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April 25, 2007
Greg Sheridan is the Foreign Editor of The Australian newspaper and the author of The Partnership: The inside story of the US-Australian alliance under Bush and Howard. He writes:
One of the reasons I always hated Marxism, which was fashionable when I was an undergraduate, was because of its determinism: its view that history had an inevitable course that it must follow. I don’t believe anything is inevitable, and think that history is enacted, unpredictably, by independent human beings who made unpredictable judgments.
For all its sins, the United States has stressed in its founding and defining documents, in its highest public leadership, and in most of the life of the nation, qualities which accord with the deepest nature of human beings —liberty, self-determination, democracy, hard work, the rule of law, civic equality, religious equality.
How does Sheridan square his assertion about the Marxist understanding of historical agency as determinism-- the view that history had an inevitable course that it must follow--with Marx's statement in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon that "Men make history, but they do not make it just as they please"?
Presumably, scholarship is not Sheridan's strong card. He needs a straw man to assert his individualist view of historical change; an ontology which he asserts is grounded in human nature.
Marx's quote implies a view of human agency that exists within tight constraints, but is free within those constraints. Human beings do not choose the circumstances for themselves, but have to work upon circumstances as they find them, have to fashion the material handed down by the past’. That is to say, we make our own history, but not under circumstances of our own choosing.
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Well, you have to understand that the Eighteenth Brumaire essay is a bit of backpedaling on Marx's part. He is attempting to explain why history didn't turn out as his deterministic theory of history would have suggested. The determinism of Marx very much is there, and it comes from his Hegelianism. Marxism would fall apart completely if you took the telos from history--and determinism of some kind is inevitable if you don't. Moreover, alot of the forms of academic and new-Left Marxism have been heavily deterministic (I'm thinking of Althusser here).
I'm not going to comment on Sheridan's second paragraph, though.