Marx the Social Scientist

Few thinkers are read through a political lens as consistently as Karl Marx. The twentieth century made this almost unavoidable: regimes claiming Marxian lineage governed roughly a third of the world's population by mid-century, and the question 'what do you think of Marx' became, for much of that century, indistinguishable from the question 'what do you think of the Soviet Union, or China, or Cuba.' Sociology has had to work around this. The discipline reads Marx not to affirm or reject his political conclusions but because he bequeathed to the social sciences a specific kind of analytical tool, and that tool has become constitutive of how sociologists think about modern societies (Giddens 1971, pp. 1-4).

The tool, in compressed form, has three parts. First, mode-of-production analysis: the claim that a society's fundamental institutions — its family forms, its legal system, its political order, its dominant ideas — are patterned by how the society organizes the production of material life. Second, class as a structural relation to the means of production, rather than class as lifestyle or income bracket. Third, ideology as a social-systemic phenomenon, not merely a set of false beliefs held by individuals but a patterned distortion produced by the position from which one views social reality (Marx and Engels 1846/1970, pp. 64-68). These three moves, taken together, constitute the analytical core of historical materialism.

A brief biographical sketch is worth the space. Marx was born in Trier in 1818, in what was then Prussia, into an assimilated Jewish family whose father had converted to Protestantism to practice law. He studied at Bonn and then Berlin, where he entered the Hegelian philosophical milieu and fell in with the Young Hegelians who were applying Hegel's dialectical method to political and religious critique (McLellan 1973, pp. 23-45). His doctoral dissertation, on Democritus and Epicurus, was submitted to Jena in 1841. Denied an academic post because of his political associations, Marx turned to journalism, editing the Rheinische Zeitung until Prussian censors shut it down in 1843.

The 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, written in Paris during the first year of his exile, are the early anchor of his thought. Here Marx works through the Hegelian problem of alienation in a new register, shifting it from a philosophical-religious problematic (Feuerbach had argued that religion alienates humans from their own species-essence) to an economic one: wage labor under capitalism alienates workers from the product of their labor, from the labor process itself, from other workers, and from their species-being as creative agents (Marx 1844/1988, pp. 70-78). The manuscripts were not published in his lifetime; they appeared only in 1932 and significantly reshaped twentieth-century interpretation, providing what became known as the 'humanist' Marx of Western European intellectual culture (Ollman 1971, pp. 131-135).

Expelled from Paris in 1845, Marx moved to Brussels, then to Cologne, and finally, after the failed revolutions of 1848, to London. He spent the remaining thirty-four years of his life in English exile, much of it reading in the British Museum, largely supported by Friedrich Engels's income from the family cotton firm in Manchester. It is the London Marx — the author of the Grundrisse notebooks (written 1857-58, published posthumously), the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), and the first volume of Capital (1867) — who matters most for the sociology we now teach.

This topic takes Marx seriously as a social scientist. It presents the analytical framework, the specific claims about capitalism, the empirical record of those claims, and the honest limits of the approach. A thoughtful reader who is politically skeptical of the Marxian tradition should nevertheless finish this topic thinking that several analytical tools are worth keeping. That is the test against which the exposition is written.