More importantly – and this brings me to my third task – I think my out-
line of a reading is productive. There is important work being done by Chris
Arthur, Patrick Murray, Geert Reuten, and others (to which I referred in the
introduction), work which seeks to reconstruct Marx’s presentation of the sci-
ence of political economy in accordance with the Aristotelian-Hegelian con-
ception of science. According to this Aristotelian-Hegelian lineage, science is
not the discovery, through abstraction, of predictive laws, as in the dominant
empiricist tradition, but rather the systematic presentation of the imminent
logic of a world of phenomena. I absolutely agree that Marx is a son of this
classical lineage, but I would add that he is an unruly son. Marx’s text does
not merely present a science, but critiques that science by leading the reader
through and beyond it. Science, for Marx, is a trial, not a foundation. Unlike
Aristotle and Hegel, Marx proceeds in his work from the irreducible differ-
ence between the effective forces and processes that make our world and the
logic of appearances to which those forces give rise. The latter is the realm
of science, while the former is the realm of history and of revolution. We will
make ourselves citizens of this realm of revolution only by showing ourselves
strong enough to overcome the realm of science.
58 • William Clare Roberts