4—
Reason, Interest, and the Necessity of History:
The Ambiguities of Marx's Legacy

Despite Marx's appreciation of the labor process, his hopes for individuation, and his insistence that social theory be premised on real individuals producing in society—despite all these elements in his own theory, Marxism has nonetheless been predominantly interpreted as a global determinism, a world view potentially inimical to subjectivity and individuality, and minimizing the role of self-conscious human agency.

It is not an accidental interpretation. In Capital , Marx himself spoke of natural laws and an inevitable crisis of capitalism. Given such statements, there seems scant room for the voluntary and creative intervention of men in history. History instead appears as an automatic process, governed by immanent laws, moving inexorably forward. Could it be that what he acknowledged as a goal and preserved as a premise—the human individual—vanished or became immaterial within the larger drama of historical development?

In what follows, I will argue that while Marx advocated a deterministic science, as well as a notion of historical necessity, he did not maintain either at the expense of subjectivity, or the subject's creative volition. A closer examination of his treatment of historical necessity and class struggle reveals important nuances in his general conception; taken together with his methodological writings and his treatment of labor, his actual approach to analyzing contemporary history prevents any one-sided reading of Marx as founding a purely objective science. Indeed, I will contend that his outlook on subjectivity, by focusing on the purposive response to circumstances affecting the proletariat, helped found his hopes for a science of society: because men pursued rational projects in their collective interest, a

vision of the emergent meaning of history became feasible. Far from crushing subjectivity, necessity in both political economy and history operated only through the rational and purposive acts of men.

As a result, Marx's theory more closely approximates the rationalism of Hegel than the positivism of Comte. Subjectivity, rather than contradicting science, helped establish it. Unfortunately, later Marxists would see the relationship differently, or misunderstand it entirely. By tracing the vicissitudes of the Marxian theory, caught between professions of science and the premise of rational social action, the ambiguities and tensions in Marx's legacy may be clarified.

Marxism as a Science:
The Laws of Political Economy

As he elaborated the leading tenets of his thought, Marx moved away from ethical entreaty toward historical science. The a prioris of philosophical anthropology still represented (however covertly) a set of universal moral imperatives; the image of the whole man fueled a denunciation of all social situations in which men led a degraded and marginal existence. But Marx persistently strove to harness such indignation with the insight into objective circumstances only science seemed to afford. In place of universal imperatives arose an historically specific sense of real possibilities for a better way of life.

But this development had disquieting implications. Having shunned philosophical reason incarnate in history as an adequate basis for anticipating socialism, Marx swung to another extreme, by seeming to declare social individuation within communism the preordained outcome of economic and technical development. In the Grundrisse and Capital , history was occasionally portrayed as a movement wherein individuals did not (actively) emancipate themselves, but instead were (passively) emancipated. Historical necessity threatened to liquidate human freedom.

Indicative of the ambiguity in Marx's position on this point was the status of social and economic "contradictions" in his model of capitalist crisis. Most of the contradictions analyzed in Capital and the Grundrisse can be called "logical": confronting the values pro-

fessed by classical political economy with the social reality he faced, Marx was able to counterpose claims of equal exchange with the fundamental inequality represented by surplus value. Other contradictions unfolded between socialized production and private ownership, increasing wealth and chronic poverty, between the possibility of expanding free time and the reality of "necessary" labor time. Yet however vividly these logical contradictions illustrated the irrationality and inconsistency of capitalism, they by no means entailed its collapse—even if they did commend its abolition to right-thinking victims of the system.

But at least one dilemma in capitalism appeared to transcend the status of a logical contradiction: Marx's celebrated formulation of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. His analysis appeared in the third volume of Capital , published posthumously by Engels. This account, if correct, indicated an immanent contradiction within the movement of capital: increasing productivity led, of itself, to decreasing profitability; the possibilities for economic crisis would forever mount. Marx in the Grundrisse had described capital as a "contradiction in action," but in volume three of Capital he for the first time analyzed these contradictions as inherently self-destructive. Independently of any human agency, the "law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall" seemed to guarantee the collapse of capitalism: "The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself."^[1] Such formulations implied that human agency was incidental to the crisis of capitalism, at most able to intervene and transform the tempo of historical development, without fundamentally affecting its direction.

Similar ambiguities plagued the abstraction from real individuals Marx executed in Capital . It made sense that the subject, considered merely as a personified economic category, should be stripped of responsibility and initiative; yet Marx seemed to extend that exoneration to real individuals: "My standpoint, " he wrote in the introduction to Capital , "from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them."^[2]

Throughout Capital , Marx constantly emphasized necessity and natural laws in a way which suggested he had given an adequate account of a predetermined reality. In his afterword to the second

edition, he referred to a "striking and generous" review that described his accomplishment as treating "the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence."^[3] In Capital he had elaborated a series of economic formulations that penetrated below surface appearances and intentions; the apparently free exchange of labor for wages turned out to mask the exploitation of labor by capital. The crucial problem was the status he accorded his reconstruction of capitalist relations. Did this reconstruction supplant all subjective accounts, and depict, for the first time, social reality , with its specific laws, secretly determining all individual acts? Or was Capital a theoretic clarification, achieved through a critique of previous political economy and its categories and hence only indirectly related to social reality?

At times, Marx endorsed the latter interpretation. Rather than simply dismissing surface appearances as a pure illusion, he was concerned that his model should eventually approximate surface appearances and account for the consciousness of economic production and circulation they fostered. "The various forms of capital, as evolved in this book, thus approach step by step the form which they assume on the surface of society, in the action of the different capitals upon one another, in competition, and in the ordinary consciousness of the agents of production themselves."^[4] Similarly, Marx maintained a distinction between theory and the reality it comprehended. Even as a more or less concrete representation of nineteenth-century capitalism, Marx's model could be applied to actual economic situations only with qualifications and emendations. Such classical Marxian "laws" as the falling rate of profit thus became "tendencies" when transferred from the realm of theory to economic reality.^[5] The difficulties in applying the economic model to the reality underlined a critical distinction between the two.

Yet Marx himself sometimes blurred that distinction, particularly in his most polemical and prophetic statements. He then claimed that his critique of political economy yielded a system of economic laws governing the development of society. He was not averse to viewing his model as a pure reflection of capitalist realities, offering a causal and comprehensive account—despite the fact that Capital contained precious few specific laws. This tendency in turn reinforced Marx's rhetorical penchant for describing the coming col-

lapse of capitalism as ineluctable. Dispossessed of initiative by its bondage to existent economic formations, subjectivity appeared then to become a mere plaything of objective historical forces.

Class Struggle and the Collapse of Capitalism

There can be no doubt that Marx viewed the demise of capitalism as necessary, and indeed all but inevitable; but an examination of his views on class struggle suggests that he rested this contention in large part on a practical assumption: that the politically organized proletariat would force the issue and deliver the final blow. If the emancipation of the individual were an automatic gift of history, then his historical relevance would remain marginal, as the ultimate benefactor of the independent motion of history. On the other hand, if a rational outcome of history required the conscious intervention of the proletariat, then individuals, through their purposive action, had an essential role to play in instituting communism.

Marx believed that the political movement of the proletariat provided the foundations for his science, and distinguished his communism from utopianism:

So long as the proletariat is not yet sufficiently developed to constitute itself as a class, and consequently so long as the very struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie has not yet assumed a political character, and the productive forces are not yet sufficiently developed in the bosom of the bourgeoisie itself to enable us to catch a glimpse of the material conditions necessary for the emancipation of the proletariat and for the formation of a new society, these theoreticians are merely Utopians who, to meet the wants of the oppressed classes, improvise systems and go in search of a regenerating science. But in the measure that history moves forward, and with it the struggle of the proletariat assumes clearer outlines, they no longer need to seek science in their minds; they have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece.^[6]

A militant class, conscious of its historic vocation and deliberately acting on it, thus appeared a decisive element, both for transcending given social relations and for providing a scientific standpoint for their analysis. In the context of historical development, it seemed transparent that "of all the instruments of production, the greatest

productive power is the revolutionary class itself."^[7] As a result, Marx devoted himself not only to deciphering the economic laws behind capitalist crises, but also to fostering a militant proletarian movement.

