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HISTORICAL AND
DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM

Historical and dialectical materialism are terms con-
ventionally employed to describe two aspects of the
theoretical structure known as Marxism. Although
logically independent of each other, the two concepts
are historically linked by virtue of the fact that they
evolved from a common intellectual stem. For practi-
cal purposes it is also relevant that Marx and Engels
are widely regarded as joint creators of a unified system
of thought encompassing nature and history. The fact
that this interpretation is erroneous does not render
it less significant. Insofar as the term “Marxism” has
come to stand for a systematic doctrine elaborated by
Engels and others after the death of Marx, the latter's
original intentions may be said to have been “devel-
oped” or “misinterpreted,” depending upon one's
viewpoint. Irrespective of where one stands on this
issue, it is a comparatively simple matter to distinguish
the historical materialism of Marx from the dialectical
materialism of Engels. In tracing this distinction, we
begin with Marx's writings on history, and then pro-
ceed to a consideration of the materialist ontology
outlined by Engels and subsequently institutionalized
in the dogmatic system of Marxism-Leninism. This
approach inverts the familiar procedure wherein his-
torical materialism is treated as the application to
history of the general doctrine of dialectical materi-
alism. Since no such view was at any time entertained
by Marx, we are on safe grounds in disregarding it.

1. Marx's Historical Materialism. A consideration
of this topic can usefully start out from an early work,
The Holy Family (1845), in which Marx draws a dis-
tinction between two divergent currents stemming
from the rationalist philosophy of the French eight-
eenth-century Enlightenment. On the one hand, the
philosophes had opposed what Marx called “mechani-
cal materialism” to the metaphysics of Descartes,
Spinoza, and Leibniz, thereby preparing the way for
the emancipation of natural science from Cartesian
metaphysics. Having successfully divorced Descartes'
physics from his metaphysics, this “Cartesian materi-
alism” eventually merged with “French natural sci-
ence.” The heritage of Descartes—who in his lifetime
had already encountered opponents in Gassendi (“the
restorer of Epicurean materialism”) and in Hobbes—
was, however, gradually dislodged by doctrines rooted
in Locke and was eventually given a new form by
Condillac and Helvétius. According to Marx, “As
Cartesian materialism merges into natural science
proper, the other branch of French materialism leads
direct to socialism and communism” (Marx, Holy Fam-
ily [1845], p. 175). Its ultimate source was an anthro
pological doctrine which emphasized the goodness of
man:

(ibid., p. 175, slightly revised).

This Marxian humanism, as formulated in the Holy
Family, the Theses on Feuerbach (1845), and the
German Ideology (1845-46), was a development of
eighteenth-century French materialism, minus its
Cartesian physics and the related epistemological
problem, in which he took no interest. The basic orien-
tation of this materialism was practical, and its appli-
cation to social life was seen by Marx to follow in-
evitably from insight into the human condition. “If man
is shaped by his surroundings, his surroundings must
be made human” (Holy Family, p. 176). This conclusion
followed without question for anyone who had incor-
porated the ethics of the French Enlightenment in his
own assumptions about the world. Marx was never
conscious of a moral problem in this respect, because
his values formed part of a commitment to the belief
that the humanization of nature (including that part
of “human” nature which was in fact pre-human, i.e.,
a heritage of man's animal past) was both possible and
desirable. In this sense, historical materialism from the
start incorporated a particular value-system: that of
the Enlightenment. At the same time the doctrine had
a specific theoretical content which differentiated it
from contemporary liberalism: it rejected the then
fashionable disjunction between society and the indi-
vidual. When he wrote in his sixth Thesis on Feuerbach
that “The essence of man is no abstraction inherent
in each separate individual. In its reality it is the en-
semble of social relations,” Marx reemphasized a notion
already stressed in the passage from The Holy Family
cited earlier: “If man is social by nature, he will de-
velop his true nature only in society, and the power
of his nature must be measured not by the power of
separate individuals, but by the power of society”
(Holy Family, p. 176).

