HISTORY AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION(1967 wrong to maintain that ' expe IS contemplation scen as the conceptual embodiment of the revolutionary principle My own account efutes this. For the creation of a situation in in science. The primacy of the category of totality is the bearer which the natural forces under investigation can function purely, of the revolutionary principle in science. i. e. without outside interference or subjective error, is quite There is no doubt that such paradoxes of method played a not comparable to the case of work in that it too implies the creation unimportant and in many ways very progressive role in the of a teleological system, admittedly of a special kind. In its essence it is therefore pure praxis. It was no less a mistake to vival of Hegel's dialectics struck a hard blow at the revisionist deny that industry is praxis and to see in it"in a historical and tradition. already Bernstein had wished to eliminate everything dialectical sense only the object and not the subject of the natural reminiscent of Hegel's dialectics in the name of 'sc ence laws of society". The half-truth contained in this sentence-and was further from the mind of his philosophical opponent it is no more than a half-truth at best-applies only to the eco- bove all Kautsky, than the wish to undertake the defence of nomic totality of capitalist production, But it is by no means contra- tradition. For anyone wishing to return to the revolutionary dicted by the fact that every single act in industrial production traditions of Marxism the revival of the Hegelian traditions wa not only represents a synthesis of teleological acts of work but is obligatory. History and Class Consciousness represents what was also itself a teleological, i.e. practical, act in this very synthesis. haps the most radical attempt to restore the revolutionary nature It is in line with such philosophical misconceptions that History of Marx's theories by renovating and extending Hegel's dialect nd class consciousness should begin its analysis of economic phenom and method. The task was made even more important by the ena not with a consideration of work but only of the complicated fact that bourgeois philosophy at the time showed signs of a structures of a developed commodity economy. This means that owing interest in Hegel, Of course they never succeeded in all prospects of advancing to decisive questions like the relation aking Hegel's breach with Kant the foundation of their analysis of theory to practice and subject to object are frustrated from the and, on the other hand they were influenced by Dilthey's attempts outset. In these and similarly problematical premises we see the result and modern irrationalism. a little while after the appearance of of a failure to subject the Hegelian heritage to a thoroughgoing History and Class Consciousness Kroner described Hegel as the materialist reinterpretation and hence to transcend and preserve greatest irrationalist of all time and in Lowith's later studies I would once again cite a central problem of principle. It is Marx and Kierkegaard were to emerge as allel phenomena undoubtedly one of the great achievements of History and class out of the dissolution of Hegelianism. It is by contrast with all Consciousness to have reinstated the category of totality in the these developments that we can best see the relevance of History central position it had occupied throughout Marx's works ar and Class Consciousness. Another fact contributing to its importance from which it had been ousted by the'scientism'of the social to the ideology of the radical workers'movement was that democratic opportunists. I did not know at the time that Lenin whereas Plekhanov and others had vastly overestimated Feuer was moving in a similar direction. (The philosophical fragments ch's role as an intermediary between Hegel and Marx, this were published nine years after the appearance of History and was relegated to the background here. Anticipating the publica- Class Consciousness. But whereas Lenin really brought about a tion of Lenin's later philosophical studies by some years, it newal of the marxian method my efforts resulted in a- nevertheless only somewhat later, in the essay on Moses Hess Hegelian-distortion, in which I put the totality in the centre of that I explicitly argued that Marx followed directly from Hegel the system, overriding the priority of economics. "It is not the However, this position is contained implicitly in many of the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that con- discussions in History and Class Consciousnes stitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois In a necessarily brief summary it is not possible to undertake a science, but the point of view of totality. This methodological concrete criticism of all the issues raised by the book, and to show paradox was intensified further by the fact that the totality was how far the interpretation of Hegel it contained was a source of