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Concept
Historical materialism
Summary
Historical materialism is Karl Marx's theory of history. Marx locates historical change in the rise of class societies and the way humans labor together to make their livelihoods. For Marx and his lifetime collaborator, Friedrich Engels, the ultimate cause and moving power of historical events are to be found in the economic development of society and the social and political upheavals wrought by changes to the mode of production. It provides a challenge to the view that historical processes have come to a close and that capitalism is the end of history. Although Marx never brought together a formal or comprehensive description of historical materialism in one published work, his key ideas are woven into a variety of works from the 1840s onward. Since Marx's time, the theory has been modified and expanded. It now has many Marxist and non-Marxist variants.
His view of history is shaped by his engagement with the intellectual and philosophical movement known as the Age of Enlightenment and the profound scientific, political, economic and social transformations that took place in Britain and other parts of Europe in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.
Enlightenment thinkers responded to the worldly transformations by promoting individual liberty and attacking religious dogmas and the divine right of kings. A swathe of thinkers including Hobbes (1588–1679), Montesquieu (1689–1755), Voltaire (1694–1778), Smith (1723–1790), Turgot (1727–1781) and Condorcet (1743–1794) detached from the ecclesiastical interpretation of the world and offered new scientific studies of human nature, history, economics and society. Some philosophers, for example, Vico (1668–1744), Herder (1744–1803) and Hegel (1770–1831), sought to discover an organizing theme, meaning, or direction in human history. For many Enlightenment philosophers, the power of ideas became the mainspring for understanding historical change and the rise and fall of civilizations. History was the gradual advance of the 'spirit of liberty' or the growth of nationalism or democracy, rationality and law.
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