The Marxian Materialist Interpretation of History and Comparative Sociology

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The Marxian Materialist Interpretation of History and Comparative Sociology

Andrey V. RezaevSt. Petersburg State University, Russia

[email protected]

Dmitrii M. ZhikharevichSt. Petersburg State University, Russia

Pavel P. LisitsynSt. Petersburg State University, Russia

Abstract

The paper argues that a materialistic understanding of history as Marx’s sociological research program has effectively been implemented in the comparative analysis of bourgeois societies. Both qualitative/case-oriented and quantitative/variable-oriented strategies of comparison were employed by Marx in his scholarship. The authors see the crucial dimension of the classical status of Marx in his engagement with his-torical comparisons – an analytical tendency he shares with Weber and, to some extent, Durkheim. A short historical exposition tracing the early reception of Marx in sociology continues with the most important contemporary criticisms of Marx’s comparative-historical analysis, focusing on the issues of Asiatic mode of production, the nature of European feudalism and the problem of capitalist rationality.

Keywords

materialistic understanding of history – Marx – comparative historical analysis – Asiatic mode of production – Grundrisse

From the time sociology crystallized as a distinct discipline, it has been committed to the comparative study of societies, cultures, and their

453The Marxian Materialist Interpretation of History

comparative sociology 14 (2015) 452–477

institutions. So much was this the case that the founding fathers of today’s sociology – Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and, in their own ways, Spencer and Pareto employed comparative analysis as the self-evident way of going about the business of sociological inquiry (Merton 1967: v).

This article is written with the hope of clarifying some of the fundamen-tal problems of the comparative approaches and strategies to the study of society developed in the writings of Karl Marx, one of the most outstanding and controversial thinkers of the nineteenth century. Although we will refer to works written with Friedrich Engels, we are primarily interested in the classical approaches developed by Marx himself.1 This particular subject – what might be called Marx and comparative sociology – has hardly been dealt with in the rich literature on Marxism, and certainly not in the systematic and sustained manner deserved by such an ambitious task. Important con-tributions of Oesterreicher (1978) and Kelly (2003) highlight the difference between Marx’s comparative sociology and philosophical theories of history, and point out some relatively neglected aspects of Marxian intellectual gene-alogy (German history of law, Scottish Enlightenment); however, neither puts Marx in the context of comparative sociology and its classical canon. Thus, the overall objective of this paper is very humble: to lay out an introductory frame-work for the studying of parallels and links between Marxian understanding of social reality and comparative sociology.

Our argument has two interrelated parts which stress Marx’s contribution to comparative social research in somewhat different but related ways. First, we argue that while working within another tradition of social analytics and being himself at best suspicious about sociology, Marx effectively has launched a full-fledged sociological research program. Called by Marx himself materialis-tic understanding of history, and broadly known (thanks to Engels) as histori-cal materialism, it has arguably been the most solid foundation for a scientific study of the social reality before the establishment of sociology’s classical canon (as represented by Weber and Durkheim). We would like to stress that, paradoxically, although he never considered himself as a sociologist, Marx was the classical thinker of this discipline. We see the crucial dimension of the

1 It is no small task to intellectually separate Marx from Engels, his collaborator over four decades, nor has this goal been elaborated seriously in the literature. It is sometimes said that Engels did not understand Marx and made more harm than good to the classical Marxism. There is no room here to enter into detailed discussion of this point. For now, it may suffice to point out that these two thinkers worked together and there was no other person in the world who was more familiar with Marx’s ideas than was Engels.

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classical status of Marx in his engagement with historical comparisons – an analytical tendency he shares with Weber and, to some extent, Durkheim.

Second, Marx’s sociology has never been an exercise in pure theory. For who could have been more aware of the limitations of the speculative method and the futility of wishful thinking before the certain circumstances of the material life than the author of materialistic understanding of history? Contrary to the way it is often presented, Marx’s sociology is both theoretically and empirically grounded, and the latter is best visible through the application of comparative historical analysis toward feudal and bourgeois societies. Moreover, as much of existing Marxist scholarship in the field suggests, comparative (and histori-cal) research could save Marx from some of the recurrent accusations for the alleged lack of flexibility and historical contingency in his writings.

While addressing such a complex subject as comparative analysis of bour-geois societies, we deliberately leave aside the commentators’ interpretations of Marxism as a political doctrine. We will begin with a short historical exposi-tion tracing the early reception of Marx in sociology and his incorporation into the canon of professional sociological thinkers. Then we briefly discuss Marx’s significance for sociological thinking in general, and outline a sketch of his social theory – materialist interpretation of history – with the focus on its com-parative perspectives and implications. Finally, we trace the most important criticisms of Marx’s comparative-historical analysis, focusing on the issues of Asiatic mode of production, the nature of European feudalism and the prob-lem of capitalist rationality. In conclusion we make some suggestions on the necessity and importance for those who are involved into comparative socio-logical analysis to look back and to read K. Marx’s oeuvres.

Historical Exposition

The sociological views of Karl Marx, comparatively unknown and ignored in his own lifetime, have had a significant influence upon sociological produc-tion right after his death (starting in the end of the nineteenth century) up to nowadays. Let us briefly trace the history of sociology’s early engagements with Marx’s thought.

