TOWARDS UNDERSTANDING HEGELIAN DIALECTICS AND MARX’S MATERIALIST INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
Keywords:
Hegelian dialectics Young, Hegelian traditionAbstract
How does the historical and philosophical thought of Karl Marx, one of the most influential thinkers of modern times, relate to the works of the great German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel? We are concerned here not with the Young Marx, but the mature Marx of later years who had broken decisively with the Young Hegelian tradition. The statements of Marx himself point to the complexity of the matter. He is known to have said famously that he ‘stood Hegel on his head’. However, he also acknowledged his intellectual debt to Hegel in most unambiguous terms, in the most productive stage of his career, when in the 1860s Marx was moved ‘to declare himself publicly a disciple of that great thinker [i.e. Hegel].’[1] In this essay we work towards developing an understanding of this complex relationship between Hegelian dialectics and Marx’s historical materialism. The dialectical doctrine was first developed and enunciated by the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. It was used by Karl Marx to explain the direction and nature of historical change. Dialectics refers to certain methods and processes, which were used in diametrically opposite ways by Hegel and Marx. Marx’s version of it is usually known as dialectical or historical materialism. According to Hegelian approach, reality is always in a state of constant flux: Being is always Becoming. This process of perpetual progressive change can be explained in terms of the inherent contradictions of all things and processes. This approach can be understood by the three laws of the dialectic
References
Cohen, G A: Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence’ (Princeton, 1978).
Gurley, John: ‘The Materialist Conception of History’, in R. Edwards, M. Reich and T. Weisskoph eds. The Capitalist System, 2nd edition (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1978).
Hobsbawm, Eric J.: The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (Abacus: London, 1975, 1995 reprint).
Lange, Oskar: Political Economy, Volume I (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1963), Chapters 1 and 2.
Marx, Karl: ‘Preface’, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1859).
Suresh, R R: Economy and Society: Evolution of Capitalism, (Sage Publications, 2010), Chapters 1 and 2.
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