![]() Does it reflect the fact that, short as it is, this text is a classic of Western social science, introducing a fundamental innovation – what Michael Löwy called ‘a new understanding of human history’ (Löwy 1981, 87)? Or is the richness just a literary device which fools the reader into thinking that something profound is going on here, whereas in fact, if you bring the argument out into the open, it fails to meet the most basic requirements of social scientific reasoning. Unfortunately, that hasn’t produced a consensus about its intellectual standing, because they disagree about the meaning of this richness. Just about every reader of this text that I know of has been struck by its richness as a piece of writing. That might seem a disappointment – is this all we have to work with? Yet it’s also the case that these twelve and a half pages compose an extraordinary document. And it’s only twelve and a half pages long. Nonetheless, Chapter 1 of the History is the only sustained, organised exposition of the theory. In fact, if you take those writings as a whole, you could almost say that U&CD runs through – or at least underneath – the entire body of his thought, and it’s what is most distinctive about it. ![]() There are of course many other local discussions of ‘unevenness’ and ‘combination’ in Trotsky’s writings. Well, if there exists a foundational text for the theory of uneven and combined development, this is it. Presentation to the Sussex Working Group on U&CD, October 2010. ![]()
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