I) HEGEL, MARX AND GOBINEAU

A) Essential Questions:

Q1)What is the difference between a philosopher and theorist?

Q2)How do Hegel and Marx theorize history?
Q3)What are Marx's central arguments against Hegel?

A1))Philosophers study the fundamental nature of reality, existence, and knowledge. Theorists use
reasoning to explain and predict what we observe.
Philosophers use logical reasoning to explore abstract concepts and answer questions about human
existence and morality. Theorists use reasoning to create intellectual structures that make sense of
evidence and provide predictions.

A2) Hegel regards history as an intelligible process moving towards a specific condition—the realization of
human freedom. “The question at issue is therefore the ultimate end of mankind, the end which the spirit
sets itself in the world” (1857: 63). Hegel incorporates a deeper historicism into his philosophical theories
than his predecessors or successors. He regards the relationship between “objective” history and the
subjective development of the individual consciousness (“spirit”) as an intimate one; this is a central
thesis in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). And he views it to be a central task for philosophy to
comprehend its place in the unfolding of history. “History is the process whereby the spirit discovers itself
and its own concept” (1857: 62). Hegel constructs world history into a narrative of stages of human
freedom, from the public freedom of the polis and the citizenship of the Roman Republic, to the individual
freedom of the Protestant Reformation, to the civic freedom of the modern state.

Marx's theory of historical materialism states that the economic base of a society, particularly the "mode
of production" (how goods are produced), fundamentally determines all other aspects of society, including
its social institutions, political systems, and ideologies, and that historical change is primarily driven by
class struggle arising from conflicts within the mode of production; essentially, the way people produce
goods shapes their society and drives historical development.

Marx's theory of historical materialism states that the economic base of a society, particularly the "mode
of production" (how goods are produced), fundamentally determines all other aspects of society, including
its social institutions, political systems, and ideologies, and that historical change is primarily driven by
class struggle arising from conflicts within the mode of production; essentially, the way people produce
goods shapes their society and drives historical development.
Historical materialism | Definition, Marx, Examples, Dialectical Materialism, & Facts | Britannica

A3) Marx likes Hegel’s concept of history as progress towards freedom. Marx takes issue with Hegel over
his abstract conception of the “idea” or absolute idealism. Marx believes Man is the true subject of his
reality. Marx feels that Hegel’s ideals are only fulfilled at the level of abstract thought. For Marx, the
material conditions of laborers/ pro-literiate show the contradiction of these ideals. Hegelian rationality is
negated through poverty and repression. The world is not a rational place and its problem cannot be
solved by rationality alone. The task of philosophers is not to merely describe and observe the world but
steer the inevitable process of transformation. Unlike Hegel, Marx takes issues with religion (the opiate of
the masses), seeing it as a strategy to induce docile bodies.

B)Hegel:

Hegel (1770–1831) belongs to the period of German idealism in the decades following Kant. The most
systematic of the post-Kantian idealists, Hegel attempted, throughout his published writings as well as in
his lectures, to elaborate a comprehensive and systematic philosophy from a purportedly logical starting
point. He is perhaps most well-known for his teleological account of history, an account that was later
taken over by Marx and “inverted” into a materialist theory of an historical development culminating in
communism. 19th century German philosopher.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Works:
The Phenomenology of the spirit: first published in 1807, is G. W. F. Hegel’s remarkable philosophical
text that examines the dynamics of human experience from its simplest beginnings in consciousness
through its development into ever more complex and self-conscious forms. The work explores the inner
discovery of reason and its progressive expansion into spirit, a world of intercommunicating and
interacting minds reconceiving and re-creating themselves and their reality. The Phenomenology of Spirit
is a notoriously challenging and arduous text that students and scholars have been studying ever since its
publication.

Key Concepts
Dialectical - the Hegelian process of change in which a concept or its realization passes over into and is
preserved and fulfilled by its opposite Dialectic Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
Thesis - antithesis -synthesis
Being - nothing -becoming - History as a movement through this dialectic.
Idealism - absolute idealism : identity of mind and nature - The absolute idea -History is moved by ideas
Geist - spirit - freedom
Philosophy of right: connected to conceptions of freedom
Thought and rationality as freedom
Freedom as a natural capacity, Freedom has its own necessity
Do we enjoy more freedom now than previous?

