Karl Marx His Life and Environment 读书笔记

作者：Isaiah Berlin

1. Marx concluded that the history of society is the hisotry of man seeking to attain to mastery of himself and the external world by means of his creative labour. This activity is incarnated in the struggles opposed classes, one of which must emerge triumphant, although in a much altered form: progress is consitututd by the succession of victories of one class over the other, and that man alone is rational who identifies himself with the progressive class in his society, either, if need be, by deliberately abandoning his past and allying himself with it, or if history has already placed him there, by consciously recognizing his situation and acting in the light of it.

2.As for more specific doctrines, historical materialism of a sort is to be found fully developed in the treatise of Holbach printed almost a century before, which in its turn owes much to Spinoza; a modified form of it was restated in Marx's own day by Feuerbach.

3. Proudhon (蒲鲁东）

-Property is theft.

-To be a citizen is to be deprieved of rights.

-Capitalism is at once the despotism of the stronger over the weaker; of the lesser over the greater.

-To accumulate wealth is to rob.

-To abolish it is to undermine the foundation of morality (because a minimum of property was required by every man in order to maintain his personal independence, his moral and social dignity)

Remedy: the supression of competition and the introduction in its place a mutualist cooperative system.

2. Hegalian Dialectic

Everything that exists contains within itself its own negation and the "seeds of its own ineluctable destruction and transformation.

Dialectic is the formal structure of reality.

The dialectic is the essence of everything.

3. Marx

1. History is the interaction between the lives of the actors, the men engaged in the struggle for attaining self-direction and the consequences of their activities.

2. Marx identified the chief factor with human beings seeking intelligible human ends——no single goal such as pleasure, or knowlege, or security, or salvation beyond the grave, but the harmonious realization of all human powers in accordance with the priciples of reason.

3. This theory, by asserting that the most important question to be asked with regard to any phenomenon is concerned with the relation which it bears to the economic structure, that is, the relations of economic power in the social structure of which it is an expression, has created new tools of criticism and research whose use has altered the nature and direction of the social science in our generation. All those whose work rests on social observation are necessarily affected. Not only conflicting classes and groups and movements and their leaders in every country, but historians and sociologists, psychologiests and political scientists, critics and creative artists, so far as they try to analyse the changing quality of the life of their society, owe the form of their ideas in large part to the work of Karl Marx.

It set out to refut the proposition that ideas decisively determine the course of history, but the very extent of its own influence on human affairs has weakened the force of its thesis. For in altering the hitherto prevailing view of the relation of the individual to his environment and to his fellows, it has palpably altered that relation itself; and in consequence remains the most powerful among the intellectual forces which are today permanently transforming the ways in which men act and think.