Bourgeois Epoch

Richard Hamilton's Critique of Marx and Engels

Richard Hamilton provides an in-depth critique of the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on Britain, France, and Germany. Hamilton contends that the validity of their principal historical claims has been assumed more often than investigated, and he reviews the logic of their historical arguments, citing relevant sources that challenge many of the assertions they used to build their theory of inexorable historical change.

Although Marx emphasized the need for systematic empirical research into historical events, he and Engels in fact relied on impressionistic evidence to support their claims of how fault lines were forming in capitalist society. Hamilton concludes that Marxist theory is poorly supported in the historical analysis supplied by its original formulators. In showing that the historical record points to alternative readings of the course of social, economic, and political development in Western society, Hamilton argues that class boundaries tend to be fluid and that major change is more often than not the product of evolutionary rather than revolutionary forces.

Publication Information

Originally published in 1991.

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