by Mikkel Flohr


This think piece is part of a JHI Blog forum: “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History.”

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living (Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, 103).

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it (Marx, “On Feuerbach,” 5).

Though often dismissed as reductive, Marx’s historical materialism offers a powerful, underutilized methodological framework for the study of the history of ideas—one that treats ideas as socially embedded, historically conditioned, and politically effective. Far from denying their significance, Marx himself saw ideas as both shaped by and shaping dominant social relations, forming part of what we might call the political economy of ideas. This complements the field’s longstanding concern with historical contextualization while opening novel possibilities for interpretation and critique that incorporate methodological reflexivity and a political orientation towards the present.

Historical materialism started from Marx’s critique of Hegel, who had claimed to overcome the opposition between spirit and matter through the self-realization of spirit [Geist] in and as history (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit). But in his absolute idealism, matter remained subordinate to spirit. Marx’s materialist critique turned this configuration on its head, instead inscribing ideas within their social and material context, which became the “guiding principle” of historical materialism (Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 262).[1]

Where Hegel emphasized the primacy of ideas in shaping society, Marx emphasized how the ways in which people practically reproduce their lives shape their ideas, laws, politics, philosophy, and religion:

In the social production of their existence, human beings inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will […] The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of human beings that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. (Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 263)

The point here is simply—against Hegel—that ideas do not arise in isolation or shape society on their own; they arise within historically determinate social relations that govern how people reproduce their lives. Ideas reflect and form an effective part of these relations and their reproduction. This includes both the ruling class’s ideological production and the everyday use of real abstractions like exchange value and private property.

I emphasize terms like the “dominant social relations” and the “social relations of production and reproduction” because they are more precise than Marx’s occasional metaphor of the economic “base,” which has since often been taken to denote a fetishized notion of “the economy,” conceived as a self-contained sphere determining other seemingly passive domains, and, moreover, been closely associated with economism and determinism (see Wood, Democracy against Capitalism, 49-75). Marx’s inversion of Hegel’s absolute idealism was also a sublation of it that reinscribed and reinterpreted ideas within a new and more expansive social and material ontology, rather than simply producing an equally one-sided materialism in which ideas somehow merely reflect the economy (whatever that might mean). Terms like “dominant social relations” emphasize the multiplicity and multidirectionality of the relations that traverse society’s spheres, mediate human beings’ self-reproduction, and thereby come to shape most aspects of their lives—including ideas. As such, then, these relations constitute what we might consider the foundation of the political economy of ideas.

For instance, under capitalism, most people are separated from the means of reproducing their existence and are thus forced to compete to sell their capacity to labor. This takes place under widely diverging conditions that are shaped by political, social, cultural, and economic factors that differ around the globe. Wage-labor (or the lack thereof) alongside reproductive responsibilities will inevitably take up most people’s daily lives, fundamentally shaping their experience and perception of the world. Their preoccupation with reproducing their existence, combined with ruling class dominance over society-wide educational, cultural, and state institutions, entails that the ruling class frequently becomes the primary producer and disseminator of ideas, culture, etc. These products then often spontaneously reflect, legitimate, and reproduce the dominant social relations and the privileges that these relations confer upon this ruling class (Marx and Engels, German Ideology; see also Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 94-136; Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism). A version of this dynamic was in many ways even more pronounced in the many stratified social structures of precapitalist historical formations. So much is evident from the canon of the history of political thought, which disproportionately reflects the interests and intellectual concerns of ruling classes throughout history.

Still, though, this doesn’t mean that ideas are necessarily limited to reproducing or glorifying the dominant social relations, but that they are always embedded in such relations and will easily come to reproduce or naturalize them unless we reflect on them and their inherent contradictions. Marx’s own works were, for instance, both critical analyses of contemporary social relations and revolutionary calls to overthrow them. Though he insisted on the primacy of practice in this regard, he hardly thought ideas were irrelevant, as he famously formulated it in 1844:

The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. (Marx, “Introduction,” 182)

Marx saw ideas as simultaneously shaped by and an effective part of specific historically mediated social and material relations and their contradictions. His works frequently criticized central theoretical representations of dominant social relations and institutions to expose the contradictions in the social and material world that these representations indirectly reflected, e.g., his critique of the modern state through Hegel’s account of it in the Philosophy of Right (see “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law”), or of capital through its depiction in the works of the classical political economists (see Capital). As such Marx’s historical materialism is uniquely relevant to the study of the history of ideas, yet it has only had limited influence. A key reason is Quentin Skinner’s influential but caricatured critique of Marxism in “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” which became a sort of manifesto for the “Cambridge School” in the history of political thought and exerted a massive influence on the discipline.

In this 1969 article, Skinner identified the meaning of historical texts with the author’s intentions in writing them. He famously proposed that these texts should be seen as speech acts intervening in a specific historical setting. To make their ideas understandable, authors had to draw on the dominant assumptions, conventions, and norms of their time (even if they wanted to challenge them), which Skinner identified with a period’s linguistic context. So, to understand what an author intended to do with a text, one had to reconstruct this context through studying contemporary works.

Skinner framed his approach via a critique of two others: On the one hand, he criticized what could be called “philosophical” approaches to historical texts, which treated them as answers to timeless questions, ignoring their historical context. On the other hand, he criticized more “sociological” approaches, including Marxism, which he accused of reducing political ideas to effects of underlying social forces—thus neglecting the author’s intentions and the political meaning of these ideas. Skinner misconstrues Marx’s materialist reconfiguration of the relationship between ideas and social forces, though he is correct to note that a Marxist approach to the history of ideas does not reduce the significance of a text to the author’s intention but rather insists on the text’s wider political significance.

