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Western Political Thought

Notes freedom, that came with the knowledge of the self. He emphatically believed that without each
individual pursuing his own goal(s), whatever they might be, nothing was achieved in history.
But to know whether these actions were in conformity with the dialectic of the universal, “the
cunning of reason” played its role by allowing passions to run their full course.
Marx agreed with Hegel that there was a constant movement in the dialectical process, but
emphasized the real rather than the ideal, the social rather than the intellectual, matter rather than
the mind. For Marx, the key idea was not the history of philosophy, but the history of economic
production and the social relations that accompanied it. He acknowledged Hegel’s great
contribution, which was to recognize world history as a process, as constant motion, change,
transformation, and development, and to understand the internal connections between the
movement and its development. From Hegel, he also learnt that the various angles of the
developmental process could not be studied in isolation, but in their relations with one another
and with the process as a whole- Hegel applied dialectics to the realm of ideas. However, Marx as
a materialist believed that consciousness was determined by life, and not the other way around.
Unlike the latent conservatism and idealism of Hegelian philosophy, Marxism rejected the status
quo—capitalism—as intolerable. Social circumstances constantly changed, with no social system
lasting forever.
Capitalism arose under certain historical circumstances, which would disappear in due course of
time. Thus Marx, like Hegel, continued to believe that dialectics was a powerful tool. It offered a
law of social development, and in that sense Marx’s social philosophy (like that of Hegel) was a
philosophy of history. Both perceived social change as inevitable.
Materialism: In essence, materialism answers the fundamental question of philosophy by asserting
the primacy of the material world: in short, matter precedes thought.
Materialism holds that the world is material, that all phenomena in the universe consist of matter
in motion, wherein all things are interdependent and interconnected and develop in accordance
with natural law, that the world exists outside us and independently of our perception of it, that
and that the world is in principle knowable. The ideal is nothing else than the material world
reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. —Karl Marx
Dialectics: Dialectics is the science of the most general laws of development of nature, society, and
thought. Its principal features are as follows:
1. The universe is not an accidental mix of things isolated from each other, but an integral whole,
wherein things are mutually interdependent.
2. Nature is in a state of constant motion: All nature, from the smallest thing to the biggest, from
a grain of sand to the sun, from the protista to man, is in a constant state of coming into being
and going out of beings, in a constant flux, in a ceaseless state of movement and change.
—Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature
3. Development is a process whereby insignificant and impreceptible quantitative changes lead
to fundamental, qualitative changes. The latter occur not gradually, but rapidly and abruptly,
in the form of a leap from one state to another.
Merely quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes.
—Karl Marx
4. All things contain within themselves internal contradictions, which are the primary cause of
motion, change, development in the world.
Laws of dialectics: The three laws of dialectics are:
1. The law of the unity and conflict of opposites;
2. Thelaw of the passage of quantitative changes into qualitative changes;
3. The law of the negation of the negation.

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