Abstract

Ever since Plato took it out of public places and made it academic, Western philosophy has been the work of theorists: people whose leisure and culture leave them free to stand back from history and look on as spectators. Traditionally, Western philosophers have tried to build their theories on suprahistorical foundations. With the American and French revolutions, history and historical consciousness become essential elements of philosophy, but its suprahistorical foundations remain. Hegel's theory completes all prior philosophical theories by showing how they progressively embody history's transcendent reality. Marx makes Hegelian idealism stand up: it becomes the historically contingent theory of revolutionary practice. Yet Marxian philosophy is haunted by a spectre of its own historical inevitability that subsequent Marxists have characteristically invoked to legitimate their contingent practice.