Historical Materialism : Karl Marx Essay

Karl Marx was born in Prussia on May of 1818 to a middle class Jewish family. As an adult, Marx attended school in Berlin where he discovered the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel’s main concept was the idea of dialect, which can be explained as the process of logical argumentation and refutation. Marx was greatly influenced by Hegel, which is shown in Marx’s belief that history evolves through a series of predictable conflicts (A+E Television Networks, LLC. 2013). Marx also believed social divisions and civil unrest were due to the increase in industrialization and the widening gap between rich and poor.

Karl Marx is considered to be one of the most influential thinkers of our age. Born in Germany in 1818, he was greatly influenced by philosophers such as Hegel, Feuerbach & St. Simon. He made an immense contribution to the different areas of sociology- definition of the field of study, analysis of the economic structure and its relations with other parts of the social structure, theory of social classes, study of religion, theory of ideology, analysis of the capitalist system etc. In this essay, we will deal with his contribution to the study of social development or the materialist conception of history.

In 1848, Marx, a German philosopher, wrote a supposedly scientific account of his perspective on history entitled The Communist Manifesto. As a materialist philosopher, he believed that economics was at the heart of history. He examined the tools and technology being used to understand the material substructure of how people were fed and clothed.

It is a commonplace that Marx's theory is a continuation of the German classical philosophy-Hegel's in the first place. He, however, wanted to turn the 'upside down' idealist dialectics the right way up, as he said, and put it on a materialist basis. In doing so he followed not so much Feuerbach's example as the materialism of the English and French Enlightenment with which he had already been well acquainted, as is clear from his work Die heilige Familie. Feuerbach instead inspired Marx to preserve the humanistic pathos, which was present in the Prometheus cult in his doctoral dissertation, also on materialistic grounds, instead of the 'sunshine idealism' he praised in the recommendation. Only an 'anthropologic' materialism could naturally serve such purposes-the mature Marx, too, always categorically distanced himself from the metaphysical and natural scientific materialisms. He also distanced himself from Feuerbach's unhistorically anthropological materialism. His materialism can only be termed anthropological if anthropology is understood as a historical anthropology (as Marx himself said in his work Das Elend der

In “Marx: Anthropologist,” Thomas C. Patterson provides archival research and contemporary analysis to defend the assertion that Karl Marx was one of the first urban anthropologists and a progenitor of emic ethnography in western culture. Patterson also aims to correct prior misinterpretations of Marx’s work in a polemic manner, addressing deficiencies in early analyses through careful argumentation and relevant evidence to contrary inferences. Patterson’s stated purpose is to answer the question “What would Marx’s anthropology look like today?” and does so by explaining the correlation between critical-dialectical methodology and the manner in which Marx went about social analysis. Chapters are organized according to each subject’s relevance to the construction of Marx’s anthropology. Chapter one focuses on the greater political state of Europe and university culture in which Marx received his education, providing historical and pedagogical explanations for the manifestation of his ideas. Chapter two explains the facets of Marx’s “philosophical” anthropology, explaining how Marx viewed the moral and social characteristics of humans. Chapter three highlights Marx’s ideas and works that explain his “empirical” anthropology, or the how he viewed the natural and biological determinants of human existence. Chapter four aims to explain the importance of modes of production and social relations to Marx’s theory of cultural change. In chapters five and six, Patterson incorporates

Karl Marx, in the Capital, developed his critique of capitalism by analyzing its characteristics and its development throughout history. The critique contains Marx’s most developed economic analysis and philosophical insight. Although it was written in 1850s, its values still serve an important purpose in the globalized world and maintains extremely relevant in the twenty-first century.

Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, and political revolutionary. When Karl Marx moved to Paris in 1843, he met Engels and together they both worked on several essays. However, Marx and Engels are best known for their revolutionary writings around the concept of Communism. Marx attained his primary intellectual influences from the work of G.W.F Hegel. Hegel’s main theory describes history as a process in which the world becomes conscious of itself as spirit. Marx furthered this theory and argues that man becomes conscious of himself as a spirit; the material world causes him to feel increasingly alienated from himself. The

The Marxist theory of historical materialism understands society to be determined by the relationships which people enter into with one another to fulfill their basic needs, for instance to feed and clothe themselves and their families. In general Marx identified five successive stages of the development of these material conditions in Western Europe.

Karl Marx drew from the philosophies of the great thinkers of his time to perfect his ideal communist system. He was born into a time when ideas of the Enlightenment were widespread. He read the works of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and the Comte de Saint-Simon (Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia). However, he was especially influenced by G.W.F. Hegel, the most prominent philosopher in Germany in the early 1800s (Microsoft Encarta). Hegel believed that ideas evolve through a continual process of contradiction and resolution and that human history is driven by this evolution. Consequently, Marx developed the belief that history evolves through a series of conflicts in a predictable, unavoidable

Karl Marx is often called the father of communism, but his life entailed so much more. He was a political economist, philosopher, and idea revolutionist. He was a scholar that believed that capitalism was going to undercut itself as he stated in the Communist Manifesto. While he was relatively ambiguous in his lifetime, his works had tremendous influence after his death. Some of the world’s most powerful and most populace countries follow his ideas to this day. Many of history’s most eventful times were persuaded by his thoughts. Karl Marx was one of the most influential persons in the history of the world, and a brief history of his life will show how he was able to attain many of his attitudes.

This crucial opening to The Communist Manifesto holds the key to understanding Karl Marx's conception of history. Marx outlines history as a two dimensional, "linear" chain of events. A constant progression of class divisions being created and overthrown, one after the other, until the result is the utopian endpoint, otherwise known as communism.

As Marx's writings were so diverse and had such great variety, the circumstances under which these writings were written are extremely important to understand. The next few points are to

The introduction of The German Ideology can be attributed to the intellectual influences Karl Marx received from the philosophy of George Friedrich Hegel (“Karl Marx”, par, 2). Hegel’s philosophical concept was based on the idea of the dialectic, which was initially used to describe the procedure of logical argumentation and refutation. While earlier philosophers had treated this signature concept as a process of generating accurate ideas, Hegel argued that these ideas develop based on a constant procedure of disagreement and resolution. He

Though Marx’s theories were first conceived over 150 years ago, his work continues to be tremendously influential and is perhaps the most well known scholarship within the sociological canon. Despite their prominence, some of Marx’s most famous ideas have yet to be proven by the course of history. Neo-Marxists may insist that the revolution is coming, but the fact remains that the overthrow of capitalism has yet to materialize. I argue that the communist revolution has not yet occurred because the proletariat has been unable to develop the universal class consciousness that Marx asserts is a necessary condition for his predicted mass uprising. Additionally, I postulate that the theories of Weber and Simmel reveal the factors impeding

In investigating further the basis of Marx's philosophy, one must note the shared belief of Hegel's and Marx's Dialectics. Dialectics is a philosophy at the heart of Marxism; it holds that all things exist not as what they are, but that every thing is in a transitory stage. An acorn is not simply an acorn; it is a future oak tree. A caterpillar exists as a future butterfly. By this philosophy, which can be understood and accepted rather simply (without an offhand disregard for the uniqueness and importance of each individual present stage of an object); it is Marx's later social implication of this philosophy which would meet resistance (Marx, Capital 103). As it were, Marx's Dialectics, at their heart, were simply a method whereby he claimed to understand more the essence of something, rather than its appearance. An appearance alone- the acorn, the caterpillar- fundamentally ignored the essence of something; the future oak tree, the future butterfly. Appearances were not necessarily deceiving or untrue, they simply did not- and could not- represent the whole of something's existence. A caterpillar is indeed a caterpillar, but since one knows that a