to serve. This middle ground supports the claim that while science may well expose the gulf between reality and experience it must eventually express that gulf in a manner consistent with everyday language and everyday experience. Said differently: Scientists may make meaning that explains but also alienates the everyday but science’s full mission requires a mediation and a translation which can explain such science in everyday terms. This is one reason why lucidity in language matters. And this is one reason that we can charge Hegel and Marx with occasional and even systematic obfuscation (despite the plethora of theoretical insights whose luminescence radiate across decades and centuries.)
Cohen gives this middle ground some contours in the following long footnote on page 413:
“Theory may be used to put someone in a position where he can understand himself without drawing upon it. Consider how psycho-analytic theory is employed in the therapeutic context. The analyst does not aim to supply the analysand with the theory and show him how it applies to himself. Rather, he employs the theory so as to enable the analysand to encounter directly the images and ideas influencing his behaviour and feeling. In this respect the conclusion of the therapy resembles the attainment of Hegel's Absolute Knowledge. For though Absolute Knowledge replaces reasoning, it is possible only after prolonged engagement in it. In the psycho-analytical case too, the aim is intuition, the means is discursion. His end state of an ideal analysis counts as self-knowledge without theory in the sense here intended.”
My conclusion after reading the book is this: that between Marx and Hegel, we need not choose. We can have them both. In a sense, my work with David Blaney has always been here, within this non-decision.
I am still formulating a critique of Cohen’s methodological commitments. His rejection of holism and dialectics is particularly bothersome. Has he never read, for example, Collingwood’s Essay on Philosophical Method – a marriage of precision, clarity, dialectics and holism. He also seems steadfast in thinking that there is no significant difference in the study of natural and social science. I am still at “no” to all that. Graduate school wounds take long to heal.
Because of my contempt for “analytic Marxism,” I approached this book with some trepidation, expecting mostly to be irritated. After all, so much of Marx is about how he does things. If someone rejects dialectics, the labor theory of value, aspects of fetishism, and holism, then we might wonder if the “analytics” have not altogether swallowed the “Marxism.” Somehow, I read on. Mind you, I managed to retain my disdain for a school that forsakes dialectics as “sloppy” and adopts methods tied instead to logical positivism, rational choice, and the ontological and methodological individualism of neo-classical economics – all elements that constituted my formal graduate school training. Nevertheless, I ended up liking Cohen’s narrative voice and found the book immensely useful.
Cohen’s narrator is a good guide because: he doesn’t hide anything about his politics or his methods; because he tells us if he thinks that Marx (or Hegel, or anyone) is wrong; because he is dedicated to lucidity (a value I hold dear); because he can take the most difficult Marxian concepts and present them plainly in a paragraph, in a chart/table, and often in just one sentence; because he is willing to admit that Marx is working with a vision of human nature, and therefore that he employs trans-historical categories; because he is does not hide the fact that Marx thought of capitalism’s historical mission as progressive; because his defense of “functional explanations” is bold, brave, and necessary (he comes close to defending teleology itself); because in the additional chapters of the 2000 edition (the book was first published in 1978), he confesses where he was wrong; and, because he seems committed to process -- you can feel and see him work out things. I highly recommend this book but it is difficult going. It took me a full week to get through it.
It begins with a very clear account of the differences between Hegel and Marx: Hegel provides the biography of the world spirit, the self comes to know itself via encounters with the otherness of the world and others; Marx, instead, founds his work on human beings as a creative producers who keep changing their relationship with nature. Chapter 2 takes us to the core formulation of historical materialism: productive forces determine productive relations which determine super-structural elements such as culture, law, ethics, aesthetics, ideology, etc. That is: human history shows a tendency for technological development (the human relationship with nature becomes something that humans begin to control and dominate); the specific “stage” (my word) of economic development determines the economic relations which determine what we might call culture. Of course, there is also a feedback loop so that these relations are not reductionist, but the larger tendency is for a kind of technological determinism. This is what Cohen sets out to defend.
One thing that struck me is that Cohen does not embed Marx’s historical materialism in the Scottish Enlightenment’s “Four Stages Theory” of history – as do, for example, Ronald Meek and Maurice Dobb. In a way, this absence cannot be surprising since one of the effects of a methodological commitment to individualism, micro-foundations, and the priority of logic is that one looks primarily at text and not context. Consider that most economics departments do not have even one person devoted to the history of economic thought. On the other hand, how could someone as erudite as Cohen fail to comment on the relationship of Marx theory of history with that of, say, Adam Smith’s. If Hegel can be included as part of Marx’s context, why not the Scottish Enlightenment and classical political economy?
The second edition has a series of additional chapters that I found juicy and exciting. Specifically, chapter 13 is excellent. There Cohen retreats from his earlier defense of historical materialism and concludes that Marx overstated his case, and that we also need Hegel’s theory of history. His new position, which he calls a “restricted historical materialism” allows for a more direct inclusion of identity, religion, culture, and ideas to a materialist theory of history.
Here are two quotes that give a taste of his new positions:
“My charge against Marxist philosophical anthropology is that, in its exclusive emphasis on the creative side of human nature, it neglects a whole domain of human need and aspiration, which is prominent in the philosophy of Hegel. In [the 1978 version of the book] I said that for Marx, by contrast with Hegel, 'the ruling interest and difficulty of men was relating to the world, not to the self. I would still affirm that antithesis, and I now want to add that, to put it crudely, Marx went too far in the materialist direction. In his anti-Hegelian, Feuerbachian affirmation of the radical objectivity of matter, Marx focused on the relationship of the subject to an object which is in no way subject, and, as time went on, he came to neglect the subject's relationship to itself, and that aspect of the subject's relationship to others which is a mediated (that is, indirect) form of relationship to itself. He rightly reacted against Hegel's extravagant representation of all reality as ultimately an expression of self, but he over-reacted, and he failed to do justice to the self's irreducible interest in a definition of itself, and to the social manifestations of that interest” 346-347.
And,
“A person does not only need to develop and enjoy his powers. He needs to know who he is, and how his identity connects him with particular others. He must, as Hegel saw, find something outside himself which he did not create, and to which something inside himself corresponds, because of the social process that created him, or because of a remaking of self wrought by later experience. He must be able to identify himself with some part of objective social reality: spirit, as Hegel said, finds itself 'at home with itself in its otherness as such'” 347-348.
This opening allows such identity creating elements as religion, nationalism, race, and gender to play a larger role in Marxism.
Another result of this opening is that Cohen finds temporal nuance in Marx’s theory of history: “It is the creative side of human nature, the side emphasized by Marxist philosophical anthropology, which finds fulfilment in free cultural activity both before and after the communist revolution” (379, emphasis added).
This is crucial for me because it shatters the temporal walls by which Marx often seals stages of history from each other. This shattering allows temporal overlap. It means that creativity and humanity exist prior to communism and therefore that previous stages of development have something to offer. Here, Marx and Cohen, are closer to Karl Polanyi and Ashis Nandy.
Last but certainly not least is Cohen’s superb appendix on Marx’s science. Cohen first explains and then critiques Marx’s claim that science is only necessary when there is a gulf between reality and appearance. Cohen calls this “subversive science” but adds that there can also be “neutral science”:
“Marx's dictum must be abandoned….we may say that scientific explanation always uncovers a reality unrepresented in appearance, but that it only sometimes discredits appearance. Let us call science subversive when it does the latter, and neutral when it does not." 412
Cohen develops a middle ground between the view that science perceives a reality unknown to that those living their everyday lives and hence that the scientist/therapist/expert knows what is best. And the view that theory must not alienate or negate the experiences of those it is meant to serve. This middle ground supports the claim that while science may well expose the gulf between reality and experience it must eventually express that gulf in a manner consistent with everyday language and everyday experience. Said differently: Scientists may make meaning that explains but also alienates the everyday but science’s full mission requires a mediation and a translation which can explain such science in everyday terms. This is one reason why lucidity in language matters. And this is one reason that we can charge Hegel and Marx with occasional and even systematic obfuscation (despite the plethora of theoretical insights whose luminescence radiate across decades and centuries.)
