ABSTRACT
Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence has received widespread praise as a rigorous attempt to reassert the validity of traditional ‘historical materialism’ against fashionable attempts to re-define Marxism in order to remove the incubus of technologism and economic determinism. It offers a sustained reading of the central texts of Marx using the techniques of modern analytical philosophy. Cohen believes modern philosophical methods enable us to re-state Marx’s materialism according to new standards of clarity and analytic rigour such that it becomes a defensible doctrine. Cohen faces two ways in this defensive operation: on the one hand, against non-Marxist critics like H.B.Acton and J.Plamenatz who have attempted to use Anglo-Saxon philosophical methods to demonstrate the fundamental weaknesses of ‘historical materialism’; and on the other hand, against Marxist theorists like Althusser and his various followers who have attempted to assert the primacy of the relations of production over the forces of production, to define the ‘instances’ of the mode of production as relatively autonomous and to conceive the ‘determination of the economy in the last instance’ as an ‘overdetermined’ process reflecting the complex structure of the social whole.
