THE DEVIL THEORY OF THE DIALECTIC
85
fore, the question Mr. Wilson raises is more of a textual than a theo–
retical one, we might quote from the explanations which the founding
fathers themselves gave of historical materialism:
"When, therefore, it is a question of investigating the driving
forces, which--consciously or unconsciously, and indeed very often
~consciously-lie
behind the motives of men in their historical ac–
tions and which constitute the real ultimate driving forces of history,
then it is not a question so much of the motives of single individuals,
however eminent, as of those motives which set in motion great masses,
whole peoples, and again whole classes of the people in each people...
But how did these classes come into existence? ... In the struggle be–
tween landed property and the bourgeoisie, no less than in the struggle
between the bourgeoisie and the
prolet~riat,
it was a question in the
first instance of economic interests, to tlle furtherance of which politic–
al
power was intended to serve merely as a means. . ; . We discover
that in modern history the will of the state is, on the whole determined
by the changing needs of civil society, by the supremacy of this or that
class, in the last resort, by the development of the productive forces
and relations of exchange....
*
"As
to the realms of ideology which soar still higher in the air–
religion, philosophy, etc., ... the people who deal with this belong to
special $pheres in the division of labor and appear to themselves to be
working in an independent field.... But all the same they themselves
remain under the dominating influence of economic development. In
philosophy, for instance, this can be
mdst
readily proved in the bour–
geois period. Hobbes was the first modern materialist (in the eight–
eenth century sense) but he was an absolutist in a period when abso–
lute monarchy was at its height throughout the whole of Europe....
Locke, both in religion and politics, was the child of the class compro–
mise of 1688. The English deists and their most consistent successors,
the French materialists, were the true philosophers of the bourgeoisie,
the French even of the bourgeois revolution. The German petty bour–
geois runs through German philosophy from Kant to Hegel, sometimes
positively and sometimes negatively.... I consider the ultimate su–
premacy of economic development established in these spheres too, but
it comes to pass within conditions imposed by tht: particular sphere it–
self: in philosophy, for instance, through the operation of economic in–
fluences (which again generally act under political, etc., disguises)
upon the existing philosophic material handed down by predecessors.
Here economy creates nothing absolutely new, but it determines the
way in which the existing material of thought
is
altered and further
developed, and that too for the most part indirectly, for it is the politi–
cal,
legal, and moral reflexes which exercise the greatest direct influ–
ence upon philosphy....
"**
•
Ludwig Feuerbach
by
F. Engels.
••
The Correspondence of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels:
Letter 214 (Engels to Conrad
lldunidt).
