Abstract

Marx said that people make their own history, though not under circumstances of their own choosing. But whether the claims of determinism and human agency can be reconciled in his "materialist conception of history" has been strongly doubted. It is not possible, critics have maintained, to discover any true laws of historical development; nor can sense be made of the notion of an economic "base" determining a society's legal and political "superstructure". ;This study contends that by distinguishing between a level of pure structure and a level at which structure is modified by human agency and other forms of contingency, one can formulate Marx's theory in a coherent, plausible, and non-trivial way. In this regard the theory's base/superstructure model is quite serviceable provided that it is expressed in terms of functional explanation, and that it is viewed as a structural tendency rather than an empirical invariance. ;The theory should be seen as embodying both a principle of structure and a principle of agency: the structural principle of the determination of society's political, legal, and ideological forms by its mode of production asserts a tendency rooted in the necessary interaction of human societies with their material environments; its complementary principle asserts that the establishment and dissolution of modes of production is intimately entwined with the political struggles of social classes. ;Marx's theory of how societies are structured and how they are transformed is not a form of philosophical materialism, nor can it be deduced from any philosophy of nature. In fact, within Marxism the issue of philosophical materialism can be read as a debate over the efficacy of human agency in the historical process. ;Marx's theory can provide no laws of necessary historical development. Rather, as I interpret it, it aims to provide a set of principles for retrospectively explaining historical change. In this sense it is akin to Darwin's theory of biological evolution. Thus while the power of a Marxian theory to predict the long-term course of history is slight indeed, its explanatory power may still be considerable