The Economic Interpretation of History

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Columbia University Press, 1924 - 166 pages
 

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Page 43 - The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
Page 47 - Technology discloses man's mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.
Page 31 - The Manifesto being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state that the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus belongs to Marx. That proposition is: That in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organisation necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained the political and intellectual history of that epoch...
Page 44 - Lebens gehen die Menschen bestimmte notwendige von ihrem Willen unabhängige Verhältnisse ein Produktionsverhältnisse die einer bestimmten Entwicklungsstufe ihrer materiellen Produktivkräfte entsprechen die Gesamtheit dieser Produktionsverhältnisse bildet die ökonomische Struktur der Gesellschaft die reale Basis worauf sich ein juristischer und politischer Überbau erhebt und welcher bestimmte gesellschaftliche Bewußtseinsformen entsprechen die Produktionsweise des materiellen Lebens bedingt...
Page 153 - A horse is no wealth to us if we cannot ride, nor a picture if we cannot see, nor can any noble thing be wealth, except to a, noble person.
Page 43 - I was led by my studies to the conclusion that legal relations as well as forms of state could neither be understood by themselves, nor explained by the so-called general progress of the human mind, but that they are rooted in the material conditions of life, which are summed up by Hegel after the fashion of the English and French of the eighteenth century under the name "civic society;" the anatomy of that civic society is to be sought in political economy.
Page 47 - The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own...
Page 58 - What we understand by the economic conditions which we regard as the determining basis of the history of society are the methods by which human beings In a given society produce their means of subsistence and exchange the products among themselves (In so far as division of labour exists).
Page 50 - ... as is the proportion or balance of dominion or property in land, such is the nature of the empire.
Page 71 - It is accordingly probable that the great epochs of human progress have been identified, more or less directly, with the enlargement of the sources of subsistence.

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