Marx's account of the proletariat and its rise, in The Communist Manifesto and elsewhere, underlined the importance he attached to a self-conscious class committed to revolutionary change. Initially, individual laborers had carried on isolated struggles against machinery, the most tangible manifestation of industrial oppression; at this stage, the working-class movement remained parochial, hampered by a nostalgia for the status medieval society had accorded the skilled craftsman. Laborers frequently found themselves in competition with other laborers; and the common causes that might unite them were usually provided by the bourgeoisie, looking for allies in its struggle against the monarchy and feudal institutions.

The proletariat, originally an "incoherent mass scattered over the whole country," only gradually coalesced into a cohesive social grouping. The development of industry altered the circumstances workers lived amid. As the working class grew in numerical extent, it became increasingly concentrated in urban centers, in accordance with the organizational requirements of modern industry. Factory labor became ever more standardized, and distinctions within the proletariat correspondingly declined. Centralized urban areas came to house laborers who increasingly shared the same conditions of life.

Meanwhile, heightened competition among the bourgeoisie rendered the livelihood of the workers ever more precarious. Wages unpredictably fluctuated. Common economic interests began to make their way into the consciousness of the laborers. In short, bourgeois relations of production created social and economic conditions that facilitated the conscious organization of the proletariat as a class militantly pursuing its interests: the rational response to the unstable and oppressive conditions of capital was the political union of the workers. As such combinations arose, and sporadically engaged in disputes, they encouraged imitation and the "ever-expanding union of the workers."^[8]

The Holy Family had already forcefully linked the proletariat to the revolutionary breakdown of capitalism. The expansion of capitalist means of production and wealth produced as its antithesis the proletariat, "that dehumanization conscious of its dehumanization,

and thus transcending itself."^[9] A product of antecedent circumstances, yet already anticipating a more human social setting, the proletariat "executes the sentence" inscribed in the mute contradictions and inhumanity of capitalist relations of production and exchange. The consciousness accompanying this execution was no pre-ordained gift of historical development, but rather a hard-won result, forged through a practical process of struggle. "For the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew."^[10]

Clearly, Marx in such passages assigned a central role to the intentional agency of the proletarians and, implicitly, their teleological anticipation of communist society; without these "subjective" factors, the conflict between labor and capital remained necessarily latent.

Moreover, Marx insisted on the element of self-emancipation involved in establishing the subjective conditions of revolution. He maintained a faith in the ability of individual workers to educate themselves, a faith reflected in his circular letter to the German Social Democratic Party, written in 1879.

For almost forty years we have stressed the class struggle as the immediate driving power of history, and in particular the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat as the great lever of the modern social revolution; it is, therefore, impossible for us to cooperate with people who wish to expunge this class struggle from the movement. When the International was formed we expressly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation of the working classes must be won by the working classes themselves. We therefore cannot cooperate with people who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must be freed from above by philanthropic big bourgeois and petty bourgeois.^[11]

In his earlier writings, Marx had spoken of the need to arouse "freedom, the feeling of man's dignity. . . . Only this feeling . . . can again transform society into a community of men to achieve their

highest purposes. . . . "^[12] He also recognized the barrier to arousing such feeling erected by the internalization of bourgeois ideologies. "If Protestantism was not the true solution, it was the true formulation of the problem. The question was no longer the struggle of the layman against the priest external to him , but of his struggle against his own inner priest , his priestly nature ."^[13] Marx in his later writings continued to stress the contribution each individual had to make to the emancipatory struggle, a contribution that could not be replaced by the self-conscious agency of a more agile and expert party elite. "Here [in Germany] where the worker's life is regulated from childhood on by bureaucracy, and he himself believes in the authorities, in the bodies appointed over him, he must be taught before all else to walk by himself ."^[14]

Once a critical consciousness became widespread among the oppressed, their awareness transformed the social situation they faced. Such a teleological and practically oriented awareness helped delineate clearly the social and material conditions which formed a shared way of life: that is why Marx hailed the arrival of class consciousness among the oppressed as a "death knell" for the ruling order.

Nevertheless, his account of class struggle often enough remained equivocal. On the one hand, he granted human agency and class consciousness a pivotal role; on the other, he portrayed them as produced by prior circumstances. Indeed Marx once noted in passing that "objective and subjective conditions" were merely "two different forms of the same conditions."^[15] In the Grundrisse , Marx observed that "when the worker recognizes the products [of his labor] as being his own and condemns the separation of the conditions of his realization as an intolerable imposition, it will be an enormous progress in consciousness, itself the product of the method of production based on capital, and a death-knell of capital in the same way that once the slaves became aware that they were persons . . . the continued existence of slavery could only vegetate on as an artificial thing. . . . "^[16]

In this passage, two elements of Marx's account of human agency and class consciousness intersect. The individual's conscious will is produced by the social relations and mode of production it is situated within; and true consciousness as such comprises a powerful incentive to act, thus promoting the practical dissolution of given con-

ditions. Conscious agency is dynamic, creative, a driving force of social transformation—and such agency is determinate, finite, rooted in a preconstituted social world. This is the authentic Marxian antinomy—one which Marx himself resolved in the dialectic of historical development, conceived as a necessary process.

Marx and the Concept of Interest

In his hopes for a communist future, Marx reconciled a doctrine of historical necessity with a notion of active subjectivity: indeed, he held that purposeful human agency at crucial moments promoted historical necessity, as his remarks on class struggle and class consciousness show. These two elements in his theory, which have often been considered contradictory, he saw as complementary. But what aspects of human agency enabled it to figure significantly in a history distinguished by its necessity?

We have already gotten a partial answer to this question through an examination of Marx's concept of labor. Yet as we have also seen, his use of labor as a paradigm of agency served to highlight the very lack of purposeful mastery under contemporary conditions of production: in other words, the self-constitution of the human species through labor has hitherto largely proceeded unconsciously. The political struggle of the proletariat to emancipate labor, on the other hand, has a different cast to it: here Marx emphasized the contemporary centrality of conscious human agency—and indeed self-emancipation—yet linked it closely to the unfolding of historical necessity. How can these various parts of the Marxist theory be reconciled, and what do they tell us about the sense of subjectivity in Marx?

In what follows, it is argued that Marx's theory rests on the assumption of an abiding rationality in social action. Because men pursued their material concerns rationally, social interaction and, ultimately, historical development could be expected to exhibit a forseeable coherence: the calculated and steadfast response of individuals, and classes, to circumstances, as well as the purposeful mastery that grew naturally out of this response, facilitated a predictive outlook toward human behavior, although that behavior remained voluntary.

In addition to labor, the key concept here is interest . If labor supplied the paradigm of effective agency within the world of natural objects, where men mastered material conditions, interest supplied the paradigm of effective agency within the world of human "pre-history," where material conditions still mastered men. Since its importance has not yet been adequately appreciated, the concept of interest in Marx merits an extended discussion.

