From: Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM
Date: Thu Oct 06 2005 - 09:48:20 EDT
> - good to see you mention Andy Blunden, who is an great > promoter of Ilyenkov. Hi again Andy: Since you liked my mentioning of Andy Blunden before, I'll do it again. (I know you're busy now so you can let others reply should they wish to and/or reply yourself at a later date.) I was somewhat taken aback when Paul C, in a post on 9/29 on "basics vs. non-basics" http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/ope/archive/0509/0195.html , asserted that a listmember "underestimates Smith's grasp of historical materialism." This caught me by surprise as I hadn't heard Smith referred to as a historical materialist previously (although, I seem to recall former member Duncan Foley once suggesting on OPE-L that we shouldn't underestimate Smith's and Ricardo's grasp of dialectics). I think it suggests a rather unconventional interpretation of the meaning of historical materialism and its origins and precursors. While I was still recovering from that assertion, I received a jolt from Andy Blunden who asserted that Hegel's theory (or at least parts thereof) could be thought of as being historical materialist! Andy B (no relation, I presume) was challenged on this by several 'hegel-marx' yahoo group listmembers, myself included. in answer, he referred to the Young Hegel, especially the 1st draft of the _Phenomenology of Spirit_ and included a large excerpt from the _System of Ethical Life_ (the whole of which is at: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/help/se.htm ) Even if we granted his inference that there are some sections of his works that read as if they could have been written by a historical materialist, I think this really misses the point. Namely, that sections of his writings can't be extracted in isolation. Rather, they have to be put in the context of his overall world-view. Within that world-view, Absolute Mind/Spirit is crucial and central. To assert that Hegel was a materialist (historical or otherwise) misses the crucial way in which his spirituality and religious conceptions shaped his theory. This is not to say that Hegel was unaware of material/natural processes. On the contrary, he was quite well-read on all of the natural sciences. Moreover, nature plays an important role within his overall perspective (see the 3 volume _Philosophy of Nature_, an often overlooked part of the _Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences_). Yet, I do not think this can be taken to be historical materialist. Am I off-track here? Did Smith have a historical materialist perspective? Did Hegel? In solidarity, Jerry
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