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GEORGE W. F. HEGEL
Hegel is a German philosopher lived in the 19 th^ century. He wrote about many different topics but we remember him today especially for politics and history. According to this author, it is only in and by the state that the individual gains his true reality, for it is only in and by it that he comes to universality. Only the state can act universally by instituting laws. Morality, which seeks universality, can be actualized only by being incarnated in institutions and manners. It's true that, according to Hegel, the states constitutes a “final end” for the individual who finds in it the truth of his existence, and that the state constitutes the actualization or the appearance of the divine in the external world. The function of philosophy is not to teach the state how it ought to be, but to teach men how the state ought to be understood. Thus, Hegel wants to show the rational in the irrational. It is the state understood as a harmonious and differentiated totality that makes possible the synthesis of rational and irrational and of the whole with its parts. To express the relation between the articulated whole which is nothing without its parts and the parts which are nothing without the whole, Hegel uses the metaphor of the organism, as the human body, in which each organ has its true reality only in the particular function it fulfills within the whole.
The state is born of conflict and is, in is turn, the theater and the origin of numerous potential conflicts. This is true of the state because it is true of man himself. The conflict between master and slave is prior to the state. The conflict continues, and it is the function of the state to resolve it. The reconciliation which the state must effect is two-pronged. On the one hand, the state is founded on reciprocity, because its citizens recognize one another; on the other hand, the state finds between it both the moment of work and need and that of sacrifice and war. This tension appears in the form of the opposition between civil society and the state, between the bourgeois and the citizen.
Hegel distinguishes between “subjective liberty”, individual consciousness and will pursuing its particular goals, and “objective liberty”, the substantial general will. On the Greeks we may affirm that in the first and true form of their freedom they had no conscience. Among them there reigned the habit of living for their fatherland without further reflection. The independent development of particularity or subjective freedom appears in the Greek states as a hostile principle, as a destruction of the social order. If the people is not organized in and by the state, it is only a collection of particular wills and “does not know what it wills”. It can speak only arbitrarily, in a way harmful to all organization. Hegel, therefore, denied that recognition of individual liberties and rights and juridical equality ought to lead to democracy. He desires a synthesis of liberation and respect, of passion and morality, of revolutionary principles and the necessity of the political order. Historically the modern state should represent a synthesis of the polis and the liberal society of political economy. The means of this synthesis is history. Freedom is realized in the modern state because, on the one hand, the state has separated out and manifested freedom's different moments and aspects; and, on the other hand, since freedom is now revealed as the essence of man, all men are in the state, and know that they are in it, as essentially free. The discovery of the true and complete essence of freedom coincides with the freedom of all.
Hegel writes about the spirits of people. They constitute concrete totalities within which the animating principle expresses itself comprehensively in religion, science, art, events and destiny. Universal history is arranged in three stages which are not three forms of government but three degrees of consciousness of freedom, ranked according to whether it is one, some, or all who know themselves
to be free. The Greek city failed partly because it did not know the Christian principle, partly because
victory as such and their manifest victory. It is indeed concrete freedom which is the final principle. Hegel makes a fundamental distinction between the people which have already reached the final stage of civilization and the others. He considers wars of civilization to be legitimate, inevitable and indispensable. This is the solution to which Hegel leads: war is indispensable to the rational state to the extent to which the state is distinguished from civil society. But the very realization of the fully developed state brings with it the withering away from war. Hegel wanted on this basis to restore the political organization and the human excellence which he blames the modern for endangering. The question that follows the study of his thought is in which proportion we should keep things from the past and in which proportion we should evolve them.
KARL MARX
Marx is a very famous and important author for what concerns political economy. According to him, economy is the living kernel of the society. Marxism claims to have discovered that the economy is the true ground of society and therewith of human life. The study of man must concern itself with real men, not with men as imagined or hoped for or believed to be. Even if it would be more exact to assert that man's singular characteristic is rationality rather than productiveness, the marxist doctrine of the primacy of production on human life rests upon the belief that it was the pressure of his needs that first forced man upward into his humanity and then continues to press him onward and upward.
Marx observes that in every epoch men have access to certain productive forces, which they apply by making use of the objects in which those forces are embodied. It is a mistake to treat consumption, distribution, exchange, money, and so on as eternal categories having an abstract, permanent content, relevance, or validity. Marx asserts that all morality, philosophy, religion, and politics are the result of the conditioning of men by their environment. All historic modes of production have had one feature in common, and that feature has in turn affected all the corresponding societies: control of the means of production has not been shared by all men, but in each age some have been owners or possessors while many more have had to give of themselves of their capacity for work, in order to have access to the instruments of production, to gain a livelihood. The process of production had a “natural” character, in the sense that certain natural differences among men determine the allotment of special tasks to individuals, and the relations of production were therefore determined, imposed, or involuntary, thus natural in the sense of non resulting from human choice.
