The Ideas of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The Philosophy of Karl Marx

In this course, Professor Henk de Berg (University of Sheffield) explores Karl Marx’s ideas and some of the thinkers that influenced him most. In the first lecture, we think about the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In the second lecture, we think about the philosophical ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach. Next, we think about Marx’s theory of dialectical materialism. In the fourth and final lecture, we think about Marx’s explanation of society's transition from capitalism to communism.

The Ideas of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

In this lecture, we think about the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel who, alongside Ludwig Feuerbach, David Ricardo and Adam Smith, had a strong influence on Marx, focusing in particular on: (i) the challenges in understanding Hegel’s work due to the seeming disconnect between his abstract conceptual apparatus and the concrete reality of everyday life; (ii) Hegel’s concept of the 'Geist', usually translated as 'mind' or 'spirit'; (iii) Hegel’s most famous book, Phenomenology of Spirit; (iv) the philosophical concept of the dialectic, which posits that history transitions from era to era, each with its own internal contradictions leading to its collapse; (iv) Hegel’s 'idealistic' method, according to which societal history is driven forward by internal changes in the Geist; (v) Hegel's understanding of the Geist as not referring to God or some cosmic or metaphysical principle, but rather to something more akin to ‘spirit of the age’, the intellectual and cultural atmosphere of an era; (vi) using the period 1950s-1980s as a real-world illustration of the self-transformation of the Geist from hard work and limited individual freedoms in the 1950s, via the 'free love' and 'drop out' attitude of the 1960s and 1970s, to the ‘synthesis’ of the 1980s, wherein ambition and hard work are present alongside sexual freedom.