Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx | Page 2

from the value which
economics discusses. All these objections are continually being made
to Marxianism, and are met by no adequate answer. And just as the
sceptical lecturer of the street corner argues that a religion which can
make men believe in the story of Balaam's ass must be as nonsensical
as that story, so with as little justice the academic critic or the
anti-socialist politician concludes that Socialism or at least Marxianism
is a tissue of nonsensical statements if these ridiculous dogmas are its
fruit.
A disentangles of true and false in so-called Marxianism is obviously
needed, and Senatore Croce is eminently fitted for the work. Much of
the difficulty of Marx comes from his relation to Hegel. He was greatly
influenced by and yet had reacted from Hegel's philosophy without
making clear to others or possibly to himself what his final position in
regard to Hegel really was. Senatore Croce is a Hegelian, but a critical
one. His chief criticism of Hegel is that his philosophy tends to obscure
the individuality and uniqueness of history, and Croce seeks to avoid
that obscurity by distinguishing clearly the methods of history, of
science and of philosophy. He holds that all science deals with
abstractions, with what he has elsewhere called pseudo-concepts. These
abstractions have no real existence, and it is fatal to confuse the system
of abstraction which science builds up with the concrete living reality.
'All scientific laws are abstract laws,' as he says in one of these essays,
(III p. 57), 'and there is no bridge over which to pass from the concrete
to the abstract; just because the abstract is not a reality but a form of
thought, one of our, so to speak, abbreviated ways of thinking. And
although a knowledge of the laws may light up our perception of reality,
it cannot become that perception itself.'

The application to the doctrine of historic materialism is obvious. It
calls attention to one of the factors of the historical process, the
economic. This factor it quite rightly treats in abstraction and isolation.
A knowledge of the laws of economic forces so obtained may 'light up
our perception ' of the real historical process, but only darkness and
confusion can result from mistaking the abstraction for reality and from
the production of those a priori histories of the stages of civilisation or
the development of the family which have discredited Marxianism in
the eyes of historians. In the first essay and the third part of the third
Croce explains this distinction between economic science and history
and their proper relation to one another. The second essay reinforces
the distinction by criticism of another attempt to construct a science
which shall take the place of history. A science in the strict sense
history is not and never can be.
Once this is clearly understood it is possible to appreciate the services
rendered to history by Marx. For Croce holds that economics is a real
science. The economic factors in history can be isolated and treated by
themselves. Without such isolated treatment they cannot be understood,
and if they are not understood, our view of history is bound to be
unnecessarily narrow and one-sided. On the relative importance of the
economic and the political and the religious factors in history he has
nothing to say. There is no a priori answer to the question whether any
school of writers has unduly diminished or exaggerated the importance
of any one of these factors. Their importance has varied at different
times, and can at any time only be estimated empirically. It remains a
service of great value to have distinguished a factor of such importance
which had been previously neglected.
If then the economic factor in history should be isolated and treated
separately, how is it to be distinguished? For it is essential to Croce's
view of science that each science has its own concepts it.' which can be
distinguished clearly from those of other sciences. This question is
discussed in Essay III Q. 5 and more specifically in Essay VI. Croce is
specially anxious to distinguish between the spheres of economics and
ethics. Much confusion has been caused in political economy in the
past by the assumption that economics takes for granted that men

behave egoistically, i.e. in an immoral way. As a result of this
assumption men have had to choose between the condemnation of
economics or of mankind. The believer in humanity has been full of
denunciation of that monstrosity the economic man, while the
thorough-going believer in economics has assumed that the success of
the economic interpretation of history proves that men are always
selfish. The only alternative view seemed to be the rather cynical
compromise that though men were sometimes unselfish, their actions
were so prevailingly selfish that for