Once the potentialities of a particular society had been realized in the creation of a certain mode of life, its historical role was over its members became aware of its inadequacies, and the laws and institutions they had previously accepted unquestioningly were now experienced as fetters, inhibiting further development and no longer reflecting their deepest aspirations. It was in this sense that Hegel claimed that spirit was “at war with itself”-“it has to overcome itself as its most formidable obstacle.” In concrete terms, this meant that historical advance did not proceed through a series of smooth transitions. Humanity is not to be conceived according to the mechanistic models of 18th-century materialism essentially humans are free, but the freedom that constitutes their nature can achieve fulfillment only through a process of struggle and of overcoming obstacles that is itself the expression of human activity. Regularities and recurrences of the sort that typically manifest themselves in the realm of nature are foreign, Hegel maintained, to the sphere of mind or spirit, which was characterized instead as involving a continual drive toward self-transcendence and the removal of limitations upon thought and action. Hegel’s stress upon the “organic” nature of social wholes and the incommensurability of different historical epochs owed evident debts to Herderian ideas, but he set these within an overall view that conceived the movement of history in dynamic terms. The “philosophy of spirit” of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel made its appearance upon the intellectual scene contemporaneously with Saint-Simonian and Comtean positivism, rivalling the latter in scope and influence and bringing with it its own highly distinctive theory of historical evolution and change. The suggestion that there is something essentially mistaken in the endeavour to comprehend the course of history “naturalistically” and within an explanatory framework deriving from scientific paradigms was powerfully reinforced by conceptions stemming from the development of German idealism in the 19th century. History as a process of dialectical change: Hegel and Marx
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