Anderson - Arguments Within English Marxism

The opening sections of The Poverty of Theory are addressed to certain general issues of historiography as a discipline. Three distinct problems are explored by Thompson, which can be formulated as follows: (i) what is the particular nature and place of evidence in any historical inquiry? (ii) what are the appropriate concepts for the understanding of historical processes? (iii) what is the distinctive object of historical knowledge? In each case, Thompson evokes and rejects what he takes to be Althussers answer, and proposes his own solution. He begins his case with the charge that Althussers epistemology exhibits a radical indifference towards the primary data which make up what it terms Generalities I: no explanation or attention is ever given to either the character of these data, or their originschief among which is experience. Althussers cavalier attitude towards empirical facts is confirmed by his account of Generalities II, or the process of cognition itself, which in effect assumes that any scientific theory can define and produce its own facts by self-validating protocols, without recourse to external appeals. Thompson argues that this is an abusive extension of the very limited and exceptional procedures of mathematics or logic, that is wholly illegitimate if applied to either the social or physical sciences, where the controls of evidence are always central. The result is that no genuine new knowledge can emerge in Althussers Generalities III (its ostensible site), since Generalities II has already pre-packaged the data of Generalities I

What is the justice of these charges? In my view, a great deal. Althussers theory of knowledgeboth of science and of ideologyis, as I have argued elsewhere, directly tributary to that of Spinoza. for their dictum that facts are never given, they are always produced, but fails to note that the work from which he quotes precisely attacks Althusser for empiricism, and hence can scarcely be regarded as a stand-in for the latter.

In constructing an eloquent and necessary general defence of the historians craft, Thompson in effect too often proceeds to an amalgamation of individual positions, each of them deficient, but in significantly different degrees and ways. Thus Althusser does indeed reply improperly on logico-mathematical protocols of proof as models of scientific procedure. His theory of knowledge, dissociated from the controls of evidence, is untenably internalist: above all, it lacks any concept of falsification. Vice versa, however, the strength of Poppers philosophy of scienceone is not sure whether Thompson realizes how strong it ishas always lain precisely in its insistence on falsifiability, a principle crucially qualified by Lakatos and others, but uncompromised by Poppers egregious illusions about historical records. The hostility which Thompson senses in the two philosophers to the practice of the historian has opposite originsapproximately, over-confidence in the paradigms of mathematics and of physics respectively; and opposite outcomesdenial of any laws of motion in the random course of history, and affirmation of them in the implacable machinery of the