ABSTRACT
In writing Theories of Surplus Value, Marx was working as an economic theorist, not as a historian, as the protean fashioner of the new, rather than as an archaeologist of the old. In modern parlance, political economy sought to express the inter-relationship of polity, economy and society, an inter-relationship which we now seek to grasp in the divided camps of sociology, economics, psychology and history which have emerged as the balkanised fragments produced in the dissolution of the original eighteenth-century project as a science of society. Teleological readings, whether of a Marxist or Schumpeterian cast, effectively foreclose on the use of past theory as a vantage point from which to criticise and renew present orthodoxy. A recent essay by a French socialist trade unionist, Pierre Rosainvallon, has argued that Marx inherited from political economy the Utopia of a civil society able to function without political intervention, and that his post-revolutionary society, beyond class antagonism, would be beyond politics.
