This paper surveys the historiography of Marxist thought, tracing how scholars have interpreted Karl Marx's ideas across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Focusing on three pivotal figures — Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, and Christopher Hill — the paper examines their contributions to Marxist historical writing, from analyses of class consciousness and the Russian Revolution to the impact of postmodernism on socialist scholarship. The paper also considers how capitalism's triumph in the 1990s nearly extinguished Marxist historical inquiry, and why the field has nonetheless persisted into the present day.
The paper employs historiographical analysis, a technique in which the scholar does not simply recount historical events but examines how other historians have interpreted those events over time. By tracing shifts in methodology and ideology — from class-focused liberal history to postmodern critique — the author demonstrates how historical interpretation is shaped by the political and intellectual climate in which it is produced.
The paper opens with a broad framing of Marxist historiography before moving through three major scholars in roughly chronological and thematic order. A transitional section addresses the crisis of Marxist scholarship after capitalism's 1990s ascendancy. The paper then returns to Hill before broadening to discuss globalization and area studies. It concludes with a reflexive, ironic observation about Marx's own relationship to postmodernism, lending the essay a satisfying conceptual closure.
The study of Karl Marx and his philosophies has fascinated political, social, and economic historians for most of the past century. Hundreds, if not thousands, of scholars have dedicated their professional lives to understanding Marx and Marxism. Over the years, there have been periods of continuity and periods of discontinuity, peaks and valleys of interest, and hundreds of viewpoints as to the meaning and importance of Marxist thought at any given time. While modern conditions may not seem to provide a fertile environment for the continued study of Marxist thought, the study of Marx is considered as important today as at any point in its illustrious historiography.
Any Marxist historiography must begin with Eric Hobsbawm, who is considered "the premier Marxist historian working today" (Matthews 88). Hobsbawm's work on Marx amounts to an impressive interdisciplinary, intergenerational synthesis that combines history and theory to weave together Marx's impact on the social, political, and economic history of the twentieth century (Ibid). Furthermore, Hobsbawm's work has required other historians to focus closely on the meaning and implications of nationalism and national identity for the study of socialist politics. As a result, the study of class consciousness has been displaced as the dominant focus of political-economic modern history.
According to Kevin Murphy, one area of Marxist historiography that has been altogether underdeveloped — even by liberal historians like Hobsbawm — is the relatively favorable reaction to the Russian Revolution of 1917, including some very sympathetic responses in the United States (10). While some historians are willing to concede this point as it relates to minor details, there still appears to be an ideological resistance to the notion that early Soviet society was fundamentally different from later Stalinism, and therefore praised around the world, if not actually virtuous (Murphy 10).
In fact, Western historians are still attempting to equate the Revolution of 1917 with the Stalinism that emerged years later (Murphy 11). Whereas history was once a left-dominated discipline and earlier liberal historians failed to develop the Marxist ideology of the Revolution, more recent right-oriented historians have only moved the ideological focus even further from what should be the mainstream. Although the field is small in terms of the number of modern-day Marxist historians, there remains a need to be aware of and to challenge prevailing trends in the field — especially when those trends reveal a weakness, as they do here (Ibid).
Another preeminent Marx scholar is E.P. Thompson. Thompson's classic work, The Making of the English Working Class, was published in the early 1960s, "when history writing was still a favorite vehicle for left intellectuals" (Wood). The book was immediately recognized as a landmark volume in Marxist history. Thompson believed that ordinary people were mired in "the enormous condescension of posterity" and needed to be rescued from it (Wood). At the heart of this observation was Thompson's wish to see historians help the working class shape its own history and bring about its own emancipation from the class struggle. The concepts of class and class struggle carry different weight today, as socialism and communism are challenged even by the far left, and historians have not answered Thompson's call to develop "the historian's craft as a political project" (Wood).
Thompson's work helped develop history as a critical practice that could expose and challenge the ideological presuppositions of Marxism. In this regard, Thompson helped bring the historical study of Marxist thought into the age of postmodernism, with its "rejection of grand narratives, totalizing knowledge, even conceptions of causality, and so on" (Wood). The conquest of capitalism over socialism and Marxism has, however, made the postmodern critical discourse increasingly obsolete among modern Marxist historians.
The most ironic and perhaps most profound characterization of Marxist historiography is this: historians have embraced the postmodern view of examining and resolving issues in intellectual thought, and there has been a universal rejection of the Machiavellian worship of progress proclaimed by the thinkers of the Enlightenment. One of the premier pioneers of the postmodern school of thought — among the first and most effective at undermining the certainty of Enlightenment thinkers — was Karl Marx himself.
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