Reading Capital: Part II Continued (Chapter 5: Marxism is not a Historicism)

Hegelianism relies on a notion of contemporaneity, as we have seen. Thus, the present forms a whole, and thinking is simply thinking the concept of the present. The past only appears as the past OF the present, as the development of the Idea which the present embodies. The present, which has become self-aware and self-critical, is Absolute Knowing, or the adequation of thinking to the Idea. Thus empirical history expresses the Idea, and is thus in a sense an image of philosophy.

Absolute historicism retains the expressivism of Hegel in inverted form. By abolishing Absolute Knowing, absolute historicism makes every present adequate only to itself—rather than an expression of a developing Idea, empirical history is itself the ground of knowing. Thus the Hegelian adequation between thinking and being is inverted but retained—philosophy (or science) is in a sense an image of empirical history.

The salient characteristic of historicism is contemporaneity, the possibility of an ‘essential section.’ This is a way of unifying the superstructure and the infrastructure; it doesn’t matter whether this takes the form of an economism or a voluntarism, the same problematic is at work (138-9). But the expressivism of a theory that cannot see past its own moment is a characteristic of ideology, not of science.