Paul,
That historical phenomena exist is not in doubt. that these phenomena can
be organised and viewed in formulations (as in Thompson) as the birth of
a class is not in dispute.
I am reminded of debates I attended in my student life between Hobsbawn,
Bernard Dixon , Cornford and others on "Is Marxism" a Science?"
(we were all so much more positivist in our view of science then!)
Your choice of gravity is good. I have no doubt my bottom is kept on my
seat by a force we all agree to call gravity. The fact I am sitting in a
University whose origins date to powerful organised labour in the C19th,
moulded both out of class conflict and social philanthropy is also not in
dispute. However accounting for gravity and the prevailing view of how we
explain gravity is not a given.
In current terms we may ask looking back on those times in the 60's when
the question was posed "Is science a Science?" in terms of how science was
viewed then and if marxism conformed to the criteria. The question posed
was: if some future political economist/philosopher can formulate models
which match the data , and that that the models have some predictive
value.
Are there historic laws? If they exist how do they work?
We have from Trotsky (My Life p 422):
"The entire historical process is a refraction of historical law through
the accidental. In the language of biology,we might say that historical
law is realised through the natural selection of accidents"
The role of "accident" I feel is greatly exaggerated, but Trotsky needed
the "accidental" early demise of Lenin to formulate explanation and yet
remain true to the spirit of dialectical materialism.
You quote for instance"
"There are many historians who
see Ibn Khaldun's "Al-Muqaddimah' (written in the 14th century) as the
first
work that attempted to understand the processes that shape the flow of
human
events that we call history from the perspective of determinant process
generated out of specific social structures."
key words here for me are "determinent processes" and "specific
socialstructures". I find these problematic becuase of determinism.
Thompson's gift to History has surely been the notion of human agency
rather than obedience to laws of history. I have had the pleasure of
re-reading the preface to MOTWC this morning.
Thompson writes of his authorship with these phrases:
" I consider..."
" I attempt an estimate..."
"in selecting themes...."
"I have been concious, at times, of writing against prevailing
orthodoxies....
"This book is coloured by being written in Yorkshire..."
Thompson is aware of "making" a "history" (in his text) as much as writing
of historical phemonmenon
In the preface he says:
"By class I understand a historical phenomenon unifying a number of
disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of
experience and in concsiousness . I emphasize it is a historical
phenomenon. I do not see class as a structure, nor even a category, but as
something which in fact happens in human relationships."
"we can see a logic in the responses of similar occupational groups
undergoing similar experiences but we can not predict any law."
What does Thompson see as History? Who choses what events, who creates
connections?
Where I am sure we are in agreement Paul is in the follow up to this
writing of class and historical phenomenon is in his statement:
"if we watch these men over an adequate period of social change, we
observe patterns in their realationships, their ideas, and their
institutions."
The question remains that if we chose different units of analysis do we
get different patterns?
Was it never thus?:
"The destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link
one's contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of
the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century.
Most young men and women at the century's end grow up in a sort of
permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the
times they live in. This makes historians, whose business is to remember
what others forget, more essential at the end of the second millenium than
ever before."
— From Hobsbawm: The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991
Martin
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