6 Historical Materialism A certain person once took it into his head that people drown in water only because they are obsessed by the notion of weight. If only, he thought, they could rid themselves of this idea, by calling it, for instance, superstitious or religious, they would thereby be saved from all danger of drowning. All his life he fought against the illusion of weight, concerning whose deleterious consequences statistics continually provided him with fresh evidence. This figure is the prototype of the German revolutionary philosophers of our day. Karl Marx1 NO FULL OR systematic exposition of historical materialism was ever published by Marx himself. It occurs in a fragmentary form in the early work that he wrot during the years 1843-8, it is briefly expounded in 1859, and it is taken fo granted in his later thought. He did not regard it as a new philosophical system sc much as a practical method of social and historical analysis, and a basis fo political strategy. Later in life he complained of the use made of it by some of hi: followers, who appeared to think that it would save them the labour of historica study by providing a kind of algebraic table from which, given enough factua data, automatic answers to all historical questions could be mechanically read off In a letter which, towards the end of his life, he wrote to a Russian correspondent he gave as an example of dissimilar development, despite analogous socia conditions, the history of the Roman plebs and of the European industria proletariat: When one studies these forms of evolution separately, and then compares them, one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon; but one will never get there by using as one's master key a general historico-philosophical theory which explains everything because it explains nothing, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.1 Copyright @ 2013. Princeton University Press. All rights reserved. The theory matured gradually in his mind. It is possible to trace its growth ir Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction and On the Jewish Question; in these the proletariat is for the first time identified as the agent destined to change society in the direction adumbrated by philosophy, which, because it is as ye Berlin, Isaiah. Karl Marx : Thoroughly Revised Fifth Edition, edited by Henry Hardy, Princeton University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ubc/detail.action?docID=1341187. Created from ubc on 2022-04-22 00:01:32.
philosophy divorced from action, is itself a symptom and an expression o impotence. It is further developed in The Holy Family, an amalgam of polemica. outbursts against 'critical criticism'2 from the young Hegelians - principally Stirne: and the brothers Bauer - interspersed with fragments on the philosophy of history social criticism of literature, and other oddities. It is most fully stated in a untitled volume, over six hundred pages in length, which he composed with Engels in 1845-6, but did not succeed in publishing. This verbose, ill-organised and ponderous work, which deals with authors and