The fracturing of social life may be epitomized in the existence of civil society or bourgeois society. The breakdown of the integrity of human life is symptomatized and presupposed by the split in our common existence between the political and the economic and social. Marx conceives the state of need and the state of political society to coexist as the state of human bondage or what he calls man's alienation. Each man is condemned to dependance upon external things and upon other men to supply his needs.
Economics or political economy is defective in that it gives an account of economic life in terms of prices, wages, costs, profit, capital, as these were trans-historic categories, or eternal elements intrinsic to economic life under all circumstances. Definition of economics can be given as the science of the allocation of scarce resources among alternative uses. Marx followed Hegel in rejecting as “metaphysical” the view that there are finished things or objects which have a fixed, given, straightforward constitution. He asserted on the contrary that everything is affected both by change and relation. All things are in flux and all flux is motion. To understand the character of all things, it is necessary to grasp the universal law of motion, the law governing nature, human history and thought. Contradiction is fundamental to development. Change is generated by contradiction through the mutual opposition of the two contradictory elements present in the thing in question.
An important element of Marx's political philosophy is his reconstruction of history for the purpose of showing that history has in fact been governed by the materialist dialect. Each epoch inherits a mode of
Eventually, a change takes place in that mode of production, brought on perhaps by a change in needs that could have been engendered by that very mode of production. The new mode of production comes into being while the relations among the human beings are still those generated by the previous mode of production. The contradiction between existent social relations and the emergent mode of production is the source of all collisions in history.
In Marx's society the means of achieving is to abolish the private ownership of the means of production and thus to abolish the distinction between owners and nonowners , distinction that is the condition for the division of human society into classes. The dissolution of classes will finally let the human history begin.
The title of Marx's major economic work, The Capital, indicates what seemed to him to be the central economic problem. Capital does not mean simply the artificial means of production, but it also means productive wealth in the peculiar form that generates profit. Profit appears directly as a part of the price of a commodity, a part which the owner of the means of production, the capitalist, is able to claim. There was, according to classic view, a period of human life when every man could produce independently; and there was a period in which land was made subject to appropriation, and the accumulation of durable property was made feasible. That crucial change in the human state was connected by classical political economy with the accumulation and protection of property in the means of production.
Marx notices a problem that arises out of the exchange of goods: when one commodity is exchanged for another, a common ground is indicated between two things which appear to have nothing at all in common. To deal with the problem of commensurability, Marx recurs to, but modifies, the distinction between value in use and value in exchange. For the distinction use value – exchange – value, Marx use value – value. The reason for this is that he does not regard exchange as a permanent, natural institution, but rather as a historic and transitory one. But exchange value is derivative from value proper, and in order to understand capitalism, it's necessary to understand exchange value and therefore value simply. The foregoing account of value provides support for Marx's definition and elaboration of the notion of a commodity. By a commodity, Marx means a good which is privately produced for the sake of exchange. Capitalism could thus be described as a system of commodity production. Indispensable to capitalism are the private ownership of the means of production and the existence of a body of men who both do not own any means of production and are perfectly free. Labor-power means the ability to labor for a given period; labor means the actual duration of the labor. Labor-power is a commodity. From the preposition the profit originates in the consumption of labor-power by the capitalist, it follows that profit can be made to increase either by consuming more labor-power or by increasing the amount of labor that is produced by a given labor-power. The restless struggle for profit causes the capitalistic economy and society to be in a state of endless flux.
Marx's predictions are on two subjects – the fate of capitalism and the character of socialist society. The ruling principle of Marxian socialist society is “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. The perfect society could not be described except on the premise that there is such a thing as philosophy, that a few men take it to be the greatest good, that more than a few never can or will take it to be so, and that therefore it's in the nature of things that justice and political society or government will not dissolve into philosophy. The economic system that would be approved as rational by Marx would not be the liberal economy.
Political life rests upon the imperfection of man and continues to exist because human nature rules out the elevation of all men to the level of excellence.
Marxism is famous for looking forward to the end not only of political life, but also of religion. Religion is the belief in the existence of a realm of the whole where there is a rectification for every defect in the terrestrial world. The belief in the possibility of conquering or governing nature perhaps opened the way to the Marxian notion that the perfection of human life is possible. We are led, through the doctrines of Marxism, to reconsider some commonly held views. One is that there is a deep hostility between philosophy and political society, another is that between philosophy and religion there is in principle war to the death, the one asserting the supremacy of reason, the other of faith. The replacement of philosophy by history was the condition for the replacement of politics and religion by society and economics.
Because of Marx being very modern, his philosophy has become very popular both in politics and economy, leading it to be a huge phenomenon called “Marxism”.