In 1893 René Worms organized the first world congress of sociologists that led to the establishment of the International Institute of Sociology (IIS), the first and oldest continuous international professional sociological association in existence. The event hosted a number of prominent scholars, including F. Tönnies, E. Ferri, M. Kovalevskii, among others, who submitted papers dis-cussing the role of Marx’s theory on the development of sociological studies



(Worms 1895).2 The Second IIS Congress in 1894 was devoted entirely to a dis-cussion of ‘historical materialism’ (Worms 1901). In 1887, F. Tönnies published Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, the formative book for a generation of sociolo-gists, underlying his indebtedness to Marx in the preface (Tönnies [1921] 1974). Tönnies regarded Marx as the “most remarkable and most profound social phi-losopher” who tried to express almost the same ideas he himself was trying to formulate in the new concepts (Tönnies 1955). Another German patriarch of sociology, Max Weber, also had a long but episodic history of encounters with Marx and Marxism. Weber, as T. Bottomore mentioned, had “two prin-ciple objections to the Marxist theory: first, that the ‘economic interpretation of history’ . . . could only be a one-sided interpretation from a particular value standpoint, not a universally valid science; and second, that the Marxist idea of socialism, derived from this theory of history, was erroneous” (Bottomore 1983, p. 105). In France Marxian ideas became tremendously popular at the end of the nineteenth century. “Durkheim himself wrote two reviews, one on Labriola’s Essays on the Materialist Conception of History, in which he rec-ognized some merit in Marx’s attempt to construct a social science, finding ‘extremely fruitful this idea that social life should be explained, not by the notions of those who participate in it, but by more profound causes . . . to be sought mainly in the manner according to which the associated individu-als are grouped” (Bottomore 1983: 105). Besides, Marxian views had enormous influence in Russia. The first Russian translation of the first volume of Das Kapital was published in 1872. By the end of the nineteenth century a Russian school of Marxism was organized in Europe. The leading figure of the Russian Marxists was Georgy V. Plekhanov, and his principal theoretical work, The Development of Monist View of History (1947 [1895]) has become one of the theoretical foundations for understanding in the USSR ‘historical materialism’ as a Marxist philosophy of history and general sociology.

Thus, by the end of the XIX century the outlines and contours of Marxist soci-ology have been already drawn in the basic ways. Obvious questions should be raised at this point, however. What does Marxist sociology exactly mean? What do sociologists mean when they refer to “Marxist sociology”? And what are the relationships between Marx’s own sociological ideas, the discipline of sociol-ogy, and the interdisciplinary body of thought known as Marxism? We do not intend to trace the interactions between Marxism and sociology in depth, but rather would like to make a very simple point: in order to understand Marx’s

2 In 1921 Tönnies also published a book where he in great detail observed a role of Marx himself and Marx’s theories for the development of economic and sociological studies (Tönnies 1974 [1921]).



impact on sociology, and for that matter, comparative sociology, one should also have a clear vision of the Marx’s relations to Marxism. It is worth doing just because Karl Marx has never called himself a sociologist, and explicitly rejected to be ‘labeled’ as a Marxist.3

In our brief historical exposition of sociology’s early encounters with Marx, we deliberately focus on the formative period for sociology itself. During these years sociology became firmly institutionalized in Europe, major journals and professional associations were established, and the classical works have been written. About the same time Marxism went somewhat different yet parallel trajectory.4 Both intellectual traditions – sociology and Marxism – interacted but remained separate from the very beginning, as well as in the later period, when in the 1930s Talcott Parsons developed his great synthesis, almost a decade after the contours of Western Marxism also began to crystallize in the works of Lukács and the early Frankfurt School. The publication of the newly discovered Paris Manuscripts in 1927, The German Ideology in 1932, and the Grundrisse in 1939,5 as well as increasing dissatisfaction of a new generation of European thinkers with the “positivist” and “economic determinist” version of Marxism propagated by the theorists of the Second International,6 argu-ably have launched the struggle for the “authentic” Marx which subsequently dominated much of the Marxist scholarship.7 Parsons published The Structure of Social Action, to which is commonly attributed the merit of codification of the disciplinary canon of sociology, in 1937, the time when, as Immanuel

3 Engels, Letter to Conrad Schmidt, 5 August 1980: “The materialist conception of history has a lot of them nowadays, to whom it serves as an excuse for not studying history. Just as Marx used to say, commenting on the French ‘Marxists’ of the late [18]70s: “All I know is that I am not a Marxist” (Engels 1972: 297–303; see also Hook 1933: ix).

4 Although Marx and Engels belonged to an earlier generation of European thinkers than Weber and Durkheim, as Perry Anderson notes (Anderson 1979 [1976]), most of the works comprising the “classical tradition” of Marxism were written before the World War I. There have also been many productive exchanges between the emerging discipline of sociology, and interdisciplinary Marxist scholarship, both in Europe and notably in Russia, during the first decades of the twentieth century. For attempts at comprehensive mapping of contem-porary currents Bidet and Kouvelakis (2008). Brill: Leiden and Boston, 2008.

5 In Russian translation. Small extracts were published in 1903 in Berlin in the Neue Zeit, where in 1952–193 the entire collection of manuscripts was published. An Italian translation appeared in 1956, and English followed in 1973 (Hobsbawm 1965: 9).

6 “Automatic Marxism” in the apt formulation of Russell Jacoby (1981).7 Althusser’s adoption of Bachelard’s concept of “epistemological rupture” to defend his thesis

on discontinuity between the “young” and “mature” Marx is definitely one of the most impor-tant milestones (Althusser 2005).



Wallerstein notes, the “classicism” of Weber’s and Durkheim’s contributions were hardly obvious and Marx “was scarcely even mentioned in most respect-able academic circles”. Later he was “added to the list, despite Parsons’s best efforts to keep him off it”, and the canon as we know it became stabilized after 1945 (Wallerstein 1998). Since then things have turned to be much more compli-cated, because of the incorporation of Marx in sociological canon, but no less so because of the Marxists’ perennial drive to unpack the “true Marx”.8 None of his writings (in general very detailed and intellectually challenging) has a finished and definite formulation of a theory. Moreover, it’s not difficult to find in the same book by Marx simply conflicting interpretations. Nevertheless, we would argue that it is not inherently difficult to understand K. Marx, specifi-cally in comparison with other sociologists of historical importance. The key thing is, as always, to read Marx himself and to take into account the fact that most of Marx’s writings were polemics written against competing doctrines.

