Research On Historical View Of The Holy Family

The Holy Family,or Critique of Critical Critique.A Refutation of Bruno Bauer and his Associates,co-authored by Marx and Engels in 1844,aims to criticize the speculative idealism of Bruno Bauer and his followers,the Young Hegelians.As an early work of Marx and Engels,The Holy Family has not received due attention in the theoretical circle.However,as an indispensable link in the history of Marxist thought,it plays an important role in inheritance and innovation: it not only settles accounts with the adverse effects of Hegelian and Bauer’s speculative philosophy,but also undertakes the heavy responsibility of constructing a new historical view.Therefore,the study of The Holy Family helps to enrich the understanding and application of Marxism.This article consists of an introduction and four chapters,including the historical background of the formation of the historical view in The Holy Family,the essence of the old philosophy and its historical view,the basic content of the new historical view,and its historical status.The first chapter was the historical backdrop of Marx and Engels’ era and the vibrant intellectual resources they absorbed.In the 19 th century,continental Europe was the most developed capitalist region in the world.They all showed a common contradiction,i.e.,economic prosperity and general poverty brought by private property.The sharp contradiction between the two prompted Marx and Engels to explore the essence,history,and ways of changing the status quo of private property.They were successively baptized by the philosophical thought tradition of German classical philosophy as well as the theories of materialism and political economy in Britain and France,laying the theoretical foundation for finding the laws of historical movement and fundamental ways of social transformation.In the second chapter,Marx initiated thoughts and criticism against his main critical object,the old philosophical idealism represented by Hegel and Bauer in The Holy Family.Hegel made outstanding contributions to dialectics in theory but was constrained by philosophical idealism.Hegel’s student Bauer developed this objective idealism to extremes,obliterating the objectivity and lawfulness of the movement,retaining only “self-consciousness” as the “dominating all,creating all” subject,which is a completely philosophical God.This philosophy analyzed poverty problems of reality and the French Revolution,as well as the history of materialism in the spiritual domain,using an egoistic kind of subjective idealism.Although Bauer’s own desire was just,his “self-consciousness” philosophy detached from reality would soon be eliminated by history.The third chapter summarizes the core ideas of the new historical view by combining Marx’s analysis of theoretical history and real social history together.First,Marx analyzed the social bases,theoretical sources,and directions of English and French materialism,arguing that socialism is the inevitable result of the development of materialism,providing theoretical preparation for social change.Second,in summarizing the historical experience of the French Revolution,Marx clarified the essence of social life,specifically elaborated on the historical subject,motive force,and direction of its development,finding the practical basis for social change.The last chapter is the evaluation of the new historical view which also contains duality because of its own uncertainty: deeply influenced by Feuerbach’s intuitionism,Marx’s new historical view was still veiled by a layer of intuition.At the same time,it also contained the germination of historical materialism transcending idealist historiography,paving the way for the construction of historical materialism.