ABSTRACT
We looked in the last chapter at Marx’s account of the development of the individual person. Here we shall turn our attention to another kind of development: the history of societies. Marx has far more to say about this than about personal development, and so in looking into his ideas we are more in the position of having to choose what to leave out than of having to discuss theories on the basis of a few texts. In this chapter and the next we shall concentrate on two themes in Marx’s theory of society, both relevant to his understanding of education. The first is the general approach known as the ‘materialist conception of history’ or as ‘historical materialism’. The other topic is the concept of ideology or, more generally, the problem of the relation between social life and social consciousness.
