Marx and Engel’s View on History

Marx and Engels, and Kant share a fundamental commonality in the conception of human history in that they both acknowledge history as a rational process whose movement follows a progressive future outline. Their concept of process, a central theme to their conception of human history, gives meaning to individual human actions which appears as simple, haphazard event, with purposive shape and rational meaning. In Kant, progress assumes the form of realizing the human potential of reason; in Marx, it is the abolishment of class differences in the revolutionary transition to communism. To this extent, one can characterize their theory as utopian conception of historical progress, having a teleological purpose at the end of human history.

Although individual action may seem in large part purposeless and vain, Kant believes that human history can be understood by virtue of these two premises: 1) All animals have natural predisposition which will eventually develop completely in the end, and 2) human beings have a faculty of reason which can only be developed to its fullest, not in the individual alone, but in the species as a whole. The idea of reason provides a priori regulative principle for investigation into human history; if the faculty of reason granted by nature to human beings is to have some purposes, then the only possibility is that the species as a human race as a whole will develop this over time. Therefore, history is the collective result of the free actions of men, tending inextricably toward the gradual realization of perfect reason. No systematic way may be found to explain single human action, but we can understand the collective human action through a series of generation as having a final goal.

Kant also believe...

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...losophy for understanding human history as moving toward progress, and slightly altered its guiding thread with what he seems to believe it as more concrete. For example, While Kant simply glosses over an unsocial sociability as an essential component of human history, Marx specifically provides a much more detailed picture of the dynamism of this antagonism at play in instigating progress in human history. As a result, Kantian idealist forms of contemplation acquired more concrete reality whereby human history is determined by the consciousness infused by life activity. Moreover, because Marx defines human history as the succession of one mode of production to the next, his empirical analysis of human history provides more definite understanding on the underlying, albeit largely unconscious, laws governing the progress of human history (of the movement of history).