nm0089: well good morning everybody er last year i volunteered or was 
volunteered to give this lecture because somebody was on leave that somebody's 
come back and apparently i'm still giving the lecture i don't know how that 
happened but here i am and what i'm going to talk about is Marxism er and 
Marxist historiography since Marx linking up with what namex said last week and 
i think one of the points that er is very important about Marx is that Marx's 
ideas and i i think namex mentioned this last week are a sort of unique fusion 
of two separate categories of thinking first of all there is a strongly 
philosophical element to Marx Marx's ideas developed er as philosophical ideas 
in the first place and it was once he'd kind of developed a er a philosophical 
view of the world based on Hegel and other er thinkers of early nineteenth 
century Germany he then er began to observe the realities of capitalist society 
around him and this 
led to the second layer of his thought the kind of empirical practical 
pragmatic understanding of the society in which he lived now any aspect of 
Marxist thought has got these two things closely infused together and this 
makes it rather exceptional if you go back before Marx you had philosophers i 
mentioned Hegel Kant and others who were not social analysts and you had people 
who were social analysts Montesquieu er Adam Smith who were not in the true 
sense philosophers i'm not saying they didn't have ideas but they didn't have 
this fusion and many people have argued that er Marx came to his conclusions 
philosophically and then used the world around him to justify them and there's 
a very er the linkage between them i think is brought out by this perhaps the 
most famous quotation of from Marx from eighteen-forty-eight from his thesis on 
Feuerbach where he argues that philosophers have only interpreted the world the 
point is to change it so for Marx er understanding was simply a 
preliminary step to action and to changing things and it follows from this that 
for a Marxist history is as i've said at the bottom it's about analysing the 
present as well as the past with a view er to changing the future not 
necessarily foretelling the future but changing the future now it's with this 
background in mind that i want to talk particularly about two aspects really 
following from this the way that Marxist ideas developed and to jump in from 
time to time to talk about the way that development of Marxist philosophy began 
to affect the way they looked at history because that's our main concern here 
is the historiography of all this now the question which arose almost p-, er 
permanently in people's minds after Marx was the question of why was it that 
the revolution that he'd predicted had not come about and in many ways the 
philosophical responses and the other responses to Marx er in the late 
nineteenth century are answers to this question and stro-, and on into the 
twentieth century as well and the first stage in this process really was one 
which began with not Marx himself so much but Engels and the person who became 
the leading figure in Marxist philosophy after er after Marx Karl Kautsky the 
leader of the s-, German Social Democratic Party it's famous famously er quoted 
everywhere that Marx said in the latter part of his life as for me i am not a 
Marxist er and if that phrase meant anything it meant that the kind of 
processes which were going on with Marx's ideas towards the end of his life and 
certainly after his death in eighteen-eighty-one were ones which er w-, which 
er were not er in his view following up the main i-, the main er essence of his 
ideas in particular there were attempts to turn his ideas into systems into 
rules into laws they were becoming in the context of the time much more 
positivistic er and they turned into what some people have called vulgar 
Marxism er a very crude form of historical materialism and Kautsky 
very much er f-, pushes forward this er concept of vulgar Marxism and of 
scientific Marxism if we look at some of the major features of that sort er of 
vulgar Marxism or s-, or or or er this attempt to turn into a set of dogmas 
essentially the starting point for most versions of it was the economic er 
interpretation of history economics is the fundamental aspect of history 
everything arises er or can be explained in terms of economic conjunctures 
economic development er and and economic base er and that there is er in this 
interpretation i'll come on to that in a moment er er a model of base and 
superstructure but the economic interpretation argued the fundamental factor on 
which all other fac-, social factors depended was er economy particularly the 
means of production er and ownership of it the means of production in different 
societies being land in feudal society machines and industrial society capital 
and labour er capital in capitalist society labour in in a number of other 
societies as well and 
the way in which those means of production were organized and particularly who 
owned them hence the basis of class because classes were divided into those 
people who owned these means of production and those people who were employed 
to work these means of production er in Marx's terminology in in a capitalist 