The difference between the liberal and the socialist
position then, as Marx perceived it in the 1840's, re-
duced itself to this: the socialists (or communists),
having taken seriously the proposition that man is the
sum total of his social relations, were concerned to
remake society, whereas liberal rationalism postulated

a fixed and stable individual human essence which
could be relied upon to find adequate expression in
appropriate social institutions—always supposing that
no artificial barriers were placed in the way. In prac-
tice, liberalism identified human rationality with en-
lightened self-interest, and the desirable social order
with one in which private initiative was permitted free
play. In this respect the liberals went back to the
philosophers of the eighteenth century, but then so did
Marx, with the difference that he rejected the individ-
ualism of the Scottish moralists and of Adam Smith,
in favor of the collectivism inherent in the French
materialists. It is important to realize that in its origins
“historical materialism” was an anthropological doc-
trine before it became a sociological one. Its signifi-
cance for Marx lay in the fact that it enabled him to
treat socialism (or communism) as the consistent appli-
cation to society of general principles extracted from
the philosophical study of human nature. Once this
nature was perceived as “social,” in the sense that it
always and everywhere refracted the character of the
cultural environment which men had constructed, the
“socialist” conclusion followed from the “materialist”
assumption. Or rather, it followed for Marx because
he took for granted the value-system of writers like
Holbach and Helvétius, for whom true self-love was
inconceivable in abstraction from human solidarity.

The notion that this anthropological naturalism is
anchored in a general theory of the universe, which
represents the world as a process of “dialectical”
movement from one stage to another, finds no support
in Marx's writings. For him, the only “nature” that
enters into practical consideration is man's own nature.
The external world, as it exists in and for itself, is
irrelevant to a thinker who approaches history with
a view to establishing what men have made of them-
selves and are still capable of becoming. It is the more
irrelevant because on Marx's assumptions about the
active role of consciousness in constituting our picture
of reality, the world is never simply “given,” any more
than that man is the passive receptacle of sense-
impressions. An external environment, true knowledge
of which is possible in abstraction from man's role in
shaping the world, is a fantasy, at any rate so far as
society is concerned. The only world we know is the
one we have constituted: that which appears in our
individual and collective experience. Man is indeed
part of nature, so that the distinction between natural
and historical science can only be relative, not absolute.
But “historical materialism” has to do with “anthro-
pological nature,” not with nature in the abstract. At
the same time, the emphasis upon the “historical”
aspect of the new viewpoint served to distinguish it
from the naturalistic approach of the eighteenth-
century French philosophes (and of Feuerbach), which
virtually ignored the historical process. A materialist
critique of the prevailing social and political conditions
presupposed an understanding of the manner in which
they had come into being, the forces which upheld
them, and the tendencies pointing beyond them. The
Theses on Feuerbach in particular represent a break
with “contemplative” materialism, and the adoption
of a “practical” standpoint which is revolutionary by
its very nature.

Historical materialism in this sense had a “dialec-
tical” element built into its conceptual structure from
the very first. It was at one and the same time an
analysis of the historical process, and the theoretical
underpinning of a particular viewpoint (the socialist
one) which implied a critique of liberal individualism
and its objective correlative: civil (or bourgeois) soci-
ety. This introduction of an activist element into a
doctrine of society proved baffling to most of Marx's
critics who accepted the positivist interpretation of
history as an ongoing process analyzable in strictly
factual terms. Historical events, on this view, were
analogous to the facts of natural science. They were
simply there to be studied in as dispassionate a manner
as possible, and the task of the historian (in Ranke's
words) was to explain “what really happened” (wie es
eigentlich gewesen).

