O problema da produção do conhecimento histórico na polêmica Thompson-Althusser

Abstract

Edward Thompson publishes in 1978 The Poverty of Theory, an essay in which he consolidates his quarrel with Louis Althusser. The objects of his criticism are Pour Marx and Lire le Capital, both from the decade of 1960. The polemic can be methodologically divided in two dimensions, theory and politics, and we will focus in the first one. This research aims to accomplish a descriptive analysis of the works related to the quarrel based on four questions referring to the problem of production of historical knowledge: “Is History a science?”, “What is the object of History?”, “What is the place and function of concepts in a Marxist theory of History?” and “What is the method for a Marxist theory of history?”. Such questions are fundamental to discuss the specificity of Marxist historiography. We consider the resumption of this polemic to be important, because the diffusion of The Poverty of Theory in the decade of 1980 provoked the expurgation of Althusserian theory of Brazilian historiography. In order to understand the main terms of the quarrel, we seek to point the intrinsic relation between method and theory in the production of historical knowledge , as well as the need of overcoming the “objectivity” of the “object” of History. Some present elements that delimit the situation in which this polemic develops are the denunciation of “Stalin’s crimes” in the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the pluralisation of Marxism after 1956 and the polemic involving the New Left Review.