I’ve been working on a multi-year project to closely read and comprehensively annotate significant writings in the history of philosophy up to the end of the 20th century. Being able to teach this material at a high level, and to critically evaluate and engage with contemporary critical theory, are the two attractors at which this project is aimed, so writings outside of the traditional western analytic canon of philosophy have been included (from Adorno to Zhuangzi).
However, in the last few months I’ve come to realize that what is missing from this attempt at a comprehensive engagement with the history of philosophy is a historical lens that can help situate these thinkers and their writings in their material, historical contexts. By reading these thinkers mostly chronologically, I’m at a vantage where I can see how many of these thinkers are in dialogue with their predecessors, but this alone is insufficient for understanding their intellectual production and thought, since it misses how such production might be the outgrowth of the particular material conditions permeating their existence. (I’m thinking here of Adam Smith theorizing about an already nascent capitalism; John Locke theorizing about liberalized monarchies after the English revolution of England, etc.)
So this set me in search of complementary material histories that I could pair with the various periods within my project. Materialist histories like Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century, E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, The Long 19th Century (Hobsbawm), and even this reddit post which sums up how the Holocaust can be effectively explained by a marxian approach; all of these clearly back-up Marx’s bold claim found in the title of this post, at least for the last five centuries.
However, I have yet to find anything quite as accomplished or detailed for the preceding millennia (something like “A People’s History of the World” would be a vulgar approximation; and Graeber and Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything seem to intentionally sidestep a marxist account of pre-history in favour of an anarchist flavour).
My question is – why? If historical materialism bears so much explanatory fruit, why isn’t there an accomplished comprehensive account of all hitherto existing society? Plate tectonics, for example, was a theory that gave us an entire history of the earth; evolution, an entire history of life; where is the marxian retrospective? Is it a problem of evidence? A limitation of the medium (i.e. history is too complex and particular to be distilled into one book or one series)? Where is the compendium for the immortal science?
Check out Michael Hudson’s works, maybe he have something that interests you
I thought he only wrote about contemporary economics; I’m now looking into his book on debt forgiveness in the bronze age, which looks a bit ‘over-specific’ but nonetheless quite relevant to the era I’m asking about – thank you for the recommendation!
He gaveta some talks about it recently too, but theyre scattered in some yt chanels
Also don’t forget the late David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years which is based on Hudson’s research and a complementary piece to Hudson’s And Forgive Them Their Debts…. Graeber focused on the anthropology side of the research while Hudson focused on the economic history.
Hudson led the collaborative research with Harvard Peabody Museum (archaeology department) in the 1990s and together with a bunch of archaeologists and Assyriologists they discovered that money has always existed as debt that dates back to the earliest human civilizations, which refuted Adam Smith’s popular conception that money emerged simply an exchange token for barter trading. In fact, except for only one or two extant primitive tribes in Polynesia, there is no evidence that barter trading has ever existed in human history before the invention of money, i.e. historical occurrences of barter trading have always taken place after money (as debt) has been invented in their societies.