Cohen gives this middle ground some contours in the following long footnote on page 413:
“Theory may be used to put someone in a position where he can understand himself without drawing upon it. Consider how psycho-analytic theory is employed in the therapeutic context. The analyst does not aim to supply the analysand with the theory and show him how it applies to himself. Rather, he employs the theory so as to enable the analysand to encounter directly the images and ideas influencing his behaviour and feeling. In this respect the conclusion of the therapy resembles the attainment of Hegel's Absolute Knowledge. For though Absolute Knowledge replaces reasoning, it is possible only after prolonged engagement in it. In the psycho-analytical case too, the aim is intuition, the means is discursion. His end state of an ideal analysis counts as self-knowledge without theory in the sense here intended.”
My conclusion after reading the book is this: that between Marx and Hegel, we need not choose. We can have them both. In a sense, my work with David Blaney has always been here, within this non-decision.
I am still formulating a critique of Cohen’s methodological commitments. His rejection of holism and dialectics is particularly bothersome. Has he never read, for example, Collingwood’s Essay on Philosophical Method – a marriage of precision, clarity, dialectics and holism. He also seems steadfast in thinking that there is no significant difference in the study of natural and social science. I am still at “no” to all that. Graduate school wounds take long to heal.
October 8, 2013
The existence of this book is almost a contradiction in itself: an analytical-philosophic defense of historical materialism. It is both a work of rigorous argumentation and a labor of love; Marx's theory of history obviously matters to Cohen, even in the later chapters where he turns his razor-sharp skill for distinction onto the theory he set out to defend two decades earlier. Documented is the maturing process of a Marxist who desecularizes Marx and Engels by doing to them what they did to their idols: rising to the challenge of critiquing them by first walking in their footsteps.
No matter who you are, this book will push your buttons. First of all, you might want to be conversant in either Marxism or analytical philosophy in order not to be totally blindsided by two kinds of confusion, unless that sounds like good fun to you. Secondly, if you are conversant in either of those, you likely hate the other; here Cohen succeeds in showing how they can potentially reinforce each other. Marxists will especially find the discussions of methodology (IX & X) and the chapters critical of Marx's philosophical anthropology and 'inclusive' historical materialism (XIII & XIV) to be challenging.
Analytical philosophers will have an easier time provided they do not experience psychological discomfort from reconstructing a pretty solid communist argument. Even so, they will likely appreciate the demise of the inclusive theory, and yet may find themselves troubled by the possibility of the 'restricted' version that the book ends up powerfully arguing for. Perhaps they will be comforted when the elder Cohen of the Second Edition admits that he is not sure how to confirm historical materialism and that he therefore became agnostic on empiricist grounds. Ironically, his critique of Marx's philosophical anthropology resembles Hegel's understanding of self-consciousness quite a bit.
What evokes a twinge of sadness in some readers will excite others and vice versa, and different readers will take different messages from the book. The good news for Marxists is that a version of historical materialism is not only consistent but downright plausible even in an empiricist-style reconstruction. The good news for anti-Marxists is that the author gave up on the theory because he wasn't sure how to confirm it. The good news for everyone is that Cohen raised the bar for academic debate on Marxist concepts and arranged his argument in a clear way that is easy (in form) to challenge should you disagree with his formulations or conclusions. Although it might be said that his methodology ultimately undermines his project in light of his later recantation, there has been a lot written since that accepts the elder Cohen's critique as a challenge.
No matter who you are, this book will push your buttons. First of all, you might want to be conversant in either Marxism or analytical philosophy in order not to be totally blindsided by two kinds of confusion, unless that sounds like good fun to you. Secondly, if you are conversant in either of those, you likely hate the other; here Cohen succeeds in showing how they can potentially reinforce each other. Marxists will especially find the discussions of methodology (IX & X) and the chapters critical of Marx's philosophical anthropology and 'inclusive' historical materialism (XIII & XIV) to be challenging.
Analytical philosophers will have an easier time provided they do not experience psychological discomfort from reconstructing a pretty solid communist argument. Even so, they will likely appreciate the demise of the inclusive theory, and yet may find themselves troubled by the possibility of the 'restricted' version that the book ends up powerfully arguing for. Perhaps they will be comforted when the elder Cohen of the Second Edition admits that he is not sure how to confirm historical materialism and that he therefore became agnostic on empiricist grounds. Ironically, his critique of Marx's philosophical anthropology resembles Hegel's understanding of self-consciousness quite a bit.
What evokes a twinge of sadness in some readers will excite others and vice versa, and different readers will take different messages from the book. The good news for Marxists is that a version of historical materialism is not only consistent but downright plausible even in an empiricist-style reconstruction. The good news for anti-Marxists is that the author gave up on the theory because he wasn't sure how to confirm it. The good news for everyone is that Cohen raised the bar for academic debate on Marxist concepts and arranged his argument in a clear way that is easy (in form) to challenge should you disagree with his formulations or conclusions. Although it might be said that his methodology ultimately undermines his project in light of his later recantation, there has been a lot written since that accepts the elder Cohen's critique as a challenge.
October 14, 2025
A big philosophical achievement, even if you lack Marxist sympathies.
The book provides a clear, painstakingly precise formulation of historical materialism. Ignoring most of Cohen's sophistication, that theory consists of the following theses:
1. Human productive power tends to increase over time.
2. The level of development of a society's productive forces (labour power, land, means of production like machinery, tools, knowledge) explain the nature of its relations of production (the relations of ownership between persons and persons or between persons and forces of production or both).
3. A society's relations of production explain its legal, political, artistic and religious institutions.
4. New relations of production (and so new economic forms of society) come into existence through revolution when existing relations of production fetter the productive potential of existing productive forces.
The theory is illustrated by a four stage periodization of economic forms of society. During each period, developments in the productive forces increase the society's productive capacity, leading to greater surplus beyond the level necessary to sustain and reproduce the workers who produced it. In each form, the surplus is appropriated by people who own the productive forces or the workers who produced the surplus or time slices of their labour power - or some combination of them. Very roughly, the forms are:
1. A pre-class or "primitive" society (in which there is no surplus product, no appropriation and therefore no classes).
2. A pre-capitalist society in which masters and feudal lords have various degrees of ownership over slaves, serfs and vassals or their labour power and appropriate their surplus product as a condition of giving them access to land, the means of production and other necessities of life.
3. Capitalist society in which capitalists own the means of production and time slices of labour power sold to them by workers and workers own no means of production and capitalists appropriate the surplus value which is the amount by which the value produced by the workers' labour exceeds the wages paid to the workers for their labour power.
4. A post-class or "communist" society in which there are no relations of ownership between persons and persons or persons and productive forces and the surplus is planned and appropriated collectively for social purposes.
Each economic form is replaced by the next when the relations of production that define it impede the development of the existing productive forces. In each period, the form of surplus and the legal means by which the surplus is appropriated differs. In feudalism, the form of the surplus is, for example, the agricultural produce grown by the feudal inferior and required by the lord as a condition for inferior's continuing tenure of the land held of the lord. In capitalism, the form of the surplus is abstract value, which is to say, money, realized by capitalist selling the commodities the worker's labour has made.
Cohen has two main aims in this book. The first is to disambiguate historical materialism so that its main claims are clear. This requires an incredible amount of conceptual tidying, translating the Marxist idiom into terms more theoretically ecumenical. There is still a large amount of technical language. The second is to defend the version of historical materialism offered in this book as a plausible interpretation of Marx's texts. That's a massive scholarly task. The two projects are relatively independent. The theory Cohen arrives at might be a plausible Marxian inspired theory of history without being Marx's theory or one close to it. Cohen hopes that his two projects line up.
This book has one important, inbuilt limitation. It is a work of philosophy, which aims to arrive at a precise formulation of historical materialism's claims. So, in the way of modern analytic philosophy, it analyses concepts like explanation, function, capital, value and others. For the most part, it does not try to determine whether the theory so clarified is true - that is, whether the evidence supports the theory.
