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Laws and tendencies in Marxist political economy

Fleetwood, Steve

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Abstract

Whilst terms like 'law of the tendency', 'tendency law' and 'tendential law' appear in Marxist political economy, they are unclear. This paper identifies the main conceptions of laws and tendencies and disambiguates them. Part 1 differentiates between law as (i) event regularity; (ii) event regularity/tendency; and (iii) tendency. Part 2 focuses on (ii) identifying five interpretations: tendency as a trend, cyclical variation, stochastically specified law, counterfactual event and a deliberately imprecise concept. Part 3 introduces tendency as the (transfactual) way of acting of a thing with properties. Part 4 explains why this conception of tendency is impossible to mathematise. © The Author(s) 2012.

Citation

Fleetwood, S. (2012). Laws and tendencies in Marxist political economy. Capital and Class, 36(2), 235-262. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309816812437921

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Jun 1, 2012
Deposit Date Nov 8, 2011
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Capital and Class
Print ISSN 0309-8168
Electronic ISSN 2041-0980
Publisher SAGE Publications
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 36
Issue 2
Pages 235-262
DOI https://doi.org/10.1177/0309816812437921
Keywords tendency, law, regularity law, tendential law, ontology, aetiology, critical realism
Public URL https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/968212
Publisher URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309816812437921

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