Materialism vs idealism¶
Core Argument¶
In this excerpt from The Holy Family, Marx traces the philosophical lineage of materialism from its English origins through its French development, arguing that the materialist tradition leads logically and necessarily to communism and socialism. The chapter’s core argument is that materialism, properly understood, provides the rational foundation for a revolutionary social programme.
Marx identifies two currents in eighteenth-century French materialism. The first derives from Descartes, whose physics treated matter as the sole substance and motion as its essential expression. Descartes’ disciples—physicians such as Leroy, Cabanis, and La Mettrie—adopted his mechanical materialism while discarding his metaphysics. The second current originates with Locke, whose Essay Concerning Human Understanding arrived in France as a welcome antidote to the discredited metaphysics of the seventeenth century, which Pierre Bayle had already demolished.
The English materialist tradition, Marx argues, is the true progenitor. He traces it back to Duns Scotus, who asked whether matter could think, and to Nominalism, which he calls “the first expression of materialism in Christian Europe.” Francis Bacon is the real founder: for him, the senses are infallible, science is experimental, and matter possesses motion not merely as mechanical force but as “impulse, vital force, tension.” Bacon’s materialism retains a “poetic-sensuous charm.” Hobbes systematises Bacon but reduces sensuousness to abstract geometry and eliminates theistic residues. It is Locke who finally establishes the principle that all knowledge derives from the senses. Collins, Toland, Hartley, and Priestley then demolish the last theological barriers in Locke’s system.
Condillac brings Locke’s sensualism to France, arguing that even the capacity for sense-perception is a matter of experience and habit. Helvetius gives materialism its distinctively French character by applying it to social life: he founds morality on self-love, enjoyment, and well-understood personal interest, and insists on the natural equality of human intelligence, the omnipotence of education, and the harmony between reason and industry.
Marx then draws the political conclusion directly. If man is formed by circumstances, then circumstances must be humanised. If personal interest is the principle of morality, then society must be arranged so that private and social interests coincide. If man is not free in the materialist sense, then punishment is senseless—the task is to destroy the social conditions that breed vice. These conclusions, Marx insists, are found literally in the French materialists. Fourier starts from them; the Babouvistes were raw materialists; Godwin and Bentham built on Helvetius; Owen took Bentham’s system and founded English communism. Dezamy and Gay developed materialism into “real humanism and the logical basis of communism.”
The polemical thrust is against any idealism or theology that would separate thought from matter, knowledge from sense-experience, or morality from material conditions. Marx is arguing that the materialist tradition, far from being a dry philosophical curiosity, contains within itself the theoretical premises for the revolutionary transformation of society.