Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History - Rilegato

Blackledge, Paul

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0719069564 ISBN 13: 9780719069567

Casa editrice: Manchester Univ Pr, 2006

Riassunto

A decade after Francis Fukuyama announced the 'End of History', anti-capitalist demonstrators at Seattle and elsewhere have helped reinvigorate the Left with the reply 'another world is possible'. More than anyone else it was Marx who showed that slogans such as this were no utopian fantasies, and that capitalism was just as much a historical mode of production, no more natural and certainly no less contradictory, than were the feudal and slave modes which proceeded it.

Paul Blackledge opens this study with a defence of the Marxist approach to the study of history against what he argues as being the naive empiricism of traditional historians and the relativism of the postmodernists. He moves on to outline Marx and Engels analyses of concrete historical processes and their critiques of the alternative historiographic methodologies of their contemporaries. He then discusses neglected historical works produced by Marxists in the half-century or so after Marx and Engels' deaths. Two central chapters survey recent Marxist debates on, first, the nature of modes of productions, including slave, feudal and tributary systems, and the revolutionary transitions between them; and, second, the methodological debate over the issue of structure and agency in the movement of history. Finally, he shows the political relevance of these debates through a concluding survey of competing Marxist attempts to periodise the present, postmodern, conjuncture.

This book should be read by historians, students of cultural, social and political theory and anti-capitalist activists.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

This is a useful contribution to the literature on historiography and a welcome change from the more nihilistic of postmodern approaches. (It) will be valuable to students of historiography and those seeking guidance to various schools of Marxism --Christopher Parker, Southport

A detailed survey and discussion of several vast literatures. In this it provides a very useful service. --David Laibman, Science and Society, (January 2008)

L'autore:

Paul Blackledge is Professor in Politics at Leeds Metropolitan University

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Manchester Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0719069564
• ISBN 13: 9780719069567
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 218