THE WORLD HISTORIANS
4.
The only way in which the sum total of the specialized histori·
cal researches might have become the truly universal historical
science of the unphilosophical second half of the 19th century
would have been by adopting the materialist conception of history
>vhich, at the crucial moment, was presented to the tottering sys·
tern of bourgeois historical thought by the theoretical representa·
tives of the socialist movement. Here, as in other respects, the
theory of Marx was in fact not so much the opponent as the true
inheritor of that classical philosophy which the bourgeoisie had
created during the phase of its own revolutionary ascendency. Like
Turgot and all other historical philosophers, Marx conceived of
history as a progressive development of humanity. His claim that
"all (written) history is the history of class struggles," that "these
class struggles are bound up with the progressive development of
the productive forces of society," and that "the next phase of this
historical progre-ss presupposes the emancipation of the proletarian
class," was not different in principle from the claims raised in
preceding epochs by the founders of the early Christian philosophy
of history and by their successors, the founders of classical bour–
geois philosophy. There is one point in which Marx was an even
truer disciple of the great classical tradition of the revolutionary
bourgeoisie than were the latter-day bourgeois historians them–
selves. The conscious alliance of historical theory with the revo–
lutionary practice of the proletarian class which was now pro–
claimed by Marx went far beyond that superficial alliance of his–
tory and politics which had been practiced occasionally by such
early representatives of bourgeois thought as Machiavelli. By
placing the aims and tactics of the proletarian class struggle on
a strictly "material" basis, Marx tried to extend to the historical
and social sciences that intimate connection with technology and
industry which in respect to the physical sciences had already been
so successfully established by the bourgeoisie itself.
Yet there is no need to deal further with the potentialities
that were inherent in the materialist conception of history in a now
forgotten epoch. The whole scheme has not been tested in the man·
ner in which it was conceived at the decisive historical moment.
What survived under the name of "historical materialism" among
the second generation of the Marxist orthodoxy in Germany and
