Image source: Peace at Last (blog)
The sword did not beat itself into the plowshare, nor did it then smelt itself down into the boiler of the steam engine. People thought of doing that, and then decided to do it. It’s the people’s motivations that are the puzzle, not the plowshare’s.
I have been doing a relative deep dive into Marx of late, reading some primary works (On the Jewish Question and The German Ideology) as well as a good secondary work (Giddens, 1995; Morrison, 2006) that translates him for present-day reader. As always, my efforts are to attempt an integrated understanding of the things I am reading in the context my developing understanding of how social science attempts to make sense of the world. Essentially, what I have been trying to figure out with these readings is what is meant by ‘materialism’, since there are a number of different takes on it. This interest is spurred by the notion of ‘materialism vs. idealism’ as one of the fundamental divisions within social science.
I am coming to the conclusion that this divide cannot be one of the most fundamental divisions in social science, despite the pedigree of the debate. Both terms – materialism and idealism – are much too amorphous to be made sense of. Each side to this debate can either win or lose by virtue of how broadly or narrowly the concepts of ‘idea’ and ‘matter’ are defined. The tendency for definitional gerrymandering makes this debate fruitless. Furthermore, ‘materialism’ is in essence just a stalking-horse for other concepts, such as rationalism, objectivity, and the stable preference for wealth and security.
Below the fold, I explore the various materialisms and materialism’s alleged conceptual opposite, idealism – which in international relations theory is often called ‘Constructivism’. I argue that materialism, as an approach to understanding human developments, basically exists to provide a simple objective means of deducing people’s and states’ interests. However, that relatively useful notion of materialism is also made up of separate assumptions, each of which is a better guide to understanding what is really at stake in the materialism vs. idealism debate. The materialism-idealism debate is really about the contradiction between objectivity and subjectivity, and the degree to which people pursue goals or behave as they are supposed to behave. Finally, the question of materialism vs. idealism is wrapped up in the question of how society is mutable.
That humans, states, and other actors pursue wealth and security is the foundational assumption of Economics and Political Science (respectively). These disciplines are then treated as the materialist disciplines as compared to sociology and cultural anthropology, which are often treated as the ‘softer’, ‘ideas-laden’ social sciences. That’s not to dismiss the degree to which the materialism-idealism debate is one that also rages within all of the disciplines, but that is the general point of view from outside of them.
My point here is that this particular dichotomy is a mistake. The materialism vs. idealism debate is too laden down with prior assumptions and fuzzy notions. The boundaries between what is material and what is ideal is sometimes misunderstood or simply gerrymandered in order to win the debate without necessarily saying anything meaningful. The best thing to do is to realize that this debate is derivable from other debates, and to focus on those others instead. At stake here are the intellectual foundations of the social sciences and the ability of social scientists to communicate to one another across disciplines, or even between different schools of thought – for example within international relations. That is currently lacking, and so there is a tower-of-Babel problem between the different social sciences as well as within international relations.
What is Materialism?
There are many materialisms. Ontologically, there are at least three meaningful materialisms in the social sciences: the prevailing understanding argued by Karl Marx, the philosophical tradition, and materialism as a set of values. In sociology there is also a ‘new’ materialism, which will be dealt with in brief below. Marx’s understanding is what to a great extent brought the debate into the social sciences (Aristotle and Plato notwithstanding). The sections below survey these to get a sense of their foundations and relevance.
Marx's Materialism
In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels ([1848]1976) argued against the intellectual hegemon of their day, Hegel, who argued that the world is a battleground for dialectics of ideas. They argued that this was not the case, and that historically developing modes of production determined the course of human events. This argument became the conventional understanding of ‘materialism’ in the social sciences. It did so by creating that contrast with Hegel’s idealism.
According to Little (2012), materialism as an explanation of developments in society is about technology and the “social arrangements governing production” (p. 199), what Marx called the ‘mode of production’ (Morrison, 2006, p. 49-51). Essentially what this argues is that (small-e) economics (ie. not Economics, the academic discipline, but the means by which folks have their livelihoods) is really the key to understanding the rest of what motivates developments in human society. It explains both politics, social conflict, and even cultural phenomena. With the focus on the class conflict between the owners of the means of the production and the working class, Marx seems to have paid very little attention to the conflict between elite groups, such as the warrior aristocracies that rule states, or the warrior bureaucracies that would supplant them deeper into the modern era.
