Did Marx Really Stand "Hegel On His Head"?

[DemocratSinceBirth]

And I mean figuratively.


What is the great mover of history, events or ideas?

[FarCenter]

1. The second law of thermodynamics

[pscot]

2. In a corner

Made him stay there too.

[kenny blankenship]

3. the better to snorkel him

[DemocratSinceBirth]

4. I'm Serious

Does my material condition affect my thinking or does my thinking affect my material condition. To me the answer is obvious; my material condition affects my thinking because the former is much less mutable

[damntexdem]

6. When you're on your head your material condition is that your blood is rushing to your brain.

Thus affecting your thinking.

[nealmhughes]

5. Not really. Marx took Hegel's dialectic concept and moved it from ideas to materialism.

Karl and Fred were, as Hobsbawm would say, "Vulgar Marxists." They saw no nuance and everything was based on two forces only colliding to form the new synthesis which becomes the next thesis for the antithesis to collide. In other words, neither thinker (Marx or Hegel) had much room for multiple forces reacting at varying vectors. Whew, I knew that historiography seminar would come in handy some day.

[damntexdem]

7. Karl was not a vulgar Marxist because he denied being a Marxist.

And he considered a great many influences in his history, although he could get a bit rigid in his philosophy.

What I say about him was that he was a great diagnostician but a lousy clinician of society.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

9. What's Ironic Is That Another Great Philosopher Christ Would Deny Being A Christian

I actually think he's the Son Of God but I don't want to hijack this discussion.

To be being a Christian and a Marxist or a small c communist are not mutually exclusive . My material condition has pushed my thinking far to the left but I don't know if I'm in the communist camp yet.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

8. I Loved Marx As A Polemicist

As a polemic there is little better reading than "The Communist Manifesto."

"All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."

That's agreat description of 2010 America; at least for some of us.

[nadinbrzezinski]

10. +1

[nealmhughes]

11. What is the great mover of history? People.

It seems to be that camps which always remind me of the 3 Stooges short "Nature! No! Nuture!"

Ideas catch hold or they don't. People move history. Great Men are convenient shorthand for the group of people who supported the said "Great Man." Marx, for example, is undeniably a Great Man, he must be, people read him and cite him (often out of context) all the time. Reagan was a Great Man, even though he did nothing original and was senile during his entire presidency. We humans feel a need to connect with someone "Great" on the left, the middle, the right, in matters of religion, economics, politics, whatever, we feel this need.

Marx tried to do away with the Great Man and the State driven concepts of rigorous academic Germanic historicism, that is to say von Ranke style, prior to von Ranke himself. He substituted the Class Conflict as driver. Now, that is great if there are only rigid classes, but in reality there are not. Not every aristocrat/capitalist is an enemy of the worker, for example.

History needs no help in occurring, it simply will, without any intervention! Remember, history is a genre of literature that treats past events using largely primary sources in an attempt to provide an analysis for the happening of past events. By the way, history is really philosophy, but historians do not do well in Greek, and students are afraid of philosophy, so we trick them by adding in dates and those silly "facts" that are so inconvenient to make our well ordered machine (rigorous philosophy) run smoothly.

[Odin2005]

12. A complex mix of ideas, technology, and economics, none of which is uniquely primary.

I reject any interpretation of history that reduces history to "just" technology and material culture or "just" ideas and beliefs.

And Hegel and anything based on Hegel is garbage.