Philosophy of History:
-History as the progress and consciousness of freedom
- 1 person is free, some people are free, all are free
Philosophy of History:
-China - One is free. Well ordered, benevolent and wise state : The Emperor. One is free and all are subject
to his power
-Athens - some individuals have freedom - freedom is moderated by the state - institutions and customs
govern freedom. Antigone - individual who acts on the interest of the family, her opponent acts on the
interest of the state. There is slavery - only some are free.
-Private rights - rights through status. Christianity - all are free in the eyes of God. Secular principle of
rights.
-What is the conception of freedom that various civilizations embody?
-Pre - historical period in Africa - Eurocentricity; Africans as having a lack of control - untamed natural
state.
-opposed to slavery on principal - believes it has a civilizing effect on African
-Sees Europe as the place where the highest conception of freedom is realized. (bbc Sounds - In our Time)

Hegel’s philosophy of history is perhaps the most fully developed philosophical theory of history that
attempts to discover meaning or direction in history (1824a, 1824b, 1857). Hegel regards history as an
intelligible process moving towards a specific condition—the realization of human freedom. “The question
at issue is therefore the ultimate end of mankind, the end which the spirit sets itself in the world” (1857:
63). Hegel incorporates a deeper historicism into his philosophical theories than his predecessors or
successors. He regards the relationship between “objective” history and the subjective development of the
individual consciousness (“spirit”) as an intimate one; this is a central thesis in his Phenomenology of
Spirit (1807). And he views it to be a central task for philosophy to comprehend its place in the unfolding
of history. “History is the process whereby the spirit discovers itself and its own concept” (1857: 62).
Hegel constructs world history into a narrative of stages of human freedom, from the public freedom of
the polis and the citizenship of the Roman Republic, to the individual freedom of the Protestant
Reformation, to the civic freedom of the modern state. He attempts to incorporate the civilizations of
India and China into his understanding of world history, though he regards those civilizations as static
and therefore pre-historical (O’Brien 1975). He constructs specific moments as “world-historical” events
that were in the process of bringing about the final, full stage of history and human freedom. For example,
Napoleon’s conquest of much of Europe is portrayed as a world-historical event doing history’s work by
establishing the terms of the rational bureaucratic state. Hegel finds reason in history; but it is a latent
reason, and one that can only be comprehended when the fullness of history’s work is finished: “When
philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old. … The owl of Minerva spreads its
wings only with the falling of the dusk” ((Hegel 1821: 13). (See O’Brien (1975), Taylor (1975), and Kojève
(1969) for treatments of Hegel’s philosophy of history.)
Philosophy of History (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Philosophy of Right: Hegel defines “right” [Recht] as the existence of the free will in the world (PR §29).
So a philosophy of right is necessarily a philosophy of freedom that seeks to comprehend freedom
actualized in how we relate to each other and construct social and political institutions. Marx and Hegel |
The Oxford Handbook of Hegel | Oxford Academic (oup.com)

Hegel’s Idealism - The universe comes to self-consciousness in human thought.

Marx
Karl Marx (1818–1883) is often treated as a revolutionary, an activist rather than a philosopher, whose
works inspired the foundation of many communist regimes in the twentieth century. It is certainly hard to
find many thinkers who can be said to have had comparable influence in the creation of the modern
world. However, Marx was trained as a philosopher, and although often portrayed as moving away from
philosophy in his mid-twenties—perhaps towards history and the social sciences—there are many points
of contact with modern philosophical debates throughout his writings.

The themes picked out here include Marx’s philosophical anthropology, his theory of history, his
economic analysis, his critical engagement with contemporary capitalist society (raising issues about
morality, ideology, and politics), and his prediction of a communist future. Karl Marx (Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Marx v Hegel
Marx likes Hegel’s concept of history as progress towards freedom. Marx takes issue with Hegel over his
abstract conception of the “idea” or absolute idealism. Marx believes Man is the true subject of his reality.
Marx feels that Hegel’s ideals are only fulfilled at the level of abstract thought. For Marx, the material
conditions of laborers/ pro-literiate show the contradiction of these ideals. Hegelian rationality is negated
through poverty and repression. The world is not a rational place and its problem cannot be solved by
rationality alone. The task of philosophers is not to merely describe and observe the world but steer the
inevitable process of transformation. Unlike Hegel, Marx takes issues with religion (the opiate of the
masses), seeing it as a strategy to induce docile bodies.

Hegel's Idealism & Marx's Materialism (youtube.com)

Notable Works:

Das Kapital - Karl Marx's Capital can be read as a work of economics, sociology and history. He addresses
a myriad of topics, but is most generally trying to present a systematic account of the nature,
development, and future of the capitalist system. There is a strong economic focus to this work, and Marx
addresses the nature of commodities, wages and the worker-capitalist relationship, among other things.
Much of this work tries to show the ways in which workers are exploited by the capitalist mode of
production. He also provides a history of past exploitations. Marx argues that the capitalist system is
ultimately unstable, because it cannot endlessly sustain profits. Thus, it provides a more technical
background to some of his more generally accessible works, like The Communist Manifesto.

https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/daskapital/summary/

Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto reflects an attempt to explain the goals of Communism, as well as the theory
underlying this movement. It argues that class struggles, or the exploitation of one class by another, are
the motivating force behind all historical developments. Class relationships are defined by an era's means
of production. However, eventually these relationships cease to be compatible with the developing forces
of production. At this point, a revolution occurs and a new class emerges as the ruling one. This process
represents the "march of history" as driven by larger economic forces.