Thus, despite of the tremendously rich and profound literature on Marx since the end of XIX century right up to the present day, as soon as a contem-porary sociologist has an objective to study Marxian input to sociological sci-ences, s/he discovers that there exists no canonical understanding of what Karl Marx has done to the development of sociological understanding of society.

What is Marxist Sociology?

On the one hand, this question appears superfluous. Indeed some of the core ideas behind the very project of sociology have been first comprehensively laid out in the materialist understanding of history. Sidney Hook says: “Marx’s con-tributions, in whatever modified form, have entered the consciousness of our time, affected the idiom of our language and understanding, and left an inerad-icable imprint on the world of scholarship” (Hook 1980: 271). As early as the late 1960s, a century after Das Kapital was published, Mandič argued that there is no Marxist or non-Marxist sociology, but one sociological science with a diver-sity of influences and competing schools (Mandič 1969: 55). Thus, one could say that sociology, insofar as it follows the core principles of materialist under-standing of history, simply cannot be non-Marxist in any meaningful sense. Ironically, these principles were targeted precisely by the critics of Marxian account of social reality for their alleged rigidity. A brilliant answer to such

8 To be sure, today this important work is hardly finished, not only because of the intellectual and political stakes associated with Marx in philosophy and social sciences, but also because new archival discoveries are still possible. See: (Carver 2010).



accusations was given by Pierre Bourdieu who was also frequently charged for his overly deterministic views of human agency. Himself being a critical reader of Marx, Bourdieu says: “Like every science, sociology accepts the principle of determinism understood as a form of the principle of sufficient reason. . . . The degree to which the social world seems to us to be determined depends on the knowledge we have of it. On the other hand, the degree to which the world is really determined is not a question of opinion; as a sociologist, it’s not for me to be ‘for determinism’ or ‘for freedom’, but to discover necessity, if it exists, in the places where it is” (Bourdieu 1994: 24–25). While standing on a different epistemological position from Marx’s, nevertheless Bourdieu reveals much of a similarity with his views that, as we have already noted, are now firmly landed at the very core of sociological reasoning.

Another way to approach the Marxian contribution to sociology is offered by Immanuel Wallerstein who simply says that “we are all Marxists” (Wallerstein 1998). While Bourdieu referred to the epistemological foundations of sociol-ogy (valid, in his formulation, for any other science), Wallerstein addresses the level of meta-theory. According to Wallerstein, Marx’s input can be dis-tilled in what he calls the Axiom No. 2 of the “culture of sociology”: “All social groups contain subgroups that are ranked in a hierarchy, and are in conflict with each other. Is this a dilution of Marxism? Of course it is, indeed a serious dilution. Is this however a premise of most sociologists? Of course it is as well” (Wallerstein 1998). Similarly, Randall Collins sees Marx as one of the authors, along with Weber, of the so-called “conflict metaphor” lying at the core of the corresponding sociological tradition. The intuition of conflict and the themes of struggle and critique are definitely central to Marx’s thought. It is, however, not enough to say just that, and admit Marx’s contribution to philosophical or meta-theoretical bases of the study of social reality, because such an account fails to acknowledge Marx’s distinctive contribution to sociology as an empiri-cal science.

The Materialist Interpretation of History

The most fundamental scientific discovery belonging to K. Marx is the materi-alist interpretation of history.9

9 We do not engage in the prolific debates about critical theory, dialectic, class theory and other Marxist themes across the social sciences. There is an abundance of excellent works reviewing the discussions of different aspects of Marx’s thought (e.g., Bidet and Kouvelakis 2008; Wright 1994; Steedman 1993; Ollman 2003).



“Historical materialism”, notes David McLellan, “was a term never used by Marx, who would have felt even less happy with the later expression ‘dialec-tical materialism’. He preferred to talk of ‘the materialist conception of his-tory’ or ‘the materialist conditions of production’, i.e. it was viewed more as a method [italics added] or approach than as a fully developed system of ideas” (McLellan 1995: 123).

The ontological foundations of materialist conception of history have been formulated already in the early work by Marx and Engels. That was in The German Ideology, a book that was not published during their lifetime and writ-ten, as they said, “for the sake of self-clarification” and “coming to terms” with German Idealism.

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. . . . The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men . . . [who] first begin to distinguish themselves from ani-mals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence . . . By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life (Marx and Engels 1968: 3).10

Reiterating this early argument, in the first manuscript of the Grundrisse Marx states: “The object before us, to begin with, material production. Individuals producing in Society – hence socially determined individual production – is, of course, the point of departure” (Marx 1973: 25). This production has never been reduced to the narrow meanings of economic production or application of certain techniques. It presupposes “the intercourse [Verkehr] of individuals with one another. The form of this intercourse is again determined by produc-tion” (Marx and Engels 1968: 3). In its most widely known, and perhaps also most developed, formulation this thesis appears in the 1859 Preface, where the

10 In fact, Marx’s later engagements with economic theory are also based on this early account. This was made abundantly clear in Ernest Mandel’s concise summary of Marxian economic theory: “Underlying Marxist economic theory is an anthropological paradigm: man is a social animal; the human species can only survive through social labour. In each specific society, there is a specific way of organizing social labour (specific relations of production) and a specific way of appropriating surplus labor (labour over and above that part of the available labour potential of the producers and their instruments of labour)” (Mandel 1983: 189).



early vague notion of Verkehr becomes crystallized in an analytical concept of the mode of production consisting in the forces and relations of production. Marx writes: “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production” (Marx 1976: 3).

