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² ibid. p. 68, citing V. Y. Mudimbe.

³ Anderson, Perry, Lineages of the Absolutist State (New York, 1979), p. 8, criticises Marxist theory for failing to produce forceful justifications that the concepts used do correctly express observable instances. The division in practice between general and specific studies arises ‘from the widespread belief that an intelligible necessity only inhabits the broadest and most general trends in history, which operate so to speak “above” the multiple empirical circumstances of specific events and institutions, whose actual course or shape becomes by comparsion largely the outcome of chance. The practical consequences of this division are often to render general concepts so remote from historical reality that they cease to have any explicatory power at all, while particular studies fail vice versa to develop or refine any global theory’.Google Scholar

⁴ Farr, James, ‘Marx's Laws’, in Political Studies (Oxford), 34, 1986, pp. 202–22.Google Scholar

⁵ Kosik, Karel, Dialectics of the Concrete (Boston, 1976), pp. 22–3. For positivist science, facts are observable and understandable in isolation from each other, but can be added in order to arrive at descriptions of patterns and laws. Dialectical understanding requires that facts and events be understood in their changing relations to each other; they have no fixed properties or meanings apart from those interconnections.Google Scholar

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⁷ Habermas, Juergen, Toward a Rational Society (Boston, 1970).Google Scholar

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¹⁰ There is, additionally, the curious ‘theory of the elephant’. Other than observing the entire beast, what would be necessary to enable us to judge a description as partial?

¹¹ Ake, Claude, ‘The Congruence of Political Economies and Ideologies in Africa’, in Gutkind, and Wallerstein, (eds.), op. cit. p. 198.Google Scholar

¹² Saul, John, ‘Nationalism, Socialism, and Tanzanian History’, in Gutkind, Peter C. W. and Waterman, Peter (eds.). African Social Studies: a radical reader (London and New York, 1977), p. 150.Google Scholar

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¹⁴ Magubane, ‘The Evolution of the Class Structure in Africa’, p. 180.

¹⁵ Ake, Claude, The Political Economy of Africa (Harlow, 1981), pp. 12 and 4.Google Scholar

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¹⁷ Aronowitz, op. cit. p. xx.

¹⁸ Samoff, Joel, ‘Underdevelopment and its Grass Roots in Africa’, in Canadian Journal of African Studies (Ottawa), 14, 1, 1980, pp. 8 and 25 fn. 26.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Magubane and Nzongola-Ntalaja (eds.), op. cit. pp. 15–16.

²⁰ Sklar, Richard, ‘On the Concept of Power in Political Economy’, in H, D and Sklar, (eds.), Toward a Humanistic Science of Politics: essays in honor of Francis Durham Wolmuth (New York, 1983), pp. 179–206.Google Scholar

²¹ For example, compare Issa, G. Shivji's 1975 strictures of positivist empiricism in Class Struggles in Tanzania with his later analysisGoogle Scholar in Law, State, and the Working Class in Tanzania (London, 1986) which uses Marxist terminology but is really an extended exercise in positivist research.Google Scholar

²² See Reiman, Jeffrey and Headlee, Sue, ‘Marxism and Criminal Justice Policy’, in Crime and Delinquency (San Francisco), 27, 1, 1981, p. 33, for the following analysis: ‘the belief in the fundamentality of class is no more dogma than is the belief in atoms. It is simply the starting point of theory…Merely pointing to complex and diverse facts no more refutes the belief in class than pointing to the diversity of physical objects refutes the belief in the existence of atoms…At issue is the capacity of the theory to render a coherent and plausible explanation of the diverse facts that meet the eye’. In short, the ‘plausibility’ of class does not lie in the facts but in the underlying assumptions about social existence, and these are given by common sense and reason.Google Scholar

²³ Shivji, Class Struggles in Tanzania, p. 4.

²⁴ Miliband, Ralph, ‘Reply to Poulantzas’, in Blackburn, Robin (ed.), Ideology and Social Science (New York, 1972), p. 256.Google Scholar

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²⁶ van den Berg, Axel, ‘Social Science, Metatheory and Lofty Ideals: a reply to Wexler and Parker and to Aschley’, in American Journal of Sociology (Chicago), 88, 6, 1983, p. 1, 261.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁷ Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, pp. 5 and 38.

²⁸ See Thompson, E. P., Whigs and Hunters (New York, 1975), pp. 258–69, for his discussion of the rule of law.Google Scholar

²⁹ Ollman, Bertrell, Alienation: Marx's conception of man in capitalist society (New York, 1976 edn.).Google Scholar

³⁰ Marx, cited in Farr, loc. cit. p. 216.

³¹ Gouldner, Alvin, The Two Marxisms (New York, 1980), p. 130.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³² Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, pp. 189, 131, and 140.