Marx by the later 1840's was sufficiently close to
positivism to reject Hegel's philosophy of history, and
by implication the entire notion of a philosophy (as
distinct from a theory) of history: an enterprise whose
theological purpose had become evident to him, once
he had emancipated himself from Hegel and absorbed
the impact of Anglo-French materialism. At the same
time he differed from Comte (whose principal work
he first read in 1866, and then dismissed as rubbish)
in refusing to treat history as an accretion of data
which could be studied on the model of the natural
sciences. History to Marx was a self-activating totality
ultimately rooted in the “production and reproduction
of material life.” Its objectivity was not of the kind
that could be discerned by the study of “facts,” and
for the same reason it did not lend itself to the fram-
ing of general laws analogous to Newtonian physics:
the model of Comte's “social physics.” The materialist
approach was outlined by Marx in the German Ide-
ology of 1845-46, and subsequently confirmed in the
well-known Preface to the Critique of Political Econ-
omy (1859):

It has for its counterpart the activist note struck in
the Communist Manifesto (1848):

These two modes of perception are held in balance
by the notion that the “materialist conception of his-
tory” is both a theory of the historical process and a
means towards its mastery. Men become masters of
their fate in the measure in which they become con-
scious of the mechanism whereby history is set in
motion and kept going. In turning their insight to
practical account, they do not for this reason abandon
the scientific standpoint. Rather, they employ their
insight into the antagonistic character of the historical
process—specifically of its ultimate stage: contem-
porary bourgeois society—for the purpose of over-
coming the antagonism. Marx's historical materialism
differs from Comte's positivism in that it incorporates
practical (political or ethical) postulates within its very
conceptual structure. He does not formulate general
laws on the basis of a dispassionate study of “objective”
data; he conceptualizes the historical process, and in
this very act unifies (critical) theory and (revolutionary)
practice.

Although Marx never employed the term “sociol-
ogy” (possibly because he held Comte's work in low
esteem), it has become customary to treat the approach
briefly sketched out in the 1859 Preface, and exten-
sively developed in Capital (1867), as a sociological
doctrine analogous to that of Comte. Within the
Marxist school itself this fashion was inaugurated by
Engels, who in his Anti-Dühring (1878) attributed to
Marx “two great discoveries,” one of them being “the
materialist conception of history.” This was described
by Engels as the doctrine “that the production (of the
means to support human life) and, next to production,
the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all
social structure; that in every society that has appeared
in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed
and society divided into classes or orders is dependent
upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how
the products are exchanged.” Marx, who had read the
Anti-Dühring in manuscript, did not bother to correct
this simplified exposition of his very complex approach,
presumably because he regarded the book as a popular
tract destined for a semi-literate public. In consequence
it came to be widely believed that “scientific socialism”
(another term coined by Engels) had for its theoretical
foundation a species of economic determinism valid
for all stages of recorded history. In the light of this
quite unfounded assumption, the relationship of the
so-called “economic base” to the “political” or
“ideological” superstructure assumed the status of a
major theoretical difficulty whose solution kept a small
army of exegetes ceaselessly employed. The “materi-
alist” standpoint was understood in terms of Engels'
statement (in the passage already cited) as signifying
that “the final causes of all social changes and political
revolutions are to be sought... not in the philosophy,
but in the economics of each particular epoch” (Engels,
1878).

In point of fact, the problem of relating the “politi-
cal superstructure” to its “material foundation” had
originally (in 1842-44) presented itself to Marx as an
aspect of his critique of Hegel's political philosophy,
notably as formulated in the latter's Philosophy of Right
(1821). While already conscious of the distinction be-
tween “state” and “society,” Hegel had assigned a
subordinate role to the latter. Marx's “materialism,”
by contrast, took for its starting point the autonomy
of a society which had manifestly developed a dynamic
of its own: Western European bourgeois society, itself
propelled forward by the mechanism of what he
termed the “capitalist mode of production.” To this
extent his approach was in tune with the procedure
common among the classical economists, notably the
founders of that discipline of “Political Economy”
which had grown up in Western Europe between 1770
and 1830. The novelty he introduced lay in the fusion
of what was later termed “economics” with “sociol-
ogy” and “history.” An introduction to some bulky
1857-58 manuscripts (first published in 1939-41) de-
fines the subject of his investigations as the sphere of
“material production.” He goes on to suggest that,
within the totality of production-distribution-consump-
tion, one element—namely production—predominates.
“From it, the process continually recommences....
There is interaction between the various elements. This
is the case in every organic whole.” Nowhere does
Marx assert that production is “in the last analysis”
the causal factor “determining” the shape of society,
still less that “economics”—in the vulgar sense of eco-
nomic interest—“determines” the political process.
These notions were introduced by his interpreters,
beginning with Engels (1878), in an attempt to gen-
eralize a principle of investigation into an all-embrac-
ing causal explanation.