The term itself is multivalent. In English, interest originally denoted a legal entitlement to something. But in the modern era, it has also come to signify, first, a personal relationship of being concerned or curious about something; second, a preoccupation with one's own well-being (as in "self-interest"); and third, the relationship of a group to matters of common concern (as in the "common interest," the "public interest," or "class interest"). The concept of interest has figured prominently in political thought since the Renaissance, generally as an unclarified and tacit category. Although by the eighteenth century interest had become associated with selfishness, the term was sufficiently elastic to enable Helvetius to proclaim that "as the physical world is ruled by the laws of movement so is the moral universe ruled by laws of interest." In an essay on the rise of interest as a new paradigm of human behavior, Albert O. Hirschman has assessed its importance for the social theorists of the Enlightenment:

Once passion was deemed destructive and reason ineffectual, the view that human action could be exhaustively described by attribution to either one or the other meant an exceedingly somber outlook for humanity. A message of hope was therefore conveyed by the wedging of interest in between the two traditional categories of human motivation. Interest was seen to partake in effect of the better nature of each, as the passion of self-love upgraded and contained by reason, and as reason given direction and force by that passion. The resulting hybrid form of human action was considered exempt from both the destructiveness of passion and the ineffectuality of reason.^[17]

Marx was well acquainted with the concept of interest. He would have encountered it, for example, in the Philosophy of Right , where Hegel makes interest the telos of individuals in civil society: "Individuals in their capacity as burghers in this state are private persons whose end is their own interest."^[18] In Adam Ferguson's Essay on the

History of Civil Society , which both Hegel and Marx had read, interest is defined in "its most common acceptation" to express "those objects of care which refer to our external condition, and the preservation of our animal nature." Interest is thus implicated in the material conditions of life and the satisfaction of needs; yet as Ferguson added, in man the instinct for survival is "sooner or later combined with reflection and foresight," and it is these rational faculties which "give rise to his apprehensions on the subject of property, and make him acquainted with that object of care which he calls his interest."^[19] Once linked to property, as in Ferguson's remark, the category of interest was easily extended from individuals to groups, to denote the concerns common to the owners of similar kinds of property. Adam Smith thus distinguished the interests of the various social orders, and Hegel insisted that "these circles of particular interests must be subordinated to the higher interests of the state."^[20]

In Marx's earliest essays, interest was used to describe the behavior of both individuals and social groups. During his investigations of poverty in 1842, he had become perplexed by the relation between private interests in civil society and the presumed universal interest of the state.^[21] As he recalled in his 1859 preface to the Critique of Political Economy , unraveling the problems posed by these "so-called material interests" gave him "the first impulse to take up the study of economic questions."^[22] The centrality of interest for Marx during this period can also be gauged by the fact that his critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right is framed in terms of the problem. Citing Hegel's definition of "concrete freedom" as the identity of particular and universal interest, Marx disputed whether the form of government defended by Hegel could fulfill this definition. A key issue was the role of the executive administration, which Hegel had identified as the "universal estate" responsible for maintaining the state's "universal interest." But Marx mocked Hegel's claim, remarking the dependence of the administration on the monarch, and the emergence of the bureaucracy as a parasitic caste pursuing its own narrow interests. State officials, "commissioned as representatives of general concerns . . . actually represent particular concerns." A year later, in his 1844 manuscripts, Marx would similarly describe the "contradiction" in the science of political economy as "the motivation of society by unsocial, particular interests."^[23]

The Interest of the Proletariat

Through this path of questioning, Marx had arrived at one of the key problems in modern social thought, a problem explored by Rousseau, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Adam Smith, as well as Hegel: the problem of reconciling universal and particular interests, or of demonstrating how the pursuit of private interests conduced to the public benefit. In 1842, Marx had proposed that a free press might serve as an impartial mediator, able to combine reason with a feeling for human suffering, and thus able to evaluate the competing claims of various private interests within society.^[24] But he soon dropped this idea, a decision no doubt hastened by censorship of the article in which it appeared. The possibility of a disinterested onlooker, moreover, seemed increasingly incredible, and not only to Marx. In Democracy in America , Tocqueville had remarked that since the "period of disinterested patriotism is gone by forever," modern politics had no choice but to "go forward and accelerate the union of private with public interests."^[25] While Marx shared Tocqueville's diagnosis, he disputed what form the remedy should take. Where Tocqueville and liberals like John Stuart Mill hoped that increased participation in government would promote a rebirth of civic spirit, Marx looked instead for a social class which already united "private with public interests."

In 1842, he had found such a union in the case of the impoverished: "Private persons who have observed the real poverty of others in the full extent of its development," can see, he wrote, "that the private interest they defend is equally a state interest."^[26] Perhaps inspired by Hegel's treatment of the executive administration, Marx now explored the possibility that a truly "universal estate" in fact existed, if not where Hegel had thought. The criteria for identifying any such class crucially involved its social and material circumstances. If civil society was rent by contradictory particular interests, it seemed desirable that a universal class somehow be in civil society but not "of" it; or, as Marx had put it in 1842 while defending the objectivity of a free press, an element was needed "which would be of a civil nature without being bound up with private interests."^[27] Similarly, if property defined the character of private interests, it seemed plausible that a class without property would also be without narrowly defined interests; again Marx had anticipated the implica-

tions of this possibility in 1842, when he described the impoverished and their interests as the "interests of those whose property consists of life, freedom, humanity, and citizenship of the state, who own nothing but themselves."^[28]

Indeed, once Marx had abandoned all hope of a disinterested mediation between the conflicting private interests within civil society, he had before him, in his writings on the problem of poverty from 1842, and in his criticism of Hegel's Philosophy of Right , virtually all the ingredients necessary for his designation, late in 1843, of the proletariat as a universal class, "a class in civil society but not of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong but wrong generally is perpetrated against it."^[29] Moreover, when he turned to study The Wealth of Nations , he would find his perception of the proletariat at least partially vindicated. According to Adam Smith, "the interest of the second order, that of those who live by wages, is . . . strictly connected with the interest of the society," since there is no order that "suffers so cruelly" from an economic decline—an assessment Marx favorably noted in his 1844 manuscripts.^[30]

Thus far, Marx's concept of interest can be seen to have a twofold importance, as a prescriptive as well as an analytic category. It was an essential concept for analyzing the modern state, "based on the unhampered development of bourgeois society, on the free movement of private interest."^[31] Interest was similarly a key category for interpreting ideologies: "Law, morality, religion, are to [the proletarian] so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests."^[32] Finally, interest figured as an important human faculty binding men together: as Marx wrote in The Holy Family, "natural necessity ," in the form of needs, "the essential human properties ," such as sociability, "however estranged they may seem to be, and interest  . . . hold the members of civil society together."^[33]

At the same time, however, interest functioned as a prescriptive category, shaping the ideal of a decent society as well as the practice of the proletarian class that would realize it. The analytic and prescriptive aspects of the category were connected, for "if correctly understood interest is the principle of all morality, man's private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity."^[34] Moreover, the discovery of this coincidence within a contemporary

class proved a practical precondition for revolutionary transcendence as well: the "subsuming of individuals under definite classes cannot be abolished until a class has evolved which has no longer any particular class interest to assert against a ruling class." Because it anticipated in its own concerns the unity between particular and universal interest, the proletariat could overcome the divisions between countries as well as within nations: "For the peoples to be able truly to unite, they must have common interests. And in order that their interests may become common, the existing property relations must be done away with . . . the abolition of existing property relations is the concern only of the proletariat."^[35]

In the present context, it is worth stressing that Marx believed common interests would unite a group without abrogating the particularity of each individual: thus in 1845, he approvingly quoted Bentham's assertion that "individual interests are the only real interests." That is why, on principle, there could be no contradiction, in a properly ordered society, between the general and the individual interest. Unfortunately, the "general interest" has hitherto been defined by a few individuals, to protect privileges which they enjoy in private. "Communist theoreticians," remarked Marx and Engels in The German Ideology , "are distinguished precisely by the fact that they alone have discovered that throughout history the 'general interest' is created by individuals who are defined as 'private persons.'"^[36] The problem with previous theoreticians, including Bentham, was that they either ignored selfish individual interests or treated this characteristic of civil society as a fixed facet of human nature. In contrast, Marx anticipated the day when communist society would free individuals from the private pursuit of narrow self-interest as well as those interests common, on the average, to a class, and instead enable them to cultivate their particular concerns as a publicly acknowledged good, in the universal interest.^[37]

Interest as an Attribute of Individuality

The category of interest was thus central to Marx's theory on many levels; it provided insight into present conditions and into their transcendence. In his critique of political economy, to be sure, the category played only a subsidiary role, but in his coverage of contemporary events, interest frequently functioned as an analytic category

specifying the motives of actors. Once installed at the heart of the Marxian enterprise as a kind of tacit concept, interest could be invoked whenever the fundamental premises of Marx's theory were at stake.

