Marx and the Many Lives of Marxism in the 20th and 21st Centuries

Over the past forty years, the Marxist intellectual tradition has served the discipline of history as a privileged site of critical interrogations into what scholars have come to characterize as simplistic approaches to the study of history. In the US, in the 1980s and 1990s, the front row in this influential conversation, led by pioneers of poststructuralist analysis, was assigned to the most recent academic encounter with Marxism. The 1960s and 1970s British and American schools of social history were criticized for holding a set of naïve presuppositions characteristic of Marxism more generally, namely, the naïve belief in the historical protagonist whose engagement with the knowable world was, according to critics, uncomplicated with considerations of cultural mediation. By the beginning of the new century, even those who wrote to counter the emergent mainstream consensus could not help but agree that Marxism had become a “name for everything that now seemed to have been superseded.”

In the counter plot I am proposing, the story does not end with the demise of Marxism. Nor does it support the premise that there exists a deep theoretical divide between twentieth-century traditions of Marxist historiography, on the one hand, and present-day analytics prevalent among social and cultural historians, on the other. I argue that the kind of Marxist historical theory that was developed by Marxist scholars in the second half of the twentieth century has played a critical even if unacknowledged—that is, latent—role in the making of contemporary historical theory in the U S. What proved to be particularly durable was precisely what the Marxist academic tradition allegedly lacked, that is, Marxist insights into such fundamental dilemmas of historical analysis as the problem of socio-cultural mediation and the challenges this theory posed to the concept of human agency in history.