A New Conception of History

Abstract

This chapter outlines a critical reconstruction of Karl Marx’s theory of history, which is developed mainly in The German Ideology and in the Preface of 1859 to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Historical materialism is presented in this chapter as a fundamental revolution in the way of thinking history, but also as a theory characterized by some unsolved problems, as, for example, the one regarding the exact meaning of the “determination” that the economic structure exerts over the ideological superstructure and the difficult relation between truth and history.