A Necessary Encounter: Historical Materialism and International Relations

Abstract

The fate of Marxism within the social sciences has, throughout the past century, been profoundly uncertain, an ambivalence that has in some respects been accentuated by the collapse of the communist movements, and of communist regimes, since the late 1980s. On the one hand, the challenge of Marxism to established patterns of thought, and to the existing state system, has led to its exclusion from the academic domain, an exclusion compounded by the dogmatisms, polemics and simplifications of Marxists seeking or holding political power. On the other hand, Marxism, itself part of the radical liberal tradition inherited from the Enlightenment, and a response, along with the recognisable academic disciplines of sociology and economics, to the rise of industrial society, has shared many areas of common ground with more strictly academic concerns and has in a variety of ways influenced their evolution. If in some areas this has led to the emergence of an identifiable ‘Marxist’ current within the social sciences, it has a broader influence, one of diffusion, so that approaches originally associated with Marxism have become more generally accepted. In this sense, in Gramsci’s phrase, Marxism has become ‘the common sense of our epoch’.