Restricted and Inclusive Historical Materialism: A Comment

Abstract

G.A. Cohen’s paper is a further instance of an ongoing recent attempt — at the vanguard of which Cohen himself has stood — to salvage at least those parts of the Marxist theory of history that must be salvaged if the theory is to retain its coherence, its legitimacy, and its usefulness as an explanatory tool for analyzing and understanding historical phenomena. As far as I know, Cohen is the only, certainly the most ingenious, writer on Marxism to employ the rigorous methods of British analytical philosophy in order to demonstrate the essentially plausible stature — as he sees it — of historical materialism. Not only beleaguered Marxists looking desperately for reassurance had their spirits raised by the appearance in 1978 of his now classic Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence; anyone who takes pleasure in sheer intellectual dexterity and believes in the manifold possibilities that ‘mental production’ and fortitude hold in store, must have been captivated — as I was — by this elaborate and exhaustive reconstruction, profound yet clear-headed throughout, of a view of history which unrelentingly attributes functional-causal primacy to the material foundations of social life.