society er the bourgeoisie and the proletariat so vulgar er Marxists argued 
very strongly for the economic er determination of society and this led er some 
and many of the tendencies continued in the twentieth century in fact in some 
ways Stalin is one of the er leading exponents of this particular version and 
crude Marxism as it was developed in the Soviet Union in the nineteen late 
twenties and thirties that society has a kind of basis and a superstructure the 
economy is the basis the superstructure is everything that's built on it social 
forms but not just social forms also ideas cultural phenomena er law er 
religion er what we're doing today er higher education whatever it happens 
to be all these things arise in this very crude interpretation from economic er 
economic er economic er origins and associated with this er is a stress on the 
on class interest and class struggle and the idea of historical laws and 
historical inevitability er in other words er the version of Marxism which is 
most often criticized by people who don't know much about Marx himself is often 
this particular version of Marxism this er version of Marxism which possibly 
Marx had in mind when he said he wasn't himself a Marxist but the first stage 
of development of Marxist ideas brings it into this rather er schematic 
positivist influenced er rule based idea of controlling history history working 
directly through laws and those laws being readily perceptible er and readily 
er understandable now er that interpretation doesn't satisfy everybody on a 
number of grounds and as i've said the key question in people's minds was why 
had there not been a revolution of the Marxist kind and the first 
bold effort to try to answer this question er was put was was one associated 
with er the name Eduard Bernstein in late er nineteenth er he developed these 
ideas in late nineteenth er early twentieth century er Britain actually 
although he was German h-, er er his British experiences meant a great deal to 
him and he began to argue that there were some fundamental flaws he didn't 
actually challenge the positivistic element so much he challenged the working 
out of some of those rules that we were looking at and he argued that in actual 
fact the the laws as they were understood by Kautsky and orthodox Marxists the 
laws of capitalist development were mistaken hence his ideas are often referred 
to as revisionism instead he argued that first of all the class idea that Marx 
had and i think that er that er namex emphasized last week let me just take 
that it's probably easier if i just take that completely off there er that all 
that classes will polarize the middle class will disappear the 
proletariat will sink into penury the peasantry will th-, will disappear the 
petit bourgeoisie will disappear under capitalism and everything will move out 
into a wide range of of of polarized classes according to Bernstein this was 
not happening and he argued that the middle class doesn't disappear in fact the 
middle class is the s-, is the class which is expanding most rapidly in Britain 
in the late n-, nineteenth and early twentieth century so far from polarizing 
and disappearing into a a class struggle between the impoverished and the super 
rich which is the crude interpretation of Marx er the development of capitalism 
was moving in a different direction and er the er lower classes were not 
disappearing and the reason for this was that ownership of capital ownership of 
the means of production was not as Marx thought polarizing through competition 
driving poor er er sec-, er er failed producers out of the market and creating 
a smaller and smaller number of big er successful producers er whether it be in 
agriculture or in industry so instead er Bernstein argued the middle class was 
getting broader the working class was actually getting richer its wages were 
improving it was owning more the petit bourgeoisie small land owners in 
particular market gardeners that kind of person were becoming more rather than 
less numerous and even shareholding was becoming dispersed through society so 
that from Bernstein's point of view er capitalism itself was beginning to 
evolve er a kind o-, would hopefully evolve into a kind of socialism which 
could be developed through pursuit of reformism through pursuing democracy 
through pursuing er the er current paths of capitalist development without 
revolution in other words he saw in an optimistic way that capitalism itself 
was dispersing ownership through society and once the ownership was dispersed 
through society was effectively almost a socialist society and that's i think 
behind that other rather mysterious quotation there the 
ultimate goal of socialism is nothing to me the movement is everything in other 
words for him the idea of future communism or whatever er i-, utopian society 
you had was not the crucial thing the crucial thing was the movement towards it 
er and the ideas that er the the the the the workers movement for reform for 
change bringing people together er things like trade unions eventually the 
Labour Party these were all things which were developing in a big way in the 
eighteen-nineties and around nineteen-hundred in the in Britain and he saw that 
as the way forward for the labour movement of course you'll realize that that 
