Concrete Historicism as a Research Paradigm

Abstract

It has long been widely accepted among Marxists that Marx’s theoretical legacy is essentially that embodied in Capital. Marx never got around to writing his theory of the state, which he had foreshadowed in 1844, let alone his own Logic, and his voluminous writings on political and historical subjects were never worked up into a systematic text like Capital. Although anticipated more than a century ago by Lenin, it has been mainly during the last 25 years that a body of literature has developed around the relationship between Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Logic, and this author (2016a, 2018) is among those who see this relationship as key to understanding Capital. However, it remains the case that for all the ink that has been expended examining the affinity between these two texts, hardly a word has been written which goes beyond describing this relationship towards applying what has been learnt to an analysis of the development of the world capitalist economy in the 180 years since Marx died, let alone to the analysis of social formations other than political economy. One exception to this is the work of this author (2016) devoted to the fundamental principles of political life, but the connection of the method used in this analysis to Capital and the Logic were not made explicit. It is the aim of this paper to justify the method which, following Evald Ilyenkov (1960), shall be called ‘concrete historicism’. The article is actually a draft for the ‘theoretical introduction’ to a collaborative work analysing the socio-political situation in a specific state.