Indeed, it is not so clear what evidence would confirm or falsify the theory, nor, given that the theory predicts fundamental social change, how long we should expect it to take for the confirming/falsifying evidence to appear. Consider the 70 year Soviet experience with Marxism. Is the movement towards capitalism after 1989 evidence that falsifies historical materialism?
That depends, in part, on whether 70 years is long enough to test the theory's predictions. Compared to the time it seems to have taken for Western countries to move from proto-feudalism to full-blown capitalism, 70 years is a drop in the ocean. Of course, even if 70 years is an appropriate testing window, one might doubt that the events following the 1917 revolution falsify historical materialism. The Soviet economy moved almost instantly from a largely agrarian, semi-feudal one to one of state economic planning without any intervening capitalism and historical materialism does not predict the persistence of a communist society that emerged from a semi-feudal one.
What the Soviet experience shows or doesn't show about historical materialism is fraught with difficulties, some conceptual (did the Soviet economy count as communist?), some factual (was there a revolution by an industrial working class?). The Soviet case is a special example of the general problem of figuring out what, if any, evidence would tend to confirm or falsify historical materialism. Another example is whether ecological crises, in particular global warming, falsify the first thesis that human productive power tends to increase over time.
Insofar as Cohen defends historical materialism, it is by showing that the theory is not incoherent, illogical, or self-defeating. Those are common objections. Plamenatz argued that the third thesis of historical materialism is incoherent. He argued that the relations of production cannot explain legal institutions because legal institutions constitute relations of production. Since legal rules constitute the relations of production, they are not distinct from them. And since legal rules are not distinct from the relations of production, they cannot be explained by the relations of production. For example, in capitalist societies, the relations of production are between workers who own no means of production and the capitalists who own the means of production and time slices of the workers' labour power that workers have sold to them. The production relationship is constituted by ownership in the means of production and labour power. And ownership, claims Plamenatz, is a legal phenomenon.
The apparent conclusion is that capitalist relations of production cannot explain capitalist legal institutions like ownership. Cohen faces down this challenge by arguing that the relations of production can be re-described in terms of effective power over the means of production, without the use of any normative or legal terms like ownership, rights and duties.
Cohen also defends historical materialism against other arguments by showing that they occlude the space of conceptual possibilities. Here is one such charge: capitalist society's relations of production cannot explain its society's superstructural institutions because superstructural institutions (such as its religion) caused capitalist patterns of ownership and labour. The direction of explanation goes the wrong way, or so it is argued. For example, Weber claimed that early Protestantism caused the move from feudal to capitalist relations of production. According to Weber, it did this by giving adherents motives to separate from guild production (through its emphasis on individuals' relationship with God unmediated by authority) and to accumulate wealth (through its asceticism and opposition to consumption).
Again, this seems to refute the third thesis of historical materialism. Several responses are possible but Cohen's main one is this: even if Weber's account is accurate, it might not be the complete story. If Protestantism caused capitalist relations of production, it might yet be the case that Protestantism came into existence because it would cement capitalist relations of production. The tendency of Protestantism of a certain vintage to establish capitalist patterns of ownership and behaviour might have been why Protestantism of that vintage emerged. The difference between Weber's explanation and Cohen's is between simple causal explanation and functional explanation. In the functional explanation, capitalist relations of production (or more accurately, the tendency to cement capitalist relations) explain the emergence of Protestantism. Functional and simple causal explanations are logically different types of explanation: they differ in form**.
Cohen's lesson is this: if you accept with Weber that Protestantism caused the development of capitalist relations of production, it is not logically necessary to give up the third thesis of historical materialism. That is because early Protestantism's having contributed causally to the emergence of capitalist relations of production is quite compatible with Protestantism having come into existence because it would cause capitalist relations. That tendency is enough for capitalist relations of production to be capable of explaining superstructural institutions like Protestantism. Of course, whether the proffered functional explanation of the emergence of Protestantism a good explanation of it is another matter (on which Cohen offers a few historical anecdotes).
The book is not supposed to be a comprehensive defence of historical materialism. It leaves historical materialism open as a possibly true theory of historical change, perhaps a plausible one. It does no more than that because it is a work of philosophy, not social science. Whether the theory is true is, in the end, a matter of evidence. But without KMTHD's clarification and disambiguation of the theory's claims, we would not know the theses that the evidence is supposed to confirm or refute. Judged in terms of its limited objectives, KMTHD is a masterpiece.
** The difference between simple causal explanation and functional explanation can be shown by the form of the laws governing the thing to be explained. A simple causal explanation is an explanation where the explanandum B is covered by a conditional generalization of the form "if A exists at t1, then B exists at t2", where A and B are event types. A functional explanation is an explanation where the thing to be explained A is covered by a more complicated, nested conditional generalization of the form "if it is the case that (if A were to exist at t1, then it would bring about B at t2), then A exists at t1". The nested conditional expresses the idea that A exists because it tends to bring about B. Dispositional facts like this are not expressed in simple causal laws. Dispositional facts enable an instance of B at t2 to explain an instance of A at t1: whenever A at t1 would cause the existence of B at t2, A exists at t1. The same is not true of simple causal explanations: B at t2 cannot causally explain A at t1 because of the direction of time (a later event cannot cause an earlier one).
The book provides a clear, painstakingly precise formulation of historical materialism. Ignoring most of Cohen's sophistication, that theory consists of the following theses:
1. Human productive power tends to increase over time.
2. The level of development of a society's productive forces (labour power, land, means of production like machinery, tools, knowledge) explain the nature of its relations of production (the relations of ownership between persons and persons or between persons and forces of production or both).
3. A society's relations of production explain its legal, political, artistic and religious institutions.
4. New relations of production (and so new economic forms of society) come into existence through revolution when existing relations of production fetter the productive potential of existing productive forces.
The theory is illustrated by a four stage periodization of economic forms of society. During each period, developments in the productive forces increase the society's productive capacity, leading to greater surplus beyond the level necessary to sustain and reproduce the workers who produced it. In each form, the surplus is appropriated by people who own the productive forces or the workers who produced the surplus or time slices of their labour power - or some combination of them. Very roughly, the forms are:
1. A pre-class or "primitive" society (in which there is no surplus product, no appropriation and therefore no classes).
2. A pre-capitalist society in which masters and feudal lords have various degrees of ownership over slaves, serfs and vassals or their labour power and appropriate their surplus product as a condition of giving them access to land, the means of production and other necessities of life.
3. Capitalist society in which capitalists own the means of production and time slices of labour power sold to them by workers and workers own no means of production and capitalists appropriate the surplus value which is the amount by which the value produced by the workers' labour exceeds the wages paid to the workers for their labour power.
4. A post-class or "communist" society in which there are no relations of ownership between persons and persons or persons and productive forces and the surplus is planned and appropriated collectively for social purposes.
Each economic form is replaced by the next when the relations of production that define it impede the development of the existing productive forces. In each period, the form of surplus and the legal means by which the surplus is appropriated differs. In feudalism, the form of the surplus is, for example, the agricultural produce grown by the feudal inferior and required by the lord as a condition for inferior's continuing tenure of the land held of the lord. In capitalism, the form of the surplus is abstract value, which is to say, money, realized by capitalist selling the commodities the worker's labour has made.
Cohen has two main aims in this book. The first is to disambiguate historical materialism so that its main claims are clear. This requires an incredible amount of conceptual tidying, translating the Marxist idiom into terms more theoretically ecumenical. There is still a large amount of technical language. The second is to defend the version of historical materialism offered in this book as a plausible interpretation of Marx's texts. That's a massive scholarly task. The two projects are relatively independent. The theory Cohen arrives at might be a plausible Marxian inspired theory of history without being Marx's theory or one close to it. Cohen hopes that his two projects line up.