is exactly the split which has occurred in the socialist movement in the 
twentieth century between those who follow the revolutionary path and those who 
follow this reformist path if you like Bernstein is the founder of New Labour 
maybe they don't even talk about socialism but the ultimate goal is nothing to 
me could certainly be said by er Tony Blair er but the movement is 
everything er and the idea that that er th-, i mean the the problem that arises 
from this that socialism is split of course has helped er to maintain socialism 
as a as as as a er an unsuccessful movement in most respects in the twentieth 
century in terms of er er in terms of what was expected in the late nineteenth 
century however not all Marxists were as pessimistic about the future although 
Bernstein i wouldn't say is pessimistic but they were they were less 
pessimistic than he was about the potential for er revolution and the 
revolutionary side of Marxism was given a new lease of life naturally by the 
Russian Revolution er but also by some ideas which preceded it and the er 
person er who engendered a number of these ideas is er Rudolf Hilferding a an 
Austrian economist and socialist er who himself ended up more of a Bernsteinian 
than a revolutionary but Hilferding as i've said like many others was 
interested in the question why hasn't there been a proletarian revolution and 
he argued that in fact what was 
happening under capitalism was a massive development of er what he called 
finance capital that capitalism itself was beginning to change there were i 
mean today we see a capitalism of giant corporations bestriding the globe 
larger than nation states holding nation states to ransom hence er the need or 
the drive to do things like put er er the European Union together to try to 
combat this by uniting nation states to try to control some of these big 
corporations er but he er argued that what had happened was that er capitalism 
had changed its nature in that in Marx's day the owners of capital were usually 
the direct investors of capital you invested your own money in what seemed to 
be profitable potential businesses by the end of the century according to 
Hilferding capitalism was now based not on individuals but on banks and other 
financial institutions which became gigantic pools lakes of anonymous capital 
er as they are today er you put your er you put your 
money into the bank or i suppose probably your overdraft in most cases but your 
money goes into the bank and er what happens to it where does it go the bank 
lends people money whose money is it lending nobody knows it's a great 
anonymous pool of capital which is not controlled by individuals you don't 
control where that money goes still less if you have pension funds or er er 
other er financial er services and so on and so forth and that money is is 
allocated by professionals who don't own the money er by professional financial 
advisers fina-, financial managers for these institutions investment managers 
and so on and so forth and he argued that this growth of monopoly capitalism 
was changing the nature of capitalism that it wasn't this was one of the 
reasons why there were super profits being made er and so on and so forth but 
this was taken up by some of the revolutionaries because he also argued perhaps 
here echoing a bit of Bernstein that capitalis-, this meant capitalism itself 
was 
becoming more organized this was a second concept he had organized capitalism 
for Marx capitalism was based on the anarchy of the market the in the inpr-, 
unpredictability of the market the market was a kind of er tempestuous ocean on 
which capitalist enterprises had to sink or swim er in order to protect 
themselves from this tempestuous sea capitalism is becoming more and more 
organized er finance capitalism is one way it's becoming more organized because 
this meant that there were links between big companies er and banks and heavy 
investors but also companies themselves were coming together into monopolies 
and cartels and and doing deals with each other to control the market the idea 
that capitalists like markets is laughable capitalists hate markets they like 
to control markets or don't like free markets they like to control markets and 
he was pointing to this as a way in which big capital had survived the 
predictions of Marx that it was changing its nature it was 
turning into what we think of as monopoly capitalism now the points from the 
revolutionary's poi-, er view is that certain revolutionaries Lenin in the 
forefront seized on Hilferding's ideas as a justification for the potential for 
revolution in the face of Bernstein's criticism er and Bernstein's revisionism 
because the conclusion which Lenin drew from Hilferding's ideas of organ-, 
organized capitalism was that here was capitalism itself developing 
institutions which could be taken over by a future revolutionary state because 
instead of having a whole inchoate class of capital owners running the 
capitalist economy you now had these key financial managers who were working 
for banks for salaries if you decapitated capitalism er and that in a se-, er 
in in Lenin's view meant nationalizing the banks you'd be able to control 
capitalist society this was the this was Lenin's assumption at the turn of the 
