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Historical Materialism #207
Social Knowledge: An Essay on the Nature and Limits of Social Science
In Social Knowledge Paul Mattick examines the possibility of scientific knowledge of society, taking Marxs critique of economics as an exemplary case of the anthropological understanding of social life.
136 pages, Hardcover
First published January 22, 1987
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About the author
Paul Mattick Jr.
11 books17 followersPaul Mattick Jr. (born 1944) is a Marxist theorist and philosopher.
He is the son of council communist theoreticians Paul Mattick Sr. (1904-1981) (author Paul Mattick) and Ilse Mattick (1919-2009).
Mattick obtained his PhD from Harvard in 1981, and is currently chair of the Department of Philosophy at Adelphi University in New York. He was previously the editor of the International Journal of Political Economy, and is the author of several books on philosophy of language, aesthetics, and the critique of political economy.
He is the son of council communist theoreticians Paul Mattick Sr. (1904-1981) (author Paul Mattick) and Ilse Mattick (1919-2009).
Mattick obtained his PhD from Harvard in 1981, and is currently chair of the Department of Philosophy at Adelphi University in New York. He was previously the editor of the International Journal of Political Economy, and is the author of several books on philosophy of language, aesthetics, and the critique of political economy.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 28, 2019
This is a wonderfully clear, but rather limited statement of the position of marxist theory in relation to both Weberian and socially-relativist conceptions of “social science, “ written by a current proponent of the Dutch-German Left Communist tradition, Paul Mattick Junior. It criticizes and rejects classical models of the operation of “social science,” especially Weber, and then wrestles at length with Peter Winch’s relativist criticism of Weber, his rejection of the anthropologist as an outside analyst of a society drawing conclusions with which the participants in the society would disagree, and his ultimate rejection of the possibility of social science itself. Mattick is both harsh and fair with Winch, completely rejecting his framework while showing how some of his concerns are actually quite close to Marx’s. The book goes on to give a vicious smacking to professional economics - always a fun pastime - and lay out elements of the marxist understanding of the production of systematic knowledge about society, concluding with situating marxism as a tool of the proletariat to be made use of and dispensed with as the capitalist mode of production which gives rise to it is done away with.
The explanations Mattick gives of the marxist methods for understanding societies are excellent, and sometimes brilliant, and his criticisms of Weber and Winch are convincing, considered and subtle. He stays so much on the level of critique of social science methodology and its internal criticisms, however, that he neglects fully performing the crucial step of analyzing the social conditions that gave rise to social science beyond a very general theoretical confirmation of its being specific to capitalism. Neither colonialism nor the social management of the proletariat are brought up - absolutely puzzling for a book on this topic; this is despite the fact of formative social science being directly involved in both the colonial projects of European states and the transformation of bourgeois “philanthropic” efforts to mollify the proletariat and prevent uprisings into modern social-containment industries such as social work. Neither is the question of how the division of labor in societies shapes day-to-day consciousness and the production of scientific knowledge taken on. This historical investigation into the conditions producing the consciousness of the social scientist is fundamentally important to the project that Mattick takes on; without it, the book is incomplete and unable to fully explain the fundamental contradictions in professional sociology, anthropology and economics.
For this reason, I’ve given three rather than four stars. I would encourage readers to give it a go anyway - it’s short, concise, and well worth the read. Just do your best to remain highly conscious of how partial and short-circuited of an explanation it is.
The explanations Mattick gives of the marxist methods for understanding societies are excellent, and sometimes brilliant, and his criticisms of Weber and Winch are convincing, considered and subtle. He stays so much on the level of critique of social science methodology and its internal criticisms, however, that he neglects fully performing the crucial step of analyzing the social conditions that gave rise to social science beyond a very general theoretical confirmation of its being specific to capitalism. Neither colonialism nor the social management of the proletariat are brought up - absolutely puzzling for a book on this topic; this is despite the fact of formative social science being directly involved in both the colonial projects of European states and the transformation of bourgeois “philanthropic” efforts to mollify the proletariat and prevent uprisings into modern social-containment industries such as social work. Neither is the question of how the division of labor in societies shapes day-to-day consciousness and the production of scientific knowledge taken on. This historical investigation into the conditions producing the consciousness of the social scientist is fundamentally important to the project that Mattick takes on; without it, the book is incomplete and unable to fully explain the fundamental contradictions in professional sociology, anthropology and economics.
For this reason, I’ve given three rather than four stars. I would encourage readers to give it a go anyway - it’s short, concise, and well worth the read. Just do your best to remain highly conscious of how partial and short-circuited of an explanation it is.
August 28, 2025
Extraordinarily dense, such that I did not feel like I wholly grasped the argument until I passed over my notes again after finishing. Mattick's essay is about scientific methodology in general -- first overcoming a dialectic between relativism and 'logical-empiricism' which was especially popular when he first wrote it.
Science is contextual, our concepts and therefore the way we will organize observations is dependent on some historical fact about our society and on our relationship to the object of study. This applies to all science, or all theory of observable phenomena. Marx’s theory was suited to a critique of the society in which he lived, and was not a general theory of all society, though his framework could be used, extended using a different vocabulary of categories, to theorize about different historical modes of production, as Perry Anderson does in his study of the transition to feudalism in Europe. Phenomena which exist across societies can be named as abstractions, but must be analyzed in isolation, according to the particular ways they relate to the different modes of production. For instance, the metabolism between ‘man’ and ‘nature’, an abstraction about the relationship between two abstractions which are analytically significant, must be distinguished according to the way that ‘man’ is organizing itself socially. The feudal relationship to nature is not the same as the capitalist relationship, which is not the same as the communist relationship will be.
Science is contextual, our concepts and therefore the way we will organize observations is dependent on some historical fact about our society and on our relationship to the object of study. This applies to all science, or all theory of observable phenomena. Marx’s theory was suited to a critique of the society in which he lived, and was not a general theory of all society, though his framework could be used, extended using a different vocabulary of categories, to theorize about different historical modes of production, as Perry Anderson does in his study of the transition to feudalism in Europe. Phenomena which exist across societies can be named as abstractions, but must be analyzed in isolation, according to the particular ways they relate to the different modes of production. For instance, the metabolism between ‘man’ and ‘nature’, an abstraction about the relationship between two abstractions which are analytically significant, must be distinguished according to the way that ‘man’ is organizing itself socially. The feudal relationship to nature is not the same as the capitalist relationship, which is not the same as the communist relationship will be.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews