Item – Theses Canada

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OCLC number
46507025
Author
Duchesne, Ricardo,1957-
Title
All contraries confounded : historical materialism and the transition-to-capitalism debate.
Degree
Ph. D. -- York University, 1994
Publisher
Ottawa : National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1995.
Description
3 microfiches.
Notes
Includes bibliographical references.
Abstract
In this dissertation I argue that the debate over the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe has reached an impasse, given the dominant methodological assumptions characteristic of Marxism in general. I examine this whole debate anew using Hegel's phenomenological procedure in contrast to the empiricist, structuralist, and functionalist methods of the past. By phenomenology I understand a logic of implication, in which key texts or theories are examined in their own terms, to determine whether their arguments are true in the manner in which they are claimed to be true. Using this phenomenological procedure, I show that no theory of the Transition is able to justify its claims for the primacy of any one factor without invoking "auxiliary" or "secondary" factors as intrinsic to their explanations. Throughout this phenomenological investigation, apparently stable theories are shown to be inherently unstable, always pointing beyond themselves. This is not because these theories are logically inconsistent. One of the inferences of this dissertation is that this is an inescapable dilemma which every foundational theory faces: no matter how complex or rigorous, it can never give a full account of itself, by itself; it will always appeal to an 'outside'--antinomies which disrupt any presumption of achieved identity. The conclusion of this dissertation deals briefly with the problem of historical indeterminacy that this phenomenological deconstruction raises. I challenge the idea that once we reject foundational knowing our understanding of history can no longer be determinate.
ISBN
0315996390
9780315996397