Historical Materialism as Materialist Epistemology of History

Abstract

This article will try to address two broad questions in the debate on the logical and epistemological articulation of “historical materialism”: (1) how and in what respects historical temporality should be interpreted and, (2) more generally, whether or not Marx’s conception of history should be understood as a philosophy of history. Addressing the question of whether historical materialism should be defined as an epistemology of history and reconstructing an ontology of history consistent with Marx’s method of inquiry will lead to outlining a conception of historical temporality that does not conform to a stagist, unilinear and mechanistic paradigm but, rather, constitutes a multilinear and non-stagist conception of historical temporality.