Proof of the continuing importance of the category for Marx can be found relatively late, in his 1881 notebooks on Henry Sumner Maine's Lectures on the Early History of Institutions . At one point in these lectures, Maine rebuked the analytical jurists such as Bentham for treating sovereignty as a question of pure will, rather than acknowledging the limits imposed by "the vast mass of influences, which we may call for shortness moral." Marx transcribed Maine's criticism, only to comment acidly that Maine could not see the economic influences behind moral phenomena. Then, in a remarkable passage, Marx attacked the analytical viewpoint of Bentham as well as the conventionalism of Maine. Both missed

the many levels: that the apparent supremely independent existence of the state is only apparent , that in all its forms it is an excrescence of society; as its appearance occurs first on a given stage of development, subsequently fading again, as soon as society has reached a hitherto unattained stage. The first separation of individuality not originally from despotic shackles (as blockhead Maine understands it), but from satisfying and sociable bonds, the primitive community—therewith the one-sided elaboration of individuality. The true content of the latter is shown when we analyze the contents of the "latter"—interests . We find then that interests have become common to social groups, that their characteristic interests have become class-interests and thus that this individuality is itself class-etc. individuality, in the last instance having economic conditions for a basis. The state is built on this foundation, and presupposes it.^[38]

Several aspects of this passage are noteworthy. Marx here underlined the historical specificity of interest, by linking it to the individuality which emerges within civil society after the disintegration of the "primitive community."^[39] More important for our purposes, though, is the explicit connection thus drawn between individuality and interest. But what does it mean to call interest the "true content" of individuality? What distinguished interest from other human faculties? Since Marx never explicitly defined the term, we will have to reconstruct his answer from a variety of sources.

We can start with a criticism of Kantian idealism in The German Ideology . There Marx and Engels accused Kant of failing to notice

that "theoretical ideas . . . had as their basis material interests and a will that was conditioned and determined by the material relations of production."^[40] The locus of interest that emerges from this statement is indicative: situated between ideas and material circumstances, and tied to a will "conditioned and determined" by social relations, it appears implicitly as an aspect of the individual animated by wants, practically oriented toward satisfying these wants, and rational—even enlisting "theoretical ideas"—in pursuing their satisfaction. That interest transcended the mere instinct for survival was commonly taken for granted: as Ferguson had put it, the interested individual pursued wants with "reflection and foresight." That Marx himself shared this understanding is confirmed by several comments in an 1842 article, where interest was characterized as "crafty" and "keen-sighted," amoral but practical, absorbed in worldly affairs.^[41] As Marx summarized his early understanding, "interest has no memory, for it thinks only of itself. And the one thing about which it is concerned, itself, it never forgets. But it is not concerned about contradictions, for it never comes into contradiction with itself. It is a constant improviser, for it has no system, only expedients."^[42]

While Marx was here condemning that "self-seeking interest which brings nothing of a higher order to realization," it is not impossible to amend this early account with later fragments, and to piece together a description of how the faculty of interest might contribute to the emancipatory process: for it seems only natural that the cooperative pursuit of a social transformation in the universal interest would, in turn, transform the individual faculty of interest. The proletarian, in pursuing his class interest, might then evolve a fraternal solidarity beyond selfish concerns and an abiding rationality beyond expedient cunning. Marx himself held such hopes for the labor movement: "When communist artisans form associations, education and propaganda are their first aims. But the very act of associating creates a new need—the need for society—and what appeared to be a means has become an end." In modern society, however, the preconditions for such a rational solidarity could be found only among the proletarians, who stood to gain "life, freedom, humanity" from pursuing their interests in common. For, as Marx put it in Capital , to explain "why capitalists form a veritable freemason society vis-à-vis the whole working class, while there is little love lost between them in competition among themselves," the

common interest "is appreciated by each only so long as he gains more by it than without it." In sharp contrast to individual capitalists, all proletarians "have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."^[43]

Materialist Pedagogy and the Enlightenment of Interest

Marx in any case did not use the notion of interest to denote a static characteristic of human beings and social classes. Indeed, the faculty of interest fulfilled a far from self-evident function even in the case of the proletariat. In Capital , Marx himself described "the intellectual desolation . . . artificially produced by converting immature human beings into mere machines for the fabrication of surplus-value."^[44] On the basis of similar observations, Adam Smith drew the conclusion that "though the interest of the labourer is strictly connected with that of society, he is incapable either of comprehending that interest, or of understanding its connexion with his own."^[45]

Yet for a variety of reasons, Marx maintained a far greater confidence than Smith in the ability of the worker to grasp his situation. One critical factor, certainly, was the inherent reasoning power he ascribed to the faculty of interest: for Marx, unlike Smith, assumed that interest provided a steadfast motive for accurately calculating advantages. (Smith, by contrast, tended to conflate interest with the passions, thus depriving the faculty of any intrinsic link with rationality.^[46] In addition, Marx assumed the importance of consciously cultivating an accurate understanding of social concerns. Although the faculty of interest inherently mediated between circumstances and consciousness, its power as an historical force derived from the ability of the interested individuals to perceive common concerns, to act together for mutual benefits, and to acquire an understanding of social relations lucid enough to make such action effective.^[47] While Marx believed such an understanding often spontaneously arose in response to circumstances, he also believed such native knowledge could be refined and elucidated through education: this would be the task of a materialist pedagogy aimed at the cultivation of interest.

In The Holy Family , Marx had quoted with evident approval several passages from Helvétius and Holbach, both of whom grasped the importance for social change of clearly comprehending one's material interest—unlike the left-Hegelians, who portrayed socialism as an ideal of pure reason independent of reality. "As, according, to Helvétius, it is education, by which he means . . . not only education in the ordinary sense but the totality of the individual's conditions of life, which forms man, if a reform is necessary to abolish the contradiction between particular interests and those of society, so, on the other hand, a transformation of consciousness is necessary to carry out such a reform."^[48] Hegel had similarly linked interest and education. In the Philosophy of Right , after remarking that the "end" of individuals in civil society is "their own interest," Hegel added that "Individuals can attain their ends only in so far as they themselves determine their knowing, willing and acting in a universal way and make themselves links in this chain of social connexions. In these circumstances, the interest of the Idea—an interest of which these members of civil society are as such unconscious—lies in the process whereby their singularity and their natural condition are raised, as a result of the necessities imposed by nature as well as by arbitrary [i.e., socially generated] needs, to formal freedom and formal universality of knowing and willing—the process whereby their particularity is educated up to subjectivity." For Hegel, "The final purpose of education . . . is liberation and the struggle for a higher liberation still. . . . In the individual subject, this liberation is the hard struggle . . . against the immediacy of desire, against the empty subjectivity of feeling and the caprice of inclination; but it is through this educational struggle that the subjective will itself attains objectivity within. . . . "^[49]

For Marx, as for Helvétius and Hegel, the formation process of subjectivity in society was prompted by the "natural" necessity of primary needs, the "arbitrary" necessity of socially acquired needs, and the individual's inherent interest in bettering his condition;^[50] moreover, for Marx as for Helvétius, education included "the totality of the individual's conditions of life." The specific shape taken by the educational process, however, depended on the individual's location within society, and the specific social connections he was drawn into and could draw upon.