In other words, the materialist interpretation of history does not postulate the ultimate determinism of the “economic”, but rather asserts that the social relations have their own causal importance structuring the entire human life process. This means that the empirical variety of historical phenomena cannot be understood either based on the actors’ own accounts of these phenomena or some abstract philosophical generalizations such as “the general develop-ment of the spirit”. This is exactly the meaning of the principle of materialism as applied to the human history: materialism is not about things, but about relations between human beings and the irreducible reality of these relations constituting an ontological level of its own. Moreover, the empirically observed historical phenomena should not be taken for granted, but rather scrutinized in search for systematic regulations and structures, because they “have their origin in the material conditions of existence, the totality of which Hegel, fol-lowing the example of the Englishmen and Frenchmen of the eighteenth cen-tury, embraces within the term ‘civil society’ ”. However, “the anatomy of this civil society . . . has to be sought in political economy” (Marx 1876: 3). It is worth noting here that the classical political economy to which Marx refers in the Preface and devoted considerable attention in the 1840s and later in the 1850s, was remarkably close to what is understood by social science today. In contrast to the discipline of economics, classical political economy in fact developed many useful conceptualizations of the social relations (e.g. between classes), as is evidenced already in the writings of Adam Smith. Indeed, it was much closer to the scientific analysis of the social reality than normative jurisprudence and speculative philosophies of history. However, being overwhelmingly influ-enced by the modern European political philosophy and social contract theory in particular, political economy tended to rely upon some static ahistorical cat-egories – and this was precisely one of the entry points of the Marxian later critique of political economy. On the contrary, Marx’s analysis begins with the assertion that the economic and social phenomena as well as economic and social problems have historically limited and therefore relative character.

Marx goes on to outline the mode of interaction between the relations of production and politics, law and culture:



The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which there arises a legal and political superstructure and to which there correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life-process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary it is their social being that determines their consciousness (Marx 1976: 4).

This passage has been widely referred to in order to justify the notorious charges in economic-technological determinism, not least because such reading was adopted by some of the early generations of Marxists who suggested the one-dimensional interaction between the two parts of the foundation-superstruc-ture relation. As we saw in the above, Durkheim’s and Weber’s appreciations of Marx were also marred by the overemphasis on the “economic” part of materi-alist understanding of history.

However, as Kelly notes, this “rigidly deterministic reading of his [Marx’s] historical sociology is not the only reading available to us” (Kelly 2003: 12). Marx describes the “totality of relations of production” as primarily social relations. In this regard, the Marxian thesis appears much more familiar to the point of view of sociology. Indeed, it states nothing but the fact that legal, political, cul-tural and intellectual phenomena are not fully explainable neither “from them-selves”, nor from the accounts or perceptions of the actors involved. Rather, one should look for the social structures influencing them in many ways which are to be traced and specified empirically. This is precisely what Marx himself does in his political writings, most notably in the 18 Brumaire (Marx 1963). In fact, Marx’s own formulations allow for a healthy degree of empirical latitude and outline the main directions of research, mechanisms and relations that need to be specified empirically, contrary to the vulgar Marxists’ one-dimen-sional interpretations. In the Grundrisse Marx writes:

All production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society [. . .] every form of produc-tion creates its own legal relations, form of government, etc. However, all epochs of production have certain common traits, common characteris-tics. Production in general is an abstraction, but a rational abstraction in so far as it really brings out and fixes the common element and thus saves us repetition. Still, this general category, this common element sifted out by comparison, is itself segmented many times and splits into different determinations (Marx 1973: 29–30).



Engels tried to clarify the Marxian position in his letter to Bloch in 1890: “According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted.” (Engels 1972: 294).

Another argument against the economic determinist reading of the materi-alist conception of history could be based on the fact that this reading in itself depends on a more or less strict separation between “the economic” and the rest of the relevant empirical variety of the social phenomena. The problem is that the separation between “the political” and “the economic” is itself a char-acteristic of capitalism,11 or bourgeois society, e.g. the very social formation Marx attempted to analyze in the first place. Indeed, the refusal to take for granted the distinction between the political and the economic has been one of the most important motives animating Marxist social analysis ever since.12

Therefore, what we wanted to show in this section by doing this brief review is the fact that the materialist understanding of history is a genuinely social theory with a powerful potential for empirical work.13 We now turn to our next argument stating that this potential can be fully realized in comparative- historical research.

11 This thesis is central to what Wood (1981) calls Political Marxism (cf. Polanyi 2001 [1944]).12 Among Marxist researchers the relations between economic and political dimensions

of analysis are often presented as controversial. Thus, the whole program of Political Marxism could be presented as an attempt to overcome the “ahistorical” and determin-ist “economic” versions of Marxism, associated with the theory of value, which fail to take historical contingency into account, although the very term has been coined in a polemic against the works of Ellen Wood and Robert Brenner and their alleged “volun-tarism” (Blackledge 2008: 268); an attempt at synthesis can be found in (Knafo 2007). An important contribution to clarifying these matters was offered by Karatani (2003) who suggested taking the controversy between the political and the economic as a quasi- Kantian antinomy, i.e. without resolving it in favor of either interpretation. Finally, one of the most comprehensive contemporary critiques of the split of the social reality into sepa-rate quasi-autonomous “spheres” was advanced by Immanuel Wallerstein, who identified the source of such view in the liberal “geoculture” formed in the aftermath of 1848 revolu-tions (Wallerstein 2004). On the other hand, this distinction was further questioned by non-Marxist literature in some other important ways we do not intend to trace here. See, however, an attempt at synthesis in Springer (2012).

13 In his introduction to the first English publication of the excerpts from the Grundrisse on the pre-capitalist economic formations, Eric Hobsbawm makes even more radical point, arguing that Marxian thought effectively transcended any disciplinary boundaries, including sociology (Hobsbawm 1965: 18).



