Class Root Cause of Socil Conflict
The Conflict of Classes: Liberal and Marxist Theories
Ralph Raico Few economists are as celebrated for their knowledge of modern intellectual history as Albert O. Hirschman. Yet in his well-known work The Rhetoric of Reaction, Hirschman is obviously at a loss when confronted with a clear statement of the classical liberal doctrine of class conflict, in Vilfredo Pareto’s Cours d’économie politique (1896-97). Here Pareto speaks of the struggle to appropriate the wealth produced by others as “the great fact that dominates the whole history of humanity.” To Hirschman’s ear this “sounds at first curiously—perhaps consciously—like the Communist Manifesto.” But Pareto quickly “distances himself from Marxism” by using the term “spoliation,” and by ascribing spoliation to the dominant class’s control of the state machine. (Hirschman 1991: 55) Clearly, Hirschman has not the slightest suspicion that Pareto was presenting, in the customary terminology, a liberal analysis that goes back to the first decades of the nineteenth century. Hirschman’s blunder is perhaps understandable if not excusable. Today few ideas are as closely associated with Marxism as the concepts of class and class conflict. Yet, as with much else in Marxism, these concepts remain ambiguous and contradictory. For instance, while Marxist doctrine supposedly
grounds classes in the process of production, The Communust Manifesto asserts in its famous opening lines: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another...1 On examination, however, these opposed pairs turn out to be, either wholly or in part, not economic, but legal, categories.2 Neither Marx nor Engels ever resolved the contradictions and ambiguities in their theory in this area. The last chapter of the third and final volume of Capital, published
Ralph Raico Few economists are as celebrated for their knowledge of modern intellectual history as Albert O. Hirschman. Yet in his well-known work The Rhetoric of Reaction, Hirschman is obviously at a loss when confronted with a clear statement of the classical liberal doctrine of class conflict, in Vilfredo Pareto’s Cours d’économie politique (1896-97). Here Pareto speaks of the struggle to appropriate the wealth produced by others as “the great fact that dominates the whole history of humanity.” To Hirschman’s ear this “sounds at first curiously—perhaps consciously—like the Communist Manifesto.” But Pareto quickly “distances himself from Marxism” by using the term “spoliation,” and by ascribing spoliation to the dominant class’s control of the state machine. (Hirschman 1991: 55) Clearly, Hirschman has not the slightest suspicion that Pareto was presenting, in the customary terminology, a liberal analysis that goes back to the first decades of the nineteenth century. Hirschman’s blunder is perhaps understandable if not excusable. Today few ideas are as closely associated with Marxism as the concepts of class and class conflict. Yet, as with much else in Marxism, these concepts remain ambiguous and contradictory. For instance, while Marxist doctrine supposedly
grounds classes in the process of production, The Communust Manifesto asserts in its famous opening lines: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another...1 On examination, however, these opposed pairs turn out to be, either wholly or in part, not economic, but legal, categories.2 Neither Marx nor Engels ever resolved the contradictions and ambiguities in their theory in this area. The last chapter of the third and final volume of Capital, published
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