The situation of the proletarian, for example, facilitated a rough

and ready understanding of contemporary social relations and their essentially inequitable nature. According to Engels in The Condition of the Working Class m England , an early work that much impressed Marx, "The English working man who can scarcely read and still less write nevertheless has a shrewd notion of where his own interest and that of his nation lies. He knows, too, what the selfish interest of the bourgeoisie is, and what he has to expect of that bourgeoisie." That Marx himself shared this high estimate of the proletariat and its native understanding is confirmed by an article he published in 1844, criticizing the Young Hegelian Arnold Ruge. In an earlier article, Ruge had described the Silesian weavers' revolt of 1844 as the futile gesture of ignorant and desperate men; he recommended that the Young Hegelians help point out the political principles at stake, and impress upon the king the need for reform. Marx, by contrast, praised the "theoretical and conscious character" of the uprising, citing as evidence the "song of the weavers," a popular anthem described by him as a "bold call to struggle" which clearly proclaimed "its opposition to the society of private property." In such mundane cultural artifacts—political almanacs and songbooks circulated widely during the popular uprisings of the early nineteenth century—Marx found the rudiments of a civic education. He also saw an eager audience: the German proletariat, argued Marx, had an "educational level or capacity for education" (Bildungsfähigkeit ) far surpassing that of the timid and narrow-minded German bourgeoisie. Nor did these workers require tutoring in political principles by Young Hegelians like Ruge; indeed, the weavers demonstrated a more realistic understanding of social forces than the latter, with his hopes for benevolent monarchial reform. In this situation, what was needed, according to Marx, was not a patronizing philosophical defense, but instead a clear and accurate description of the Silesian weavers' revolt itself, and an analysis of its context and consequences: "Confronted with the first outbreak of the Silesian workers' uprising, the sole task of one who thinks and loves the truth consisted not in playing the role of school-master in relation to this event, but instead of studying its specific character."^[51]

Marx, like Engels, thus assumed that the proletarians of nineteenth-century Europe were uniquely situated to acquire a dear and lucid understanding of modern social relations; indeed, their per-

sonal experience of poverty and exploitation made such an understanding all but imperative. In the words of The German Ideology , "The contradiction between the individuality of each separate proletarian and labor, the conditions of life forced upon him, becomes evident to him, for he is sacrified from youth onwards. . . . "^[52]

As The Communist Manifesto added, the interests of the proletariat were also shaped by the "elements of political and general education" (Bildungselemente ) bequeathed by the bourgeoisie to the proletariat to enlist its aid in the bourgeois revolutions; as sections of the ruling class subsequently came to defend the interests of the proletariat, they supplied it as well "with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress," and further helped cultivate its interests beyond "the immediacy of desire," to a level of shared insight into historical development and the objective possibilities for freedom it harbored. Thus, as Marx summarized the process in The Poverty of Philosophy , economic conditions in themselves helped transform "the mass of the people in the country into workers. The domination of capital had created for this mass a common situation, common interests," but the workers were not immediately aware, either that they shared common interests, or that these interests were implicated in a social system which dominated them all: "This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself." However, the native understanding of the worker and the crowded urban conditions of factory labor, coupled with the political education provided by the bourgeois revolutions, gradually brought the workers to the point where they could collectively protest the social conditions of an existence they perceived as unjust. The political struggle which followed forced each party to clarify publicly its aims and principles: and it was only in and through this increasingly conscious struggle that the proletariat finally became "united and constitutes itself as a class for itself."^[53]

The proletariat's political organization had a critical role to play in this pedagogical process: for if the objective "identity of interests" within a social group generated "no community, no national bond, and no political organization," then this group could prove "incapable of enforcing their class interests in their own name."^[54] A political party represented a forum where workers could become aware of common concerns, while party leaders could help transform "the aims of the individual into universal aims."^[55] To this end, the new

science of society needed to be conveyed to the workers. On the one hand, science, by associating itself with the proletariat, "ceased to be doctrinaire," and became revolutionary; on the other, the proletariat, by equipping itself with a scientific understanding of the laws governing society, ceased to be the passive product of circumstances, and instead became their effective master. It was thus one of Marx's constant concerns to present his scientific findings in a popular form, through speeches and pamphlets like "Wage Labor and Capital." By demonstrating the systemic exploitation of labor under capitalism, he hoped to make clear the reasons why a revolutionary transformation was necessary, as well as why such a revolution was in the interest of the workers. However, the ultimate success of this pedagogical task depended on the willingness of workers to educate themselves: "They themselves," declared Marx and Engels in 1850, "must do the utmost for their final victory by clarifying their minds as to what their class interests are," a clarification facilitated "by taking up their position as an independent party as soon as possible."^[56]

In the course of the class struggle thus consciously articulated, the proletarians came to understand the discrepancy between reality and the ideals inculcated during the bourgeois revolutions. Moreover, they came to understand this discrepancy as unnecessary and irrational: the technical and economic means for the emancipation of labor and the realization of true liberty and equality existed, as did the cooperative power of the working class necessary to effect such a transformation in their mutual interest. While rooted in the individual and his needs, enlightened interest thus provided a real motive for actualizing such norms as freedom and justice—norms in no way reducible either to the economic demands of trade unionists or to the categorical imperative of the philosphers.^[57] Dedicated to making the possibility of communism manifest in just such discrepancies between professed norms and a contradictory reality, the party leaders wanted "the workers to leave the old society alone, the better to be able to enter the new society which they have prepared for them with so much foresight."^[58] Yet since the primary role of the party was educational—to form an awareness among workers of the objective possibilities for simultaneously bettering their condition and launching a revolution in the general interest—the party on Marx's account could never assume a "vanguard" role in Lenin's

sense, since the success of the party was measured only in terms of the workers it enabled to initiate cooperative action, as well as the enlightened standpoint they took. "It is the business of the International Working Men's Association to combine and generalise the spontaneous movements of the working classes, but not to dictate or impose any doctrinary system whatever."^[59] Instead, a materialist pedagogy of interest sought to transform the isolated gestures of the "I want" into the effective, organized, and self-conscious agency of the "We need, can and must"—that is, to transform the isolated struggle of the worker for survival into the self-constitution of the proletariat as a class "for itself," practically comprehending the "historical movement as a whole."

The universal interest in Marx, then, was not spontaneously generated through an unintentional "harmony" of interest, as in Smith, nor was it deciphered and imposed from above by a fair-minded elite, as in Hegel's theory of the bureaucracy. Rather, the universal interest in Marx was to be realized through a collective political struggle which simultaneously engendered solidarity among the workers, and, by making them aware of their common interest in a revolutionary transformation, made them aware of their "great historical mission," the emancipation of "the downtrodden millions."^[60]

The peculiar features Marx ascribed to interest as a subjective faculty played an essential role in his understanding of this process. As we have seen, Marx, like several theorists before him, portrayed interest as occupying an intermediate region within the panoply of human faculties, partaking of the cunning of reason and the forcefulness of passion, channeling the pressing nature of needs in a rational direction. Individuals could thus be counted on to pursue their interests with some degree of foresight and calculation as well as with steadfastness and perseverance—and it was this constant basis that a materialist pedagogy could build upon.

Let us summarize our findings, then. In Marx's understanding of human prehistory, it was enlightened interest , and not consciousness per se, or labor per se, which was the essential aspect of effective human agency. Interest was that critical subjective faculty in Marx's theory that mediated material needs and formative ideals, social conditions and self-conscious historical development, the immanent and the transcendent, the individual and the universal. The class interest of the proletariat within civil society transcended

civil society, for the proletariat, in coming to pursue its interests self-consciously, discovered that its particular emancipation entailed universal emancipation: for where all previous political movements were of minorities, "in the interest of minorities," the proletarian movement, in the familiar words of The Communist Manifesto , "is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority."^[61]

Hegel, Smith, and Marx:
The Necessity of Reason

In Marx's theory, only the native rationality of interested human action assured the scientific coherence of social interaction and historical development: an interested calculation heedful of material conditions, like the purposeful mastery of natural means exemplified in free labor, generated forseeable patterns of behavior, and thus facilitated a deterministic and predictive approach to analyzing it. Yet this reconciliation, within Marx's own theory, of a rationally active subjectivity with a scientifically depicted social objectivity marked by necessity was vulnerable to subsequent positivist distortions—a mistaken reading of Marx, to be avoided by reintegrating his work within a tradition of Enlightenment rationalism which includes Smith's political economy as well as Hegel's philosophy. Like Smith and Hegel, Marx depicted a social and historical process marked by necessity, yet incorporating conscious human agency as a causal element in its own right.

In Hegel, necessity had taken the shape of rational dialectic, the "moving soul of scientific progress." Dialectic constituted the principle "through which alone immanent connection and necessity enters into the content of science."^[62] For Hegel, "the philosophical approach to history has no other intention than to eliminate the accidental," and, implicitly, present only the necessary.^[63]

Hegel's notion of the necessary was unusual, however. In the Science of Logic , he argued that "the absolutely necessary is only because it is, and has otherwise neither condition nor ground. But equally it is pure essence; its Being is simple reflection into itself; it is because it is."^[64] Such an equation of actuality with necessity disarmed the notion of any predictive element: Hegel comprehended necessity retrospectively.

