Karl Marx and History

Karl Marx developed a theory of history and society that was indispensable as an underpinning of his larger economic theory. For Marx, human history was and is essentially economic history, and thus we cannot begin to understand economics until we understand the basic material premises of all human history. In The German Ideology, he presents each of four premises in detail, fleshing out a broader materialist conception of history. This materialist conception explains the myriad ways in which humankind has endeavored to meet its urgent material needs, and ultimately provides us with an understanding of history that does not rely upon, or utilize, a universal dogma or a timeless range of objective human values. The ideas of Marx the Historian lead inexorably to the conclusions of Marx the Revolutionary, expressed most famously in the Communist Manifesto.

Marx believed that the history of mankind was the history of the class struggle (Berlin 120). Throughout history, human beings have devised various responses to the "material conditions of life", which are ostensibly variations of economic existence (Marx 161-162). In The German Ideology, Marx presents the premises of the materialist method, premises which he insists can be verified empirically. As Isaiah Berlin points out, these premises establish a historical conception of man as a technological being, a being made what he is "by means of the work that they cannot avoid doing if they are to satisfy their needs"

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Category: Philosophy - K