of its rivals in this field, developed an extensive discourse on literature in this century. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of them is no doubt to be found in the very intransigence of the critique which the founders of historical materialism made of the capitalist order in which they lived. Radically and inexpugnably critical in outlook from the start, Marxism was carried swiftly by its own impetus, as it were, onto the terrain of literary criticism. Marx’s correspondence with Lassalle shows how natural this movement was, in its inaugural gesture. This is not to say that there was any easy concord between social and literary discourses within Marxism, then or later. On the contrary, the record of their relations has been a complex, tense and uneven one, riven by multiple breaks, displacements and deadlocks. If no complete rupture has ever occurred, since the days more or less of Mehring, it is doubtless due to the fact that beyond their common critical starting-point, there has always been an ultimate historical line of flight along the horizon of each. It is not entirely fortuitous, then, that the contemporary locution ‘critical theory’ should have two dominant connotations: on the one hand a generalized body of theory about literature, on the other a particular corpus of theory about society descending from Marx. It is the latter that customarily acquires capitals, a shift into upper case essentially effected by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s. Horkheimer, who codified this sense in 1937, intended to recover with it the sharp philosophical edge of Marx’s materialism, unduly blunted — as his generation saw it — by the heritage of the Second International. Politically, Horkheimer declared, the ‘only concern’ of the critical theorist was to ‘accelerate a development that should lead to a society without exploitation’.1 Intellectually, however, he sought – in Adorno’s later words – ‘to make men theoretically conscious of what it is that distinguishes materialism’.2 The main thrust of the Frankfurt School’s interventions over the years lay in just this direction — a long and passionate critical elucidation of the bequests and contradictions of classical philosophy and its contemporary successors, one which led increasingly, over the years, towards the domains of literature and art in the work of Adorno or Marcuse, each of whom brought their careers to rest in the realm of aesthetics. Still, to define Marxism as a critical theory simply in terms of the goal of a classless society, or the procedures of a consciously materialist philosophy, is obviously insufficient. The real propriety of the term for Marxism lies elsewhere.
What is distinctive about the kind of criticism that historical materialism in principle represents, is that it includes, indivisibly and unremittingly, self-criticism. That is, Marxism is a theory of history that lays claim, at the same stroke, to provide a history of the theory. A Marxism of Marxism was inscribed in its charter from the outset, when Marx and Engels defined the conditions of their own intellectual discoveries as the emergence of the determinate class contradictions of capitalist society itself, and their political objectives not merely as ‘an ideal state of affairs’, but as borne by the ‘real movement of things’. This conception involved no element of complacent positivity — as if truth were henceforward guaranteed by time, Being by Becoming, their doctrine immune from error by mere immersion in change. ‘Proletarian revolutions,’ wrote Marx, ‘criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them.’3 Two generations later Karl Korsch was the first to apply this revolutionary self-criticism to the development of Marxism since the heady days of 1848, distinguishing — as he put it — ‘three major stages through which Marxist theory has passed since its birth — inevitably so in the context of the concrete social development of this epoch.’4 These words were written in 1923. Without being altogether aware of it, their author was with them ushering in a fourth stage in the history of Marxist theory — one whose final shape was to be far from his expectations and hopes at the time. I have myself tried to explore something of what that shape proved to be, in an essay on the course and pattern of Western Marxism from the aftermath of the First World War to the end of the long boom that followed the Second World War — the half-century between 1918 and 1968.5 That survey, written in the mid-seventies, included a diagnosis and some predictions. It sketched a provisional balance-sheet of a long period that seemed to be drawing to a close, and suggested other directions in which Marxist theory would or should move, in a new setting. A major purpose of these lectures will be to measure the accuracy of the analysis and the anticipations of that text, in the light of subsequent developments.
Before this task is tackled, however, it is necessary to make a preliminary observation. I have said that Marxism lies apart from all other variants of critical theory in its ability — or at least ambition — to compose a self-critical theory capable of explaining its own genesis and metamorphoses. This peculiarity needs some further specifications, however. We do not expect physics or biology to provide us with the concepts necessary to think their emergence as a science. Another vocabulary, anchored in a context that is conventionally distinguished as one of ‘discovery’ rather than ‘validation’, is needed for that purpose. To be sure, the principles of intelligibility of the history of these sciences are not simply external to them. On the contrary, the paradox is that, once constituted, they typically achieve a relatively high degree of immanent evolution, regulated by the respective problems posed within each and by their successive resolutions. What Georges Canguilhem, himself a historian of the life sciences conspicuously committed to the study of the ‘normative’ social dimensions impinging on them, nevertheless does not hesitate to call their common ‘axiological activity, the quest for truth’,6 acts as an internal regulator increasingly, if far from completely, insulating them from a sheerly external order of determinations in cultural or political history. One might say that although the origins of the natural sciences escape their own theoretical field entirely, the further they develop the less need they have of any other theoretical field to explain their development. The institutionalized ‘quest for truth’, and the structure of problems set by the governing paradigm, suffice in predominant measure to account for their growth. Canguilhem, like Lakatos in the Anglo-Saxon philosophy of science, affirms in this sense the priority of the internal history of the concepts of the natural sciences, in their sequence of derivations, ruptures and transformations. For Canguilhem, their external history, always present, typically becomes causally crucial only at the junctures when ‘normal’ progress falters.
By contrast, disciplines like literary studies — traditionally described as the humanities — have rarely made any claim to cumulative rational progress of this sort. They fall subject to the same kind of external determinations in their origins, but never elude them in the same way thereafter. In other words, they possess neither axiological stability derived from the autonomy of the veridical, nor self-reflexive mobility capable of explaining their changing patterns of enquiry in terms of their own concepts. One discipline that explicitly sought to do the latter was, of course, the sociology of knowledge developed by Scheler and Mannheim. But its effort over-reached itself, ending in a relativism that effectively denied any cognitive validity to the ideologies or utopias it dismantled, thereby undermining its own pretensions. ‘The “all” of the indiscriminately total concept of ideology,’ Adorno remarked, ‘terminates in nothingness. Once it has ceased to differ from any true consciousness it is no longer fit to criticize a false one.’7 He rightly insisted that the dividing-line separating any such sociology of knowledge from historical materialism was the ‘idea of objective truth’. We shall see the surprising importance of this apparently innocuous commonplace tomorrow. For the moment, it is merely necessary to point out that the protocols for a Marxist reflection on Marxism must therefore be twofold. On the one hand, the destiny of historical