century from these ideas so by nationalizing the banks you could then control 
er you could then 
control er the evolution of capitalism control where investment went and you 
could control where er the priorities for society were and the fundamental 
problems of exploitation hopefully could be avoided by the state intervening 
and controlling this process and moving towards socialism so Lenin saw this as 
as a-, a-, as er monopoly capitalism as a step towards potential socialism 
because sen-, socialism is supposed to be a rational controlled organized 
society er one which was er in which human beings er called the tune and 
organized society the way they wanted it not one in which society called the 
tune and organized human beings in whatever was appropriate to the given 
economic er conditions of the day secondarily Lenin also looked at another 
phenomenon of the late nineteenth century as did Rosa Luxemburg and Nikolai 
Bukharin to argue that one of the reasons for the growth of these big 
monopolies and the expansion of capitalism was imperialism that er where Marx 
might have thought 
that capitalist ec-, capitalist er er r-, profit rates would fall because ca-, 
if capitalism was a kind of enclosed system once it became a global system the 
massive opportunities for what Lenin called super profits to be made by 
investing overseas and international trade and the monopoly companies were in 
the forefront of this and he argued that the most advanced workers of western 
Europe the wor-, the er er skilled workers of Germany and France and Britain 
were actually doing quite well out of capitalism as it was this is of course 
what Bernstein had also said because they were able to be paid by the super 
profits of imperialism so this was buying them off so to speak from their 
revolutionary potential er and Lenin also came to the conclusion that since 
imperialism is a global system you could have a revolution at any one point of 
it Bernstein er er Bukharin er was the first person to coin the phrase that 
capitalism could break at its weakest link er and Lenin's conception of 
capitalism was of of a 
global system with Russia as one of its weakest links so while Russia was not a 
capitalist society at the time of the Russian Revolution Lenin thought he was 
breaking the world system of capitalism by er attacking it at this at this weak 
link and from there it would spread to where it should take place in Germany er 
in France in Britain in western Europe and eventually who knows even in North 
America er s-, but Lenin er and these thinkers were still fairly much in the 
tradition of the semi-positivistic er interpretation of Marx since the Russian 
Revolution particularly since many people er on the left criticized the Russian 
Revolution and the way it was developing from very early on inclusing including 
Rosa Luxemburg who was very worried about the dictatorial and anti-democractic 
tendencies of Lenin and the Russian Revolution in nineteen-seventeen and 
nineteen-eighteen very early on er many er thinkers began to look in different 
directions for er new inspiration about Marxist ideas and these are ones 
which begin to feed in to er which begin to feed in to a new er way of looking 
at society er and these are ones which become particularly influential for 
twentieth century er Marxist hi-, and other historiography in particular a 
group of thinkers er began to move away from this er traditional as it were 
almost rule based er version of Marxism to drawing attention to quite different 
aspects of it to argue that the revolution had not occurred for amongst other 
things what we might think of in some way as cultural reasons that they turned 
our attention towards the issue of consciousness the political awareness of a 
given individual or a d-, given group of individuals er what role does this 
play in history we can't say that the economic base simply determines what 
everybody thinks what they think and the struggle for them to develop their own 
ideas and for them to er become er part of a larger movement focused around 
particular ideas and to become aware of their situation in 
society is one of the reas-, is one of the factors er why or or or the fact 
this hasn't happened is one of the reasons why society er why the revolution 
that Marx expected had not taken place and in do-, in in pursuing this area 
they began to open up a whole er whole range of issues er for social and 
historical exploration er in a sense the earliest of these although he's often 
forgotten is Antonio Labriola who was perhaps the first person to begin to 
break with er the more er positivistic interpretation of Marxism and he pointed 
to the fact that what materialist theory represented for him was the first 
attempt to create a sort of er general science general social science unifying 
different historical processes er the materialist theory is the culminating 
point of this process what he meant was that in looking at history and the way 
it develops er materialism and the materialist theory is the first to break 
away from the compartmentalization of history into religious history history of 
politics er history of the 
law constitutional history and so on and so forth and begin to look at human 