The Marxian Approach to Comparative Historical Analysis

There is no common understanding among sociologists regarding what is “comparative historical analysis”, or “comparative method”, or “comparative sociology”. On the one hand, many prominent scholars argue that compari-son in social science is everywhere because “thinking without comparison is unthinkable” (Oyen 1990). On the other hand, scholarly dictionaries, articles in periodicals and monographs present quite different, and at times even com-peting, understandings of what comparative sociology and/or comparative sociological analysis actually is.14

Elsewhere we have already specified our understanding of what ‘compara-tive sociology’ is and how its essential notions and terms should be defined (Rezaev 2015). In 2014 the Concise Encyclopedia of Comparative Sociology was published to help researchers establish common groundings in understand-ing basic terms of comparative sociology. We agree with the editors of this Encyclopedia that “the ultimate aim of comparative sociological research is to develop concepts and generalizations based upon identified similarities and differences among social entities being compared, especially in their behavior (including ways of thinking and acting), in their values and ideologies, and in the intrinsic elements of social structures” (Sasaki, Goldstone, Zimmerman, and Sanderson 2014: xii). Discussing the contribution of Marx, we would only like to stress that comparative analysis of social entities has both time and space dimensions. History and temporality are obviously important dimen-sions for comparative analysis.

“Comparative sociology” is also a controversial term. It appears at the mar-gins of the mainstream literature and is sometimes defined in competing ways. Emile Durkheim argued that “comparative sociology is not a particular branch of sociology; it is sociology itself, in so far as it ceases to be purely descriptive and aspires to account for facts” (Durkheim 1949: 139). Durkheim represent one of the most powerful stances on comparative sociology, where it is equated to sociology in general, and comparison is thought to be the condition of pos-sibility of an empirical investigation. Another view, most popular in 1970–80s, sees comparative sociology as comparison of social systems. “By comparative sociology, we mean any sociological endeavor in which two or more social sys-tems are compared” (Lee 1987: 60). Similarly, in a more recent account, John R. Hall offers a more general definition based on the idea of comparing cases: “Comparative sociology encompasses a range of practices that focus on the jux-taposition of cases or aspects of cases, either to induce or to test theoretically

14 See: R. Marsh, 1967; Smelser, 1976; Ragin, 1987; Mills et al., 2006.



derived hypotheses, to apply social theory, or to produce bounded generaliza-tions and ‘rules of experience” (Hall 2005: 391). This shift from systems to cases could probably be attributed to the multitude of social units and forces at play in the contemporary world, transformation, multiplication and growing poros-ity of their borders, to the rising complexity of the social life in general. The importance of complexity is also reflected in a further definition that share the sensitivity to the cultural determinants of cognition typical for anthropo-logical approaches: “Comparative sociology and comparative social research have much to do with perspective. Researchers in one nation need a means to adopt and understand the perspectives of their counterparts in other nations” (Concise Encyclopedia of Comparative Sociology 2014: xii). Finally, Immanuel Wallerstein argues that “Comparative sociology has thus always represented a number of vectors simultaneously: anti-ethnocentrism . . ., interest in the macro levels, and interest in complex structures, hence interest in historical detail. Comparative sociology is not a field, but a critique of whatever seems narrow and reductionist in sociology. The disappearance of the term will mean either the great success of the great failure of this critique” (Wallerstein 2003: 103).

For the purposes of this study, we will refer in what follows to comparative sociological research as a type of sociological inquiry where research problems or questions can be posed and addressed as the problems of comparisons in time and space, or answered by the means of comparison and comparative methods.

As we have seen, comparative sociology was firstly understood as sociology itself, then as a branch of sociology, and now it is rather a special perspective, a form of current sociology existence that tries to overcome the shortcomings of traditional sociology and social sciences in general. In a sense, comparative sociology reiterates the sociological patriarchs’ programs that oriented each and every researcher toward comparative analysis. There is plenty of litera-ture on Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, less on Karl Marx, as comparative sociologists. The issue of correspondence between their theoretical perspec-tives and comparative work is not a novel topic, too: empirical comparisons of classics were intertwined with their research interests and theoretical find-ings (historical comparisons of different modes of production in Marx; ideal types as theory-building tools in Weber; diachronic and synchronic compari-sons, as well as anthropological case studies in Durkheim). Classics needed comparisons to make sense of transforming reality (Lachmann 2013). Both synchronic and diachronic comparisons are necessary to outline basic, deci-sive features of modern society; therefore, comparisons are primary, theory



is secondary (Esping-Anderson 2000). Max Weber and Emile Durkheim are regarded as founding fathers of two essentially different modes of compara-tive research usually referred to as qualitative, or case-oriented, and quanti-tative, or variable-oriented, strategies of comparison. These strategies, among other basic characteristics, possess their own “ontologies”, e.g. foundational concepts of social reality (Ragin, Zaret 1983). The materialist interpretation of history – understood as the social relations theory – is quite compatible with both strategies, or to put it in other words, both qualitative/case-oriented and quantitative/variable-oriented strategies of comparison have been employed by Marx in his scholarship (Rezaev 2015: ch. 2).

As many commentators observe, Marx develops not only an ontology and a theory of social reality, but also gives an account of its development in history. In fact, historical materialism was far beyond the early positivist sociology not only in its conceptualization of the social reality as the reality of social rela-tions, but also because Marx never fell into the trap of the separation of “social statics” and “dynamics” which the nascent positivist sociology was so much prone to. Duncan Kelly notes: “very much like Max Weber, Karl Marx saw no clear distinction between historical and sociological analysis” (Kelly 2003: 11). This gives yet another hint why Marx is in fact much closer to sociological clas-sics – he, too, envisioned sociology as a historical and comparative discipline (Lachmann 2013).

