WI: No Hegel

Well, historical materialism's probably a no go for one; Marxism, if anything like it happens at all*, will certainly be different.

*and no, socialism in general doesn't count -- that's happening, has happened, with or without Hegel
 
I'd have never heard the words "Hegelian dialectic" from strange but hot looking women in college. It would have saved me hours of time.
 
I'm not sure a socialism that has no Marxism would be recognizable to us as socialism.

Well, Robert Owen laid alot of the groundwork, and I'd have to think there'd still be unionism, and likely the Rerum Novarum still happens -- so it's likely you'd get something with the same broad principles, but absent the inclination toward historical determinism or even the idea of progress.
 
The dialectic wasn't some huge innovation in thought; we'd just associate it with someone else.

Marxism only took the bare mechanism of dialectic; it threw away most of Hegel's own socio-political baggage. So I doubt socialism or even Marxism becomes unrecognizable.
 
The dialectic wasn't some huge innovation in thought; we'd just associate it with someone else.

AIUI, before Hegel (or, to be fair, Fichte), the dialectic was understood as a form of argument, most associated with Socrates dialogues; what Hegel did was develop the method into an methodical way to understand everything -- ideas, history, what have you. One of the ideas that came out of this systematic approach was historicism, which went on to play a very key role in Marxism.

So, if anything like Marxism develops, it would certainly look different -- one key example being the development of a kind of "scientific socialism".
 
The dialectic was already seen in much of that light dating back to its use in the Socratic Dialogues. Hegel was only one of many to utilize it in that manner.

Hell, Hegel didn't even use the standard thesis-antithesis-synthesis formulation. He preferred abstract-negative-concrete.
 
The dialectic was already seen in much of that light dating back to its use in the Socratic Dialogues.

Ah, now that you mention, I recall Plato discussing the historical decline of government in Book VIII of The Republic. :eek: I also recall Giovanni Vico writing about the matter, though I don't know if his approach was dialectical or not.

And yet, I still can't shake the feeling that Hegel was the guy who really turned Historicism into a major idea, allowing Marx to make it such a centerpiece of his thought.

Maybe if someone could fill in some more examples? :eek:
 
I'm reviving this thread because I've recently gotten interested in Max Stirner. He was writing in the Hegelian tradition, so no Hegel likely means no Ego and It's Own.
 
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