society as a whole and of course this has been er a massive er development in 
er twentieth century historical studies and twentieth century historical 
understanding that there is nothing these days which is separate from history 
and in particular er it's this er sort of holistic sense of history but 
Labriola's ideas er gave way to others which became er i think much more e-, 
effective in particular er i Georg Lukacs the Hungarian Marxist er and i've 
taken a couple of key er s-, er a couple of key er concepts from him er he 
developed the idea or this is present in Marx although er it's a technical 
point here that Marx's er philosophical ideas of the early er writings were not 
known er until the nineteen-thirties and the nineteen-forties because some of 
his key works had never been published until that time so in many ways Lukacs 
was er er er was was predicting er the er ideas of Marx which had not yet been 
er published and revealed and he emphasized the question o-, the 
issues of alienation and reification and i include reification particularly 
because many people have seen this as being crucially relevant to modern 
consumer society alienation is a concept which is present in Marx and er 
particularly in those early writings er s-, as i say only a few of which had 
actually been published at the time Lukacs was writing by which Marx argued 
that human beings could create things which they didn't recognize as their 
creations and kind of bowed down to them as though they were what controlled 
human beings in other words human beings had a had a a tendency to create their 
own masters in various ways and by looking at er a number of these things as 
social conventions rather than as ruling forces you could then take a step 
towards er overcoming this alienation and controlling them there were a number 
of important er er examples of this let's take er a very philosophical example 
a lo-, er Marx's view on this arose from some theological interpretations by 
Feuerbach whom i mentioned earlier about the idea of God Feuerbach argued that 
it wasn't God that created man it was man that created God because God was a 
human conception and a human construction so to speak and having created this 
er construction human beings then took it as a literal reality and began to 
obey er this er God which they themselves had created it seems a strange sort 
of theology i suppose to most of you but it has been quite influential amongst 
religious thinkers as well because it does point to the fact that knowledge of 
God as we or conceptions of God as we understand them are human creations 
there's no two ways about that er although that doesn't necessarily follow that 
God is a human creation in this sense but certainly the conceptions of God are 
and secondarily in more social terms er one could point to phenomena like er we 
have in foremost in our mind i suppose the market don't buck the market why not 
buck the market we made it it's our market it's supposed 
to be there to do what we want that is what er er Lukacs would argue these are 
human creations there's nothing s-, nothing sacred about the market the market 
is a human convention money is a human convention all these things are created 
by people so why do we bow down and worship them as though they were ruling 
over us er so many Marxists began to argue that the first step towards 
revolutionary action was to un-, with this level of understanding this level of 
combating of what appeared to be the fundamental rules of society around us and 
a special form of alienation was this one er which er w-, this one usually 
referred to as reification which is er defined roughly speaking er as 
transforming human properties into properties of man-made things er this of 
course has opened up a lot of discourse about the nature of modern consumer 
society and advertising and things like that when you buy a commodity these 
days it's often associated with things which are way beyond that particular 
commodity er you're buying fun you're buying happiness you're buying goodness 
knows what if you buy the right product if you can associate thirst with a can 
of Coca-cola you're winning aren't you er persuade people that they don't want 
a drink they want a Coke er you are moving towards er towards controlling or or 
or developing your own commercial interests over people and in a mass scale 
this idea that you can actually er er you you can actually influence people by 
er turning these human properties into commodities is o-, is referred to also 
as commodity fetishism i suppose we live in an age of commodity fetishism er as 
you're only too well aware i'm sure designer this designer that label this 
label that the right thing here the right thing there why are you buying those 
things er to be seen to be you to be to be with to to to to be buying the right 
things whatever it happens to be this is a form of reification it's not because 
you want them or y-, because you need them or because there's any particular er 
necessity to have a a pair of Calvin 
Klein underpants or whatever it happens to be er but you made but you still go 
out and people still go out and buy them er and er this is er what Lukacs would 
think of as reification now associated with that also moving into the cultural 