In the 1859 Preface, Marx gives an account of historical development theory: at some point the productive forces of society come into conflict with the exist-ing relations of productions – first and foremost property relations – which turn into their fetters. This point, according to Marx, signals an era of social revolution. It is important to note here that Marx talks about an extended period of time, when “with the change in the economic foundation the whole immense superstructure is more slowly or more rapidly transformed” (Marx 1976: 5). Marx goes on further to outline the preliminary comparative classifi-cation of the historical modes of production:

In broad outline, the Asian, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as progressive epochs of the socio-economic order. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of an individual antagonism but of an antagonism growing out of the social conditions of existence of individuals; but the produc-tive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society simultaneously create the material conditions for the solution of this antagonism. The



prehistory of human society therefore closes with this social formation15 (Marx 1976: 5).

This outline provoked much controversy in subsequent interpretations arisen mainly around the so-called “primacy thesis” asserting a unidirectional causal relation between the economic foundation, relations of production and superstructure. The other side of this determinist account would be reckless voluntarism centering around the notion of the class struggle. We have already devoted much of the argument to shift this rigid reading arguing for a more sociological, empirical and historically contingent reading of Marx. In fact, we want to argue that such a reading could only be enacted in comparative- historical research, where these “antinomies” could be translated into, and dealt with as, the empirical questions of comparison. In the Introduction to the Grundrisse Marx insists on the empirical mode of historical enquiry guided by the general theoretical framework:

Whenever we speak of production, then, what is meant is always produc-tion at a definite stage of social development – production by social indi-viduals. It might seem, therefore, that in order to talk about production at all we must either pursue the process of historic development through its different phases, or declare beforehand that we are dealing with a spe-cific historic epoch such as e.g. modern bourgeois production, which is indeed our particular theme (Marx 1973: 26).

We will now try to highlight some of the specific aspects of Marx’s comparative- historical method. Considering methodological issues it is worth compar-ing Marx with the mainstream comparative approaches to social analysis of his time. Some engagements with comparative work in the social sciences of the time could be found in classical political economy, nascent anthropology and evolutionary social thought. Such a comparison will also allow us to reject

15 Eric Hobsbawm argues that a proto-version of Marxian theory of history was developed already in the German Ideology. It was based primarily on data from the history of clas-sical Antiquity (Greek and Roman), Western and Central Europe and was also limited in its explanatory details: for example, no mechanism of transition from feudalism to bour-geois modes of production is specified, though the transition itself is implied. However, Hobsbawm notes, already in this early version of what later became the theory of histori-cal development, Marx allowed enough place for contingency in his models, for example, discussing different alternative forms of historical development of the primitive commu-nal society, and different routes from feudalism to capitalism (Hobsbawm 1965: 36).



some of the recurrent criticisms of Marx’s thought. One of the rare instances of Marx’s direct engagement with method is to be found in the Grundrisse, in the famous passage from the introduction, where Marx critiques the abstract models of political economy inherited from the social contract theories of the 18th century. Marx writes:

The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eigh-teenth-century Robinsonades, which in no way express merely a reac-tion against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine. . . . It is, rather, the anticipation of ‘civil society’, in preparation since the sixteenth century and making giant strides towards maturity in the eighteenth. In this society of free compe-tition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds etc. which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and lim-ited human conglomerate (Marx 1973: 25–26).

It is important to note here that Marxian criticism is not simply an unmasking of the political economists’ failure to engage in a real historical examination of the pre-capitalist modes of production, but rather their inability to do justice to capitalism itself, the bourgeois society. The arms-length contractual rela-tions between autonomous subjects are not just an ideological illusion, but constitute the very differentia specifica of capitalism compared to the other social formations. The emergence of these relations is the result of historical development and the unique feature of modernity, or bourgeois society. This reading differs both from the “formalist” approaches projecting capitalist rela-tions into history (e.g. mainstream economics or formalist anthropology), but also from much of contemporary economic sociology based on the notion of “embeddedness” in Granovetterian interpretation and emphasizing various social structures behind the market exchange (for the initial philosophical argument see: Toscano 2008).

It is the bourgeois society that Marx regarded as the

most developed and the most complex historic organization of produc-tion. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allows insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations . . . The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after the higher development is already known (Marx 1973: 46).



Consider, for instance, the Marxian discussion of labor, seemingly a “quite simple category”:

Nevertheless, when it is economically conceived in this simplicity, ‘labour’ is as modern a category as are the relations which create this simple abstraction. . . . Indifference towards specific labours corresponds to a form of society in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where the specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference. Not only the category, labour, but labour in reality has here become the means of creating wealth in general, and has ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals in any specific form. . . . This example of labour shows strikingly how even the most abstract categories, despite their validity – precisely because of their abstractness – for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific char-acter of this abstraction, themselves likewise a product of historic rela-tions, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations” (Marx 1973: 44–45).

Abstract labor, discovered by Adam Smith, is not simply a mental abstraction used in the analysis, but the product of historical development realized under capitalist relations of production. It is the specificity of capitalism that labor as such becomes the primary object of exploitation, by means of purely eco-nomic coercion no longer “embedded” in the complexity of social relations surrounding it under feudalism or Ancient mode of production.16

Thus Marx remained critical not only of political economy, but also of its counterparts, evolutionary and historicist theories of social development. Represented, most notably, in the writings of Herbert Spencer (and the early Durkheim), these theories treated history as a process of social evolution in terms of increasing complexity of the social organization through the process of functional differentiation. The latter, associated with nascent anthropology, which “at the time of his birth (1818) . . . was still a part of general philosophy; by the time of his death (1883) it had declared its independence as a separate discipline” (Kelley 1984: 245), engaged in the increasingly detailed ethno-

16 Marx makes a similar point in the discussion of money: “This very simple category, then, makes a historic appearance in its full intensity only in the most developed conditions of society. By no means does it wade its way through all economic relations. [. . .] Thus, although the simpler category may have existed historically before the more concrete, it can achieve its full (intensive and extensive) development precisely in a combined form of society, while the more concrete category was more fully developed in a less developed form of society” (Marx 1973: 44).



graphic and archaeological studies of the “primitive” societies in search of a comparative understanding of modern societies. Duncan Kelly notes that in his late years Marx developed a profound interest in the emerging discipline of anthropology which only began to getting rid of the influence of the abstract evolutionary schemes.

