Marx's Critique and Reinvention of Hegel's Theory of World History

Abstract

Hegel's idea of world history is an important branch of his philosophical system, which mainly discusses the development, essence, meaning of history and the evolution of human reason. He believed that history is the process of realising the Absolute Spirit (Geist), which represents the evolution of human reason, and the end of history is the realisation of human freedom; the ‘world spirit’ is the unfolding process of the absolute spirit, and world history is the writing of the absolute spirit in different time and space. Marx, on the other hand, criticised Hegel's abstract thinking from the materialist conception of history. He thought that Hegel's idea of world history was unable to reveal the complexity and concreteness of real history, and ignored the concrete historical conditions and social practices. After critically absorbing Hegel's view of history, Marx reshaped the theory of world history, established that the subject of history is the real human being, and pointed out that the factors driving the process of history should be established in the real material production activities instead of the pure spirit (Geist) referred to by Hegel. Marx establishes a brand new mechanism of historical evolution, further establishes the foundation of the materialist conception of world history by clarifying the roles of labour, interaction and division of labour and their interrelationships in the process of historical evolution, comprehensively elaborates the theory of social history and world history, and reveals step by step the law of the development of human history under the state of alienation.