area is another one of those that group of thinkers er Antonio Gramsci er and 
Gramsci er developed a number of ideas but he's most well known for the concept 
of hegemony Gramsci spent most of his life in er or a large part of his life in 
Mussolini's prison system er and he had a great deal of time to reflect on 
these issues and perhaps not the greatest access to information but he argued 
that er the issue of consciousness was crucial because er the socie-, the 
crucial element in society or a crucial element in society which Marx had not 
really er allowed for in this particular way was the cultural domination of a 
particular class the ideas and beliefs which are shared by a wide proportion of 
a society the assumptions of that particular society the web of beliefs as it 
says here the institutional and social relations of a given society and through 
this through establishing a certain set of beliefs let's take the one one of 
those that i mentioned before if everybody believes in the market the people in 
whose interest the market operates of course er have succeeded in establishing 
that particular set of er concepts and beliefs in society and if people accept 
it that's fine for them maybe not quite so fine for the people who er do not er 
benefit so er thoroughly from the market and er this intellectual hegemony this 
cultural hegemony was the work of intellectuals now er for Gramsci everybody is 
in part an intellectual intellectuals are not entirely a separate class every 
form of labour has a certain intellectual content to it according to him er 
it's a question of the proportionality but he divided intellectuals into two 
classes organic intellectuals and traditional intellectuals roughly speaking i 
suppose in as far as he was 
concerned goodies and baddies traditional intellectuals those who established 
the hegemonic ideas of the time and organic intellectuals people who were 
associated with particular groups and classes in society and e-, and enunciated 
and and developed the ideas characteristic of those particular classes so 
different classes would have their own organic intellectuals er the working 
class would have its intellectuals the middle class would have its 
intellectuals the aristocracy would have their intellectuals intellectuals were 
part of every other class and int-, intellectualism was a part of almost every 
human being's er er part of every human being's er outlook on life although he 
obviously hadn't seen Do You Want to be a Millionaire [laughter] er er but the 
sphere in which this e-, evolves and which this battle takes place is another 
key concept which is talked about a great deal civil society because er one of 
the long term phenomena since the Middle Ages was the growth of er o-, of 
society and of important er changes and important forces in society outside the 
state and civil society was the area in which intellectuals battled out their 
different conceptions and in fact would conduct a kind of intellectual class 
struggle through the media the press television er and all the rest of it and 
and that er this was an area of political activity major political activity 
moving away from the kind of traditional Marxist emphasis on workers' movements 
trade unions er strikes and that kind of thing which were still important but 
for Gramsci the the additional element which was required was to move into a ch-
, challenge the ruling hegemonic ideas of a given er period and a given 
generation now er what has all this got to do with er historiography a lot of 
these ideas had important implications and i think i've got er two or three er 
two or three er er concepts here i think we've got time to do this er what is 
how how is are these ideas beginning to affect how history is understood er 
first of all it i-, it's implicit that er according to a number of these ideas 
and i s-, er and i suppose both the consciousness ideas to some extent but even 
more the vulgar Marxist ideas the idea i mean most Marxists would argue that 
history was structural that the role of individual er men and women was not 
crucial in history er human beings would be the object of history not its 
subject the whole point of revolution was to change this relationship to turn 
them into the subjective history so they controlled their own history but er 
historical explanation moves away from the idea of great individuals and moves 
more towards the idea of groups of classes of structural problems er and so on 
and so forth secondarily i suppose er from the mid-nineteenth century we tend 
to talk these days about historical change rather than about historical 
progress er historical progress is something which er people are much more 
sceptical about today and we use the much more neutral word change to describe 
how 
the different conflicting forces we're talking about er impact on each other 
and create er a new situation it's also er and i've mentioned this already er 
has moved towards er history becoming more holistic so the history is not 
divided up into separate domains er it becomes er the object of the historian 
is to try to give much broader explanations touching on all aspects of of life 
er the the traditional fields in British historiography break up after the 
