I’ve been working on a multi-year project to closely read and comprehensively annotate significant writings in the history of philosophy up to the end of the 20th century. Being able to teach this material at a high level, and to critically evaluate and engage with contemporary critical theory, are the two attractors at which this project is aimed, so writings outside of the traditional western analytic canon of philosophy have been included (from Adorno to Zhuangzi).

However, in the last few months I’ve come to realize that what is missing from this attempt at a comprehensive engagement with the history of philosophy is a historical lens that can help situate these thinkers and their writings in their material, historical contexts. By reading these thinkers mostly chronologically, I’m at a vantage where I can see how many of these thinkers are in dialogue with their predecessors, but this alone is insufficient for understanding their intellectual production and thought, since it misses how such production might be the outgrowth of the particular material conditions permeating their existence. (I’m thinking here of Adam Smith theorizing about an already nascent capitalism; John Locke theorizing about liberalized monarchies after the English revolution of England, etc.)

So this set me in search of complementary material histories that I could pair with the various periods within my project. Materialist histories like Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century, E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, The Long 19th Century (Hobsbawm), and even this reddit post which sums up how the Holocaust can be effectively explained by a marxian approach; all of these clearly back-up Marx’s bold claim found in the title of this post, at least for the last five centuries.

However, I have yet to find anything quite as accomplished or detailed for the preceding millennia (something like “A People’s History of the World” would be a vulgar approximation; and Graeber and Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything seem to intentionally sidestep a marxist account of pre-history in favour of an anarchist flavour).

My question is – why? If historical materialism bears so much explanatory fruit, why isn’t there an accomplished comprehensive account of all hitherto existing society? Plate tectonics, for example, was a theory that gave us an entire history of the earth; evolution, an entire history of life; where is the marxian retrospective? Is it a problem of evidence? A limitation of the medium (i.e. history is too complex and particular to be distilled into one book or one series)? Where is the compendium for the immortal science?