Yet necessity also arose for Hegel in the present, as a sort of "compulsion" exercised by reason itself. In a sense, it could then be considered prospectively as well as retrospectively. In the case of retrospective necessity, knowledge disengaged the essential from the past; in the case of prospective necessity, relative rationality, or reason showing itself in history, actually propelled history forward. In the Phenomenology , reason confronted, mediated, and overcame contradictions, such as those between a normative system of beliefs and actual social practices. To the extent that Hegel believed that the rational became actual, the transition from one set of beliefs to another had a certain inevitability conferred upon it; given a contradiction, he frequently spoke as if there were but one rational way to transcend it. As a consequence, sublimation of contradiction appeared in Hegel as a necessary progress in rationality founded on reason itself.

Throughout his works, he proposed a close interrelation between reason, freedom, subjectivity, and necessity. In the Logic , he portrayed subjectivity as passive as well as active. As passive, subjectivity subjected itself to "determinate causality," the empirical, natural sequence of causes and effects; as active, subjectivity posited its own identity through a new causality, which represented the subject's own manifestation: "Active substance is manifested in action as cause or original substantiality; and action means that it posits itself as its own opposite, which is also the transcendence of its presupposed otherness, of passive substance."^[65]

In the course of action, man employed understanding and concepts, faculties which enabled him to comprehend the natural relations of causality he confronted in the surrounding world. By consciously positing his ends via a rational means, man mastered external causality, and shaped himself, as well as circumstances: he attained freedom within and through necessity. Man gave himself his own end "by virtue of the divine in him—that which we designated at the outset as Reason , or, insofar as it has activity and power of self-determination, as Freedom ."^[66] For Hegel necessity accommodated free subjectivity, while subjectivity simultaneously transcended and preserved necessity in its creative acts.

Adam Smith's incorporation of free subjectivity within a necessary social whole not only anticipated but indeed influenced Hegel's philosophy of spirit: the "invisible hand" and the "cunning of reason" are not so dissimilar as might at first appear. In Smith's politi-

cal economy, atomistic individualism gave rise to a rational and harmonious distribution of economic wealth, beyond the selfish intentions of the acquisitive individuals populating Smith's social world. Free individuality thus participated in a socioeconomic order governed by lawlike regularities.

It was a result facilitated by Smith's assumptions concerning the nature of "economic man." At the foundation of economic order, he placed "the propensity to truck, barter and exchange," which he took as "a necessary consequence of the faculties of reason and speech."^[67] According to Smith, self-love and self-interest motivated this propensity, which in the aggregate helped maximize the material goods available to all individuals. The public interest in wealth was served by private avarice; each, by egoistically striving to promote his own material security, unwittingly rendered "the annual revenue of society as great as he can."

But this argument contained as its hidden premise the view that individuals behaved rationally in calculating their interests and undertaking economic ventures. While Smith in The Wealth of Nations portrayed avarice as beneficial for the economy, he never argued that private economic folly would lead to public wealth: indeed the economic cunning of reason depended ultimately on the reasoned exercise of cunning, at least in conducting economic affairs. Smith here joined Hegel in affirming (and presuming) the power of reason to order the world, both intentionally and unintentionally. What on a microcosmic level appeared as an anarchic confrontation of interested egos, on the macrocosmic level appeared as a law-governed whole which necessarily satisfied the demand for a reasonable economic order.

Both Smith and Hegel assumed that rationality structured human affairs on both an objective and subjective level. For both, a collective social reason emerged beyond the intentions of the individuals involved; but for both, the exercise by individuals of their reasoning capacity insured, however unintentionally, this reasonable outcome. Both viewed the exercise and outcome of reason as necessary—as necessary as reason itself.

Marx inherited this approach to the problems of necessity and rationality. Like Hegel and Smith, he emphasized the rational outcome of the social and historical process, and he also followed Hegel and Smith in basing this result, however unintended, on the funda-

mental rationality of human action. Marx of course did not believe men incapable of irrational, shortsighted, or emotional behavior. But he also believed that men were able to calculate their interests, and, at least potentially and in the long run, that they were able to evaluate normative disputes. A history devoid of such forms of rationality could hardly issue in communism; Marx in fact based his hopes for the future on a merger of reasoned class interests (the Smithian heritage) with reasoned progress in superseding obsolete social forms (the Hegelian heritage). The site of this merger, and the contemporary vehicle for progress in rationality, would be the proletariat. Without the rational intervention of the latter, the necessity of history, deciphered by Marx's critical science of political economy, would come to naught.

In short, the hidden premise animating Marxian science was Marx's presumption of the (potential and likely) rationality of social action. His conception of theory could therefore hardly exclude subjective factors, since predictability and hence lawfulness in social theory rested on the anticipation of rational behavior. His science indeed relied on this vision of man. By following Hegel and Smith in linking objective necessity with subjective rationality, Marx was able to integrate the "real individual," his potential for conscious agency intact, into a determinate and necessary social universe.

Marx in any case did not elaborate a simple concept of necessity. As in Hegel and Smith before him, at least three different usages of necessity can be distinguished, each having a different bearing on the sense of subjectivity.^[68]

In the first place, Marx tried to establish a "necessity of events," closely related to the natural scientific concept of determinism. Necessity here defines a result which flows in a predictable manner, independently of human intentions, from antecedent circumstances. Smith believed in this sense that the wealth of nations would be a necessary outcome of free trade, just as Marx believed in this sense that increasing exploitation was the necessary outcome of capitalist relations of production.

Second, a "necessity of means" can be discerned. This necessity represents a method or procedure requisite to attain a desired end and expresses an aspect of instrumental rationality. In this sense, Marx and Hegel both insisted that a mastery of the chemical and mechanical laws governing external nature was necessary to the free

exercise of human labor. Engels's description of freedom as insight into necessity bears on this usage.

Finally, there is in Marx a "necessity of ends," where certain norms are deemed essential to being fully human. Freedom could be called a necessity in this sense, as could such other norms as equality and dignity. Indeed, to the extent that they had become universal and apparently self-evident, such values informed the intentional structure of individual action, and thus could be considered practically effective as well as historically specific. Faced with any such "necessity of ends," subjectivity assumed an essentially active role, since it was only through its intentional agency that such "normative necessity" was expressed and fulfilled.

Marx felt communism was necessary in all three senses of the word: the logic of economic events pointed toward and in some sense caused it, the end of rational social planning required it, and, to the extent they desired freedom, men themselves demanded it. Marx's notion of necessity had further affinities with Smith's and Hegel's.

Like Hegel, Marx held that contradictions between a normative set of shared beliefs and social practices would sooner rather than later lead to the establishment of a new set of beliefs concordant with actual practices, or to the transformation of practices to accord with a given normative standard. Such a transcendence of contradiction appeared for both Marx and Hegel as a progress in reason that proceeded with necessity; for both, enlightened subjectivity—in the case of Marx, the class-conscious proletariat—furthered this progress in reason. Marx consequently anticipated the realignment of consciousness during the era of proletarian revolution in a direction favorable to the universalizing social practice already characteristic of capitalism. (Marx and Hegel did not, however, view progress as a unilinear process; on the contrary, for both, reason only emerged in the course of a dialectic marked by setbacks and turnabouts. As the young Marx put it, "Reason has always existed, but not always in a rational form.")^[69]

Like Smith, Marx felt confident that individuals and classes were motivated by material interests, and, as Smith put it, a desire for bettering their condition—"a desire which, though generally calm and dispassionate, comes with us from the womb and never leaves us till we go into the grave."^[70] Just as Smith's assumption helped him

elaborate a deterministic theory founded on free individual acts, so Marx's similar premises enabled him to set the free action of the proletariat within a global historic necessity: the rationality and abiding passion involved in the pursuit of interest facilitated the predictability of social action, as the classical political economists had been quick to appreciate.^[71] What Marx basically accomplished in this regard was the replacement of Smith's conception of harmonious egoistic interests with his own notion of conflicting class interests. In both cases, though, interest made possible an ultimately rational and hence necessary social development.

