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Both Proudhon and Marx grappled with the question of how to develop
a scientific understanding of society and the capitalist system. The issue is
not simply a matter of opposition between idealist and materialist
philosophy. More fundamentally, the disagreement concerns how to think
about the relationships between reality, concepts, history, and scientific
knowledge. The central question is whether the workings of capitalism
should be explained by tracing their historical origins or by theoretically
reconstructing the logic of their mechanisms and contradictions.
As early as 1846, in The System of Economic Contradictions, Proudhon
is said to have developed a hypothetico-deductive method for analysing
capitalism as a structured whole. This method was initially subjected to
severe criticism by Marx, before Marx himself later adopted a comparable
approach in Capital