From: Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM
Date: Sun Jan 23 2005 - 05:57:21 EST
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@hetnet.nl> Sent: Saturday, January 22, 2005 8:31 PM Subject: Hume II As regards social causality, I think the basic type of explanatory approach suggested by Ernest Mandel was of a parametric type - simply summarised as follows: (1) in principle, at any point in time, certain courses of action are possible, and others are ruled out. This makes social behaviour determinate. (2) Decisions are made about courses of action, within that determinate framework, and a course of action is pursued. (3) By that fact, other courses of action become ruled out, and new possibilities are created. Such a framework includes both determinism and free will - history is viewed an open-ended process, yet also subject to determinism, insofar as not anything can happen and some things are more likely to happen than others. A great deal then depends on the realism of the assumptions made about what is possible (at least the most likely possibilities) and what is ruled out. In turn, that realism depends a great deal on historical understanding, the historical-temporal context, i.e. the domain of what we can more or less definitely know. This defines perceptions of what can be changed, and what cannot change. An interesting early comment by Lenin on this topic: "Materialism provided an absolutely objective criterion by singling out "production relations" as the structure of society, and by making it possible to apply to these relations that general scientific criterion of recurrence whose applicability to sociology the subjectivists denied. So long as they confined themselves to ideological social relations (i.e., such as, before taking shape, pass through man's consciousness - We are, of course, referring all the time to the consciousness of social relations and no others - they could not observe recurrence and regularity in the social phenomena of the various countries, and their science was at best only a description of these phenomena, a collection of raw material. The analysis of material social relations (i.e., of those that take shape without passing through mans consciousness: when exchanging products men enter into production relations without even realising that there is a social relation of production here)-the analysis of material social relations at once made it possible to observe recurrence and regularity and to generalise the systems of the various countries in the single fundamental concept: social formation. It was this generalisation alone that made it possible to proceed from the description of social phenomena (and their evaluation from the standpoint of an ideal) to their strictly scientific analysis, which isolates, let us say by way of example, that which distinguishes one capitalist country from another and investigates that which is common to all of them. (...) Then, however, Marx, who had expressed this hypothesis in the forties, set out to study the factual (nota bene) material. He took one of the social-economic formations- the system of commodity production-and on the basis of a vast mass of data (which he studied for not less than twenty five years) gave a most detailed analysis of the laws governing the functioning of this formation and its development. (...) Just as Darwin put an end to the view of animal and plant species being unconnected, fortuitous, "created by God" and immutable, and was the first to put biology on an absolutely scientific basis by establishing the mutability and the succession of species, so Marx put an end to the view of society being a mechanical aggregation of individuals which allows of all sorts of modification, at the will of the authorities (or, if you like, at the will of society and the government) and which emerges and changes casually, and he was the first to put sociology on a scientific basis, by establishing the concept of the economic formation of society as the sum-total of given production relations, by establishing the fact, that the development of such formations is a process of natural history. Now - since the appearance of Capital - the materialist conception of history is no longer an hypothesis, but a scientifically proven proposition. And until we get some other attempt to give a scientific explanation of the functioning and development of some formation of society - formation of society, mind you, and not the way of life of some country or people, or even class, etc.- another attempt just as capable of introducing order into the "pertinent facts" as materialism is, that is just as capable of presenting a living picture of a definite formation, while giving it a strictly scientific explanation - until then the materialist conception of history will be a synonym for social science. " Lenin, What the "Friends of the People" Are and How they Fight the Social Democrats (1894) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1894/friends/01.htm (This quote was the basis for a little-known work by Johannes Witt-Hansen, Historical Materialism: The Method, the Theories. Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1960). Witt-Hansen also wrote a number of books about theories in physics). Jurriaan
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