Video:
Audio:
Recommended Reading:
- Powerpoint presentation
- Complete text of books discussed in the lecture:
- Auguste Comte’s General View of Positivism
- Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology
- Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species and The Descent of Man
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto
- Auguste Comte’s General View of Positivism
- Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology
- Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species and The Descent of Man
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto
- The Austrian school of economics has always been severely critical of both positivism and Marxism. See, for example, “Positivism and the Crisis of Western Civilization,” Chapter 3 of Ludwig von Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk did much to destroy the theoretical edifice of Marxism in the late 19th century. See, for example, his Karl Marx and the Close of His System.
- Charles Darwin has many modern defenders and detractors. The best known contemporary popularizer of his work is Richard Dawkins, the author of The Blind Watchmaker and The Greatest Show on Earth. The critics who have received the most attention are Intelligent Design advocates Philip Johnson (Darwin on Trial), Michael Behe (Darwin’s Black Box), and Jonathan Wells (Icons of Evolution, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design). See also the Ben Stein documentary Expelled.
Naturalism and Marxism – Quiz
- Identify Auguste Comte’s three stages of social evolution.
- Explain the concept of uniformitarianism as utilized by Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin.
- Charles Darwin first gained public attention as a naturalist by publishing his observations taken during the voyage of the _____________ in the 1830s.
- Explain how G.W.F. conceived of history as a dialectical process.
- Outline Marx and Engels’s theory of class struggle and their forecast for how it would ultimately be resolved.
- Explain the Marxian concepts of the “material substructure” and “ideological superstructure” of society.
- theological, metaphysical, positive
- “the present is the key to the past”; present rates of change are observed and extrapolated into the past
- HMS Beagle
- The “Absolute Idea” unfolds through history in the conflict between thesis and antithesis. Each conflict results in a synthesis, which in turn becomes the thesis of the next stage of the process.
- In any historical era two major social classes, an upper class and a lower class, are in conflict. A new phase of history occurs when the lower class revolts against and overthrows the upper class. In the last phase, the proletariat will overthrow the bourgeoisie. When all are members of the proletariat, the process ends.
- Society and culture—including religion, ethics, art, literature, and modes of thought—are based on the technology and modes of production of that era.