I’ve been working on a multi-year project to closely read and comprehensively annotate significant writings in the history of philosophy up to the end of the 20th century. Being able to teach this material at a high level, and to critically evaluate and engage with contemporary critical theory, are the two attractors at which this project is aimed, so writings outside of the traditional western analytic canon of philosophy have been included (from Adorno to Zhuangzi).
However, in the last few months I’ve come to realize that what is missing from this attempt at a comprehensive engagement with the history of philosophy is a historical lens that can help situate these thinkers and their writings in their material, historical contexts. By reading these thinkers mostly chronologically, I’m at a vantage where I can see how many of these thinkers are in dialogue with their predecessors, but this alone is insufficient for understanding their intellectual production and thought, since it misses how such production might be the outgrowth of the particular material conditions permeating their existence. (I’m thinking here of Adam Smith theorizing about an already nascent capitalism; John Locke theorizing about liberalized monarchies after the English revolution of England, etc.)
So this set me in search of complementary material histories that I could pair with the various periods within my project. Materialist histories like Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century, E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, The Long 19th Century (Hobsbawm), and even this reddit post which sums up how the Holocaust can be effectively explained by a marxian approach; all of these clearly back-up Marx’s bold claim found in the title of this post, at least for the last five centuries.
However, I have yet to find anything quite as accomplished or detailed for the preceding millennia (something like “A People’s History of the World” would be a vulgar approximation; and Graeber and Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything seem to intentionally sidestep a marxist account of pre-history in favour of an anarchist flavour).
My question is – why? If historical materialism bears so much explanatory fruit, why isn’t there an accomplished comprehensive account of all hitherto existing society? Plate tectonics, for example, was a theory that gave us an entire history of the earth; evolution, an entire history of life; where is the marxian retrospective? Is it a problem of evidence? A limitation of the medium (i.e. history is too complex and particular to be distilled into one book or one series)? Where is the compendium for the immortal science?
Thank you for your response!
What I meant was that their analysis felt like it complicated traditionally marxist positions, eschewing the deterministic trajectory of history (not a bad thing) and being concerned more with the characteristics of individual freedom within early societies rather than more causal ‘class-like’ elements that constrain or enable that freedom. While their problematization of centralized hierarchical states does seem to echo the more utopian visions of a post-socialist, communist society, in our given time and in the context of problems of a global scale, it seems appropriate to be skeptical when these past observations start to turn into present prescriptions for adopting ‘flexible and creative’ forms of organization that have, in the last century, been ineffective at challenging power or ushering in meaningful and lasting alternatives. If you do have a chance to read it, though, I would recommend it.
icic
I haven’t read the book yet, but the tendency to turn the observations into prescriptions isn’t unique to Graeber & Wengrow so I get what you mean; for me personally I find such takes often sorta act like we won’t need decades to centuries of disciplined war-communism to fix the environmental catastrophe we’re in without a collapse of globalized society. I do wanna push back slightly on “flexible and creative” forms of organizations’ ineffectiveness however–from Afghanistan to China to Vietnam to Cuba to the Houthis today its been repeatedly shown that imperialists can be forced to admit defeat.
I do wanna point out that the traditional Marxist position you outline (deterministic trajectory of history) is, while sadly reflective of many traditional Marxists, not reflective of Marx’s own positions (which repeatedly and explicitly eschew a determinined/fixed/set trajectory for history); even at Marx’s most simplified (in the Manifesto) he’s explicit that the struggle can end in more than one way.
Some more books that may interest you:
James Scott Seeing Like a State. Really important to understand the critique of centralization that Graeber&Wengrow are (almost certainly) basing stuff on. I really love Scott’s book because he repeatedly and explicitly positions himself as pro-planning, even pro-central planning if its done with more input from local knowledges. Scott also puts particular emphasis when he’s criticizing socialists that “the capitalists do it to, but its more piecemeal and harder to track”. I’ve also seen Scott’s Against the Grain and The Art of Not Being Governed highly recommended, but haven’t gotten around to reading them myself yet.
Natan Levy’s The Dawn of Agriculture and the Earliest States in Genesis 1-11 looks at archaeological evidence in the Near East, the arguments from The Dawn of Everything, Seeing Like a State, and Against the Grain (among other works) and the first 11 chapters of the Bible. Its primary focus is on the formation and (in historical time) rapid rising and falling of early bronze age city-states. Levy takes class struggle and ecological issues as the basis of his investigation.
In general though, the broader histories tend to engage the least with economic stuff (especially broader histories of anything before like 1600). This is because the level of specific study needed to research the economics of e.g. the middle ages such broadness (all of europe! for a thousand years!) is hard.
For example, for this total history of the european middle ages 500-1500 AD you gotta learn latin+arabic+greek+hebrew and/or various local dialects, you gotta get funding to visit archives across Europe, you gotta read through the little surviving evidence of economic affairs, you gotta combine that with the political histories from the period, then you go to the next archive and its political histories say an entirely different thing and there’s no corroboration of the economic evidence from Site A, but there is mention of a trade with site C (and on it goes). And you might think “well, there’s a long time of historical scholarship to have read the archives and written the broad histories” (which is a valid question!) but unfortunately the archives are vast. And then once one’s gotten all the paper sources sorted out the archaeological reports come in saying: “actually the castle at site E that is mentioned in source D is like half of the size described and made of dirt, not marble. And also despite a god-caused famine in source C, there’s no indication of a decline in wheat pollen at this level of the soil, which indicates that harvest yields for wheat in site E were unchanged that year”. There’s lots already written that can be drawn on; but coverage of scholarship is uneven and there’s lots of cracks. And even if one decides to abandon primary sources to just read modern secondary sources, you’ve gotta learn basically all the european languages, plus japanese and mandarin, because the most up to date research on e.g. Romanian history is usually in e.g. Romanian.
So it’s a tough situation.