Modern Industrial society in specific is characterized by class conflict between the bourgeoisie and
proletariat. However, the productive forces of capitalism are quickly ceasing to be compatible with this
exploitative relationship. Thus, the proletariat will lead a revolution. However, this revolution will be of a
different character than all previous ones: previous revolutions simply reallocated property in favor of the
new ruling class. However, by the nature of their class, the members of the proletariat have no way of
appropriating property. Therefore, when they obtain control they will have to destroy all ownership of
private property, and classes themselves will disappear.

The Manifesto argues that this development is inevitable, and that capitalism is inherently unstable. The
Communists intend to promote this revolution, and will promote the parties and associations that are
moving history towards its natural conclusion. They argue that the elimination of social classes cannot
come about through reforms or changes in government. Rather, a revolution will be required. The
Communist Manifesto: Full Work Summary | SparkNotes
Key Concepts:

Phenomena : a fact or situation that is observed to exist or happen, especially one whose cause or
explanation is in question

Dialectics - the interconnectedness of all phenomena; you cannot understand the part away from the
whole. The relationship among contradictory parts. The flux, motion and state of change that defines all
phenomena.

Dialectical materialism - the economic law of motion for modern society. 5 epochs of history:

Primitive communal - slave - feudal - capitalist - socialist and communist: maps out the social classes
against evolving means of production - “end of history” to point at which all struggle ends and freedom is
realized/ dialectic comes to a rest via through socialism and communism

Historical Materialism vs Idealism:

Idealism - History is shaped by ideas.

Historical Materialism - history and ideas are shaped by material conditions (poverty, repression,
struggle, war, revolution).

Gobineau
(born July 14, 1816, Ville-d’Avray, France—died October 13, 1882, Turin, Italy) Joseph-Arthur, Count de
Gobineau (1816-1882), was a French aristocratic novelist, diplomat, and theorist whose ideas greatly
influenced the development of racist thought in Europe and the United States. He rejected Enlightenment
explanations for human diversity, including the impact of geography and cultural or political institutions,
instead insisting on permanent and unequal racial characteristics passed down since the earliest days of
humankind. He argued that human history was defined by the rise of pure races with superior
characteristics who, through a process of mixing with inferior races, gradually lost their vitality and
collapsed, leaving the stage clear for purer races to rise. In particular Gobineau championed Germanic
“Aryans,” a concept borrowed from the study of ancient languages and then applied to an imagined,
superior race with traces running throughout the white races.
Gobineau on the inequality of races (1853) – Black Central Europe

Notable Works

Essay on the Inequality of the Races (1853):

● Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, 1853–1855)
is a racist and pseudoscientific work of French writer Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, which
argues that there are intellectual differences between human races, that civilizations decline and
fall when the races are mixed and that the white race is superior. It is today considered to be one
of the earliest examples of scientific racialism. Expanding upon Boulainvilliers' use of
ethnography to defend the Ancien Régime against the claims of the Third Estate, Gobineau aimed
for an explanatory system universal in scope: namely, that race is the primary force determining
 world events. Using scientific disciplines as varied as linguistics and anthropology, Gobineau
divides the human species into three major groupings, white, yellow and black, claiming to
demonstrate that "history springs only from contact with the white races." Among the white races,
he distinguishes the Aryan race as the pinnacle of human development, comprising the basis of all
European aristocracies. However, inevitable miscegenation led to the "downfall of civilizations".
(en) About: An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (dbpedia.org)

Key Concepts

Scientific racism: the theory (now largely discredited) that different racial and ethnic groups have innately
differing levels of physical, intellectual, and moral development that distinguish them as superior or
inferior.(Oxford language dictionary)

Racial difference: difference as articulated within the social construction of racialized groups
Difference through racializations: Racialization' refers to the process through which the concept of 'race' is
socially constructed, highlighting the historical, social, and political factors that contribute to the
institutionalization of racism

Aryanism: of or relating to a hypothetical ethnic type illustrated by or descended from early speakers of
Indo-European languages: Synonym for nordicism: of or relating to the Germanic peoples of northern
Europe and especially of Scandinavia 2: of or relating to a group or physical type characterized by tall
stature, long head, light skin and hair, and blue eyes.