By extending the thesis of interest-governed behavior from individuals to classes, and by combining it with the Hegelian thesis of the enlightenment of consciousness through conflict, Marx was even able to extend the domain of predictability to historical development. But the proletarian on this account was by no means a passive product of history; rather, as a materially interested and increasingly self-conscious participant in history, the proletarian was expected to intervene and transform the direction as well as the tempo of historical development in forseeable ways, through the cooperative pursuit of aims he held in common with others, and through an enlightened understanding of the contradictory forces governing the circumstances he faced.

The role of interest for Marx indeed recalls Hegel's passage on the cunning of reason: "Reason is as cunning as she is powerful . Her cunning consists principally in her mediating activity, which by causing objects to act and react on each other in accordance with their own nature, in this way, without any direct interference in the process, carries out reason's own intentions. With this explanation, Divine Providence may be said to stand to the world and its processes in the capacity of absolute cunning. God lets men do as they please with their particular passions and interests; but the result is the accomplishment of—not their plans, but His."^[72] Lacking faith in divine intercession, a materialist pedagogy by contrast sought intentionally to attune the "particular passions and interests" of enslaved men to their true end and the proper end of history—freedom. But it did so merely by eliciting the interest in universal freedom implicit in the particular interests of each worker and by creating situations where these workers could become aware of their common interest in a revolutionary transformation of society. Without any "direct

interference" in the process of historical development, and merely by causing the conflicting classes within civil society "to act and react on each other in accordance with their own nature," the political party of the proletariat helped organize and educate new men consciously dedicated to surmounting the contradictions of capitalism in a more reasonable society. Or, as Marx himself expressed it:

This antagonism between modern industry and science on the one hand, modern misery and dissolution on the other hand; this antagonism between the productive powers, and the social relations of our epoch is a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and not to be controverted. Some parties may wail over it; others may wish to get rid of modern arts, in order to get rid of modern conflicts. . . . On our part, we do not mistake the shape of the shrewd spirit [cf. Hegel's cunning Reason] that continues to mark all these contradictions. We know that to work well the new-fangled forces of society, they only want to be mastered by new-fangled men—and such are the working men. They are as much the invention of modern times as machinery itself. . . . The English working men are the first born sons of modern industry. They will then, certainly, not be the last in aiding the social revolution produced by that industry, a revolution which means the emancipation of their own class all over the world, which is as universal as capital-rule and wages-slavery.^[73]

Marx's Rationalism

As should be apparent by now, Marx, like Adam Smith and Hegel, was a rationalist and one of the last radical champions of universal enlightenment. Of course, he was not a rationalist in the sense of a philosopher deducing an a priori metaphysic or regulative ideals of reason; nor did he have much sympathy for the classical rationalism formulated by Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Instead, Marx was an Enlightenment rationalist in the mold of such materialists as Helvétius, Holbach, and Diderot. These thinkers combined a rejection of innate ideas with a generalizing science of man and were concerned both with the systematic study of society and the enunciation of universal principles of right and justice. As the historian Elie Halévy described him, this type of rationalist "believes in the allpowerfulness of science. . . . Just as science guarantees to man the power to transform physical nature at will and without limits, so

also, if it be true to its word, it should guarantee him the possibility of transforming human nature without limits. . . . Education has the faculty of transforming the human character to an unlimited extent, of making all men intellectually equal, and therefore worthy of possessing equal wealth."^[74]

Marx, to be sure, would not have recognized himself in this portrait: he was too much the historical realist to place much confidence in universal principles, unarmed science, or educational reforms isolated from the broader context of social development. But within this context, in his expectation of capitalist collapse, he anticipated the enlightened practice of new men—politicized proletarians—as surely as his science dissected the destructive laws governing capitalist relations of exchange. At the root of his expectations, moreover, stood an essentially optimistic outlook on the prospects for transforming human character: once the "downtrodden millions" became aware of their stake in changing an exploitative social order, they would surely rise up to act on such rational impulses. To the extent it appeared reasonable, finally, individual and collective action also appeared predictable and hence amenable to scientific treatment.

The extent of Marx's rationalist optimism becomes dear through a comparison with Rousseau. Both Rousseau and Marx felt a legitimate society would be ordered around common interests: as Rousseau put the point in The Social Contract , "Unless there were some point in which all interests agree, no society could exist. Now, it is solely with regard to this common interest that the society should be governed."^[75] But if Rousseau and Marx agreed about the proper end of association, they disagreed on the means for realizing this end. For Rousseau, the issue was one of properly denaturing men, through a legitimate form of association, which would embody, not just in law, but also in customs and mores, a real commonality of interest; only on this basis might individuals be reconstituted as moral agents and free social beings. The difficulty was that men had already been socialized by the "bad contract" of civil society, which promoted avarice, deceit, and the pursuit of selfish interests. To surmount this substantial difficulty, Rousseau resorted to the fabulous figure of the "Great Legislator," a semidivine public tutor who bestowed just laws and shaped, through a civil religion, the customs and mores of a people; for those used to the luxury and egoism of

civil society, there was no other device capable of making them "bear submissively the yoke of the public welfare."^[76]

To Marx, by contrast, no such unlikely and drastic device for denaturing men seemed necessary, for the proletariat already implicitly embodied a real commonality of interest. Civil society, rather than being only an obstacle, instead contained many of the elements required for reconstituting individuals as free social beings; what was needed was not a mythic religion to yoke particular interests, but rather a thoroughgoing social science that would clarify the interests defended by the different classes within civil society, and demonstrate the interest of the proletariat in creating a classless society. In this way, Marx's "historical realism" actually reinforced his rationalist optimism.

Marx also believed that the normative elements essential to a good society were already at hand; freedom and equality seemed ideals vouchsafed by the political and economic achievements of the era. As Marx put it in an early essay, "As far as actual life is concerned, the political state especially contains in all its modern forms the demands of reason," even if these demands remained abstract ideals. Marx made an analogous point in Capital , when he remarked that "the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice."^[77] The social critic, in short, could count on certain constellations of belief, such as Jacobin liberalism, classical political economy, and Hegelian philosophy, to help orient his practical and theoretical work. And if Marx by no means shared the ahistorical bias of the natural-law theorists of the French and American Revolutions, he did share their view that certain truths were self-evident—even if these were historically developed. It was in this spirit that he could exclaim, in a remarkably concise formulation of his rationalist optimism, "History is the judge—its executioner, the proletariat."^[78]

As it affected his understanding of individuality, Marx's own rationalist disposition emerged in his assumption that human beings tended to respond rationally to circumstances and to evaluate shrewdly the advantages afforded by different courses of action. The concept of interest implied a tacit convergence between needs and insight, the passions and reason. Indeed, by taking this convergence for granted, the category of interest minimized the potency of blind inertia, and the possibility of a stubborn discrepancy between

understanding and the will to act, between having concerns in the world and caring enough about that world to risk changing it. The concept of labor similarly reinforced Marx's rationalist assumptions. As Marx analyzed it, the labor process resembled a calculated form of instrumental activity, where the materials of nature were modified for coherent ends with insight into the appropriate means. By applying this model of human action to practice in general—by making labor his paradigm of effective human agency—Marx was able to avoid tackling other aspects of human behavior less amenable to rationalist explanation.

Rationalism indeed offered an immanent assurance that Marx's interpretation of history and its ultimate sense would be fulfilled. In his "Toward the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction," Marx had aligned the proletariat with (Hegelian) philosophy: the proletariat became the social agent of Reason in history. Although Marx eventually abandoned this essentialist, neo-Hegelian conception, he continued to depict the proletariat as a class driven by rational needs and interests. As Marx's economic works added, the proletariat was also propelled into the foreground of history by the logic of events and institutions; the reign of capital sharpened class polarities and increased the exploitation of labor. Yet even in the later works, subjective needs and interests joined objective events in pushing the proletariat to the point where it had no rational alternative but to revolt: to do otherwise would be an abdication of reason.

