Abstract
Marx's historical materialist account of classical political economy seeks out the theoretical anomalies that classical economists sometimes felt but never clearly resolved, reveals their accommodations to capitalism, and shows that this accommodation was rooted not in bad faith but in the bourgeois horizon within which they unwittingly operated. Marx associates these scientific and political failings with the methodological shortcomings of ordinary empiricism's inattention to the logic of its catagories. Three specific methodological criticisms are exemplified: one concerns confusions between abstract and concrete categories; a second, the essence/appearance relationship; and a third, failures to distinguish general from historically specific categories.