It is equally worth noting that Marx does not speak
of a “materialist conception of history,” contenting
himself with the more modest term “materialistic and
thus scientific method.” The conversion of his critical
method into a determinist social philosophy was pri-
marily the work of Engels, who after the death of
Marx in 1883 assumed the role of exegete. The next
step consisted in transforming the Marxian critique of
society into a comprehensive doctrine embracing both
nature and history. This process too was set in motion

by Engels, and continued (after his death in 1895) by
the orthodox school, primarily represented by Karl
Kautsky, G. V., Plekhanov, and Antonio Labriola. It
will be considered in the following section. Here it
remains to be noted that in its original Marxian form
the “materialist conception of history” had a twofold
character: (1) As a general principle of historical inves-
tigation, or conceptualization, it remained a mere
sketch, although of great potential fertility for the
social sciences, a circumstance clearly recognized by
Max Weber, whose own work bore the imprint of his
lifelong preoccupation with the problems raised by
Marx. (2) As a finished theory of the actual historical
process, the new method had originally been employed
for the critical analysis of one particular social forma-
tion only: bourgeois society. Capital (1867-94) con-
tained an historical sketch of the rise of capitalism in
Western Europe, but did not attempt to answer the
question why no corresponding development had oc-
curred elsewhere. As for the pre-capitalist formations
briefly considered in the Grundrisse of 1857-58, the
analysis, while “materialist” enough, did not point to
“internal contradictions” similar to those which (in
Marx's view) were at work in contemporary bourgeois
society.

In fairness to all concerned, it may be said that
Marx's theoretical approach in the crucially important
Preface of the 1859 Critique, as well as in his earlier
and later writings, lent itself to an equivocation. On
the one hand, he had inherited from his prede-
cessors—notably Adam Smith and David Ricardo—the
notion of an autonomous economic sphere interacting
with the remainder of society (including the political
and cultural “superstructure”). On the other hand, he
had taken over from Hegel the conception of history
as a self-activating totality within which all the seem-
ingly independent elements were “organically” linked.
By fusing these two modes of thought, he arrived at
a vision of modern society as a uniquely determined
totality of social relations, dynamically propelled by
an equally unique and unprecedented mode of produc-
tion. The “historical” element in this “historical mate-
rialism” lay in the fact that he described as “bourgeois”
the social relations (or production relations) which
Smith and Ricardo had treated as “natural.” The “ma-
terialism” lay in his ascription to the “relations of
production” of a higher degree of reality than had been
accorded to them by Hegel and the other “idealist”
German philosophers. But if the “relations of produc-
tion” were virtually synonymous with “society,” there
was no specificity of the economic sphere, and the
distinction between base and superstructure broke
down. It cannot be said that Marx ever quite managed
to solve the problem, or even to state it in an entirely
unambiguous manner. Had he done so, both his follow-
ers and his critics would doubtless have been saved
a great deal of trouble.

