The Dialectical Progression of History

Kurt Biray

History is accumulative. Our history is the most pivotal determinant of our future.  In other words, what happens now is directly interconnected to what will occur in the near and long-term future. The rhetorical concepts of “fate” and “destiny” are simply non-existent in a world that is governed by the principles of science. This applies to the natural sciences but also characterizes the social sciences as the dynamics of political and economic systems throughout the globe are highly dependent on history itself. 

History is integral for understanding our increasingly intricate society. It lays the foundation for explaining certain trends and events that we witness throughout our lives and therefore, can be fully utilized to predict and shape our own future and the future of our planet. When speaking of sociological disturbances and distributions of wealth or even modern-day political and economic systems, history plays an essential role in explaining humanity's societal and economic development and progress.

Historical Materialism - who were Marx and Engels trying to influence in writing The German ideology?

A cartoon by Friedrich Engels of ragging party times
at the Hippel Cafe in Berlin, home of the Young Hegelians

In 1845 a young Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, age 27 and 25 respectively, sat down to write one of their first joint works in what would prove to be the beginning of a life-long effort of collaboration. The two radicals were unable to find a publisher for their work, which would remain unprinted until the early 1930s; since then it has been understood as an important polemic against materialist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach which further deepened the method of historical materialism.

In writing The German Ideology, the young Marx and Engels no doubt believed (and, would later say) they were completing a work addressing an entire contemporary debate which was captivating a generation of German philosophy students. These thinkers, whose spirit had been inflamed by the jargon of Hegel’s dialectics, were struggling to turn from the nebulous world of the Spirit, to the world of everyday life with its political problems.

For those young Hegelians, Feuerbach therefore provided a sort of bridge; his theories presented a kind of intellectual passage-way built partly of older French Enlightenment thinking (which saw man as a product of nature, not disembodied Spirit) and retaining some of Hegel’s dialectics. It is not God who creates man, Feuerbach essentially wrote, but man who creates God.