Page 214 - DPOL201_WESTERN_POLITICAL_THOUGHT_ENGLISH

Western Political Thought

Notes form of a synthesis. The synthesis in turn would become the thesis, and the process continued till
a perfect society was attained.
For Marx and Engels, it was not enough to understand the general processes of history, but also
the way these processes worked themselves out in the present. If one desired to transform the
world, then a correct diagnosis of the prevailing social conditions was necessary. In the nineteenth
century, this meant an understanding of the working of bourgeois society, a study of the sociology
of capitalism. Capitalism created unavoidable suffering, which ought to be replaced first by
Socialism and then Communism.
Self-Assessment
Choose the correct options
1. The term dialectical materialism was coined in ............... .
(i) 1887 (ii) 1885 (iii) 1880 (iv) 1886
2. Karl Marx was a ............... Philosopher.
(i) Greece (ii) German (iii) Italian (iv) None of these
3. Marx was born on ............... .
(i) 5th May 1818 (ii) 5th May 1819 (iii) 8th May 1815 (iv) 5th May 1816
4. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts was written by Marx in ............... .
(i) 1844 (ii) 1845 (iii) 1850 (iv) 1843

11.7 Summary

• Marx wrote in the optimistic environment of Victorian England, where the gloomy predictions
of Malthus were forgotten. He was a believer in the uninterrupted progress of human
civilization and of industrial society. He did not recognize any limits to growth. He was
generally hopeful of the liberating and progressive roles of science and human rationality.
For their sheer range and breadth of influence, it would be appropriate to say that one could
not write without taking into account his writings, and without understanding the full import
of his ideas.
• Marx claimed that he had turned Hegel upside down, and was initiating his own independent
line of theorizing. Though he styled his brand of socialism as scientific, his exposition was
not systematic and cogent. His observations and descriptions of the Communist ideal lacked
the details that were needed to project a blueprint. The general nature of the descriptions
meant different things to different people. Unless one clearly and precisely stated the meaning
of a just society, it was not possible to debate and reflect on it. Instead, when “men range
themselves under the banner as friends and enemies of the ‘Revolution’, the only important
question which is just and useful is kept out of sight and measures are judged not by their
real worth but by the analogy they seem to have to an irrelevant abstraction”. This failure to
give details led to considerable confusion, for the same words conveyed different things to
different people. “... Marx sketched but never developed a systematic theory of the state and
hence the idea of a political economy remained overdetermined and undescribed politically”.
• However, Marx was a revolutionary and a socialist, but above all he was a humanist who
believed in genuine emancipation and liberation of human beings. He registered protest
against every kind of domination. True, many of his. predictions did not materialize, but
Marx’s genius lay not merely in his ability to predict, but in the new modes of thinking about
economic and political issues.
• The doctrine which has survived and grown, and which has had a greater and more lasting
influence both on opinion and on action than any other view put forward in modern times,

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