pened under bourgeois or "proletarian" auspices: the destruction of the old landed aristocracy; the rise of a new ruling class in its place; the "annihilation" of small-scale production; the transformation of peasants and artisans into wage workers; the replacement of communal, patriarchal, and "idyllic" arrangements by contractual arrangements; a new individualism in personal life; the collapse of religion and the spread of scientific habits of thought; the demystification of authority. Some such series of developments had to take place whether anyone wanted it or not and no matter what groups happened to be in charge of the state at any given time. Marx's theory of history, Elster writes, was "strangely disembodied." By "working backward from end result to preconditions," it "could dispense with actors and their intentions." Because it dispensed with actors, we should add, it could also reduce questions of morality to the justification of means by the end decreed by "history."

The neglect of human agency not only made for moral obtuseness; it also made for historical miscalculation on a large scale. By denying any capacity for historical understanding or autonomous action on the part of his opponents, Marx assumed that capitalists and workers would carry out their prescribed assignments to the bitter end, the capitalists resisting demands for reform, the workers forced into more and more desperate and revolutionary measures of self-defense. Even in Marx's lifetime, however, it was clear that history had already deviated from "iron necessity" in important ways. The English government had begun to institute reforms that would eventually give the working class a share in political power. The fact that most of these reforms were pushed through by Tory regimes was one indication, moreover, that the "bourgeois revolution" had not brought the bourgeoisie to power either in France or even in England; and while Marx advanced ingenious explanations to show why it was not always in the best interest of capitalists to govern outright, these explanations represented an implicit admission that the course of history is governed not by some overarching set of "natural laws" but by particular events, by specific conflicts over the distribution of wealth and power, and by decisions made in the heat of the moment, often with inadequate information, that often turn out to have quite unexpected results.

The more the grand structure of Marx's theory has to be modified to allow for "exceptions," the less it explains. The entire history of capital

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