This book has one important, inbuilt limitation. It is a work of philosophy, which aims to arrive at a precise formulation of historical materialism's claims. So, in the way of modern analytic philosophy, it analyses concepts like explanation, function, capital, value and others. For the most part, it does not try to determine whether the theory so clarified is true - that is, whether the evidence supports the theory.
Indeed, it is not so clear what evidence would confirm or falsify the theory, nor, given that the theory predicts fundamental social change, how long we should expect it to take for the confirming/falsifying evidence to appear. Consider the 70 year Soviet experience with Marxism. Is the movement towards capitalism after 1989 evidence that falsifies historical materialism?
That depends, in part, on whether 70 years is long enough to test the theory's predictions. Compared to the time it seems to have taken for Western countries to move from proto-feudalism to full-blown capitalism, 70 years is a drop in the ocean. Of course, even if 70 years is an appropriate testing window, one might doubt that the events following the 1917 revolution falsify historical materialism. The Soviet economy moved almost instantly from a largely agrarian, semi-feudal one to one of state economic planning without any intervening capitalism and historical materialism does not predict the persistence of a communist society that emerged from a semi-feudal one.
What the Soviet experience shows or doesn't show about historical materialism is fraught with difficulties, some conceptual (did the Soviet economy count as communist?), some factual (was there a revolution by an industrial working class?). The Soviet case is a special example of the general problem of figuring out what, if any, evidence would tend to confirm or falsify historical materialism. Another example is whether ecological crises, in particular global warming, falsify the first thesis that human productive power tends to increase over time.
Insofar as Cohen defends historical materialism, it is by showing that the theory is not incoherent, illogical, or self-defeating. Those are common objections. Plamenatz argued that the third thesis of historical materialism is incoherent. He argued that the relations of production cannot explain legal institutions because legal institutions constitute relations of production. Since legal rules constitute the relations of production, they are not distinct from them. And since legal rules are not distinct from the relations of production, they cannot be explained by the relations of production. For example, in capitalist societies, the relations of production are between workers who own no means of production and the capitalists who own the means of production and time slices of the workers' labour power that workers have sold to them. The production relationship is constituted by ownership in the means of production and labour power. And ownership, claims Plamenatz, is a legal phenomenon.
The apparent conclusion is that capitalist relations of production cannot explain capitalist legal institutions like ownership. Cohen faces down this challenge by arguing that the relations of production can be re-described in terms of effective power over the means of production, without the use of any normative or legal terms like ownership, rights and duties.
Cohen also defends historical materialism against other arguments by showing that they occlude the space of conceptual possibilities. Here is one such charge: capitalist society's relations of production cannot explain its society's superstructural institutions because superstructural institutions (such as its religion) caused capitalist patterns of ownership and labour. The direction of explanation goes the wrong way, or so it is argued. For example, Weber claimed that early Protestantism caused the move from feudal to capitalist relations of production. According to Weber, it did this by giving adherents motives to separate from guild production (through its emphasis on individuals' relationship with God unmediated by authority) and to accumulate wealth (through its asceticism and opposition to consumption).
Again, this seems to refute the third thesis of historical materialism. Several responses are possible but Cohen's main one is this: even if Weber's account is accurate, it might not be the complete story. If Protestantism caused capitalist relations of production, it might yet be the case that Protestantism came into existence because it would cement capitalist relations of production. The tendency of Protestantism of a certain vintage to establish capitalist patterns of ownership and behaviour might have been why Protestantism of that vintage emerged. The difference between Weber's explanation and Cohen's is between simple causal explanation and functional explanation. In the functional explanation, capitalist relations of production (or more accurately, the tendency to cement capitalist relations) explain the emergence of Protestantism. Functional and simple causal explanations are logically different types of explanation: they differ in form**.
Cohen's lesson is this: if you accept with Weber that Protestantism caused the development of capitalist relations of production, it is not logically necessary to give up the third thesis of historical materialism. That is because early Protestantism's having contributed causally to the emergence of capitalist relations of production is quite compatible with Protestantism having come into existence because it would cause capitalist relations. That tendency is enough for capitalist relations of production to be capable of explaining superstructural institutions like Protestantism. Of course, whether the proffered functional explanation of the emergence of Protestantism a good explanation of it is another matter (on which Cohen offers a few historical anecdotes).
The book is not supposed to be a comprehensive defence of historical materialism. It leaves historical materialism open as a possibly true theory of historical change, perhaps a plausible one. It does no more than that because it is a work of philosophy, not social science. Whether the theory is true is, in the end, a matter of evidence. But without KMTHD's clarification and disambiguation of the theory's claims, we would not know the theses that the evidence is supposed to confirm or refute. Judged in terms of its limited objectives, KMTHD is a masterpiece.
** The difference between simple causal explanation and functional explanation can be shown by the form of the laws governing the thing to be explained. A simple causal explanation is an explanation where the explanandum B is covered by a conditional generalization of the form "if A exists at t1, then B exists at t2", where A and B are event types. A functional explanation is an explanation where the thing to be explained A is covered by a more complicated, nested conditional generalization of the form "if it is the case that (if A were to exist at t1, then it would bring about B at t2), then A exists at t1". The nested conditional expresses the idea that A exists because it tends to bring about B. Dispositional facts like this are not expressed in simple causal laws. Dispositional facts enable an instance of B at t2 to explain an instance of A at t1: whenever A at t1 would cause the existence of B at t2, A exists at t1. The same is not true of simple causal explanations: B at t2 cannot causally explain A at t1 because of the direction of time (a later event cannot cause an earlier one).
April 14, 2025
Rarely am I this impressed with a book I've disagreed with so thoroughly!
February 13, 2012
A good guide for some basic Marxian concepts, particularly for students of analytic philosophy. The goal of the book is to give expression to Marx's theory of history without resource to dialectical tools. Chapters 2-5 were pretty good (the constitution of the productive forces; the economic structure; material and social properties of society; and fetishism). My interest began to dwindle after that. A large chunk of the book defends the use of functional explanation in an analytical-Marxian theory, which is interesting. Cohen's writing is too often overly austere, sacrificing readability and a decent aesthetic for the constraint of remaining "analytic". He'll go so far overboard that the text almost comes off as a joke at some points, though I imagine students of a more analytic persuasion will argue for its legitimacy. I am glad I read it, overall. Off to some more original sources.
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September 14, 2016Karl Marx meets dense, analytic philosophy, heavy on the defined terms, with little patience for the sort of "cultural" trappings of mid- 20th Century Western Marxism. The thing is, this is probably the sort of thing that Marx envisioned for the extension of his thought. It elaborates why the Marxist vision works, and at the same time throws out a good deal -- because lest it be forgotten, Marxism should always be a method, never a dogma. The early chapters, especially, are almost bracingly fresh, and it's a shame that the analytical-Marxist line of thought seems to largely be ignored these days. I do love the Frankfurt School guys -- after all, they asked a lot of very big, very important questions -- but if you want to look at the real nuts-and-bolts technical detail of why historical materialism is relevant, Cohen makes a hell of a guide.
September 7, 2021
I like this book a lot. I also think it's (mostly wrong). Why? It is the best-put defence of an orthodox (soft) determinist stance within historical materialism. I think its simplicity is marvellous -- it made me think about lots of stuff, I never previously considered because I did not think what the dispute at hand was. This is what I find more worthwhile: its provocative nature, it makes you think.
I think most wrongly is the position (& its most important assertion) that productive forces enjoy explanatory primacy over production relations, i.e. the technological interpretation of historical materialism. But this book made me think, again, well *how do I not do that?*
Furthermore, two elements I found useful:
(i) A non-legal language (introduced in the chapter "Base and Superstructure, Powers and Rights"); I think it helps me a lot what terms to use when describing certan procedures and not to rely on simple legal terms, which have their own limits.
(ii) The concept of "restrictive historical materialism", i.e. "History is, inter alia, the systematic growth of human productive power, and forms of society rise and fall when and because they enable and promote, or frustrate and impede, that growth." (p.367). I think this is a very useful conception of histmat -- it does not pretend to explain every religious phenomen based upon materialist elements, but the ones interacting with economic factors. I think this a brilliant way of understanding histmat's limits.