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³⁴ Magubane, ‘The Evolution of the Class Structure in Africa’, p. 187.

³⁵ ibid. p. 171.

³⁶ Colletti, Lucio, ‘Marxism: science or revolution?’, in Blackburn, (ed.), op. cit. p. 374.Google Scholar

³⁷ ibid. p. 375.

³⁸ Kosik, op. cit. p. 22, expresses the idea in this manner: ‘every phenomenon can be conceived as a movement of the whole. A social phenomenon is an historical fact to the extent to which it is studied as a moment of a certain whole, that is, to the extent to which it fulfills that two-fold role which makes it an historical fact in the first place: the role of defining itself and of defining the whole…The interconnectedness and mediatedness of the parts and the whole also signifies that isolated facts are abstractions, artificially uprooted moments of a whole which become concrete and true only when set in the respective whole. Similarly, a whole whose moments have not been differentiated and determined is merely an abstract, empty whole’. Cf. Nnoli, ‘The African Social Scientist and his Society’, p. 27: ‘A fact in social sciences is a union of the past, the present and the future’.

³⁹ ibid. pp. 47–50.

⁴⁰ Samoff, ‘On Class, Paradigm, and African Studies’, p. 46.

⁴¹ ibid. p. 50. See also Scarritt, James R., ‘Relating Classes and Politics: the contribution of Joel Samoff to the study of Africa’, in Africa Today, 29, 3, 1982, pp. 36–8.Google Scholar

⁴² Samoff, Joel, ‘Crises and Socialism in Tanzania’, in The Journal of Modern African Studies (Cambridge), 19, 2, 06 1981, pp. 279–306.Google Scholar

⁴³ Ollman, op. cit. pp. 19, 38, and 60–9.

⁴⁴ ibid. p. 285, fn. 37.

⁴⁵ Again, Kosik expresses this point of view well in op. cit. p. 14: ‘Thinking progresses from a vibrant, chaotic, immediate idea of the whole towards concepts, to abstract conceptual determinations, and in summing them up returns to the starting point which no longer is an uncomprehended though vibrant whole of immediate perception, but is a richly differentiated and comprehended whole of the concept. The journey from the “chaotic idea of the whole” to the “rich totality of many determinations and relations” is identical with comprehending reality.’ Although the notion of an immediately apprehended whole is not familiar to positivist science, Kosik's phraseology resembles the argument advanced by Northrop, F. S. C., Logic of the Sciences and Humanities (Cleveland and New York, 1959)Google Scholar, that the mystical appreciation of totalities (as practised by ‘Eastern’ science) should be blended with the analytical rationality of ‘Western’ thought.Kosik's analysis points to a major division between what might be described as ‘totalisers’ and ‘discretisers’, differentiated by their views of what it is feasible to know in an immediate sense. Some scholars simply accept it as possible that the whole can be understood as one and at once; whereas positivists, scientific Marxists, and most common folk tend to find themselves limited by the belief that only discrete, unique events can be perceived directly.

⁴⁶ Gouldner, op. cit. pp. 202–3.

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⁴⁸ Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, p. 189.

⁴⁹ Antonio, Robert J., ‘Immanent Critique as the Core of Critical Theory: its origins and development in Hegel, Marx and contemporary thought’, in The British Journal of Sociology (London), 32, 3, 1981, p. 332.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Mennasemay, Maimire, ‘Political Theory, Political Science and African Development’, in Canadian Journal of African Studies, 16, 2, 1982, p. 223.Google Scholar

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⁵² Habermas, Juergen, Legitimation Crisis (Boston, 1975), and Toward a Rational Society.Google Scholar

⁵³ Aronowitz, op. cit. pp. 34–42.

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⁵⁶ ibid. Vol. II, p. 142.

⁵⁷ Feenberg, Andrew, Lukacs, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory (Totowa, N.J., 1981), p. 25.Google Scholar

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⁵⁹ Kosik, op. cit. p. 137.

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⁶¹ Chabal, Patrick, Amilcar Cabral: revolutionary leadership and people's war (Cambridge, 1983).Google Scholar

⁶² Aidoo, Thomas Akwasi, ‘Ghana: social class, the December coup, and the prospects for socialism’, in Magubane, and Nzongola-Ntalaja, (eds.), op. cit. pp. 15 and 151.Google Scholar

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⁶⁴ Ake, op. cit. p. vii.