First World War er i've given a few examples down there and in the words of 
Gareth Stedman Jones before this happened no attempt was made to fuse this 
aggregate of specialist routines into a meaningful historical totality so er 
that is partly er the way in which er which historiography er began to evolve 
under the pressure of these kind of ideas which have come from other quarters 
as well but this was a major challenging area er going beyond that er i haven't 
talked in any great detail about the subject of dialectics because er it's a 
complex issue in itself but er having said that progress has given way to 
historical change er Marxist historians in particular tend to put stress on 
dialectical iss-, on on on diale-, the dialectical nature of historical 
struggles I-E that there are always conflicting forces that force A conflicts 
with B and very often this produces a synthesis of both those forces C which is 
different from either A or B and history moves co-, constantly dialectically 
because C then gives rise to its opposing idea D which produces E and h-, and 
this leads to an interpretation of history which is based on the constancy of 
change that there is no stability in history er nothing stays the same er that 
change is the normal condition of life rather than stability er we would 
probably not have a big problem er understanding that but conservatism with a 
small C is based on the opposite point of view that stability is normal and 
change is abnormal er and that er this er dialectical view of history 
shows that change is the fundamental bedrock of history er rather than er any 
form of stability or stasis secondly er the particularly the the Western 
Marxists raised as i've said the problem of consciousness er and added to the 
more positivist structuralist interpretations the whole issue of it being far 
too crude to simply say that complex er cultural phenomena like law and 
religion can simply be crudely related to the economic base of a given society 
these are much more complex and they need much more detailed examination they 
need to be looked at much more carefully and much more closely er you can't 
simply say Jane Austen is a f-, is a mouthpiece of the British upper classes 
that sort of thing although many er crude Marxist literary historians have 
attempted to do things like that er Lenin himself said that Tolstoy was just er 
largely a mouthpiece of the Russian landowning gentry which seems the most 
inadequate description of Tolstoy imaginable to anybody who's read him thirdly 
er these 
people drew attention to a whole new areas of historical subject matter 
obviously implicit in what i've been saying the development of capitalism 
itself er Marx analysed the capitalism of his day er the analysis of 
contemporary society and its evolution over the previous decades and centuries 
was absolutely crucial to this level of historical understanding er 
industrialization came into the picture er the er agitations of the oppressed 
classes er the ideas of peasants workers peasants and workers were almost 
entirely absent from historiography except as occasional intruders in peasant 
revolts or er er un-, er untidy uprisings of various kinds in the past there 
was very little interest in these groupings er and there was very little 
interest in in in er in revolutions it was thought rather crudely that it 
wasn't going to be possible to write the history of ordinary people because 
they didn't leave any traces behind but essentially this is the kind of 
argument which has been levelled 
at any er at many of the new phases of er historical interpretation it's not my 
job to bring this up to date but i can remember when gender history began to 
evolve er conservative historians again with a small C argued well there can't 
be any gender history we can't write the history of women because there can't 
be any evidence for it because if there had been we would have done it this 
idea that history is evidentially based and emerges er full blown out of the 
archives er in fact of course once people started asking questions about the 
history of women they went and found there was a whole new way of looking at e-,
at at at at archives which already existed or material which already existed 
and whole swathes of material which had never been looked at the same had been 
done for peasants the same had been done for workers classes who had been er in 
the phrase hidden from history er it's a ques-, and and this points to the to 
the to to the er er this points to the er fact that historians no longer saw 
themselves as 
the subjects of historical enquiry er as or as outside it it led to the whole 
question of the role of the historian themself er i-, if in the nineteenth 
century traditional idea the historian was above history er and simply related 
what had happened er these ideas led to historians becoming part of the hi-, of 
the social process historians themselves are organic or traditional 
intellectuals they are part of the intellectual struggle they are part of 
hegemony if conservative or dominant ideas suggest that er women should not be 
emancipated historians over the past hadn't even noticed that they were 
unemancipated and then suddenly when the r-, issue of women's emancipation 
arises historians begin to turn towards it as a new question a new hish-, issue 
