Marx's Reaction Against Hegel http://faculty.washington.edu/wtalbott/phil332/trmarxI.htm
Marx claims to have turned Hegel on his head, in the following way: 1. The Individual and Particular Has Priority Over the Universal (Materialism replaces Idealism). Start from the individual and particular. Basic Empirical Facts: modes of production and relations of production and exchange. History is the history of the development of the division of labor. Forms of property are a symptom of the underlying facts. 2. Basic empirical facts have priority over laws and philosophical theories. Laws and all religious, moral, and philosophical speculation is part of a superstructure that is determined by the sub-structure of basic empirical facts. 3. Purely descriptive has priority over the Ethical (Normative). There are no ethical relations independent of the basic relations of production and exchange. 4. Invisible Hand Explanation of History. History is the product of causal relations, not ideas. Marx's Latent Hegelianism 1. Although Marx denies objective moral truths, his account is an account of the elimination of alienation, oppression and exploitation. Marx claims to be able to explain them purely descriptively. But in this he fails. His account seems to make use of universal ethical categories. 2. Surprisingly, according to Marx, history has a teleology. Its goal is human emancipation (Hegel's goal). 3. Emancipation is understood anti-individualistically. Emancipation as a species being. 4. Historical progresses dialectically by resolving conflict. Note, however, that Marx's description of the process is not Hegelian: a. History progresses not as a result of conflicts (contradictions) of ideas, but by class conflict: free man and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, bourgeoisie and proletariat (870). b. The Final Stage of the Process is specified: The abolition of bourgeois private property, that is, private property in the means of production, and the abolition of bourgeois individualism in favor of life as a species being, ultimately to include the withering away of the state. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