⁶⁵ E.g. Charney, Craig, ‘Political Power and Social Class in the Neo-Colonial African State’, in Review of African Political Economy (Sheffield), 38, 1987, pp. 48–65;Google ScholarJoseph, Richard, ‘The Ethnic Trap: notes on the Nigerian campaign and elections, 1978–1979, in Issue: quarterly journal of opinion (Los Angeles), 11, 1–2, 1981, pp. 17–23;Google ScholarMafeje, Archie, ‘The Ideology of “Tribalism”’, in The Journal of Modern African Studies, 9, 2, 06 1971, pp. 253–6;CrossRefGoogle Scholarand Nnoli, ‘Ethnicity and the Working Class in Africa’.Google Scholar

⁶⁶ Saul, John, ‘The Dialectic of Class and Tribe’, in Race and Class (London), 20, 4, Spring 1979, p. 371, argues that ethnicity must be taken ‘seriously as a real rather than ephemeral and/or vaguely illegitimate variable in Africa’, and that the ‘availability’ of ethnic consciousness needs explaining in its own right rather than be reduced to colonial manipulation or bourgeois ideology. He attempts to locate the continuing persistence of ethnic identity in the centre-periphery contradiction, and in the ‘frozen transition’ from pre-capitalist to capitalist modes of production, both of which gives rise to nationalistic/ethnic appeals. Also, ethnic consciousness can be a progressive force in the struggle by the dominated against the ruling class and imperialism. Ethnicity is a real puzzle, a genuine anomaly.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ E.g. Ake, op. cit.; Barongo, Yolamu (ed.), Political Science in Africa: a critical review (London, 1983);Google ScholarFreund, Bill, The Making of Contemporary Africa: the development of African society since 1800 (London, Basingstoke, and Princeton, 1984); and Gutkind, and Waterman, (eds.), op. cit.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁶⁹ ibid. p. 297.

⁷⁰ Kolakowski, op. cit. Vol. II, p. 344.

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⁷⁴ Hirschman, Albert O., ‘The Search for Paradigms as a Hindrance to Understanding’, in World Politics (Princeton), 12, 3, 04 1970, p. 335.Google Scholar

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⁷⁶ Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1970 edn.), p. 10.Google Scholar

⁷⁷ ibid. p. 206.

⁷⁸ ibid. p. 135.

⁷⁹ ibid. pp. 204, 150 and 158.

⁸⁰ Samoff, ‘Class, Conflict and the State in Africa’, p. 42.

⁸¹ Keat, Russel and Urry, John, Social Theory as Science (London, 1975), p. 57.Google Scholar

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⁸³ Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, p. 26.

⁸⁴ E.g. von Freyhold, Michaela, ‘Labour Movements or Popular Struggles in Africa’, in Review of African Political Economy, 39, 1987, pp. 27–9.Google Scholar What, for example, does it mean to argue for the ‘adaptation’ of Marxist concepts to African realities, if these are not granted an autonomous power to shape or ‘force’ adaptations. In ‘Class, Class Conflict and the State in Africa’, p. 44, Samoff argues that ‘class’ is deprived of its Marxist connotations if defined as a ‘stratum’, as a concrete category of observable individuals and ‘their attitudes, values and behavior’; whereas if conceived properly, ‘class’ is ‘a relationship, defined simultaneously by structure and process’, and can be ‘observed indirectly by focusing on its behavior’. But the only observable ‘its’ are precisely the individuals and ‘their attitudes’ that have been rejected as indicators of class. There are no ‘its’ whose behaviour can be observed either directly or ‘indirectly’. Class is a construct, an imputed relationship among things and people. Hence it is not clear what adaptations African reality has forced on Marxist concepts and consciousness. As pointed out by Joshua B. Forrest, ‘The Contemporary African State: a “ruling class”?, in ibid. 38, 1987, pp. 69–70, there is ‘an unfortunate tendency among some Africanists to impose a modified Marxian framework on a social context in which classes are in fact quite difficult to locate’. In consequence, the ‘conceptual strength of their paradigm’ is weakened as ‘“class” is transformed into no more epistemologically significant a term than “group”, “caste”, “clique”, “status”, “name”, “identity”, or “affiliation”’.

⁸⁵ Kolakowski, op. cit. Vol. I, p. 311.

⁸⁶ Gouldner, op. cit. p. 21.Google Scholar See also Suchting, W., ‘Knowledge and Practice: toward a Marxist critique of traditional epistemology’, in Science and Society (New York), 47, 1, 1983, pp. 2–36.Google Scholar

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⁸⁸ Jewsiewicki, op. cit. p. 70.Google Scholar Following Critcher, Charles, ‘Structures, Cultures, Biographies’, in Cultural Studies (London), 1975, pp. 167–73,Google ScholarTakagi, Paul, ‘Race, Crime and Social Policy: a minority perspective’, in Crime and Delinquency, 27, 1, 1981, pp. 48–63, suggests the categories of structures (‘objective givens of a society’), cultures (common ways of thinking), and biographies (the attempts by individuals to manage their lives within given structural and cultural givens) as organisational devices. Events need to be explained by concepts appropriate to each category, and by the specific conjuncture of structure, culture, and biography. None of the categories is more or less true or primary for explanation. All are necessary.CrossRefGoogle Scholar