Marxist materialism – also called ‘historical materialism’ – leaves assumptions about individual actor behavior, the microfoundations of social science, implied. As a grand historical theory it does not specify how one person, alone, will behave. Social science is, however, about interpersonal interaction, of which the lowest-common denominator is the dyad of two actors. Marx implies that two actors will act in a certain way depending on their station in society, capacity for violence, or ownership of the means of production. The implication is that there is a pre-existing material difference between two individuals in which one has an advantage over the other, and the other is, then, exploited for their labor. The material difference between them is assumed. In this simple two-actor model, there needs to be a sufficient disparity between the two actors that the materially wealthier actor has enough of an advantage to destitute the other to the point where that other is forced to sell their labor rather than engage in a progressively advantageous livelihood of self-employment.
According to this approach whole societies constitute themselves around the overall goal of production and reproduction of itself. The need for production (ie. livelihoods) is central to what any society must do, and production requires a material base: biological and mineral matter. The intellectual ‘substance’ of technology and organization are obviously necessary for production, but that latter ‘matter’ is so presumed that it has been effectively rendered ‘immaterial’. Yet, these are requirements for Marx’s mode of production to operate. The organization of production is where the exploitation of the workers happens that Marx is centrally concerned with.
The virtue of Marxist materialism is that it presents – either in itself or implied – a fairly coherent theory. It takes on board Economics’ general assumptions with the caveat that actors see one another as exploitable labor resources rather than as potential trading partners. It is ‘materialist’ in the sense that material resources provide actors with the capability to produce and reproduce as well as coerce one another into systems of exploitation. In Marx’s nineteenth century, moreover, the material resources used in the production of agriculture and manufactures were manifestly the overwhelming share of the economy that it was easier to overlook the economic value of ideas and knowledge as resources. Furthermore, as Giddens distinguishes class societies from class-divided societies, Marx’s era saw the erosion of the value of traditional class divisions to one in which one’s station was a function of one’s wealth, rather than one’s wealth as being a function of one’s station. As such, material wealth – ownership of the means of production – as seen as increasingly relevant, as compared to the cultural baggage of agricultural class-divided society.
Physicalism
The Marxist understanding contrasts to a philosophical tradition of materialism, which argues that people’s behavior depends not only on their physical environment, but also their physical constitution. Not only do humans require mineral and biological resources, at a micro-level their behavior is determined by brain chemistry. This latter aspect is an understanding contrasted to the notion of a train of thought developing in the brain with its own logic and direction. This version of materialism is also called physicalism. Essentially, physicalism is the corner that constructivists such as Alexander Wendt (see below) paint materialism into by insisting on materialism’s narrow foundation on a physical base - matter.
The legacy of this philosophical materialism is likely coupled with the 19th century’s industrialism and lust for raw materials, which drove Europe’s colonial expansion. The philosophy has not caught up with Keynes’ animal spirits, the knowledge and service economies of the 20th and 21st centuries, nor with the realities of security and insecurity. At nearly any level, human behavior is motivated by notions that are at such a remove from a given allocation of particular physically-material resources, that it just makes no sense to treat them as the essential bedrock to human understanding. Those human beings who are forced to behave in such a way are also the least powerful people in society. They are more at the whims of those with less-physical/material concerns than they are subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous weather and crop yields.
This narrowly physical reading of materialism is so narrow that it becomes useless to social science. It is manifest that the world is constructed on mountains of shared human ideas. The social world is more than the yeasty stuff of energy-hungry neurons. At the global level, the raw materials of the physical environment tend to bring their social environments more poverty than wealth. Mineral resources are as often as not a curse more than a blessing (Sachs & Warner, 1995). As such the physical base can be at odds with the economic reality.
Materialist Values
A third understanding of materialism is, itself, ideational in nature. It is what Ronald Inglehart (1977) calls ‘materialist values’, as opposed to ‘post-materialist values’. The materialism in this context is about believing in (ie. having an idea of) the pursuit of security, wealth, and livelihood being what people do and should do, while post-materialism is about justice, freedom, and equality (to name a few) – ie. the notion that people should pursue higher goals than the bottom line.
However, those material values – also often called survival values – are much more than the assumption that individual people need to put their material survival first. It further implies a narrow – but not individual – concept of the self. Survival values warrant more conflictual inter-group behavior that is much more than merely the competition for resources. It protects the norms of behavior that symbolize one as a member of a certain group, even when those norms of behavior have little to do with the group’s survival, security or integrity. Furthermore, the groups in question themselves are not necessarily constituted for the survival of its members. When materialism is taken as a set of values in themselves, it is open to more between heaven and earth than is theorized by economists.
