METHOD, METAPHYSICS AND THEORY 55 notion of the historical-general is more explicitly elaborated a little later when Marx refers to the notion of "production in general" (p 85). Production in general is not ahistorical because it has been abstracted out of historical experience, and hence fully grounded in a historical matrix. Yet it is not a historically specific category capable of being tied to a specific historical epoch. In Marx's words, "...Production in general is an abstraction in so far as it really brings out and fixes the common element and thus saves us repetition..." (p 85). But whether a component is general and how general are not a priori issues, but historically ascertainable matters. One can only be fascinated by Marx's methodological subtlety when he argues that the postulate of production in general does not imply that there really exists in empirical fact any such phenomenon. As Marx asserts, "... If there is no production in general, then there is also no general production. Production is always a particular branch of production—e g agriculture, cattle-raising, manufacture etc. — or it is a totality .." (p 86). No doubt what follows in the original text is somewhat unclear and abrupt. But what seems to be fairly clear is the fact that the historical method yields two kinds or levels of understanding, or perhaps one should say two moments in an epistemological process. One is the historical general and the other is the historical particular. But these are epistemologically interdependent categories, and further there is also an epistemological priority involved in the sense that the historical particular has an epistemological, because ontological, priority. The historical general is a later methodological product derived from abstracting from a cluster of related historical particulars. The crucial epistemological point to note here is that the Marxist category of the historical general should not be confused with the bourgeois epistemological process of eternalising the historical specific in order to theoretically abolish its historical specificity. In Marx's own words, the bourgeois political economists attempt "to present production—see e g Mill—as distinct from distribution etc., as encased in eternal natural laws independent of history, at which opportunity bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled in as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded..." (p 87). In short, Marxist historical methodology does not abolish abstractions or generalities, but it rejects fully historically ungrounded abstractions and generalities. The basic methodological point here is that historically grounded generalities and abstractions can be translated back into the historically specific components from which they were derived in the first place. The Marxist historical methodology also means that the process of de-constituting the historical abstraction or generality implies a historical re-constituting of the components of that abstraction or generality into a totality of necessary relationships. But the bourgeois methodology of the political economists avoids precisely doing this. Abstraction, as Marx.saw, was the work of the "mind" but