Nineteenth Century Thought Read Online Free Page B

not the
writer posits a solution outside the existing framework. The novel and the
writer seem to be looking in two different directions, the latter suggesting a
path, idealistic and abstract, that the former cannot uphold.

Marxism
    The climax of Materialist thought is
seen in Marxism. Another name of this doctrine is historical materialism which
signifies the application of materialist dialectical logic to history. Marx
offered a theory of history under which he projected class struggle as the
driving force of social life through epochs and centuries. Without such an
approach, it was not possible to explain change in human surroundings that
otherwise was noticed all around, in countries and continents. In fact, changes
had swept, as Marx saw it, through Europe at such a hectic pace in the previous
centuries, particularly after the Renaissance, that they offered a constant
challenge to thinkers and philosophers in their effort at evolving answers to
theexisting questions. Being idealist, mechanical or unilinear , the traditional logic remained confined to
merely 'interpreting' what was considered reality. The starting point of Marx's
dialectical logic, on the other hand, was the famous thesis that
"Philosophers have so far interpreted the world. The point, however, is to
change it." In this manner, materialist logic came to devote itself to
study society solely in order to change it - of course, to the extent possible
at a given time. Raymond Williams has remarked in his book The English novel
From Dickens to Lawrence that after the publication of Marx's Communist
Manifesto in 1848, the novel in England changed radically, it became
entirely different from what it was in the preceding period. Indeed, the impact
of this famous document was not only on the novel but on the whole of
nineteenth century European life -the masses, the social structures, the
states, regimes, ideological-philosophical systems, culture, literature and the
arts.
    The vast appeal of Communist
Manifesto in the nineteenth century did not go to Marx's head, a young man
of thirty at the time, who modestly said that the credit for the theory went
actually to the emergence of a new class in history, the industrial worker or
the proletariat. According to Karl Marx, Marxism was the theory of the
proletarian class which he only elaborated at the given historical moment. The
outlook of the proletariat enabled scholars to grasp the nature of the mode of
production (the base), social consciousness (corresponding to the base in
superstructure) and the immense potential of the productive forces. In the
light of this, Marx had a great deal to say about the formation and role of
ideas in social life.
    See for example the notion that ideas
are formed in society not in a place outside or beyond it. If we find this to
be true, we would be led to the conclusion that we .should determine the
veracity of ideas, improve them if they are inadequate and discard them if they
have become obsolete with the passage of time. Such a notion restores to the
human being the dignity of his/ her existence by virtue of which the making and
unmaking of social reality would pass into the human domain. It is thus the
human being, not any transcendental power that should be called The Maker. Let
us understand a few basic premises of Marxism, particularly related to ideology
and consciousness from the passage quoted below:
    We set out from
real active men, and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the
development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process. The
phantom s formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their
material life process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material
premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology, and their
corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of
independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their
material production