362
PARTISAN REVIEW
There is nothing in the loose, fragmentary, and occasional "alii·
ance of history with practical politics" which could have rendered
to · the disconnected and widely divergent historical studies
the
same service which the intimate
alliance of science with technology
and industry
has rendered to the sciences proper.
The cooperation and division of labor that is characteristic
of modern industry has been only superficially duplicated in
the
realm of historical thought. The "industrialization of history" has
in many cases reproduced the pathological features of the indus–
trial sy. tern without reproducing its positive results. Every critical
observer is aware of the utter dependence of present-day historical
research on the hazard of existing "raw materials" and on the
other hazard of the invention of new tools and machinery. For
example, as Toynbee points out, a great number of modern his·
torians have turned to the study of the Dynasty of the Ptolemies in
Egypt rather than to that of the immensely more important and
historically interesting Dynasty of the Seleucids in Asia simply
because the "Ptolemaic papyri" offered the richest mine of un–
worked raw material in this field.
Thus it appears that the present-day organization of historical
research does not even reflect that comparatively unsatisfactory
regulation of industrial production which prevailed in the earliest
phases of "free" commodity production and which was in fact
!nstrumental in keeping the sciences proper in line. Industrial
production is bound, after all, by the laws of the market; a com·
modity must have some social utility to be sold; its "use-value"
appears in its "exchange-value." No similar "automatic" self·
correction results from the pseudo-"market" for which the special–
ized historical scholars produced their often entirely useless com·
modities. The picture is not improved by the
institutionalization
to which the scientific production of the American scholars has
been recently subjected through the increasing control and direc·
tion of their formerly "free" activities by the powerful scientific
Foundations. Here as in other fields the mockery of a "planned"
production that is superimposed on the market by the increasing
influence of monopoly capitalism has only disturbed the automatic
self-corrections, such as they were, that existed in an earlier phase,
without replacing them by effective planning.
