New Grundrisse for the levels of analysis problem

pp. 13-42

in: Peter Archibald, Marx and the missing link, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1989

Abstract

For many of his interpreters, Marx was both a "methodological holist" and a 'sociological reductionist"; that is, his only units of analysis were collective "totalities' such as entire communities and classes, and he regarded such collective phenomena as not only "independent of the consciousness and wills' of individuals, but themselves the only (or by far the most important) sources of the latter. For some such interpreters, most notably Lukács and Althusser, this was as it should be;¹ for others such as E. P. Thompson, Jean Cohen, and Jon Elster, such thinking is a misguided hypostatization of society and reification of individuals, an "objective teleology" which, in Marx's case, represented a regression to the Hegelianism of his youth and/or an obsession with bourgeois political economy and its stress on the market.² Astoundingly, for still others, especially Louis Dumont,³ Marx was both a methodological individualist and a psychological reductionist! Here too he is alleged to have been unable to escape the quagmire of political economy, only now the major carryover was homo economicus rather than a self-regulating market. Finally, for a fourth category of commentators, including Joachim Israel and D. F. B. Tucker, Marx was a methodological individualist in order to avoid an objective teleology, but he did not in fact resort to psychological reductionism either.⁴