Historical Materialism 's Inheritance And Transcendence Of Historical Philosophy

Historical materialism succeeds the tradition of western Philosophy of history, and more than that, becomes a science of history.Modern history disenchants the traditional idea of history, but historical materialism and Philosophy of history succeed it from Christine theology of history, which describes all the human history, including past and future, as a whole and connected procedure.In the theology, the procedure is the fallen of humans and their salvation. And in the modern history, the subject changed from salvation to revolution and freedom, which are most connected with Politics. Based on these political thoughts, Hegel’s philosophy of history described a procedure that freedom changes in different ways dialectically. So Hegel’s philosophy of history is a kind of political philosophy, which has a purpose no more than other political philosophy. That is finding a new free government system of nation. Actually, this purpose had been fulfilled in the western modern democracy system. That means Hegel’s philosophy of history has no helping about nowadays and future.Historical materialism succeeds the tradition of philosophy of history and describes all the history as one procedure. But Historical materialism expands its thoughts from politics and focus on the phenomenon of "alienation". The historical materialism’s explanation of history has a main purpose to find out the origin of "alienation" and, at the same time, find a way to extinct it from history. Explain the phenomenon of "alienation" in a history procedure and find a way to advance to a new society without "alienation" are two requests which must be included in a Historical materialism’s explanation, even before the history research really started.Historical materialism’s explanation has an ontology of "product" which means humans’forced labor to survive and their free work can be dialectical united in ontology. That is totally different from the ontology of traditional philosophy of history. Based on that ontology, historical materialism uses "productive force" and "interactive communication" to describe the history dialectically."Productive force" and "interactive communication" introduce the special "product" history condition in two different ways. Productive force shows how a society fulfilled its "productive" needs. And all productive force must be an interactive communication in real history. A historical materialism’s explanation explains a historical phenomenon by pointing out its productive force background which means its interactive communication at the same time. So Historical materialism is not a kind of determinism. For example, when Marks study the Oriental society, the research still focus on the "alienation", then explain the society by "productive force" and "interactive communication", but Marx had never use his history system about western Europe to explain the different Oriental Society, the research of the topic can be communicate with modern history. Except the purpose of understanding "alienation", the ontology of "product" and the way of using "productive force" and "interactive communication" to explain history, all other conclusions of Historical materialism can be corrected by the study of modern history.Historical materialism is still useful for our days. In our society, the phenomenon of "alienation" had already overflowed from the field of material productive, which was first noticed by Marx, and expand to all human lives. Historical materialism has a duty to understand our new society and find a way to extinct "alienation" in history.