Vejas Liulevicius: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, you actually have electron humor. I love it. And you deliver in such a dry, beautiful way. Okay, there’s again, a million questions. So you outline a set of contradictions, but it’s interesting to talk about his view. For example, what was Marx’s view of history? Marx had been a student of Hegel. And Hegel as a German idealist philosopher had announced very definitively that history has a purpose. History is not a collection of random facts. And as an idealist, he proposed that the true movement of history, the true meaning of history, what made history, history with a capital H, something that’s transcendent and meaningful was that it was the working out of an idea through different civilizations, different stages of historical development. And that idea was the idea of human freedom. So it was not individuals or great thinkers alone making history and having an impact. It was the idea itself striving to come to fruition, striving to come to an evermore perfect realization. In the case of Hegel, in this very Prussian and German context, he identified the realization of freedom also with the growth of the state because he thought that governments are the ones that are going to be able to deliver on laws and on the ideal of a state of the rule of law, in German the Rechtsstaat. That was a noble dream. At the same time, as we recognize from our perspective, state power has been put to all sorts of purposes besides guaranteeing the rule of law in our own times. What Marx did was to take this characteristic insistence of Hegel that history is moving in a meaningful and discernible way towards the realization of an idea and flipped it on its head. Marx insisted that Hegel had so much that was right in his thinking, but what he had neglected to keep in mind was that in fact, history is based on matter. So hence, dialectical materialism, dialectical referring to things proceeding by clashes or conflict towards an ever greater realization of some essential idea. And so Marx adapts a lot of ideas of Hegel. You can recognize entire rhetorical maneuvers that are indebted to that earlier training, but now taken in a very different direction. What remained though was the confidence of being on the right side of history. And there are few things that are as intoxicating as being convinced that your actions not only are right in the abstract, but are also destined to be successful. And also that you have the rigor of science backing you in your journey towards the truth.…

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