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. And his philosophy of history consisted in seeking out in the “everlasting struggle of peoples and heroes” this necessary dialectic development, which was the one real cause and explanation of the course of that struggle, no matter what those who took part in it might be thinking or intending. In the social production of their subsistence men enter into determined and necessary relations with each other which are independent of their wills—production-relations which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. To a concrete or very realistic mind, the idea of a “contradiction” between forces and relations is so abstract and undynamic as to be incapable of explaining any motion whatever.
