ABSTRACT
As a thinker and the creator of a philosophical system, Marx can be regarded as a product of English economics, French Enlightenment philosophy and German nineteenth-century thinking. His concept of history is based upon Hegel’s version of the dialectic with its thesis, antithesis and synthesis as the formula with which one should be able to understand human and social development. But, unlike his ideological master, Marx was a materialistic determinist. While, for Hegel, world history was ‘that gigantic drama, in which the spirit of the world – by way of the struggle of dialectic antagonisms – develops into an ever greater awareness and freedom’,1 Marx saw the explanation of historic events and political division as lying in the economic organization of society, in the conditions of ownership rights and production, while the role of the individual was restricted to being the result of these.
