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Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory, by Alex Callinicos. Leiden, Amsterdam/Boston, Massachusetts: Brill, 2004. $70.00. Pp. lui, 287.
Making History WAS originally published in 1987; this second edition is published as part of the Historical Materialism Book Series. The book first appeared when the debates occasioned by G. A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History were in full swing. The confrontation between French-originating structuralism (Althusser, Balibar, Godelier) and the English historicist tradition best exemplified by E. P. Thompson was also a major reference point. The sharpening of controversy within and around Marxism in the 1980s reflected, perhaps, two crises: one in the Western academy, where the increasing temper of doubt and crisis-of-Marxism sentiment reflected a steady rightward shift in the balance of political forces; the other being of course the looming transformations in what Callinicos calls the Stalinist regimes of the post-capitalist world.
Into this heady mix, Callinicos presented his sustained inquiry into the foundations of historical materialist theory. It was, and remains in its new incarnation, a clarion call to avoid the pitfalls of degeneration of Marx's grand synthesis - of social structure and human agency, of conscious will and objective limits to its realization - into one or another one-sided alternative. The alternatives, such as rigorous theorization based on rational choice, may appear to address contradictions and ambiguities in the original and therefore "defend" Marx, but in fact ultimately pull us away from the theoretical power and revolutionary potential of Marx's synthesis - however much his legacy does stand in need of development and clarification.
Early chapters examine the entire "analytical Marxist" project of Cohen, Jon Elster and John Roemer (among others), which sought...