Historical Theory

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This started with the overthrow of the absolute monarchy, passed through the revolutionary regime of Robespierre and the bourgeois-military dictatorship of Napoleon and ended in the Bourbon Restoration. For example, capitalism tends to increase the rate at which the forces develop and stresses the accumulation of capital.

As envisaged by Hegel, this freedom was not realised through the emancipation of mankind from oppressive and servile social conditions but from the overcoming of false, inadequate ideas. They became more and more sluggish and shortsighted in the fields of sociology and history because discovery of the underlying causes of change in these fields could only threaten the continuance of capitalist domination. Towards the end of his life, Engels commented several times about the abuse of historical materialism. The French historians of the early 19th century acquired a deeper insight into the economic conditioning of the historical process through their studies of the English and French revolutions.The raw materials for genuine history-writing were first collected in the annals of the reigns and chronicles of kings in the river valley civilisations of the Near East, India and China.

Marx identified society's relations of production (arising on the basis of given productive forces) as the economic base of society. Every essential element of each stage hung together as components of a unified whole which expressed the dominant principle of its age. No single state or people dominated world history; each was to be judged by its role in the development of the totality. Surplus from agriculture was distributed to the citizens, who exploited the slaves that worked the fields.

Thus some 18th century rationalists who believed that “opinion governs mankind” looked toward an enlightened monarch to introduce the necessary progressive reconstruction of the state and society. They were the first to try to explain the evolution of society along materialist lines, however crude and awkward were their initial efforts.

Marx underpins his theory of history by drawing attention to a fundamental reality of human existence – the necessity to labor to ensure physical survival. The earliest men did not even distinguish themselves from the rest of nature or draw a sharp line of demarcation between themselves and other living creatures in their habitat. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. According to Marx, this conception of history amounted to nothing more than a collection of 'high-sounding dramas of princes and states'.The first synthetic conception of history arose from the fusion of elements taken over from the old creation myths with a review of these records. However, Hegel's contention, in Marx's view, that ideas or the 'spirit of the age' drive history was mistaken. This was mythologised in the persons of the Three Fates and further rationalised by learned men as the ultimate law of life. As Charles Brockden Brown, an American novelist of the early 19th century, put it: “Human beings are moulded by the circumstances in which they are placed.