All in all, a very worthwhile book to read. Much is wrong, but wrong books are necessary; and it's incredibly clear while at it!
I think most wrongly is the position (& its most important assertion) that productive forces enjoy explanatory primacy over production relations, i.e. the technological interpretation of historical materialism. But this book made me think, again, well *how do I not do that?*
Furthermore, two elements I found useful:
(i) A non-legal language (introduced in the chapter "Base and Superstructure, Powers and Rights"); I think it helps me a lot what terms to use when describing certan procedures and not to rely on simple legal terms, which have their own limits.
(ii) The concept of "restrictive historical materialism", i.e. "History is, inter alia, the systematic growth of human productive power, and forms of society rise and fall when and because they enable and promote, or frustrate and impede, that growth." (p.367). I think this is a very useful conception of histmat -- it does not pretend to explain every religious phenomen based upon materialist elements, but the ones interacting with economic factors. I think this a brilliant way of understanding histmat's limits.
All in all, a very worthwhile book to read. Much is wrong, but wrong books are necessary; and it's incredibly clear while at it!
August 21, 2021
A clear and detailed account of historical materialism, turns Marx's obscure and boring prose into a clean (and hence honest) analysis of terms and propositions. Just the "analytic philosophy way" =)
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February 4, 2025It's been quite a journey with this book. I started reading it in 2018, stopped for years, came back to it a couple of times between big hiatuses only to notice I forgot most of it. I think it was only in the middle of the last year that I decided to go back to it but study it in depth, basically reading it twice: once every chapter as an overview and then writing my own commentary and interpretation page by page. After this long journey, I now consider that I got a decent grasp of it and that I won't forget its arguments that soon. I thought about going over all my notes and reflections and condensing them in this review, but I am honestly exhausted from it and, at this stage, will only write about it in more general terms.
Right off the bat, I think it's one of the clearest expositions of Marx's ideas I've read. Surely having approached the first volume of Capital with a bunch of guides, like David Harvey's and Harvey Cleaver's, I didn't come to these ideas as a blank slate. But I do believe that the analytical formulations given by Cohen really make them feel more logical and understandable. I appreciate the project of reformulating Marxian theory with more modern conceptual tools and it was a profitable enterprise. I don't appreciate the dismissiveness towards dialectical thought, the attitude that this is "bullshit" outdated science that has to be extirpated from historical materialism. Sure, part of this attitude is just for the polemic, but still feels like throwing the baby with the bath water. I can see how dialectics lacks rigor from a strictly scientific standpoint, nonetheless it is still a useful conceptual framework to understand historical phenomena.
Despite this dismissive attitude, Cohen wrote one of the best introductions to Hegel's thought possible in that short span of pages. Of course it's not comprehensive, but it is very elucidating and shows the bridge from Hegel to Marx brilliantly.
There are other concepts made significantly clearer by Cohen's formulation, such as fetishism, and the way he uses an almost aristotelian categorical method to describe all possible productive forces and relations. The simplified theory of history in four stages makes way more sense to me than the "age of empires eras"-like explanation that tries to cover all possible forms of modes of production as stages in history, which smells of a materialist Hegelianism. The primacy thesis, regarding how the development of productive forces shape the transformation of production relations is the center piece of the theory and it's where it shines the most.
In the additional chapters, Cohen adds the breakdown of Marxian doctrine into four pieces (philosophical anthropology, economics, theory of history, and vision of future) and shows that there is some independence between them and the failures of one do not entail the collapse of the whole edifice. I really appreciate the concept of restricted historical materialism that unburdens the theory from what I always considered cynical theoretical attempts of reducing the whole spectrum of human experiences to economical explanations. Historical materialism is powerful, but in its restricted form it only attempts to provide functional explanations to those aspects outside of economic history that interact with the development of productive forces and the shaping of production relations.
I've seen criticism thrown at this book saying that the extirpation of dialectics makes historical materialism a mechanical and deterministic theory which would fail to capture the dynamics of contradictory tensions in history. I don't see how this *must* be the case. Yes, I agree that dialectics provide a fluid and dynamic way of interpreting these phenomena, but I don't think that dialectics are necessary to see things dynamically. My biggest problem with Cohen is a small part of his formulation, but that is so central that I think it does a lot of the heavy-lifting. For most of the text, he avoids entering into humanistic discussions about human nature, but it ends up being unavoidable when trying to explain why productive forces must keep developing, so he attempts to affirm the most minimal set of characteristics of human nature that he could propose: that humans are rational, and try to improve their living conditions when constrained by scarcity. I don't think there is something necessarily wrong with this, but it opens a pandora box of issues. First, of how to actually prove that this is the case beyond just a reasonable assumption, and then to try to prove that this is all that is required to be affirmed of human nature. I believe that Cohen himself later felt the problem with this in his additional chapter, when he criticizes the one-sidedness of Marxian philosophical-anthropology and tries to rescue from Hegel the need for self-definition and identification.
Regardless of these issues, I do firmly think that discussing historical materialism with Cohen's formulation might be one of the most fruitful ways to do so with clarity and precision.
Right off the bat, I think it's one of the clearest expositions of Marx's ideas I've read. Surely having approached the first volume of Capital with a bunch of guides, like David Harvey's and Harvey Cleaver's, I didn't come to these ideas as a blank slate. But I do believe that the analytical formulations given by Cohen really make them feel more logical and understandable. I appreciate the project of reformulating Marxian theory with more modern conceptual tools and it was a profitable enterprise. I don't appreciate the dismissiveness towards dialectical thought, the attitude that this is "bullshit" outdated science that has to be extirpated from historical materialism. Sure, part of this attitude is just for the polemic, but still feels like throwing the baby with the bath water. I can see how dialectics lacks rigor from a strictly scientific standpoint, nonetheless it is still a useful conceptual framework to understand historical phenomena.
Despite this dismissive attitude, Cohen wrote one of the best introductions to Hegel's thought possible in that short span of pages. Of course it's not comprehensive, but it is very elucidating and shows the bridge from Hegel to Marx brilliantly.
There are other concepts made significantly clearer by Cohen's formulation, such as fetishism, and the way he uses an almost aristotelian categorical method to describe all possible productive forces and relations. The simplified theory of history in four stages makes way more sense to me than the "age of empires eras"-like explanation that tries to cover all possible forms of modes of production as stages in history, which smells of a materialist Hegelianism. The primacy thesis, regarding how the development of productive forces shape the transformation of production relations is the center piece of the theory and it's where it shines the most.
In the additional chapters, Cohen adds the breakdown of Marxian doctrine into four pieces (philosophical anthropology, economics, theory of history, and vision of future) and shows that there is some independence between them and the failures of one do not entail the collapse of the whole edifice. I really appreciate the concept of restricted historical materialism that unburdens the theory from what I always considered cynical theoretical attempts of reducing the whole spectrum of human experiences to economical explanations. Historical materialism is powerful, but in its restricted form it only attempts to provide functional explanations to those aspects outside of economic history that interact with the development of productive forces and the shaping of production relations.
I've seen criticism thrown at this book saying that the extirpation of dialectics makes historical materialism a mechanical and deterministic theory which would fail to capture the dynamics of contradictory tensions in history. I don't see how this *must* be the case. Yes, I agree that dialectics provide a fluid and dynamic way of interpreting these phenomena, but I don't think that dialectics are necessary to see things dynamically. My biggest problem with Cohen is a small part of his formulation, but that is so central that I think it does a lot of the heavy-lifting. For most of the text, he avoids entering into humanistic discussions about human nature, but it ends up being unavoidable when trying to explain why productive forces must keep developing, so he attempts to affirm the most minimal set of characteristics of human nature that he could propose: that humans are rational, and try to improve their living conditions when constrained by scarcity. I don't think there is something necessarily wrong with this, but it opens a pandora box of issues. First, of how to actually prove that this is the case beyond just a reasonable assumption, and then to try to prove that this is all that is required to be affirmed of human nature. I believe that Cohen himself later felt the problem with this in his additional chapter, when he criticizes the one-sidedness of Marxian philosophical-anthropology and tries to rescue from Hegel the need for self-definition and identification.
