Abstract

Critics have wrongly dismissed Marx's theory as an archaic "essentialist" approach to history due to the inadequate understanding of the intentionally tentative character of Marx's theoretical works, the accompanying epistemological demand for historical analysis, the dialectical tension between theory and empirical analysis and, therefore, of Marx's open- ended definition of historical knowledge. Through a reconstruction of Marx's project it becomes clear that because Marx's materialist conception of history and his view that abstract representation represents not a universal philosophy of history, but rather elements of an epistemologically modest materialist science of history, his project contains an inbuilt epistemological demand for continued historical analyses as the praxis of that science. Such analyses are necessary elements of the process of moving beyond the abstract representation of the mode of production. They are crucial both to correct the conceptual presentation itself, and to enlarge the scope of the conception from the mode of production to the totality of bourgeois society