Jon Elster and I each worked sympathetically on Marxism for a long time, and each of us independently came to see that Marxism in its traditional form is associated with explanations of a special type, ones in which, to put it roughly, consequences are used to explain causes. In keeping with normal practice, Elster calls such explanations functional explanations, and I shall follow suit here. 1 He deplores the association between Marxism and functional explanation, because he thinks there is no scope for functional explanation in social science. It is, he believes, quite proper in biology, because unlike social phenomena, biological ones satisfy the presuppositions that justify its use. Elster therefore concludes that the Marxist theory of society and history should abandon functional explanation. He also thinks that it should, instead, draw for its explanations on the resources of game theory.
I do not think that course is open to historical materialism. I believe that historical materialism's central explanations are unrevisably functional in nature, so that if functional explanation is unacceptable in social theory then historical materialism cannot be reformed and must be rejected. But I do not think functional explanation is unacceptable in social theory. My judgment that historical materialism is indissolubly wedded to functional explanation naturally reflects my conception of the content of historical materialist theory. To display, then, the grounds of that judgment, I shall expound what I think historical materialism says. I shall provide a r~sum~ of the theory that I attribute, on a textual basis, to Marx, and that I explicate and defend in my book Karl Marx's Theory of History. z
In my book I say, and Marx says, that history is, fundamentally, the growth of human productive power, and that forms of society rise and fall according as they enable and promote, or prevent and discourage, that growth. The canonical text for this interpretation is the famous 1859 "Preface" to A