2. The Dialectical Materialism of Engels. In contrast
to the “historical materialism” of Marx which, what-
ever its inadequacies, represents a momentous intel-
lectual achievement, the “dialectical materialism” of
Engels cannot be regarded as an important contri-
bution to philosophy. Its significance lies in the fact
that, for historical reasons, it has become the keystone
of an institutionalized system of thought binding upon
the adherents of what is officially known as Marxism-
Leninism. This philosophy having obtained official
status in the USSR and in Eastern Europe (not to
mention China, where it has undergone a further proc-
ess of barbarization and banalization), every discussion
of the subject necessarily assumes an unwelcome
quasi-political character. In what follows, these cir-
cumstances are disregarded as much as possible, and
attention is centered upon the intellectual substance
of the doctrine. The topical importance of what for
convenience may be termed “Soviet Marxism,” or
“Marxism-Leninism,” makes it necessary to direct the
reader's attention to the existence of an indigenous
literature on the subject; but it needs to be emphasized
that this literature holds little interest for anyone con-
cerned with the basic philosophical issues (Jordan,
1967).

Unlike Marx, who had undergone a rigorous aca-
demic training and possessed a comprehensive knowl-
edge of both ancient and modern philosophy, Engels
was self-taught in philosophic matters, a circumstance
which weighed heavily upon his subsequent attempts
to effect a synthesis of Hegelian logic and natural
science. A man of great talent, enormous versatility,
and inexhaustible capacity for work, he nonetheless
lacked the intellectual power which enabled Marx to
unify history, sociology, and economics into a coherent
system of thought. At the same time, the example set
by his senior associate, and his own profound attach-
ment to the Hegelian tradition—of which in a sense
he remained a lifelong prisoner—activated a dormant
ambition which he shared with other German writers
of his time: the desire to bring about a reconciliation
between the “natural philosophy” of the romantic
school and the positive sciences which had developed
under the quite different impact of Cartesian and
Hobbesian “mechanical materialism.” The resultant
synthesis—sketched in outline by Engels in his writings
of the 1870's and 1880's, and eventually termed
“dialectical materialism” by Plekhanov—became the
philosophical foundation of what from the 1890's on-
wards was very generally described as “Marxism”; the
term encompassing at one and the same time the

historical materialism of Marx (as interpreted by
Engels), and the pseudo-ontological doctrine con-
structed by Engels from the debris of the Hegelian
system.

While it has been noted that Marx's naturalistic
approach from the start contained a “dialectical” ele-
ment, in that it left room for the interaction of human
consciousness and a nonhuman environment, the mate-
rialism of Engels could be described as “dialectical”
for reasons much more closely connected with the
enduring legacy of Hegel's system. Hegel had seen in
nature and history the unfolding of a metaphysical
substance which he termed “Spirit”; ultimately a theo-
logical conception, although Hegel for the most part
stayed closer to Aristotelianism than to Neo-Platonism.
For Marx there was no such universal principle of
motion. What he inherited from Hegel was rather a
species of holism which placed the idea of totality at
the center of all theoretical conceptualizations. From
this he deduced the methodological rule that the ele-
ments of a social structure could not be dissociated
from each other: they had to be regarded as parts
forming an organic, interconnected whole. While in
principle there was no reason why this rule should not
be extended to the domain of nature, Marx did not
in fact attempt to outline a general logic applicable
to nature and history alike. His doctrines relating to
societal evolution were not deduced from a general
principle, nor did he infer from his reading of Hegel's
Logic (cf. Wissenschaft der Logik, 1812-16) that par-
ticular changes in society were traceable to the opera-
tion of a universal law of motion. Least of all was he
concerned with the concept of an eternal material
substance underlying the phenomena. “The anthropo-
logical realism of Marx precluded the adherence to
absolute materialism of any sort, including dialectical
materialism” (Jordan, p. 93).

In contrast to Marx, who had genuinely abandoned
the Hegelian search for an all-embracing logic of (ma-
terial or spiritual) development, Engels revived the
notion that an objective process of this kind was
actually discoverable. Moreover, he undertook to show
that the dialectical principle—self-transcendence by
way of internal conflict to higher levels of develop-
ment—was operative in human history, conceived as
a singularity within the domain of nature. The basic
assumption of the dialectical method, on his reading,
was that:

(Ludwig Feuerbach, in Selected Works, II, 351).