“New” Materialism
There seems to be a new take on materialism is sociology, which at one stage argues that there should be “a focus upon matter”, but not so much upon what matter is, but what on matter does. This approach does not ‘privilege’ human agency, nor does it deny that thoughts, memories, desires and emotions have material effects (Fox & Alldred, 2017, p 23-26). It is also one that refuses to take a stand on the ‘dualisms’ between the natural and cultural and between mind and matter. In short, a materialism that is not all that materialist. It is probably a wise approach to take – leaving the baggage of the old debate behind – but it is not one that has any business calling itself materialist. An -ism needs to have some grounding in its original concept, and it must also be one that focuses on the cause of developments, rather than the developments that are the effects being explained.
Drawing & Quartering the Materialisms
With this range of different understandings of materialism, we are none the wiser. The extremely material materialism – physicalism – is too narrow to be useful, while Inglehart’s materialism is itself constituted by ideas. The new materialism seems pointless if not absurd. Marx’s materialism appears a happy Goldilocks medium and has the advantage of a long-standing pedigree. But is it more than some arbitrary spot on the spectrum?
Furthermore, as societies and economies have developed, the material part of materialism – biological necessities sated by biological and mineral resources - seems to be a smaller and smaller part of ‘the economy’ as agriculture and manufacturing are eclipsed by service sectors, and much of an economy’s added value is based on the communication of ideas. Furthermore, technological change and the whims of fashion, not to mention Keynes’ “animal spirits”, all impact the demand and supply of goods, services and investment capital, none of which is that slow and steady deterministic factor on social structure that materialism used to represent.
Certainly there is a use at looking at economic factors to social developments as well as individual-level decisions. However, it is not useful to be under the illusion that Economics has a physically-material base the way that the word suggests. Likewise, it is not helpful to usurp some moralistic high-ground in which materialistic values are somehow the motivations of a baser form of humanity. It is better to be done with the concept altogether and move on to ideas about human motivation and behavior that lead to clearer insights.
What of Constructivism?
Constructivism is a more current term for idealism, at least within international relations theory. International relations (IR) theory remains the anchor of my knowledge base, since that is where I received my intellectual foundations. In that political-science corner of the social sciences, Alexander Wendt (1999) contrasts the materialist approaches of Neorealism and Neoliberalism to the Constructivist approach. As an idealist approach, Constructivism is the theoretical paradigm that people and organizations respond to situations according to the way in which they intersubjectively interpret them. Those interpretations are, themselves, ideas, as are the interests and power that drive actors to act.
Neorealism and Neoliberalism, he argues, assume that states pursue ‘power’ and ‘interests’, which they mistakenly presume are objectively material. The difference between them, Wendt argues, is that Neoliberals also highlight the role of international institutions. Power is often narrowly defined as military capability (aka the ‘mode of destruction’), and interest as the “egotistic desire for power, wealth and security” (p. 92).
Wendt explicitly contrasts the materialism of Neorealism and Neoliberalism to the ‘conventional’ Marxist understanding of the term (p. 94). What Wendt does is to reduce Neorealism and Neoliberalism into straw men by arguing that power, interests, and institutions are constituted by ‘ideas all the way down’. In so doing he effectively takes philosophical physicalism as the contrast to ‘ideas’. He defines materialism into a trash can of which he then disposes.
Essentially, I agree with Wendt that software is vastly more important than hardware, but I think that in so doing he unfairly sucks the marrow out of Neorealism and Neoliberalism. That is a disservice since neither of them argue for a physicalist understanding of materialism. Both argue for a rationalist approach, which implies an objective assessment based on consequentialist logics, with fairly static assumptions about the nature of international politics. These do not require power and interests to be about the number of tanks, bombers, or barrels of oil produced. What it means is that they assume a broadly intersubjective understanding of what people and states want for themselves. These assumptions are so intersubjective – so widely understood – that it is effectively objective. Neorealists and Neoliberals also assume that states and other actors have interests that are often at odds with one another (Neorealism) but sometimes compatible (Neoliberalism). Their theories are about the logics of interaction. They are not about the mode of production, the physical base, or the materialist belief systems of peoples.
