Historical materialism and the economics of Karl MarxCroce, Benedetto
Philosophy
Historical materialism and the economics of Karl Marx
Croce, Benedetto
Historical materialism; Marxian economics
And I will say yet more; in ethical matters, I have not yet succeeded
in freeing myself from the prison of the Kantian Critique, and do not
yet see the position taken up by Kant surpassed; on the contrary, I
see it strengthened by some of the most modern tendencies, and to me
the way in which Engels attacks Dühring with regard to the principles
of morality in his well-known book, does not in truth appear very
exhaustive.[70] Here again the procedure is repeated which we have
already criticised in connection with the discussions upon the general
concept of value. Where Dühring, owing to the exigencies of scientific
abstraction, takes for consideration the isolated individual and
explicitly states that he is dealing with an abstract illustration
(_Denkschema_), Engels remarks, wittily but erroneously--that the
isolated man is nothing but a new edition of the first Adam in the
Garden of Eden. It is true that in that criticism are contained many
well-directed blows; and it might even be called just, if it refers
only to ethical conceptions in the sense of assemblages of special
rules and moral judgments, relative to definite social situations,
which assemblages and constructions cannot claim absolute truth for
all times, and all places, precisely because they are always made for
particular times and particular places. But apart from these special
constructions, analysis offers us the essential and ruling principles
of morality, which give opportunity for questions which may, truly, be
differently answered, but which most certainly are not taken into
account by Marx and Engels. And, in truth, even if some may be able to
write on the _theory of knowledge according to_ _Marx_,[71] to write
on the principles of ethics according to Marx seems to me a somewhat
hopeless undertaking.
VI
CONCLUSION
_Recapitulation: 1. Justification of Marxian economics as
comparative sociological economics: 2. Historical
materialism simply a canon of historical interpretation:
3. Marxian social programme not a pure science: 4.
Marxism neither intrinsically moral nor antimoral._
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