Stanley Aronowitz, The Crisis in Historical Materialism (1990)

Abstract

Stanley Aronowitz’s The Crisis in Historical Materialism was first published in the United States in 1981 and then reissued with new material in the LDS series. It is one of the key texts to have come out of the experience of the sixties, a decade marked by a wave of new interest in Marxist thought as the Stalinist hegemony dissolved. Figures such as Korsch and Lukacs whose work had been subject to the prohibitions of the Comintern resurfaced and the publication of Marx’s own early thinking on the relation between philosophy and economics in the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts stimulated radical rethinking. Most importantly perhaps, Marcuse’s reworking of themes from the Frankfurt School and Althusser’s redrawing of the distinction between science and ideology provided many of the emphases that were to issue from the movements of 1968. But if the thinking of the New Left was an essential part of the heterogenous mix of economics, politics and culture which made up the sixties, that thinking was itself fundamentally unaffected by the heterogeneity of which it was a part. The great merit of Aronowitz’s book is its sustained attempt to produce a historical and social understanding fully adequate to that experience.