Constructivism can be a very useful criticism of these paradigms of thinking – that differences in perspective matter, that power and interest can fundamentally change over time, and that norms structure the system – but Wendt’s ideas-based criticism of them is beside the point. They should not be taken as straw men, because then the criticism itself becomes facile. Furthermore, Constructivism is wholly under-theorized. By arguing that interests are not objectively deducible, and that power (the means to pursue those interests) and also not calculable, it effectively advises analysts to throw up their hands. One might as well consult a Ouija board to impute the behavior of actors.
Why Materialism vs. Idealism in the first place?
Yet, what is the point of the debate between the import of the material/physical reality vs. the ‘world of ideas’ in terms of which is the most critical explanations of human events? The point has been to understand the behavior of actors, be those individuals, firms, states, or any other collective human agency that makes decisions.
What is implicit in this debate is:
- The degree to which interests can be objectively deduced,
- The degree to which actors pursue ‘interests’ as compared to following norms, and
- The degree to, and manner in, which those interests are mutable.
The pursuant sections explore these three aspects in turn. However, the point is to realize that these are all part of the materialism vs. idealism debate, but on their own also capture different debates within the social sciences.
Objective vs. Subjective
A materialist world is presumed to be understandable through humanity’s objective need for physical resources, such as food, shelter, clothing, etc., in order to survive and thrive. The patterns of production and consumption of these resources can be objectively tracked and (presumably) understood. This is both an ontological as well as epistemological point. It is ontological since the rational-actor model, in which an actor seeks to expand its capacity to use material resources, allows for simple models to be built. It is epistemological because those models can then be tested. Also, questions of objectivity and subjectivity raise questions for the abilities of actors to understand one another. Materialist presumptions, not only by social scientists, but also by actors themselves, provide them a baseline to anticipate one another’s motives and responses to different actions and communications.
On that heap of assumptions, Economics – the discipline – has made its bed. Yet, the value and production of ideas in the economy is not – by most economists – taken as a controversial matter. The economy is driven more by changes in technology, tastes, organizational patterns – ideas – more than it is subject to the exploitation of physical resources. Ideas are not a prohibitive issue for economists. The importance of ideas is not the antithesis to their craft. The idea that people can come to an intersubjective valuation of goods and services is precisely the point of Economics. If materialism is about matter over mind (physicalism), then Economics is not a materialist science. Economics is about how actors negotiate intersubjective values in the real and measurable world.
The point of materialism is to deduce what people want and thereby predict their behavior. It is to make their behavior understandable without having to delve into the complex subjective human social psyche or culture. By contrast, the point of the idealist position is to demonstrate that different people want different things because they think different thoughts. According to that position, in order to predict behavior, one needs to understand a person’s or a people’s subjective point of view – their psychology or culture.
As such, it is quite immaterial (pun intended) what people want as long as their behavior can be deduced (predicted) by an analyst who cannot induce (read) their specific thoughts. Materialism has been one version of deducing people’s preferences for satisfying their needs and wants and thus predicting their behavior.
Logic of Consequentiality
Another presumption of ‘materialism’ is the degree to which actors transgress their moral codes – norms – in order to pursue security and material gain. Norms, here, are codes of conduct that provide actors with a list of dos and don’ts, depending on role and situation. It is what James March (1982) calls the logic of consequentiality vs. the logic of appropriateness. According to the former, actors manipulate their surroundings – social and physical environment – in deliberate pursuit of goals. The logic of appropriateness, by contrast, argues that actors behave in ways that are deemed appropriate for them. Given that a society makes it appropriate for people to be safe and have a livelihood, these two are not opposites (see the materialist values, above). Furthermore, the Marxist presumption is that moral codes are enablers of the mode of production. Yet, there are social codes that dictate barriers to the degree to which they pursue security and material gain, especially where these might transgress on the ability of others to do the same.
The fact of production implies a logic of consequentiality. People perform labor, usually onerous, in order to meet their needs at a later moment. Economics and Political Science in particular presume that actors are goal-motivated. They are ‘rational’ in the sense that they calculate the costs and benefits of manipulating their environment in the pursuit of their goals. Any norms of behavior are guideposts, and may pose a reputation cost or benefit to breaking or maintaining norms, respectively.
Mutability
Another reason that materialism has been an easy presumption for social science is that ideas are often presumed to be more mutable than basic human material needs are. The economic literature presumes fixed preferences for material affluence. In the old sociological literature that looks at modernization and rationalization, the presumption was that societies became more rational and materialistic as they modernized. The modern society allegedly created the modern man, who was rational and materialistic. Inglehart’s (1977) research, however, argues that societies – particularly the affluent Western societies – have become less materialistic over time, having concerns for interests not narrowly related to their immediate or medium-term survival and affluence.
