ABSTRACT
This chapter explains descriptive generalization of the Marx philosophy. Here two sorts of reasons come to mind: the first biographical and psychological, having to do with Marx's personal history and mental outlook, the second philosophical, having to do with certain underlying Marxian assumptions that can be successfully separated from the remainder of his thought, to the advantage of the latter, The chapter alluded to Marx habitual optimism concerning the likelihood of an imminent, Europe-wide social upheaval. He expected it, realistically enough, to begin with a political or military catastrophe in one or another country-Russia was prominent among the countries that figured in this thinking, as several of Marx's letters attlest and then to spread to others. Beyond the generalization that regularities, including certain specifiable sorts of causal regularities, obtain in the interrelated regions of phenomena that concern him, Marx requires no theory about the strict predictability of future social events to underpin his analysis.
