To return to Capital, the effect of the mistake I have just pointed out, which postulates the imaginary existence of a non-existent relation, is to make a different relation invisible, a relation which is legitimate because it exists and is established by right between the theory of the economy and the theory of history. If the first relation theory of the economy and concrete history was imaginary, the second relation theory of the economy and theory of history is a true theoretical relation. Why has it remained until cheap ghd australia now, if not invisible, at least opaque to us? Because the first relation had the advantage of obviousness, i.e., of the empiricist temptations of the historians who, reading pages of concrete history in Capital the struggle for the reduction of the working day, the transition from manufacture to modern industry, primitive accumulation, etc.
felt in some sense at home in it and therefore posed the problem of economic theory as a function of the existence of this concrete history, without feeling any need to pose the question of its status. They gave an empiricist interpretation of analyses of Marxs which, far from being historical analyses in the strict sense, i.e., analyses sustained by the development ghd midnight collection of the concept of history, are more the half-finished materials for a history cf. Balibars paper than a real historical treatment of those materials. They used the presence of these half-elaborated materials as an argument for an ideological concept of history, and therefore posed the question of this ideology of concrete history for the abstract theory of political economy: hence both the fascination of Capital for them, and their unease before a discourse which seemed to them to be speculative in many places.
The economists had much the same reaction, torn between concrete economic history and abstract economic theory. Both hoped to find in Capital what they sought, but they also found something else which ghd purple straighteners they had not sought and which they therefore tried to reduce, by posing the imaginary problem of the relation, one-to-one or otherwise, between the abstract order of concepts and the concrete order of history. They did not see that what they had found did not answer their question but a quite different question, which, of course, should have given the lie to the ideological illusion of the concept of history which they had brought with them and projected into their reading of Capital. They did not see that the abstract theory of political economy is the theory of region which, as a region level or instance is an organic component of the object of the theory of history itself. They did not see that history features in Capital as an object of theory, not as a real object