The Marxian theory of history has also been frequently criticized as deter-ministic in the sense that it implies a unidirectional progression of the modes of production. In his discussion of the trajectory of Marx and Engels’ views on history, Eric Hobsbawm summed up the most viable counter-arguments to this criticism. He argues that, indeed, their knowledge of history was in many respects limited, especially regarding the pre-capitalist and non-European societies (despite Marx’s profound interest in Indian affairs developed in the 1850s and Engels’s serious preoccupation with medieval history). Moreover, “now it is generally agreed that Marx and Engels’ observations on pre-capitalist epochs rest on far less thorough study than Marx’ description and analysis of capitalism” (Hobsbawm 1965: 20). However, Hobsbawm points out that, firstly, Marx aimed to develop a general theory “of all social change [. . .] this general analysis does not imply any statement about specific historical periods, forces and relations of productions whatever. Thus the word ‘class’ is not even men-tioned in the Preface, for classes are merely special cases of social relations of production at particular – though admittedly very long – periods of his-tory” (Hobsbawm 1965: 11). Secondly, “looking at the actual historical record, Marx thought that he could distinguish a certain number of socio-economic formations and a certain succession. But if he had been mistaken in his obser-vations, or if these had been based on partial and therefore misleading infor-mation, the general theory of historical materialism would remain unaffected” (Hobsbawm 1965: 19–20). While Marx might well have been mistaken in some of his historical accounts, the structure of his argument, i.e. the theory, did not lose its analytical power and openness to further empirical research. Testing it against the new data was to be done by Marx’s followers. This – constructive – point of view allows one to see the value of Marxian approach to comparative analysis in spite of the apt criticisms developed by different scholars.

Contemporary Criticisms of Marxian Comparative-Historical Sociology: The Asiatic Mode of Production, European Feudalism and Capitalist Rationality

The last section emphasized perspectives and implications of Marx’s reasoning in historical comparisons across time. Much of the contemporary criticism of Marx’s comparative sociology centers, however, on space-comparisons: around



the argument that Marx’s theory, developed in the midst of Western European capitalist growth, cannot give an adequate account of the pre-capitalist and non-Western economies and societies. In Marx this problem is related to the three key issues: Asiatic mode of production, theory of Western feudalism, and the problem of (modern) capitalist rationality.

The foremost source on the Marxian views on the Asiatic mode of produc-tion, also featuring in the 1859 Preface, is the Grundrisse.17 Marx treated the despotic irrigation states in Asia as centralized apparatuses of direct appro-priation of labor through the means of coercion. Exercising coercion in a centralized manner these arrangements differed from European feudalism structured around manorial relations and interactions between the landlord and the peasantry, presupposing a different class structure “although landlords were numerous and prosperous in Asia as well as in Europe, in Asia, military and bureaucratic corps were the main beneficiaries of forced labor, whereas in Europe lords reaped most of the surplus” (Lachmann 2000: 39–40). This analy-sis has been subject for many critical interventions beginning with the work of K.A. Wittfogel on “oriental despotism” (Wittfogel 1957). Anthony Giddens who offered one of the most comprehensive critical accounts of historical mate-rialism devoted particular attention toward this issue, connecting it with the more encompassing criticism of Marx: “My own views are that the relevance of Marx’s writings on the non-European civilizations is strictly limited, for vari-ous reasons, and the term ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’ should be dropped.” (Giddens 1983: 5). Richard Lachmann gives an overall assessment of the debate on the value of the concept. He argues that, on the one hand, scholars of the non-European societies agree that “Asiatic mode of production” is perhaps the “least useful notion” in Marx, who “had little to say about the dynamics of class conflict and social change in Asia”. On the other hand, despite the con-siderable scholarly effort devoted to the elaboration of a suitable theoretical framework which could help to generalize from the rich empirical materials, “the analysis of Asian transitions has become stuck in a rut because schol-ars have tried to infer trajectories of social change from typologies of agrar-ian production and surplus extraction viewed in isolation from the broader structures of elite and class relations”. However, according to Lachmann, the Weberian approach to Asian history has even less to contribute because of its essentialism,

17 For an extended discussion of the Marxist scholarship and developments on this issue see Sawer (1977).



arguing that Asian worldviews and social practices lacked certain cru-cial features present in Europe and Japan. As a result, they claim, Asian societies aside from Japan never developed as European societies did. Weberians fail to explain the different dynamics of Asian societies and instead content themselves with descriptions of stagnant cultures (Lachmann 2000: 40).

While Marx’s accounts might well have been mistaken, though to a large extent due to the lack of historical evidence (Hobsbawm 1965: 26 and passim), the overall direction of the analysis looking at the dynamics of conflict within the structural setting, rather than “ideational” factors, is potentially more promising.

