ABSTRACT
Hegel regarded history as the logical evolution of the Eternal Thinking Process in a disguised form. It was a process of advance by contradiction and the negation of the negation. Marx retained the principal assumptions of this philosophy: namely, that history is some one thing or process, irrespective of the interests of a given historian; that this process has some one cause, other than the conscious purposes of men, which explains it all; and that this cause has the property of being logical in its development, and of advancing by contradiction, and the negation of the negation. The Marxian explanation of law and the state, for example, may be and usually is expressed in a causal form. The development of the forces of production brings classes into conflict, and the exploiting class in order to preserve its supremacy, creates or appropriates the state, and codifies those customs and those moral ideas and tendencies which are favourable to its supremacy.