Regardless of these issues, I do firmly think that discussing historical materialism with Cohen's formulation might be one of the most fruitful ways to do so with clarity and precision.
June 11, 2023
This is not the sort of book you expect to end with a twist, unless you're currently reading this first sentence of my review, in which case maybe you're starting to suspect it might. Indeed, it seems much changed in the author's thinking between the first and second editions of this book. This second edition contains four new chapters at the end of the book, of which two are devoted to Cohen's change of heart: he no longer believes historical materialism to be true.
Superficially this seems like it might invalidate the work of the first eleven chapters, but it does not. What this book is and remains is a best and sincere attempt to make sense of Marx's theory of history. Whether or not historical materialism is true (it's probably not), there is still value in understanding Marx's views if only because of the massive influence he's had on so many thinkers.
This first edition of the book is an entry point into analytical Marxism. It begins by quite laboriously defining and investigating the core terms that occur will occur in the argument. For instance expect to ponder whether empty space constitutes a productive force (it does). It is building up to a philosophical transparent argument for historical materialism. Roughly speaking we can take historical materialism to mean:
"...the theory which says that there exists, throughout history, a tendency towards growth of human productive power, and that forms of society rise and fall when and because they enable and promote, or frustrate and impede, that growth."
I consider the exposition largely successful. While it is far from being totally convincing, the argument is presented clearly enough that it is quite easy to pinpoint the issues and gaps (if the author doesn't point out these limitations first himself).
While the entire argument doesn't track there are a number of interesting "lemmas" introduced along the way. In particular I enjoyed the resolution of the apparent paradox in Marxist conception of superstructures, which required purging all instances of legal terms within the productive relations. I also enjoyed the defence of functional explanations (which are most Marxist explanations). The author convincingly argues that functional explanations make sense in Darwinian settings, in which economic competition is easily seen to lie.
Notably absent is a discussion of the 'controversial' (and very probably false) labour theory of value. While I found this disappointing at first, I realised then that what this book accomplishes is proving that historical materialism is not contingent on this shaky assumption. Though what remains is no longer economics in my opinion, but a pure sociological theory.
Discussing now the new chapters, ultimately the reason Cohen has given up on Marx is he feels that Marx denies an important human need which is a sense of self. While this seems minor at first, the implications are profound. It provides a second mechanism for the formation of social structures, beyond simply productive forces contradicting an axiom of (a strict version of) historical materialism. The Protestant reformation is discussed at length and whether it was due to economic forces (it appears not) and whether it had economic consequences (maybe, but also probably not). Nevertheless, counterfactually we can conceive of a religious dogma associated around asceticism and hard work, which has similar roots to Protestantism and would in fact have an economic impact. This would contradict even lax definitions of historical materialism.
Overall I thought this book was great! Highly recommend if you have the patience to get through the first few chapters.
Superficially this seems like it might invalidate the work of the first eleven chapters, but it does not. What this book is and remains is a best and sincere attempt to make sense of Marx's theory of history. Whether or not historical materialism is true (it's probably not), there is still value in understanding Marx's views if only because of the massive influence he's had on so many thinkers.
This first edition of the book is an entry point into analytical Marxism. It begins by quite laboriously defining and investigating the core terms that occur will occur in the argument. For instance expect to ponder whether empty space constitutes a productive force (it does). It is building up to a philosophical transparent argument for historical materialism. Roughly speaking we can take historical materialism to mean:
"...the theory which says that there exists, throughout history, a tendency towards growth of human productive power, and that forms of society rise and fall when and because they enable and promote, or frustrate and impede, that growth."
I consider the exposition largely successful. While it is far from being totally convincing, the argument is presented clearly enough that it is quite easy to pinpoint the issues and gaps (if the author doesn't point out these limitations first himself).
While the entire argument doesn't track there are a number of interesting "lemmas" introduced along the way. In particular I enjoyed the resolution of the apparent paradox in Marxist conception of superstructures, which required purging all instances of legal terms within the productive relations. I also enjoyed the defence of functional explanations (which are most Marxist explanations). The author convincingly argues that functional explanations make sense in Darwinian settings, in which economic competition is easily seen to lie.
Notably absent is a discussion of the 'controversial' (and very probably false) labour theory of value. While I found this disappointing at first, I realised then that what this book accomplishes is proving that historical materialism is not contingent on this shaky assumption. Though what remains is no longer economics in my opinion, but a pure sociological theory.
Discussing now the new chapters, ultimately the reason Cohen has given up on Marx is he feels that Marx denies an important human need which is a sense of self. While this seems minor at first, the implications are profound. It provides a second mechanism for the formation of social structures, beyond simply productive forces contradicting an axiom of (a strict version of) historical materialism. The Protestant reformation is discussed at length and whether it was due to economic forces (it appears not) and whether it had economic consequences (maybe, but also probably not). Nevertheless, counterfactually we can conceive of a religious dogma associated around asceticism and hard work, which has similar roots to Protestantism and would in fact have an economic impact. This would contradict even lax definitions of historical materialism.
Overall I thought this book was great! Highly recommend if you have the patience to get through the first few chapters.
April 21, 2025
GA Cohen's "Karl Marx's Theory of History, A Defence" is a very well known and detailed modern defence of historical materialism and I'm not sure I feel really qualified to criticise it. Cohen was a significant Marxist scholar hugely influential on the modern understanding of historical materialism and I'm just a guy who's read some Marx. But for what it's worth, here are my views.
Cohen's book is one of the foundational texts for what became known as 'analytical marxism'. In the past I have not found analytical marxism particularly persuasive. In Jon Elster's "Making Sense of Marx" - another key book for analytical marxism - it felt like Elster was trying to fit Marx into a pre-existing framework that was assumed to be 'true' and against which Marx was only valid when he could be made to fit within the framework, in this case modern economics, lopping off as 'wrong' the bits that didn't fit. Cohen takes a similar approach, but this time the pre-existing framework is analytical philosophy. What analytic philosophy brings in this case is however the real strength of the book. Cohen codifies and clarifies, removing ambiguity and creating a comprehensive and logically coherent theory from the individual pieces left behind by Marx.
This drive for clarity is also Cohen's weakness. His version of historical materialism feels rigid and mechanical, driven by a positivist approach to cause and effect. Everything has to fit into a neat box with no room for ambiguity. What's missing is anything approaching dialectics, a recognition that not everything is quite so clearly either one thing or another, that there is ambiguity and contradiction. This is most obvious in his use of functional explanation. Cohen makes much of justifying his use of functional explanation - he theorises that historical change is driven by the technology of production, functional explanation allows change in the relations of production to happen because it is functional for the continued development of productive forces rather than necessarily directly caused by changes in the underlying economic structure (as would ordinarily be required by his mechanical cause-and-effect model of the historical materialism). I think a more open engagement with Marx's method would clearly see the dialectic between relations and forces of production, developing an analysis based on the sort of philosophy of internal relations set out by Bertell Ollman to theorise the dynamic tension that drives change through history.
This lack of ambiguity and contradiction, of the struggles and conflicts inherent in Marx's view of history in Cohen's drive to determine cause and effect is pervasive. For example Cohen takes some time to establish the nature of capital itself, following a logical line of argument to determine whether capital is a thing or a social relation, reaching the conclusion that it is a thing, a physical object - be that machine, tool, factory or whatever. This pursuit of a single position closes down all the really fruitful ways of thinking about the impact of capital as process and flow analysed for example by David Harvey. Similarly Cohen considers class to be a static position in the economic structure occupied by individuals in contrast to the more fluid (and to my mind more realistic, given the history of class formation and consciousness) position taken for example by EP Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, where class is theorised as a process of becoming that a group undergoes together underpinned by the position of it's members in the relations of production.