This speculative hypothesis in turn became the
foundation of an evolutionary doctrine applicable to
nature and history alike. In contrast to the prevailing
positivist evolutionism which was popular among lib-
erals because it specified an uninterrupted forward
movement from “barbarism” to “civilization,” Engels'
quasi-Hegelian approach emphasized the self-contra-
dictory nature of the process; dialectical motion im-
plied progress through conflict between opposing
forces. In its application to society this principle was
invoked by Engels' followers to account both for the
necessity of class conflict and for the inevitablity of
socialism as the resolution of one particular conflict
between classes. This presentation of the subject was
not understood as an imaginative metaphor—as such
it might have had some limited usefulness—but as the
“scientific” description of an ongoing process, one that
possessed a logic quite indifferent to the subjective
volition of its human representatives. As in Hegel's
philosophy of history, the Idea (the hidden rationality
of the Whole) triumphed at the expense of its own
agents, who might include entire classes, nations, or
generations. This reversion to Hegel's metaphysical
construction of world history was dubbed “dialectical
materialism” for no better reason than that Engels
substituted “matter” for “spirit” as the ontological
substance underlying the motion of the phenomena.
In practice his approach represented an abandonment
of Marx's revolutionary humanism and a return to the
Hegelian standpoint.

While Engels' partiality to the romantic Naturphi-
losophie inaugurated by Schelling, Carus, and other
German writers of Hegel's time had no practical con-
sequences, his adoption of a determinist approach in
the field of history opened the door to the subsequent
introduction by Kautsky of an evolutionism virtually
indistinguishable from that of Auguste Comte and
Herbert Spencer. The irony lay in the circumstance
that this mode of thought was positivist rather than
speculative. But having once introduced a determinist
monism in the name of “dialectical materialism,” it
proved comparatively easy to extrude the Hegelian
element while retaining the determinism. This became
the distinguishing mark of the Social-Democratic
variant of “orthodox Marxism.” In contrast to this
evolutionism, which went with democratic optimism
in politics, Lenin from about 1914 onwards system-
atically reintroduced the Hegelian emphasis upon con-
flict and contradiction as the motivating force. Before
that date he had been content to expand Engels' hints
into a “materialist” philosophy of science which was

not particularly “dialectical,” but rather concerned to
defend the “objective” reality of the external world
against the “subjectivism” of Kant and his followers
(Jordan, pp. 208ff.).

In purely philosophical terms, the difference be-
tween Engels' ontological, or metaphysical, materi-
alism, and the doctrine of Plekhanov and Lenin is not
without interest. Plekhanov, and following him Lenin,
eliminated from the concept of “dialectical materi-
alism” the ontological notion of “matter” as an absolute
substance or constituent element of the universe. In
its place they introduced the rather more common
sensible use of “matter” as a logical concept signifying
little more than the externality of the world for the
reflective consciousness. In other words, they substi-
tuted for Engels' metaphysical monism an ordinary
epistemological realism which at least had the advan-
tage of being compatible with the procedure of the
natural sciences. The locus classicus of this trans-
formation (which was never described as such) is
Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909), a
work which after 1917 obtained canonical status in the
USSR and for the Marxist-Leninist school generally.
Unfortunately, the philosophers of this school have
simultaneously had to cope with Engels' own quite
different (because fundamentally metaphysical) under-
standing of the term “materialism,” as well as with
Lenin's quasi-Hegelian logical speculations in his
Notebooks of 1915-16. The resulting conflicts and con-
tradictions have furnished material for exhaustive logi-
cal tournaments among philosophers in Eastern
Europe, without for that reason bringing any nearer
that fusion of dialectical logic with positive science
which remains the stated aim of the Marxist-Leninist
school. Insofar as the gradual change in the intellectual
atmosphere since the late 1950's has encouraged
greater independence of thought in the Soviet sphere,
there has been a tendency for two “revisionist” trends
to crystallize outside the official orthodoxy: existential-
ist humanism, oriented on the writings of the young
Marx, on the one hand, positivist scientism and em-
piricism on the other. In countering these trends, the
official dogmatism of the Leninist school, while retain-
ing its function as an integrative ideology or Weltan-
schauung for the benefit of the Communist party,
appears to have been placed on the defensive; a posi-
tion from which it is unlikely to emerge.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K. Marx, and F. Engels, The Holy Family (Moscow, 1956),
pp. 168-76. For the original text see DieHeilige Familie
(1845) in Marx-Engels Werke, (Berlin, 1959), 2, 132ff. T. B.
Bottomore and M. Rubel, Karl Marx—Selected Writings in
Sociology and Social Philosophy (London, 1956; New York,
1964), gives a selection of relevant passages on various
aspects of historical materialism. Although conventionally
attributed to both Marx and Engels, The Holy Family was
almost entirely composed by Marx, and the remarks cited
in the text represent a “materialist” and post-Hegelian view
on the subject of French naturalism as the ultimate source
of “socialism and communism”: the latter term carrying
more specific implications concerning the abolition of pri-
vate property. See also Karl Marx—Early Writings, trans.
and ed. T. B. Bottomore, with a foreword by E. Fromm
(New York, 1964), passim. The rather overworked theme
of Marx's views on human “alienation” is best approached
by consulting the Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844 in the edition prepared and introduced by Dirk J.
Struik (New York, 1964) on the basis of Martin Milligan's
translation from the German text, as first published in
Marx-Engels, Gesamtausgabe (hereafter MEGA), Abt. I,
Band 3 (Berlin, 1932). An excellent analytical and critical
introduction to the topic of historical materialism in gen-
eral, and Marxian sociology in particular, is to be found
in Karl Korsch, Karl Marx (New York, 1963), passim.

Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845), posthumously pub-
lished by Engels as an Appendix to his own Ludwig Feuer-
bach (1888), now in Werke, Vol. 21 (Berlin, 1962), 263ff.
(without the Appendix); see MEGA, I, 5, 533ff., for the
original German text of the Theses. For an English-language
edition of Engels' essay and of the Theses, see Marx-Engels
Selected Works (Moscow, 1951), II, 324ff. For Marx's critique
of Feuerbachian materialism see The German Ideology, in
MEGA, I, 5, and the various translations. See also Marx's
letter to Engels of 24 April 1867 (MEGA, III, 3, 383), where
he observes that “the cult of Feuerbach” notable in the
Holy Family now seems rather out of date. It is fair to
say that Feuerbach's critique of religion was of greater
importance for Engels than for Marx, who took his materi-
alism straight from the British and French philosophers of
the eighteenth century. On this subject see Korsch, op. cit.,
pp. 172ff.; Sidney Hook, From Hegel to Marx (New York,
1950), pp. 220ff.

Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy (Berlin, 1859); see Marx-Engels, Selected Works
(Moscow, 1958), 1, 361ff. The subject is discussed from a
Marxist standpoint in Korsch, op. cit., pp. 183ff., and from
a positivist one in Z. A. Jordan, The Evolution of Dialectical
Materialism (London and New York, 1967), pp. 111ff. It is
undisputed that in the 1840's Marx received his decisive
intellectual stimulus towards what was later called the
materialist conception of history from Henri de Saint-Simon
and his pupils. The latter had once included A. Comte,
whose Cours de philosophie positive (1830-42) was then
unknown to Marx and made no impression on him when
he finally read it, many years later, in Littré's edition of
1864. Jordan (op. cit., pp. 125ff.) suggests that the Comtean
notion of social physics has its counterpart in the Marxian
approach, and that for Marx—as for Comte—“society is the
true reality, and the individual the abstraction” (p. 132).
The present writer is unable to accept these conclusions.
Neither does it seem to him that the 1859 Preface constitutes
a retreat from the sociological realism of Marx's earlier

writings in favor of a neo-Hegelian philosophy of history
(Jordan, op. cit., p. 299).

