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Two thinkers, side by side

Life

Portrait of G.W.F. Hegel
G.W.F. Hegel

1770 CE – 1831 CE

IdealistModernGerman

He tried to say everything at once (that history is reason unfolding, that mind and world are one) and nearly managed it.

Portrait of Karl Marx
Karl Marx

1818 CE – 1883 CE

MaterialistModernGerman

He argued that philosophy had been describing the world when it should be changing it, and then described it more precisely than almost anyone.

Connection

G.W.F. Hegel inverted dialectic Karl Marx — Marx stood Hegel on his head: the Hegelian dialectic of ideas became the materialist dialectic of economic forces. He kept the logic of contradiction and development while replacing Spirit with the labor of actual human beings.

Shared Ideas

Progress

Ideas

ReasonProgressChangeThe General WillThe Categorical Imperative
EqualityThe Social ContractProgress

Words

“The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”

— G.W.F. Hegel

“What experience and history teach is this — that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, nor acted on lessons they might have drawn from it.”

— G.W.F. Hegel

“Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

— Karl Marx

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

— Karl Marx

Key Moments

October 1806

Phenomenology finished as Napoleon enters Jena

1818

Professor and rector in Berlin

14 November 1831

Death by cholera

1849

Permanent exile in London

1867

Capital, Volume I published

Works

Phenomenology of Spirit

Philosophy of Right

Capital, Volume I

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Volume I · Ancient Greece · 624-262 BCE