What both Inglehart’s and Hofstede’s (e.g. Hofstede, Hofstede & Minkov, 2010) research into intercultural comparison also shows, however, is that social values generally do not change rapidly over time. That said, they do shift – and the same is true of the materialism of societies. That said, Weber’s ([1915[1930) argument regarding the Iron Cage suggests that people’s individual-level social values can often be overruled by the values embedded in the social system. Social systems take longer to change than individuals’ minds do.
Nevertheless, in society decisions are made by those who have the greatest affluence and power. These are also those who are least likely to be nervous about their daily bread, and least likely to have the basic material necessities of the society at heart. Through their control over cultural media, they furthermore set the cultural agenda in terms of determining what ‘the society’ is seen to value. They can afford to follow the whims of their post-materialist values. This is nothing new.
As a result, while Economics presumes stable material preferences, neither the material base of a society nor its cultural and social values, are static or infinitely mutable. Materialist values were only even fixed in economic theory – never in reality. Therefore, materialism vs. idealism as a framework for understanding changes in society only really matters much if materialism is taken as material values vs. post-materialist values (or pre-materialist values as the case may theoretically be), but ‘materialism’ as such is just another set of ideational values. This is not a cardinal orientation to steer one’s social science philosophy after.
Conclusion
Materialism is generally understood in different ways, often depending on the cudgel the user requires for the dead horse at hand. It is often contrasted to idealism (or Constructivism) as one of the primary contradistinctions in social science. Regrettably, however, this amorphous polarity is not at all useful as a navigational device in the social sciences given its shifting orientation.
It is useful, however, to dissect materialism’s corpse. It helps us find the components that can still be useful for understanding human motivations and social structures. These can, then, be used in order to have more insight into more contemporary theories of Sociology, Economics, Political Science, and Cultural Anthropology. These are the ideas of how objectivity, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity are both part of our different understandings of human beings (ontology) as well as how we go about understanding human and social behavior (epistemology). Finally, we can also jettison the materialist conceit of the fixedness or mutability of human materialist interests, as these are just as mutable as ideas are – perhaps even more so – given the shifting nature of what constitutes the material in question as well as the general slowness with which ideas often change in society.
Even the most common understanding of materialism in social science, Marx’s idea that the forces and relations of production determine social developments – is still captured by economic perspectives. The perspective of Marx, nor those of Economics, were never all that physically-materialist to begin with, and have since become less so as ideas have increasingly become that which the factors of production produce. We gain more insight into the discipline of Economics when we take materialism’s dissected parts, and realize that the assumed objectivism is still there, but also that the theoretical core of Economics is about how subjective actors arrive at intersubjective prices. Furthermore, rationalism, also known as the logic of consequentiality, is still a firm and perfectly debatable part of the social sciences. It never needed materialism to be there.
In the end, materialism was probably a useful foil to vague notions of Hegelian ideas. It has its place in philosophy as well as neuro-psychology, but social science has too many levels beneath it for materialism to be a valid approach. Let us simply be done with it.
Works Cited
Fox, N.J. & Alldred, P. (2017). Sociology and the new materialism: Theory, research, action. London: Sage Publications.
Giddens, A. (1995). A contemporary critique of historical materialism, 2nd ed. Basingstoke, UK: MacMillan Press.
Hofstede, G., Hofstede, G-J. & Minkov, M. (2010). Cultures and organizations: Software of the mind, 3rd Ed. New York: McGraw Hill.
Inglehart, R. (1977). The silent revolution: Changing values and political styles among Western publics. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Little, D. (2012). Varieties of social explanation: an introduction to the philosophy of social science. Boulder: Westview Press.
March, J.G. (1982). Theories of choice and making decisions. Society, 20(1), 29-39.
Marx, K. (2009). On the Jewish question. Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. Andy Blunden, Matthew Grant and Matthew Carmody (Eds.). (Original work published 1844)
Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1976). The German Ideology. Moscow: Progress Publishers. (Original work scribbled 1846)
Morrisson, K. (2006). Marx, Durkheim, Weber: Formations of modern social thought, (2nd ed.). London: Sage Publications.
Sachs, J. & Warner, A. (1995). "Natural Resource Abundance and Economic Growth". NBER Working Paper (5398). doi:10.3386/w5398.
Weber, M. (1930). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. T. Parsons (trans.) New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. (Original work published 1915)
Wendt, A. (1999). Social theory of international politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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