F. Engels, Anti-Dühring. Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolu-
tion in Science (Moscow, 1954), p. 369. For the original
German text see Werke (Berlin, 1962), 20, 248ff. For an
account of what Marx intended by his “materialist” method
of investigation see Korsch, op. cit., pp. 167ff.; Bottomore,
Karl Marx—Selected Writings..., op cit., pp. 14ff. For
an extensive specimen of Marx's actual historical investi-
gations, see Karl Marx: Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations,
trans. Jack Cohen, edited and introduced by E. J. Hobsbawm
(London, 1964). This presents a brief extract from the bulky
manuscript composed by Marx in 1857-58 in preparation
for Capital (1867-94). While part of this material was used
by him for his Critique of Political Economy (1859), and
some minor excerpts appeared in Kautsky's Neue Zeit in
1903-04), the entire manuscript saw the light only in
1939-41, when it was published in Moscow under the title
Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ükonomie. Virtually
ignored at the time, it was republished in its entirety in
Berlin in 1953 (in a volume running to over 1,000 printed
pages) and translated into Italian in 1956. Its importance
for the concept of historical materialism lies in the fact that
in it Marx, for the first and last time, dealt at some length
with the structure of non-European societies. He thus sup-
plied a basis for some of the startling generalizations of the
1859 Preface. Antedating Capital by a few years, the
Grundrisse already belong to his mature period, and their
study is essential for an understanding of his peculiar fusion
of history, sociology, and economics. They also cast some
light on the concept of the “Asiatic mode of production”
briefly adumbrated in the 1859 Preface, and subsequently
ignored in Soviet literature for reasons apparent to anyone
conversant with the circumstances of the Stalinist era. For
a dispassionate critique of the Marxian approach from an
empiricist standpoint, strongly marked by the influence of
Max Weber, see J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism,
and Democracy (New York, 1942), passim. This work, how-
ever, antedates the publication of the Grundrisse in an
edition available to Westerners, and thus does not entirely
come to grips with the problems raised by Marx's investi-
gations.

Z. A. Jordan, The Evolution of Dialectical Materialism:
A Philosophical and Sociological Analysis (London, 1967)
is the best introduction to this subject. Starting from the
now generally accepted distinction between the original
approach of Engels and that of Marx, the author traces in
considerable detail the exfoliation of Engels' unsystematic
essays into the fully developed system of “dialectical mate-
rialism” first outlined by G. V. Plekhanov and subsequently
codified by Lenin and his successors, down to and including
Stalin. Gustav A. Wetter, Dialectical Materialism: A Histori-
cal And Systematic Survey of Philosophy in the Soviet Union
(London, 1958), offers an equally learned, but differently
organized, account of the topic, the author giving little
space to Marx and Engels, while centering attention upon
the evolution of Soviet philosophy since 1917. Unlike
Jordan, he deals at some length with Bukharin, Deborin,
and some lesser figures. For a critique of Engels' philo
sophical writings see Sidney Hook, “Dialectic and Nature,”
in his Reason, Social Myths and Democracy (New York,
1950), pp. 183ff. For the impact of Leninism on the philo-
sophical and scientific discussions in the USSR before the
full rigor mortis of Stalinism set in, see David Joravsky,
Soviet Marxism and Natural Science 1917-32 (London, 1961).
For a more recent and less technical discussion of Marxism-
Leninism as a pseudo-ontological system of speculation
about nature and history see A. James Gregor, A Survey
of Marxism (New York, 1965). The brief reading list ap-
pended to this work provides a guide to official Soviet
literature on the subject, as well as to works by Western
authors and a few “revisionist” critics of Leninism who have
retained the Hegelian-Marxist approach antedating the
formulation of Soviet orthodoxy in the 1930's. For a brief
but pregnant discussion of this latter theme, see Eugene
Kamenka, “Philosophy in the Soviet Union,” Philosophy
(Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy), 38, No. 143
(Jan., 1963).

GEORGE LICHTHEIM

[See also Determinism; Economic History; Enlightenment;
Evolutionism; Ideology; Marxism; Positivism; Revolution;
Romanticism, Post-Kantian; Social Democracy.]