Historical materialism and the economics of Karl Marx

by Benedetto Croce

As to the second investigation, that concerning teleology, there would be some difficulty in including it in the number of sciences if it be admitted that ideals are not subjects for science. But here Professor Stammler himself comes to our assistance by assigning the foundation of social teleology to philosophy, which he defines as the science of the True and of the Good, the science of the Absolute, and understands in a non-formal sense.

Professor Stammler speaks readily of a monism of the social life, and accepts as suitable and accurate the name materialism as applied to Marx's conception of history, and connects this materialism with metaphysical materialism, applying to it also Lange's statement, viz., that 'materialism may be the first and lowest step of philosophy, but it is also the most substantial and solid.' For him historical materialism offers truth, but not the whole truth, since it regards as real the matter only and not the form of social life; hence the necessity of completing it by restoring the form to its place, and fixing the relation between form and matter, combining the two in the unity of social life. We doubt whether Engels and his followers ever understood the phrase social materialism in the sense which Stammler assigns to it. The parallel drawn between it and metaphysical materialism seems to us somewhat arbitrary.

We come to the group of concrete sciences, i.e., those which have for their subject society as given in history. No one who has had occasion to consider the problem of the classification of the sciences, will be inclined to give the character of independent and autonomous sciences to studies of the practical problems of this or that society, and to jurisprudence, and the technical study of law. This latter is only an interpretation or explanation of a given existing legal system, made either for practical reasons, or as simple historical knowledge. But what we think merits attention more than these questions of terminology and classification, is the conception of social economics, advanced by Stammler; of the second, that is, of the concrete social sciences, enumerated above. The difficulties arising out of this conception are more serious, and centre on the following points; whether it is a new and valid conception, or whether it should be reduced to something already known; or finally whether it is not actually erroneous.

Stammler holds forth at length against economics regarded as a science in itself, which has its own laws and which has its source in an original and irreducible economic principle. It is a mistake, he says, to put forward an abstract economic science and subdivide it into economic science relating to the individual and social economic science. There is no ground of union between these two sciences, because the economics of the isolated individual offers us only concepts which are dealt with by the natural sciences and by technology, and is nothing but an assemblage of simple natural observations, explained by means of physiology and individual psychology. Social economics, on the other hand, offers the peculiar and characteristic conditions of the externally binding rules, under which activities develop. And what can an economic principle be if not a hypothetical maxim: the man who wishes to secure this or that object of subjective satisfaction must employ these or those means, 'a maxim which is more or less generally obeyed, and sometimes violated'? The dilemma lies then between the natural and technological consideration and the social one: there is no third thing. 'Ein Drittes ist nicht da!' This Stammler frequently reiterates, and always in the same words. But the dilemma (whose unfortunate inspiration he owes to Kant) does not hold, it is a case of a trilemma. Besides the concrete social facts, and besides the technological and natural knowledge, there is a third thing, viz., the economic principle, or hedonistic postulate, as it is preferred to call it. Stammler asserts that this third thing is not equal in value to the two first ones, that it comes as a secondary consideration, and we confess that we do not clearly understand what this means. What he ought to prove is that this principle can be reduced to the two former ones, viz., to the technical or to the social conditions. This he has not done, and indeed we do not know how it could be done. That economics, thus understood, is not social science, we are so much the more inclined to agree since he himself says as much in calling it pure economics, i.e., something built up by abstraction from particular facts and hence also from the social fact. But this does not mean that it is not applicable to society, and cannot give rise to inferences in social economics. The social factor is then assumed as a medium through which the economic principle displays its influence and produces definite results. Granted the economic principle, and granted, for example, the legal regulation of private property in land, and the existence of land differing in quality, and granted other conditions, then the fact of rent of land arises of necessity. In this and other like examples, which could easily be brought forward, we have laws of social and political economics, i.e., deductions from the economic principle acting under given legal conditions. It is true that, under other legal conditions, the effects would be different; but none of the effects would occur were it not for the economic nature of man, which is a necessary postulate, and not to be identified with the postulate of technical knowledge, or with any other of the social rules. To know is not to will; and to will in accordance with objective rules is not to will in accordance with ideals which are merely subjective and individual (economic).

Stammler might say that if the science of economics thus interpreted is not properly a social science, he leaves it on one side, because his object is to construct a science which may be fully entitled to the name of social economics. But—let us, too, construct a dilemma!—this social economics, to which he aspires, will either be just economic science applied to definite social conditions, in the sense now indicated, or it will be a form of historical knowledge. No third thing exists. Ein Drittes ist nicht da!

And indeed, for Stammler an economic phenomenon is not any single social fact whatever, but a group of homogeneous facts, which offer the marks of necessity. The number of economic facts required to form the group and give rise to an economic phenomenon cannot be determined in general; but can be seen in each case. By the formation of these groups, he says, social economics does not degenerate into a register of data concerning fact, nor does it become purely mechanical statistics of material already given which it has merely to enumerate. Social economics should not merely examine into the change in the actual working out of one and the same social order, but remains, now as formerly, the seat of all knowledge of actual social life. It must start from the knowledge of a given social existence, both in regard to its form and in regard to its content; and enlarge and deepen it up to the most minute peculiarity of its actual working out, with the accuracy of a technical science, the conditions and concrete objects of which are clearly indicated; and thus free the reality of social life from every obscurity. Hence it must make for itself a series of concepts, which will serve the purpose of such an explanation.

Now this account of the concept of social economics is capable of two interpretations. The first is that it is intended to describe a science, which has indeed for its object (as is proper for sciences) necessary connections, in the strict sense of the word. But how establish this necessity? How make the concepts suitable to social economics? Evidently by allowing ourselves to be guided by a principle, by abstracting a single side from concrete reality; and if it is to be for economics this principle can be none other than the economic principle, and social economics will consider only the economic side of a given social life. Profits, rent, interest, labour value, usury, wages, crises, will then appear as economic phenomena necessary under given conditions of the social order, through which the economic principle exerts its influence.

The other interpretation is that Stammler's social economics does not indeed accomplish the dissolving work of analysis but considers this or that social life in the concrete. In this case it could do nothing but describe a given society. To describe does not mean to describe in externals and superficially; but, more accurately, to free that group of facts from every obscurity, showing what it actually is, and describing it, as far as possible in its naked reality. But this is, in fact, historical knowledge, which may assume varied forms, or rather may define in various ways its own subject. It may study a society—in all its aspects during a given period of time, or at a given moment of its existence, or it may even take up one or more aspects of social life and study them as they present themselves in different societies and at different times, and so on. It is history always, even when it avails itself of comparison as an instrument of research. And such a study will not have to make concepts, but will take them as it needs them from those sciences, which do, in fact, elaborate concepts.

Thus it would have been to great interest to see the working out of this new social economics of Stammler a little more clearly, so that we might determine exactly in which of the aforesaid two classes it ought to be placed. Whether it is merely political economy in the ordinary sense, or whether it is the concrete study of single societies and of groups of them. In the latter case Stammler has added another name or rather two names; science of the matter of social life and social economics, to the many phrases by which of late the old History has been disguised (social history, history of civilisation, concrete sociology, comparative sociology, psychology of the populace and of the classes, etc.). And the gain, if we may be allowed to say so, will not be great.

September 1898.