The nature of Western feudalism was another important entry point to the critique of Marxian comparative approaches. In Marxist literature the contro-versy concerning feudalism found its most articulated forms in the two debates in Anglophone Marxist history: the Sweezy-Dobb and the Brenner debates (Dobb 1947, Sweezy 1976 [1950], Hilton 1976 Brenner 1976, 1982, Lachmann 1989). Scholars disagreed about the nature of European feudalism – whether it should be treated, in accordance with Weberian literature, as a stagnant rural economy with a cyclic pattern of development following demographic trends coinciding with the perpetual conflict among the power holders, or as a social formation structured around the class conflict in the countryside. The expla-nations of the emergence of capitalism in Western Europe varied accordingly. Proponents of the first position argued for the impact of the long-distance trade and the urban growth on the gradual replacement of feudal stagnation in the merchant cities of Northern Italy; proponents of the second saw the class conflict in the agricultural sector as the crucial driving force leading to the establishment of capitalism in England. The prevailing consensus in favor of the first explanation, broadly supported by Weberian approaches, French historians working in the tradition of Henri Pirenne and Fernand Braudel, and Marxist literature of world-systems analysis, was challenged by the interven-tion of Robert Brenner in the 1970s.

Brenner posed the problem of English primacy as the problem of compari-son and addressed it by means of a Marxist analysis of class structure and class struggle in the feudal countryside. In his analysis Brenner compared the trajec-tories followed by Western and Eastern Europe after the Black Death. Brenner argued that the links to the growth in productivity, new levels of investment and the introduction of the new production techniques etc. are not explana-tions but merely description of what economic development is (Brenner 1976),



and the appeals to demographic fluctuation are insufficient because differ-ent regions (England and France, Western and Eastern Europe) produced dif-ferent patterns of development in reaction to the common challenge (1348 famine). Thus, Brenner turns the focus of analysis from the population or the abstractions of the purely economic analysis to the class structure and rela-tions of production – social-property relations in his terminology – between the owners of the means of production and direct producers. It is precisely because these factors are missed in both economic and demographic explana-tions, “typically . . . abstracting (for the moment) from the social or class struc-ture for certain analytical purposes” (Brenner 1976: 30), they fail to account for the empirical variety in a comparative examination. In Brenner’s analysis, social-property relations are inherently conflictual and effectively mediate the resulting impact of the economic and demographic trends on the subsequent trajectory of development. The population decline provoked a reaction from the feudal landlords and an attempt to increase their control over peasantry. In Western Europe the traditions of communal solidarity allowed peasants to be effective in their struggle with the increase of exploitation, while in Eastern Europe the seigneurial reaction was successful which in turn led to the imposi-tion of serfdom. The transformation of the property relations in the Western Europe was thus influenced by the result of the agrarian class conflict which allowed for a more personal and economic freedom on the part of the peas-antry and quickened the establishment of the labor market.

Although this overly brief and somewhat superficial sketch of Brenner’s argument perhaps cannot fully do justice to both the value and impact of his work as well as to its contenders in the debate, it gives a clear account of the power of Marxist framework for making sense of contingent historical events while preserving a rigorous theoretical perspective and engagement with com-parative work.

Finally, there is a third criticism of Marxian comparative approach, linked with the former two: the question of capitalist “mentality”, or rationality. It is argued that rational economic behavior and strategic calculation of the actor’s interests is not inherently in human nature, but rather is a result of historical development of capitalism. Being itself a version of the Weberian protestant ethic argument, this line of criticism is also present, for example, in the writ-ings of Karl Polanyi (1944), who treated both Marxism and liberalism as the two manifestations of what he termed “market mentality” emphasizing the primacy of the “economic” in the actor’s motivations and behaviors. In fact, the model of rational actor could be easily read as a presupposition of Marxian theory of the class struggle as well as that of the historical sequence of the



modes of production (Analytical Marxists developed the rational implications of Marxian models, see: Roemer 1986). In this view, Marx’s theory is insuper-ably bound to the European cultural context where it has been developed, and thus cannot give an adequate account of the non-European economies and societies. Much of the Weberian comparative scholarship has been devoted to the search of the cultural factors functionally equivalent to the role of protestant ethic in shaping European capitalism. However, these criticisms essentially are deeply flawed because they are based, again, on the economic determinist reading of Marx. Should this latter be abandoned, and the primacy of the social structural relational factors reinforced, the analysis of the non-European social forms in Marxian terms will be possible.

Conclusions

The figure of Karl Marx, as sociologist and as comparative sociologist, is ambig-uous, and this ambiguity could be explained not only by the characteristics of Marx’s ouvres, but also by the lack of clarity within (comparative) sociol-ogy itself. This essay presents an attempt to clarify Marx’s theoretical and methodological argument in connection with the development of compara-tive sociology a form of current sociology existence that tries to overcome the shortcomings of and to bring new perspectives to traditional sociology.

The results of our inquiry could be summarized in the following propositions.First, the materialist understanding of history is the most fundamental sci-

entific discovery belonging to Marx, and the most important one for sociologi-cal reasoning. As such, the materialist understanding of history implies, and provides theoretical bases for, the empirical historical-comparative analysis of social relations.

Second, in his writings, Marx devoted special attention to comparisons across time, including applicability and comparability of historically-specific concepts (as labor and money) for earlier historical periods. While Marx might have been mistaken in some of his historical accounts, the structure of his argument, i.e. the theory did not lose its analytical power and openness to fur-ther empirical research.

Finally, the critique that blames Marx for ethnocentrism – impossibility of proper comparisons in space, with non-Western societies – is often based on vulgar economic deterministic interpretations of materialist understanding of history neglecting its truly sociological implications. Contemporary compara-tive studies conducted in Marxian perspective demonstrate its fruitfulness



both for time- and space-comparisons that makes Marx’s approaches equally to those developed by Weber and Durkheim.

Acknowledgment

This research was supported by the Russian Scientific Foundation grant No. 15-18-00101.

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The Marxian Materialist Interpretation of History and Comparative Sociology