Suchergebnisse

The publication of numerous historical novels during the Victorian age attests to the survival of Sir Walter Scott's legacy of the Waverley novels. Nevertheless, Thomas Hardy's Wessex historical novels form a break from Scott's tradition of Historical Romances. The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) illustrate Hardy's substitution of the socio-economic and technological changes that took place in rural England during the 1830s for Scott's political context to portray their impact on the rural communities. At the same time, Hardy's Wessex novels, as well as his epic-drama The Dynasts (1903; 1905; 1908), which depicts the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, exhibit the skeptical spirit of the age in terms of their assimilation of the principles of the leading philosophers, historians, and biologists of the times, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Auguste Comte, Arthur Schopenhauer, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Darwin. Hardy himself acknowledges their impact on his ontological outlook on life in general, and on history in particular. Accordingly, using the above mentioned texts as representatives of Hardy's work, the study aims at assessing the influence of those intellectuals on Hardy's work, in terms of his conception of the historical process, as a process of repeated tragedies rather than of progress, his evaluation of change, as well as his views on the universal condition of humanity throughout the ages; the study also focuses on Hardy's fictional methods, such as his manipulation of time, especially the connection of the ancient past with the present, to dramatize his personal convictions on history and life.

"… the extremely dubious speculative juggling, with the concepts and terms of the materialist method, which has under the pens of some of our Marxists transplanted the methods of formalism into the domain of the materialist dialectic; which has led to reducing the task to rendering definitions and classifications more precise and to splitting empty abstractions into four equally empty parts; in short, has adulterated Marxism by means of the indecently elegant mannerisms of Kantian epigones. It is a silly thing indeed endlessly to sharpen or resharpen an instrument, to chip away Marxist steel when the task is to apply the instrument in working over the raw material!" (Leon Trotsky)

Relations are 'internal' where the 'essence' of the individual is the outcome of its relations. Marx's historical materialism treats social relations as internal in this sense. The human essence is the potential to develop the capabilities required for the actualisation of 'freedom' as activity objectifying universal intellectual, aesthetic and ethical values. Its full realisation requires the ideal social relations of 'communism'. Such relations are the end product of human history conceived as a dialectical process of internally related stages in which the development of individual capabilities is brought about by 'estrangement' within the internal production relations that define each stage.

Karl Marx's concept of SC, which was constructed to define mid-nineteenth-century capitalist societies, is more broadly defined to adapt to ancient & modern societies. The presupposition propagated by Marx that class consciousness & political activity are essential features of SC & class conflict contradicts his view of slaves as a SC. The ancient Roman & Greek slaves lacked these features. Although he never provided a definition of SC, one can be derived from his works: SC is a relationship of exploitation; class conflict involves the resistance to exploitation, but not necessarily consciousness of SC or collective political activity. In this light, slaves can be seen as a SC. Exploitation is divided into two types: direct & individual (on a personal level), & indirect & collective (in the form of taxation, military conscription, & forced labor). Marxist historical analysis is compared to structuralism (which describes history, but fails to explain it) & to Weberian analysis (which rejects SC & exploitation as the basis for analyzing history). The establishment of definitions for the Marxist concepts of SC & class conflict, & the broadening of these nineteenth-century notions, makes them applicable to both ancient & modern history. D. Graves.