Marx and the Politics of Abstraction

Abstract

Professor of Sociology at Eastern Kentucky University. He has published several works on Marxist theory, method, and political economics, including Marx's Scientific Dialectics (Brill, 2007). Many scholars see science and politics as mutually exclusive realms, where the latter's influence contaminates former's purity. Karl Marx's critics often interpret him within this framework, where his value-laden judgments render his analysis of capitalism moot. Though defenders argue that Marx rejects an objective-subjective dichotomy, this book offers a different interpretation. Through the method of critique Marx examines problems and biases in putatively neutral forms of scientific knowledge, specifically models that fail to capture the relations of power and knowledge dominant in capitalist society. By incorporating these relations into his abstractions and tracing their historical movement, Marx's corrective to malformed approaches to scientific knowledge more readily lays bare capitalist society's exploitative and distortive nature. This book demonstrates these principles and applies them to conventional sociological methods, theories of religion, and class analysis.

Marx’s Method of Successive Abstractions and a Historical-materialist Sociology of Religion

“…The conclusions to which Marx’s methods lead are where a dialectical approach to science meets the politics of abstraction (Paolucci, 2007, 2011). Static conceptions of religion—universal definitions that depict it as a historical constant, functionalist apologetics based on this depiction—fail to grasp religion’s real development in time, space, and social structure.…”

Forum: In the Beginning There was No Word (for it): Terms, Concepts, and Early Sovereignty

“…From the methodological perspective of a sociological anti-idealist (or, expressed positively, a materialist), the affirmative answer to Prudovsky's question is obvious, as there is an objective social reality existing "out there" independent of our concepts of it. Social practices can, in this line, exist prior to us encapsulating them semantically in a distinct term such as "sovereignty" (cf., Bugge 2007, Paolucci 2011. For the sociological idealists who do not acknowledge the possibility of a methodological divide between knowledge (including language, concepts) and a knowledgeindependent reality (the social world), the answer to Prudovsky's question is negative.…”

La recherche qualitative critique : la synergie des approches inductives et des approches critiques en recherche sociale

“…Ce projet passe par l'élaboration d'une théorie critique de la société à l'encontre de la pensée scientifique classique qui miroite la réalité plutôt que s'efforcer de la changer (Horkheimer, 1937(Horkheimer, /1974. Le projet de l'Institut de recherches sociales consiste donc à développer un marxisme scientifique en mesure d'analyser et de remettre en question l'ordre social bourgeois qui, dans la société capitaliste, laisse le patronat exploiter le prolétariat à ses propres fins, privant ce dernier de sa liberté et de sa dignité (Jay, 1977(Jay, /1989Paolucci, 2011).…”