HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

Marx's thought was strongly influenced by:

• The dialectical historicism of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel;
• The humanism of Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
• The classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo; and
• The French socialist and communist thought of Saint-Simon and Fourier.

Marx believed that he could study history and society scientifically and discern tendencies of history and the resulting outcome of social conflicts. However, Marx was not only interested in studying history and social development. He famously asserted that "philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however is to change it," and he clearly dedicated himself to trying to alter the world.

Marx's view of history, which came to be called the materialist interpretation of history (and which was developed further as the philosophy of dialectical materialism) is certainly influenced by Hegel's claim that reality (and history) should be viewed dialectically, through a clash of opposing forces.

Hegel believed that the direction of human history is characterized in the movement from the fragmentary toward the complete and the real (which was also a movement towards greater and greater rationality). Sometimes, Hegel explained, this progressive unfolding of the Absolute involves gradual, evolutionary accretion but at other times requires discontinuous, revolutionary leaps - episodal upheavals against the existing status quo. For example, Hegel strongly opposed the ancient institution of legal slavery that was practiced in the United States during his lifetime, and he envisioned a time when Christian nations would radically eliminate it from their civilization.

While Marx accepted this broad conception of history, Hegel was an idealist, and Marx sought to rewrite dialectics in materialist terms. He wrote that Hegelianism stood the movement of reality on its head, and that it was necessary to set it upon its feet. (Hegel's philosophy remained and remains in direct opposition to Marxism on this key point).

Marx's acceptance of this notion of materialist dialectics that rejected Hegel's idealism was greatly influenced by his study of Ludwig Feuerbach. In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach argued that God is really a creation of man and that the qualities people attribute to God are really qualities of humanity. For example, the Holy Trinity was a human projection of the family (man, woman, and child) onto God.

Accordingly, Marx argued that it is the material world that is real and that our ideas of it are consequences, not causes, of the world. Thus, like Hegel and other philosophers, Marx distinguished between appearances and reality. But he did not believe that the material world hides from us the "real" world of the ideal; on the contrary, he thought that historically and socially specific ideologies prevented people from seeing the material conditions of their lives clearly.