Marx's contribution to history

[bailey_187]

obviously we all know marx's main contribution was the materialist conception of history, and marxist historians have contributed lots to history using this (christopher hill, hobsbawm, hilton etc)

however, how else has marx influenced non-marxist/"mainstream" historians and modern historical thinking?

[Rakhmetov]

obviously we all know marx's main contribution was the materialist conception of history, and marxist historians have contributed lots to history using this (christopher hill, hobsbawm, hilton etc)

however, how else has marx influenced non-marxist/"mainstream" historians and modern historical thinking?

I've heard that the liberal historian (emeritus) Walter LaFeber was influenced by Lenin's book Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

http://books.google.com/books?id=CbfWj02CgAAC&pg=PA698&lpg=PA698&dq=walter+lafeber+imperialism,+the+highest+stage+o f+capitalism&source=bl&ots=PBu--zIgfQ&sig=u96tlYno2-sNHPMDgZsTmt0rTxw&hl=en&ei=kH_ATce8FZTrgQeN6P3UBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CDEQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=walter%20lafeber%20imperialism%2C%20the%20highes t%20stage%20of%20capitalism&f=false

[Feodor Augustus]

however, how else has marx influenced non-marxist/"mainstream" historians and modern historical thinking?

'Social history', which is perhaps the dominant form of academic scholarship, owes a lot to Marx and many subsequent Marxists. Perhaps very few historians of this mould accept the Marxist telos, - i.e. the 'inevitable' (Marx) communist revolution, - however most make use of Marxism as a functional theory of human action.

Even most liberal historians seem to today write a kind of 'history from below', which Marx and Engels were pioneers of; while other forms of historical theory (and I'm thinking of post-modernism in particular here) seem to have arisen partly in reaction to Marxist structuralism. Pretty much no historical controversy has been left untouched by Marxists, and their contributions have 'influenced' many.

At the same time many Marxists have been 'influenced' by non-Marxists (Lenin's Imperialism, mentioned by Rakhmetov, is a prime example), and there is nothing really surprising about this. A certain fluidity of ideas is to be expected amongst the opposing tendencies of an intellectual discipline, and Marxism has been recognised as a legitimate form of historical scholarship for some time now.

What is most interesting is how many current liberal scholars seem to be trying to appropriate Marx for their own purposes. Even after history has debunked (or so we are told) socialist thought, Marx cannot be avoided by anyone serious about discussing human social theory. It is as if the Left won the argument but lost the war...

[caramelpence]

Whilst not a form of history as such, world-systems theory owes something to Marx's critique of capital and theories of imperialism associated with the Marxist tradition. The most general form of influence is that Marxist history has forced historians to shift from a focus solely on the occurrence of political events at the top of society, which we might see as the distinguishing feature of the most traditional and conservative forms of historical writing, to a greater emphasis on the relationship between politics and society and the importance of conflicts in the social and economic spheres. It's also important that Marxist history has involved the resuscitation of what Foucault called disqualified knowledges - experiences that are outside the remit of conservative historiography because of their association with subaltern groups and their often inchoate modes of expression but which have been taken up by Marxists as legitimate objects for study, the most obvious example of this trend being EP Thompson's opus on the formation of the English working class, which pays explicit attention to hitherto-ignored strata and forms of resistance, such as the Luddites, liberal radicalism, Methodism, and so on. In this respect one might also trace a relationship between Marxism and the newer field of subaltern studies.

If you get a copy of Hobsbawm's recent book How to Change the World, there are a couple of chapters that look at the broader influence of Marxism outside of the committed milieu during different periods. This might be of interest to you.