As a consequence, capitalism could appear to Marx as a predictable sequence of social situations that necessitated individual actions, in the sense that these situations warranted a foreseeable rational response. The proletariat as a class found itself under the sign of such a compulsion: "The question is what the proletariat is , and what, consequent on that being , it will be compelled to do."^[79]

To be sure, the proletariat had to become aware of its own objective interests, just as the full flowering of man's rational freedom awaited the emancipation of labor. But because Marx held the view that civil society was already held together and driven forward by "natural necessity, essential human properties" and "interest," there was never any serious doubt in his mind that the proletariat would become so enlightened. Indeed, sooner or later it had to, since to remain ignorant of its real interests would be irrational. Marx's

rationalist assumptions thus helped guarantee that history would play out the meaningful drama he had deciphered. Within modern history, the proletariat embodied the necessity of reason—a necessity that conferred upon history a teleological coherence.

The removal of the domination of nature over man and of man over man, combined with the dissipation of ideological illusions in the comprehension of a "general mind" employing science, thus seemed to assure human emancipation. The subjective conditions for a proletarian revolution arose necessarily from the proper objective conditions: once the proletariat had entered into an intractable conflict with the bourgeoisie, once traditional ideologies had been dissolved by the advance of capitalist production itself, once a workers' party had indicated to the proletariat where its authentic interests lay, there was little question for Marx that the proletariat would obviously and inevitably act rationally and seek to achieve its authentic class interests with a clear consciousness devoid of ideological contamination. The whole chain leading Marx to anticipate the collapse of capitalism would be unthinkable without the rational response of the vast majority to the rational initiatives of the enlightened organizers of the workers' party.

The rationalist dimension to Marxian theory nonetheless sharply distinguished Marx's outlook on historical necessity from that held by positivism, Comte's in particular. While both Marx and Comte attempted, by analyzing social phenomena, to disclose the laws governing these phenomena, Comte saw society as the ultimate reality and the individual as a mere abstraction. Unlike Marx, who balanced his social realism with an insistence on the ontological primacy of interacting individuals, Comte viewed society as an infinitely greater whole; he claimed that individuals owed their entire development to the larger social organism. The individual for Comte represented a vanishing moment in the forward march of humanity, which, as the higher being of a new positive religion, should be accordingly worshiped. Individuals, stripped of creative will, became the mere objects of the factual investigations and verdicts of positive science.

While Marx's materialism also aimed at a scientific and empirical analysis of social conditions, it did not eliminate the human individual as a factor and force in history. Unlike Comte, Marx incorporated the human subject within the scientifically determinate social

object. Indeed, in Marx, it was only the rationality of the social subject which set the final stamp of necessity on the social object.

Marxism between Science and Reason

The corpus of Marx's writings represents a synthesis of individualist aims and presuppositions with a scientific and deterministic account of objective social conditions and their historical development. At the heart of this synthesis lay his comprehension of subjectivity as rationally directed interest and causally efficacious labor. It was a synthesis that would eventually collapse under the theoretical pressure of positivism and the practical pressure of revolutionary setbacks and gradualist achievements within the social democratic movement.

Despite Marx's own distance from Comte's positivism, his most "necessitarian" statements came to support a neopositivist orthodoxy within Marxism. Indeed, the focus of Marx's published work on the abstract theory of capital facilitated misunderstanding: by reading into the crisis model of Capital a straightforwardly natural scientific concept of determinism, orthodox Marxism relegated his teleological account of the labor process to the margins of the theory. In so doing, orthodoxy obscured the central concepts of reification, alienation, and objectification, none of which could be properly understood apart from his comprehension of labor. Orthodoxy also abandoned Marx's hopes for an indigenous and militant labor movement, its will formed through enlightening the interest in emancipation inherent in each oppressed worker.

Marx himself had envisioned a combination of spontaneous proletarian development and coordinating conscious organization as the twin keys to social revolution. But to the degree that the spontaneous workers' movement failed to meet his original expectations, the emphasis was shifted to organizational questions. Several options were available. German social democracy by the turn of the century had created a huge bureaucratic party structure that could be viewed as paternalistically safeguarding the interests of the proletariat while conditions "ripened." The failure of Marx's original expectations here resulted in accommodation to a political reality seemingly barren of self-generating revolutionary activity.

But a militant wing within the international socialist movement viewed the situation differently. They saw the low level of proletarian militancy as a dangerous sign of bourgeois ideological hegemony and believed the situation could best be corrected by a dedicated cadre of enlightened revolutionaries counterposing themselves to the worker as his true consciousness. The immanent logic of this position pointed in the direction of an elite, possibly conspiratorial party organization; such a party would attempt to wrench the working class into an adequate awareness of its historical mission as defined by Marxian theory.

The most rarely advocated strategic position professed a continuing faith in the spontaneous capacities of the proletariat. This position was generally coupled with an organizational program aimed at encouraging in a revolutionary direction whatever spontaneous workers' movements did arise. Ironically, it was a strategy frequently confused with some heretical variant of anarcho-syndicalism, so complete was the disenchantment of orthodoxy with indigenous working-class activity. Indeed, the widespread preoccupation with organizational issues as a corrective for proletarian lassitude concealed an inability to launch a fundamental reexamination of the subjective premises of the Marxian theory. Marx's assumptions concerning the subjective conditions for revolutions remained a largely unquestioned adjunct to the larger economic edifice.

But the dilemmas and uncertainties surrounding practical questions could not leave the subjective aspects of Marxism unaffected. In fact, in Marx's own formulation, his theory depended to a crucial extent on rational social action if its forecasts were to stand. Marx's understanding of revolutionary possibilities and aims was thus intimately linked with his perception of subjectivity. As a result, the shifting comprehension of practice by Marxists was accompanied by a largely unacknowledged revision of Marx's own comprehension of subjectivity.

Insofar as Marx's optimism concerning the rational capacity of the individuals comprising the proletariat to initiate revolutionary action remained unconfirmed by events, Marxism as a doctrinal system was confronted with several possibilities for reinterpreting or revising Marx's outlook on man. One was simply to hold fast to the rationalist view of man, usually as an unexamined premise, in the face of all historical adversity. In varying degrees, Eduard Bernstein

and Rosa Luxemburg, as well as such later neo-Hegelians as Lukács, may be said to have taken this course, which gained some additional credibility with the success of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution.

A second possibility was implicitly or explicitly to empty subjectivity and consciousness of any autonomous force, in favor of a purely objective determinism, that, while externally guaranteeing the validity of Marxism, more resembled a positivistic variant of mechanical materialism than it did Marx's original doctrine. This route was widely traveled in the years after Marx's death; Engels inaugurated the exodus from historical dialectic to positive science as the systematic setting for "dialectical materialism."

Finally, a third possibility lay in the critical reexamination of rationalism as well as positivism. While an altered comprehension of subjectivity would have wide implications for the whole Marxian theory, it might be possible to insert a modified image of subjectivity at the base of Marxism, even if it meant abandoning the primacy of rational interest and labor, and, as a consequence, the necessity of history that Marx had postulated. This infrequently broached possibility was explored at some length in the "existential Marxism" of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre.

On the whole however, Marxism has oscillated between the first and second alternatives, between a rationalism based on enlightened subjectivity and a positivism stripped of any reference to subjectivity. In Marx's own case, his tacit commitment to a rationalist view of man, and the degree to which his understanding of history depended on it, was greater before 1848 than after. It is almost as if, after the disappointment of 1848, Marx, whether consciously or not, sought to develop a more objective outlook on history, by focusing on the economic laws which defined the possibilities for social development. To this extent—and despite the fact that Marx never abandoned either an essentially rationalist image of subjectivity, or his insistence that subjectivity must actively participate in fulfilling the meaning of history—the basis for the subsequent elaboration of Marxism as a purely objective positive science was latently contained in his own move beyond the ratio of Hegelian Spirit, to economic laws as a principal guarantee of a rational history.

He thus bequeathed to his heirs a legacy charged with ambiguity. Although he himself had insisted on individual emancipation as a

cardinal goal of socialism, and valued highly the creative potential of human practice, the understanding he originally elaborated came to be interpreted as a scientific world view of ironclad objective laws. In practice, the goal of individual emancipation faded from view, while in theory, subjectivity and consciousness became epiphenomena of objective material conditions. In Marxism after Marx, the sense of subjectivity was transformed.