Skip to main content

Publication Details

The Principle of Historicism in the Works of Marxist Classics

(Original title: Princíp historizmu v dielach klasikov)
Filozofia, 40 (1985), 1, 12-20.
Type of work: Papers
Publication language: Slovak
Abstract

In its effort to penetrate the dialectics of historical processes the Marxist-Leninist philosophy achieved the scientific interpretation of the principle of historicism. It became a constituent methodological component of the study of social development and it superseded qualitatively Hegel’s analysis of temporality. In the process of practice Man and society gaind knowledge how human subjectivity formed inner links of the conception of the temporal perspective and how the general principle of contradiction of developmental processes (the relation of the past, present, future) was applied. The category of the historical past and present is concretization of the categories „history and contemporaneity“. The present investigates retrospectively the past, it has itself a historical-formative function and perspective^ determines the future. The Marxist principle of historicism is the basis for scientific prediction as on operatively-functional methodologic instrument for social sciences and social practice.

Marx’s conception of historicism was further developed by Lenin in his polemics with the „narodniks“ and with „legal marxism“ and in the concrete union with the social-political reality of Russia. The principle of historicism was conceived not only as a methodological core of historical knowledge, but it becomes a penetrative theory of historical revolutionary practice, an inevitable condition for explaining the class character of social phenomena. The open ideologic system of the theoretical heritage of Marxist classics makes it possible to generalize empirical instigations of historical practice even in the present time and in polemics against bourgeois philosophy of history, politology and sociology manifests its scientific value as functional and topical.

File to download: PDF