It was also adapted and repurposed by Marx. Despite his impregnable style he did pass on one very famous idea which I think is quite useful and does actually have the power to demystify the world sometimes, if you interpret it generously. Now, Hegel is as perplexing a philosopher to understand as you’ll find and notoriously difficult to read even for bookish academic types. Hopefully you are beginning to see how Marxism combines these two theories. They wanted to overthrow the state-by violent revolution if necessary-and see those pampered high hats to hell. The materialists, on the other hand, thought that reality was just “what you see is what you get,” and as such didn’t think that the Prussian aristocracy had any right to rule-even less a divine one granted by some elitist specter. Hegelian spiritualism justified their privileged position by giving them a pretext for ruling over the plebs, since the weltgeist had conveniently picked them out for the task. The Prussian government and the intellectuals of Prussian universities preferred Hegelian spiritualism, because it essentially said that history was guided by the world spirit, or weltgeist, which acted through the great men of history and government to bring about its will. Marx believed that he was building upon them, but Mises believed they were incompatible. These two philosophies were Hegelian spiritualism (after the influential German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel) and materialism. The weird thing about dialectical materialism, Mises notes, is that Marx seemed to cobble it together from pieces of two existing philosophies that contradicted each other. 72) summarizes Marx's view as follows: “These forces are the driving power producing all historical facts and changes.” He wrote, “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.” 1 Mises (1957, p. In fact, properly viewed through the lens of class struggle, history would naturally subsume those other ways of seeing the world and illuminate the context in which they unfolded, particularly when it came to technological innovation, which Marx thought would ultimately determine the struggle of the age. He believed that seeing history as the history of class struggle had better explanatory power than viewing it through other lenses, such as the history of ideas, technological innovations, or military conflicts. For example, the class struggles between slaves and their masters, between feudal lords and their subjects, and-in his day-the class struggle between capitalists and their workers. Marx theorized that human history is best viewed as a series of class struggles between social forces that have contradictory interests. Dual Origins: Hegelian Spiritualism and Materialism The ideas that dialectical materialism represents have not fallen out of favor and may even be on the rise.īut what the heck is dialectical materialism? ![]() However, Mises’s critique (found in chapter 7) is still relevant. When Mises released his book Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolutionin 1957, dialectical materialism was still the official philosophy of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall was still a good thirty years from coming down. It has been absorbed by those who do not call themselves Marxists and even by people who consider themselves anticommunist. ![]() On the contrary, writes Mises, dialectical materialism dominates the ideas of more people than you think. It certainly can’t exert much influence in the world if only a small number of radical Marxists could even tell you what it means. The term looks so obtuse that you’d be forgiven for thinking that only pretentious students loitering outside the philosophy department smoking hand-rolled cigarettes could imagine that it has anything to do with real life. Most people have never heard of dialectical materialism. Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.
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