Engels invoked contingency and accident to soften economic determinism

Evidence

The German Ideology proposed a general historical scheme: but now that this threatened to harden into a rigid and abstract orthodoxy, Engels was obliged to insist that “all history must be studied afresh” and that Marx’s materialism is “not a lever for construction à la Hegelianism” (Engels to Carl Schmidt, 8/5/1890). Face-to-face with “determination by the economic,” Engels has to win some space for the “interaction of all these elements,” and for the “endless host of accidents” through which “the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary” (Engels to J. Bloch, 9/21–22/1890). He accepts some blame (“Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame”) for the tendency to reduce everything to the economic, and to disregard the effect of the superstructures and the ideological forms in “exercising their influence upon the course of the historical struggles.” The play between contingency and necessity, the “infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant,” the intersection of many individual wills into “a collective mean, a common resultant,” are bold attempts to circumvent some of the problems implicit in the original problematic (Engels to Bloch). — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 500