Political Thought

Capitalism as an Institution.The thought of Marx’s early writings was heavily influenced by his early Hegelian training. The reasoning by which he constructed its framework was largely deductive, but like Hegel he tended to fit into the framework a great mass of data drawn from his historical studies. It aimed to be a philosophy of … Read more

Dialectical Materialism and Politics.The concepts of ideology, economic determinism, and the class struggle complete the theoretical parts of Marx’s social philosophy. They were to provide the stimulus to a working-class revolution and also a guide to the strategy of revolutionary parties, for the purpose of a philosophy, as Mar said, is not to interpret the … Read more

Engels on Dialectic in Economic Determinism. The theory of dialectical materialism was completed by Marx about 1850. From that time forward it was presumed in all that he wrote but even in Capital it was nowhere stated; the treatment of socialism in that work turned discussion toward intrinsically less important economic theories such as surplus … Read more

Marx’s Summary In Dialectical materialism. The fragmentary manner in which Marx worked out the theory of dialectical materialism justifies the quotation at some length of his only summary statement of it, which was not written, however, until several years after the theory took shape. In the social production which men carry on they enter into … Read more

Ideology and the Class Struggle of Dialectical Materialism. It was characteristic of Marx that he was interested less in perfecting dialectical materialism as a philosophy of history than in applying it to concrete situations, especially with the purpose of finding a program of action for a consciously revolutionary proletariat. Thus in 1848 he and Engels … Read more

Economic Determinism of Dialectical Materialism. Feuerbach’s claim that the motive forces in social history are material meant for Marx that these forces are economic. The economic, moreover, meant for him the method of economic production, for he was convinced that any system of production carries with it a corresponding way of distributing the social product, … Read more

Dialectical Materialism. Marx’s first statements of dialectical materialism were made in a group of works written between 1844 and 1848 under the stimulus of feuerbach’s materialist interpretation of Hegel and as incidents in Marx’s career as a revolutionary socialist. It should be noted that Marx used the word “materialism” In a specialized sense that may … Read more

The Proletarian Revolution with Marx and dialectical materialism. Liberal political thought developed largely as an elaboration of two fundamental social or moral ideas, that politics is distinctively an art of reaching non-coercive adjustments between antagonistic interests and that democratic procedures are the only effective ways for making such adjustments. Consequently, though its later history undertook … Read more

The Present Meaning of Liberalism. An estimate of the meaning of liberalism and its present position in political theory must take account of the fact that the word is used, with some consistency, in two senses, the one more restricted and the other more general. This usage, however, is not arbitrary, for there are valid … Read more

Liberalism, Conservatism, Socialism. Green’s restatement of liberalism did away with the rigid line between economics and politics by which the older liberals had excluded the state from interfering with the operation of a free market. From Green’s point of view even a free market was a social institution rather than a natural condition, and quite … Read more