The end result of all this mechanical causation driven by the changing technology of production is to strip historical materialism of its revolutionary content. Cohen postulates an articulated mechanism that put me very much in mind of of the structuralism criticised by Thompson in his Poverty of Theory despite Cohen's very different starting point (Althusser's position would almost certainly fit the category of "bullshit Marxism" attacked aggressively by Cohen in the introduction).
Finally, Cohen often treats Marx's writing as monolithic supporting his argument with quotes from across the range of his work from the early Economic and Philosophic manuscripts onwards. While I'm not inclined to accept that there is a significant break in Marx's thinking in the way that used to be fashionable, it does seem odd to act as if there was almost no development over decades of his work.
In short, whether you wholly agree with Cohen's position or not there is no doubt that this is a key book for understanding historical materialism as theorised by Marx. Cohen clarifies and codifies bring logical coherence to the very fragmentary statements that Marx left behind - but best balanced by some less mechanical reading which see things from a more dialectical perspective of contradiction and process.
This review can also be found on my blog here >> https://marxadventure.wordpress.com/2...
Cohen's book is one of the foundational texts for what became known as 'analytical marxism'. In the past I have not found analytical marxism particularly persuasive. In Jon Elster's "Making Sense of Marx" - another key book for analytical marxism - it felt like Elster was trying to fit Marx into a pre-existing framework that was assumed to be 'true' and against which Marx was only valid when he could be made to fit within the framework, in this case modern economics, lopping off as 'wrong' the bits that didn't fit. Cohen takes a similar approach, but this time the pre-existing framework is analytical philosophy. What analytic philosophy brings in this case is however the real strength of the book. Cohen codifies and clarifies, removing ambiguity and creating a comprehensive and logically coherent theory from the individual pieces left behind by Marx.
This drive for clarity is also Cohen's weakness. His version of historical materialism feels rigid and mechanical, driven by a positivist approach to cause and effect. Everything has to fit into a neat box with no room for ambiguity. What's missing is anything approaching dialectics, a recognition that not everything is quite so clearly either one thing or another, that there is ambiguity and contradiction. This is most obvious in his use of functional explanation. Cohen makes much of justifying his use of functional explanation - he theorises that historical change is driven by the technology of production, functional explanation allows change in the relations of production to happen because it is functional for the continued development of productive forces rather than necessarily directly caused by changes in the underlying economic structure (as would ordinarily be required by his mechanical cause-and-effect model of the historical materialism). I think a more open engagement with Marx's method would clearly see the dialectic between relations and forces of production, developing an analysis based on the sort of philosophy of internal relations set out by Bertell Ollman to theorise the dynamic tension that drives change through history.
This lack of ambiguity and contradiction, of the struggles and conflicts inherent in Marx's view of history in Cohen's drive to determine cause and effect is pervasive. For example Cohen takes some time to establish the nature of capital itself, following a logical line of argument to determine whether capital is a thing or a social relation, reaching the conclusion that it is a thing, a physical object - be that machine, tool, factory or whatever. This pursuit of a single position closes down all the really fruitful ways of thinking about the impact of capital as process and flow analysed for example by David Harvey. Similarly Cohen considers class to be a static position in the economic structure occupied by individuals in contrast to the more fluid (and to my mind more realistic, given the history of class formation and consciousness) position taken for example by EP Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, where class is theorised as a process of becoming that a group undergoes together underpinned by the position of it's members in the relations of production.
The end result of all this mechanical causation driven by the changing technology of production is to strip historical materialism of its revolutionary content. Cohen postulates an articulated mechanism that put me very much in mind of of the structuralism criticised by Thompson in his Poverty of Theory despite Cohen's very different starting point (Althusser's position would almost certainly fit the category of "bullshit Marxism" attacked aggressively by Cohen in the introduction).
Finally, Cohen often treats Marx's writing as monolithic supporting his argument with quotes from across the range of his work from the early Economic and Philosophic manuscripts onwards. While I'm not inclined to accept that there is a significant break in Marx's thinking in the way that used to be fashionable, it does seem odd to act as if there was almost no development over decades of his work.
In short, whether you wholly agree with Cohen's position or not there is no doubt that this is a key book for understanding historical materialism as theorised by Marx. Cohen clarifies and codifies bring logical coherence to the very fragmentary statements that Marx left behind - but best balanced by some less mechanical reading which see things from a more dialectical perspective of contradiction and process.
This review can also be found on my blog here >> https://marxadventure.wordpress.com/2...
July 18, 2025
This is a super interesting book that I agreed with many things in and disagreed with others.
Things I Agreed with
1. Primacy of Productive Forces
2. Human thought as part of the productive forces (though I agree with Vanessa Wills, see "What Could it Mean to Say Capitalism Causes Sexism and Racism?") that this supports a more dynamic, non-teleological Marx.
3. There has to be a basis of humanity qua humanity, pre-production. G.A. Cohen's simple definition is quite nice.
4. Marx radically underestimates the need for the self to create the self, mold the self, and be able to define itself(this means I'm also partial to his critique of Marx's abolition of roles necessarily being a good thing.
Things I disagree with
1. Not necessarily that functional explanations have no merit, but I have some qualms that historical materialism relies on these sorts of formulations in order to retain logical coherence in the idea of the primacy of the productive forces. I admit that it works loosely, but as another commentator says, Cohen gets very, very close to defending teleology itself. I'll have to think more on this, for sure.
2. I think materialist dialectics have merit, especially in a more Maoist sense, as it more fluidly adapts itself to Marx's own view on science, which Cohen largely rejects. It also escapes the quite unfair characterization he gives dialectics from the outset (such as that a Marxist would say a slave is both a slave and not a slave, I mean, come on, he has to know it would be more complicated than that)
Super interesting book, though, but one that gets bogged down at times by its analytical character.
Things I Agreed with
1. Primacy of Productive Forces
2. Human thought as part of the productive forces (though I agree with Vanessa Wills, see "What Could it Mean to Say Capitalism Causes Sexism and Racism?") that this supports a more dynamic, non-teleological Marx.
3. There has to be a basis of humanity qua humanity, pre-production. G.A. Cohen's simple definition is quite nice.
4. Marx radically underestimates the need for the self to create the self, mold the self, and be able to define itself(this means I'm also partial to his critique of Marx's abolition of roles necessarily being a good thing.
Things I disagree with
1. Not necessarily that functional explanations have no merit, but I have some qualms that historical materialism relies on these sorts of formulations in order to retain logical coherence in the idea of the primacy of the productive forces. I admit that it works loosely, but as another commentator says, Cohen gets very, very close to defending teleology itself. I'll have to think more on this, for sure.
2. I think materialist dialectics have merit, especially in a more Maoist sense, as it more fluidly adapts itself to Marx's own view on science, which Cohen largely rejects. It also escapes the quite unfair characterization he gives dialectics from the outset (such as that a Marxist would say a slave is both a slave and not a slave, I mean, come on, he has to know it would be more complicated than that)
Super interesting book, though, but one that gets bogged down at times by its analytical character.
April 7, 2025
I wish I had someone to recommend this to, a fascinating dive into Marxian theory, its application throughout history, and an incredible critique of the state (and capitalism obv)
July 11, 2022
Hopefully know enough about social relations now to go outside and relate to real people🤞🤞🤞
December 6, 2025
I think that Marxism (or scientific socialism as G.A. Cohen much prefers to call it), stripped of the dialectical gymnastics that often obscure its arguments far more than necessary, can be a profoundly useful tool for people of any political persuasion to understand. Cohen’s distillation of historical materialism into its analytical parts is a very solid and rigorous entry into the most relevant aspects of Marx’ theory. I do wish Analytical Marxism had become the dominant tradition of leftist academics and activists.
July 21, 2022
By now I've read several of G.A. Cohen's books, and I consider this one (his first) the best. It is rightly regarded as a paragon of philosophical clarity and rigor, as well as perhaps the canonical "analytical" statement of Marxism's claims. Ironically, the weakest aspect of this book, I think, is Cohen's commitment to defending a broadly Marxist theory. In the chapters of the Expanded edition, Cohen provides some valuable criticisms and corrections to the Marxist claims. But Cohen clearly shows the urge at various points to move beyond Marxist theses and develop a more satisfactory, independent social theory of his own; for whatever reason, he unfortunately did not.
