From Vico to Marxism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 June 2025
The chapter provides historical and philosophical evidence that Marxist epistemology and historiography of science were largely consistent with the maker’s knowledge tradition that inspired Vico in the eighteenth century. Marxist scholars produced an extraordinary number of historical reconstructions and philosophical analyses resonating with many of the ideas discussed in Chapters 1–3: viz. the conviction that the history of knowledge (as history tout court) is not the history of great geniuses, but the history of collective actions; the belief that consciousness of individual subjects is the product of a given society; the idea that knowledge is more about making and doing than speculating and theorising; the idea that new forms of making and doing, and therefore thinking and imagining, emerge throughout human history and that all knowledge is eminently historical and rooted into specific social relations and material cultures. Scholars as different as Lifshitz or the so-called father of Russian Marxism, Georgi Plekhanov; Marxist historians, philosophers, and scientists like Boris Hessen, Nikolai Bukharin, Benjamin Farrington, György Lukács, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and Max Horkheimer (among many others) all subscribed to different versions of praxis epistemology.
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