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History of Political Economy Annual Supplement to Volume 34 (2002) 361-377



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The Marxist Tradition in the History of Economics

Anthony Brewer


There is a significant Marxist tradition in the study of the history of economics. Marx himself wrote extensively on his predecessors, albeit mainly in works that remained unpublished at his death. His approach has had a substantial impact in the field, particularly from the mid-twentieth century onward, although it may be fading now. It was, after all, Marx who introduced the name classical to describe Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and others, a usage that has become universal, and his interpretation has had a lasting influence on debates over the identification and characterization of classical economics.

The orthodox Marxist interpretation of classical economics focuses, as Marx did, on the labor theory of value and the notion of surplus-value.1 After discussing Marx's own writings (and the rather special case of Marxist writings on Marx as a historical figure), I shall take Ronald Meek's work, and in particular his Studies in the Labour Theory of Value ([1956] 1973)2 as exemplifying this approach. The publication in 1960 of Piero Sraffa's Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities launched an alternative approach, less obviously connected to Marx. Sraffa's book itself is a work of pure theory, but it led, as Sraffa must have intended, to a new reading of Marx and of the classical economists, [End Page 361] which allowed the development of an essentially Marxist interpretation that is independent of the labor theory of value. It is mainly (but not exclusively) in this modified form that Marx's influence survives in the subdiscipline today.

This essay is a study of the line of interpretation that descends from Marx and its influence on thinking about the history of economics. For that reason, the title deliberately refers to the Marxist tradition rather than to Marxism. Some individuals writing in this tradition think of themselves as Marxists. Others do not. That is not very important. What matters here is the interpretative framework employed.

Marx as a Historian of Economics

Marx wrote a great deal about other economists, but there is a sense in which one could say that he made no attempt to study them historically, in that he never attempted to understand earlier writers in their own terms. His approach was like that of a modern economist who prefaces an article with a survey of the existing literature and its shortcomings, as a preliminary to the original work presented. A historian of ideas, by contrast, is “more concerned with a faithful reconstitution of developments over time than with current debates” (Clarke 1998, 129) and should aim to understand past writings in the context of their own time.

Marx's pattern of work is well known. He worked obsessively over the writings of his predecessors, going back to William Petty and before, copying out long sections of their work, commenting on it, and developing his own ideas as he went. In the first instance, then, his reading of his predecessors was an integral part of his own self-education and of the construction of his own analysis. In his finished work, which here means primarily the first volume of Capital, he referred to earlier writers either to acknowledge the origins of particular ideas or to distinguish his own arguments from those of others and to argue the superiority of his own. But his treatment of other writers was in all cases subordinated to the development and presentation of his own theories. He saw the development of the subject as a process leading inexorably to himself. Anything that he could present as a step toward his own theory is praised, albeit in a rather patronizing way. It is, we are given to understand, a pity that Smith and Ricardo had not shown the insight and resolution needed to carry the argument through to its logical conclusion in Marx's own [End Page 362] theory. With few exceptions, anything that does not fit the story is...

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