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June 24, 2007I started out my intellectual life as a fake Marxist (all catchwords and social grumbling during the days of Cornel West and Noam Chomsky in my backpack). And then I swung to the right, becoming something of a neoconservative, but with a theological bent. And then back to the left, if that's the right word, as I encountered GA Cohen, whose breakthrough book was this one. It was one of the founding enterprises of the academic movement known as _analytical Marxism_, which Cohen described during its gestation as ``Marxism without bullshit.'' And this it is. I'm not a Marxist, but I am as sympathetic toward Marxism as one can be without being a committed partisan. And this book opened up the possibility. Even if one rejects Marxism, it is this form, I think, which must be met.
February 19, 2020
Decpcionante. Muita semantica e pouca filosofia. As únicas partes interessantes são a introdução e os capitulos finais, adicionados na edição de 2000 que discutem os pressupostos filosoficos da escola britanica do marxismom analitico e as objeções ao marxismo. Recomendo pular o meio do livro completamente.
August 24, 2022
Analytical marxism is anti-dialectic, ahistorical, positivistic, reduccionistic and on page 341 the author claims that he no longer can proves Marx's theory is true.
What a great "defence".
If this book was more synthetic and less formulaic, it would've been 2 stars, so yeah, pass this up.
What a great "defence".
If this book was more synthetic and less formulaic, it would've been 2 stars, so yeah, pass this up.
May 12, 2018
Cohen is tired of Marxists relying on ambiguity in texts, and so tried to use analytic tools to make precise and potentially more falsifiable the theory of historical materialism, which is in brief:
He's engaged in two distinct activities - trying to look for the best interpretation of Marx, and trying to alter these claims to make them plausible. And surprisingly, these two aspects go together quite well in his book.
There are clarifications about the specific elements and their relationships in Marx's account - forces of production, production relations, property relations, superstructure, etc. Distinctions are made between Marx's "philosophical anthropology" and "theory of history", and it is argued that the first is inadequate as an account because it ignores the human need for community, but also argued that this doesn't really affect Marx's theory of history. It is also made clear that Marx's labour theory of value (where labour creates exchange value in proportion to the hours of labour necessary) does not have to be accepted for the general account of history to be accepted.
The major effect of all this clarification, unfortunately for Marx, is that the massive theoretical optimism of Marx is fully on display as overly optimistic. It becomes painfully clear that Marx's insistence that a certain set of production relations will last until all the productive forces mature as much as possible is an unwarranted hangover from Hegel. It is also completely unclear why the overthrow of capitalist relations of production would occur with the kind of necessity Marx assumed in his scientific socialism, and especially why this overthrow would somehow result in the liberation of uncoerced and free human creativity. Of course, these are not rendered impossible, but by making the distinct aspects of Marx's account clear, Cohen renders them shaky.
(I think Cohen's view in his later book You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? states this pessimism overtly, and there he instead advocates for less scientific socialism and more utopian socialist thought)
That being said, there is still a Marxist edifice Cohen defends ably here, and his work of clarification engaged in, in making some Marxist ideas more plausible and others less, is excellent and valuable.
The heart of historical materialism is the thesis that there is, throughout history's course, a tendency towards growth of human productive power, and that forms of society [which are salient to the economic life] rise and fall when and because they enable and promote, or frustrate and impede, that growth. Human productive activity increases in potency as history unfolds, and social forms accommodate themselves to that material growth process. They flourish to the extent that they help to raise the level of development of the productive forces, and they decline when they no longer do so.
He's engaged in two distinct activities - trying to look for the best interpretation of Marx, and trying to alter these claims to make them plausible. And surprisingly, these two aspects go together quite well in his book.
There are clarifications about the specific elements and their relationships in Marx's account - forces of production, production relations, property relations, superstructure, etc. Distinctions are made between Marx's "philosophical anthropology" and "theory of history", and it is argued that the first is inadequate as an account because it ignores the human need for community, but also argued that this doesn't really affect Marx's theory of history. It is also made clear that Marx's labour theory of value (where labour creates exchange value in proportion to the hours of labour necessary) does not have to be accepted for the general account of history to be accepted.
The major effect of all this clarification, unfortunately for Marx, is that the massive theoretical optimism of Marx is fully on display as overly optimistic. It becomes painfully clear that Marx's insistence that a certain set of production relations will last until all the productive forces mature as much as possible is an unwarranted hangover from Hegel. It is also completely unclear why the overthrow of capitalist relations of production would occur with the kind of necessity Marx assumed in his scientific socialism, and especially why this overthrow would somehow result in the liberation of uncoerced and free human creativity. Of course, these are not rendered impossible, but by making the distinct aspects of Marx's account clear, Cohen renders them shaky.
(I think Cohen's view in his later book You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? states this pessimism overtly, and there he instead advocates for less scientific socialism and more utopian socialist thought)
That being said, there is still a Marxist edifice Cohen defends ably here, and his work of clarification engaged in, in making some Marxist ideas more plausible and others less, is excellent and valuable.
May 21, 2023
Cohen argues for “non-bullshit” Marxism through his analytical approach (opposing dialectical thinking) to defend Marx’s theory of history. While it is a very good book that elucidates on difficult matters, such as use-value and production forces, I would not recommend it to readers who are not familiar with Marx’s writings, as it diverges from the actual writings. Cohen, after all, is claiming to know Marx more than Marx knew himself (modestly). In this analytical Marxist book, Cohen’s charisma and Marx’s poetics are unfortunately absent. Instead we get a dissection of key Marxist concepts dismissing the totality of their context; I would argue it’s productive but not practical. And while philosophers might get away with this methodology, historians do not. The important subject on social class is left out of the book. And, where is art? culture? literature? Cohen, the amusing man whose wife takes videos of him pretending to be Stalin, was not the writer of this book. It is somehow disappointing as I believe he could have written a more accessible, more pedagogical, more relevant book… and yet, this is what Oxford professors do.
June 18, 2020
In this academic and tough work Cohen tries to defense Marx's theory of history in the light of historical materialism. Marx suggested that if the appearence and nature of the things were the same it would be unnecessary to do science. Soi he tried to find out general laws of historical transformation so as to change the worl. As he put it, the philosophers had interpreted the world until then, for him the point was to change it. Additionally, he said that we had to understand world well so as to change it. Historical materialism was key to form a new world. In the light of Marx's premises, Cohen, discusses all the concepts that Marx used.
The book is academic; the writer takes up both economics, sociology, philosophy and poltics. It is hard for those who for the first read a text about Marx and Marxism.
April 9, 2019
I mean, obviously it's a seminal work, and a necessary one as far as putting Marxian concerns on a concrete analytic foundation, but I have no idea how anyone could get through this book... Besides the amazing first chapter on Marx v Hegel, it's hard to tell which points are actually fundamental and which are just sorta nitpicking at vocabularic corner cases
October 15, 2021
Yet, it causes many debates in your whole reading. However it doesn't make sense to be scored lower than 4. You know, it might have been one of the two options of what Marxism supposed to be. I opposed this book but admire it too for his interpretation made Marxism potential to be a modern analytic method.
April 13, 2019
If you ever wondered what was it that Karl Marx meant with "historcal materialism" and do his predictions make any sence on the light of modern social science and analytical philisophy, this is the book for you.
August 3, 2024
I seriously don’t understand why this book was ever talked about—I thought it provided minimal value for history students. 3 stars is generous, but G.A. Cohen was goated with the sauce and was funny on YouTube
July 12, 2020
the disaster of a marxist theory with unflappable slogans and abstraction over dialectics. as if 18th Brum and Civil War were never written. some good analysis sometimes tho i guess
August 7, 2023
Muy buena introducción
July 24, 2024
Daunting, but fundamentally illuminating in both its claims and method.
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