similarly in the nineteenth century national historians turn towards the 
history of their own nationalities historians in other words increasingly 
become part of the intellectual struggle er and see themselves as part of the 
intellectual struggle and in fact come to the conclusion that they cannot 
separate themselves from the society in which they exist this has led to er and 
again it's a territory that i don't want to jump into at this particular moment 
the sort of post-modernist extremes of this that er you go to so far that the 
histor-, that history at the end of the day doesn't tell you anything about the 
past because it's a construction of the historian er herself or himself er and 
er while most Marxist historians wouldn't go as far as that the the objectivity 
of history was undermined by this and the subjectivity of history was stressed 
that doesn't mean to s-, that doesn't mean to say one can necessarily conclude 
that one will need that that w-, one can go as far er as the post-modernists in 
saying that there's no such thing as history or we cannot know anything worth 
knowing about the past most historians would tend to disagree with that so if 
just to summarize at the end er if we look at er a number of points 
made by the Italian historian Momigliano quoted by Hobsbawm er arguing what had 
happened to history in the hundred years after Ranke er he stressed in 
particular two or three of the points that we've been looking at here a decline 
in political and religious history er national histories begin to look old-
fashioned according to this er and instead of national and religious history 
history of the state er there's a major turn towards social and economic 
history er and the twentieth century has seen of course massive development in 
the late twentieth century massive development of social and economic history 
er it's no longer easy to use ideas as an explanation of history although ideas 
as i've been stressing have a role in history the concept that everything in 
history arises from ideas which had been prevalent er in certain schools of 
nineteenth century historiography er is much more difficult to sustain these 
days that ideas themselves are seen as socially i don't know whether to 
say conditioned or determined perhaps the best word is to say socially shaped 
er they don't arise full-blown unobjectively er in people's heads they are 
themselves partly constructed socially er and ideas themselves are related to 
the society in which they evolve er and although we can then er move on from 
that and say that one can look at explanations in term of social forces it 
still doesn't necessarily solve that thorny issue of the precise relationship 
between er the explanation of historical events and the explanation of 
individual actions what is the relationship between these two this is something 
which constantly puzzles historians and constantly puzzles philosophers of 
history can we go totally structural and say individual actions mean nothing 
probably not because at certain stages individual actions can weigh very 
heavily if Stalin had not been Stalin there may not have been a terror if Lenin 
had not been Lenin there might not have been a Russian 
revolution if Napoleon had not been Napoleon er the French Revolution might 
have turned out differently individual actions individuals may un-, certain 
under certain conditions be very effective but we can't go to the other extreme 
and say history is nothing but the accumulation of the action of individuals or 
dominated by the action of individuals because those individuals work in 
contradictory and sometimes complementary ways and it's what they do it's a 
resultant of what they all do together which in a sense changes history rather 
than what they do as individuals it's the resultant of of of of the collective 
actions of individuals very often which er which leads to social pri-, er 
issues so it hasn't actually solved this problem and finally as i've already 
mentioned it had become very much more difficult to speak of progress or of the 
meaningful development of events in a certain direction what is poshly known as 
a teleological view of history the idea that things are always moving towards 
some sort of 
goal er usually for the better er progress in the liberal historiography in the 
mid-nineteenth century future socialist society and perhaps communism in the 
Marxist interpretation of history er Marxism is seen as a kind of teleological 
history i-, itself is a kind of teleological history because it does see 
society rising through different stages towards er some sort of ideal er 
utopian er future er and this er vision er is is one which is shares er i-, 
well not the same vision but the er notion of that kind of progress is 
something which Marx shared with er many of his contemporaries who were 
liberals and one which is much more sceptically er looked upon today okay i 
want to stop there and er you should have a copy of a few items of bibliography 
which has been circulated er to add to what you've already got because these 
are quite interesting articles focused specifically on the issues i've been 
talking about Marxist interpretation of history and er Marxist interpretation 
of society okay