Ellen Meiksins Wood later challenged Skinner’s approach, inspired by Marx, and developed it into what she called the “social history of political theory.” Wood criticized Skinner for reducing historical context to other texts: “Historical contexts, for [Skinner], are languages, utterances, words. It appears that only some words are worth listening to; but, more fundamentally, the social and material conditions in which words are deployed are deliberately excluded” (Wood, “Why it Matters,” 5). She followed Skinner’s general approach but argued that it was necessary to expand the historical context to include and even focus on the extra-textual:

To understand what political theorists are saying requires knowing what questions they are trying to answer, and those questions confront them not simply as philosophical abstractions, but as specific problems posed by specific historical conditions, in the context of specific practical activities, social relations, pressing issues, grievances and conflict. (Wood, Citizens to Lords, 3–4)

The social history of political theory aimed to reinterpret historical texts in relation to their social context, focusing on who owns or controls the means of production, central political structures, class and other social identities and hierarchies, and especially their contradictions and conflicts— as well as the linguistic context. Together, these central social relations shape how people reproduce their existence in a given society and will thereby also come to shape their ideas, even if these ideas are not immediately reducible to any of these relations (see also N. Wood, “Social History of Political Theory,” 348).

These assertions formed the basis of Wood’s magisterial reinterpretation of Western political thought from ancient Greece to the Enlightenment (Citizens to Lords; Liberty and Property). This project never reached its theoretical starting point in Marx, perhaps unsurprisingly given its already expansive scope. However, this omission can also be conceived otherwise: Marx must remain a blind spot because the social history of political theory limits the relevance of historical texts to their original context. Wood warns that “if we abstract a political theory from its historical context, we in effect assimilate it to our own,” which she perceives as untenable (Citizens to Lords, 16)—just like Skinner, who insisted that “we must learn to do our own thinking for ourselves” (“Meaning and Understanding,” 52). Interpreting Marx on these terms would undermine the foundation of Wood’s Marxist approach, and so remains unwritten. This methodological imperative is strange for a self-declared Marxist and is not native to this tradition but inherited from Skinner’s approach. The implicit contradictions of her historicism could therefore also potentially be resolved through a return to Marx’s historical materialism.

History—intellectual or otherwise—cannot avoid some degree of presentism. As soon as we try to interpret and explain historical texts in the present, we are already assimilating them to our context. Any interpretation of historical texts involves translating them across temporal and conceptual divides and thereby transferring and transforming them so that they can be understood within contemporary frameworks of meaning. Moreover, Skinner and Wood both insist that historical texts must be conceived as interventions in their own historical context, but they do not extend this principle to their own texts and reflect on them as interventions in the present in a similar manner. However, they should. The point is to be transparent and reflexive about what we are doing when we engage with the history of ideas, how, and to what end.

Historical materialism offers valuable resources for such an endeavor insofar as it was explicitly conceived to combine careful analyses of historically determinate social relations with explicit efforts to change them. This did not mean that these political efforts undermined the integrity of the analysis; on the contrary, the fact that the analysis was meant to support these political efforts entailed that it was carried out with the utmost rigor. It should be possible to develop a historical materialist approach to the history of ideas that is not only capable of engaging with past political thought but also acknowledges its own positionality and orientates itself in relation to its potential contemporary political significance. This is not meant to encourage autobiographical excesses or political declarations, but to promote methodological consistency through self-reflexivity about the social and historical position from which we interpret the past, and the political orientation and implications of how and why we do so.

Drawing on the extensive theoretical resources of Marx’s work, a historical materialist approach to the history of ideas could further combine Wood’s “social history of political theory” with a contextual understanding of ideas as both a reflection and an effective part of a given society’s central social and material relations (and their inherent contradictions).

Such an approach would enable at least two different interpretive strategies. First, a form of immanent critique: a close engagement with a historical text on its own terms and in relation to the context that it describes, especially the contradictions that it might register, distort, or help to reproduce. Rather than merely historicizing ideas, this approach seeks to draw out their internal tensions and trace them back to the contradictions of dominant social relations at the time, and thereby develop better accounts of the conditions and institutions that these texts describe. Second, a historical materialist approach could also take the form of a selective and strategic retrieval of historical concepts or insights that may be considered useful for analyzing or transforming present social conditions—such as this very engagement with Marx’s thought for the purposes of developing a political economy of ideas that does not treat history as a closed archive, but as a resource for rethinking and engaging both our past and present.

This essay draws on my recent article “Towards a Materialist History of Ideas: History, Contradictions, and Possibilities“ published in Rethinking Marxism.

[1] The majority of the works by Marx and Engels cited here can also be consulted online here.

Mikkel Flohr is a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Department of Social Science and Business, Roskilde University, working at the intersection of political theory, the history of political thought, and political sociology. He has worked on the history and theories of sovereignty, the people, and democracy. He has also published extensively on Marx and Marxism and is currently working on a book on Marx’s critique of political theology and editing a special issue of Political Theology on “Marx and Revolution.”

Edited by Alec Israeli.

Featured image: Proun (Study for Proun S.K.) by El Lissitzky, via Wikimedia Commons.