Logical-historical method

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A logical-historical method has significant in the long term, up to Friedrich Engels declining interpretation Karl Marx elected political economy for the presentation of his criticism by economic categories goods simple, unfolded, general form of value , money and capital in a logical Order developed which in abstract form reflects the historical development of these categories. In his 1859 review of Karl Marx's book " On the Critique of Political Economy " , Engels wrote :

“The critique of the economy, even after the method has been won, could still be applied in two ways: historically or logically. Since in history, as in its literary mirroring, the development as a whole and by large goes from the simplest to the more complicated conditions, the literary-historical development of political economy gave a natural guide to which criticism could build, and on the whole and large, the economic categories would appear in the same order as in the logical development. This form seems to have the advantage of greater clarity, since the real development is followed, but in fact it would at most make it more popular. The story often goes in leaps and bounds and zigzag and would have to be followed everywhere, whereby not only a lot of material of little importance would have to be taken up, but the train of thought would often have to be interrupted; moreover, the history of the economy could not be written without that of bourgeois society, and the work would then be infinite, since all preparatory work was missing. So the logical treatment was in place. But this is in fact nothing else than the historical, only stripped of the historical form and the disturbing contingencies. With what this story begins, the train of thought must also begin, and its further development will be nothing but the mirror image, in an abstract and theoretically consistent form, of the historical course; a corrected mirror image, but corrected according to laws that the real historical course itself provides, in that every moment can be viewed at the point of development of its full maturity, its classicity. "

Engels drew the conclusion that before capitalism there was simple production of goods . So he wrote in his addendum to the third book of Capital in 1895 :

"In a word: Marx's law of value applies in general, insofar as economic laws apply at all, for the entire period of simple commodity production, i.e. until the time when this is modified by the advent of the capitalist form of production."

The following is also used as further evidence:

“The exchange of commodities at their values ​​or approximately at their values ​​requires a much lower level than the exchange at production prices, for which a certain level of capitalist development is necessary. ... Apart from the control of prices and price movements by the law of value, it is absolutely appropriate to consider the values ​​of commodities not only theoretically but historically as the prius of production prices. "

This interpretation of Marx's work has long been undisputed in both Orthodox Marxism , Marxism-Leninism and Western Marxism . In this sense Marx would have continued corresponding considerations by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel .

After this idea I assert that the sequence of the systems of philosophy in history is the same as the sequence in the logical derivation of the conceptual definitions of the idea. I maintain that if the basic concepts of the systems that have appeared in the history of philosophy are stripped of purely as regards their external configuration, their application to the particular, and the like, then one obtains the various stages of the definition of the idea itself in its logical concept . Conversely, if the logical progression is taken for itself, one has in it according to its main moments the progression of historical phenomena; - but one must of course know how to recognize these pure concepts in what the historical figure contains.

Apart from individual forerunners such as the economist Isaak Ilyich Rubin , only the Neue Marx-Reading since the 1970s assumes that Marx does not logically-historically describe the development of capitalism, but logically-systematically (also simply: logically ) the current production and Reproduced capitalism on an already developed capitalist basis.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ MEW , Volume 13, pp. 474-475.
  2. ↑ MEW , Volume 25, p. 909.
  3. ↑ Emmerich Nyikos: Capital as a process - On the historical tendency of capitalism. Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 978-3-631-59807-8 , p. 635.
  4. ^ Karl Marx: The capital. Volume III, Section II, Chapter 10, MEW 25, p. 186.
  5. ↑ Emmerich Nyikos: Capital as a process - On the historical tendency of capitalism. 2010, p. 620.
  6. ^ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel : Lectures on the history of philosophy. Volume 1, 1840 3. Results for the concept of the history of philosophy

literature