STOTE

Principle of Utility (Bentham)

The foundational principle that "approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question." Actions should maximize the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

Felicific Calculus (Bentham)

Bentham's method for quantifying and comparing pleasures and pains to determine the right course of action. Considers factors like intensity, duration, certainty, and propinquity (how immediate the pleasure/pain is). Example: Weighing the immediate pleasure of drinking a large sugary drink against the long-term pain of health consequences and healthcare costs

Harm Principle (Mill)

"The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection." The only legitimate reason to restrict someone's liberty is to prevent harm to others. Example: Opposing soda taxes because they restrict individual consumer choice without preventing direct harm to others.

Longue Durée

What historians call thinking in long periods - tracing intellectual developments across centuries rather than focusing on short-term changes

Science of the Legislator

How political economy was initially conceived as a branch of politics focused on governance, before shifting to a science of individual decisions and subjective value

Analytically Egalitarian

Bentham's approach that assigns equal weight to all individuals' happiness regardless of class, race, gender, or nation - different from later neoclassical economics that "fetishizes individual differences."

Aggregative

The utilitarian focus on the sum total of happiness rather than its distribution - meaning a policy benefiting many slightly could outweigh severe burdens on a few.

Parallax

The lecture's metaphor for how production and consumption are "part of the same system, but the world looks a little off between them, just like when you open and close one eye at a time."

Consequentialism

A moral system focused primarily on the consequences of actions, not intentions or motives.

Bentham's utilitarianism is consequentialist.

Example: Judging whether a policy is good based solely on whether it increases overall happiness, regardless of the policymaker's intentions.

Deontological Ethics

The belief that some actions are inherently right or wrong, independent of their consequences. Often contrasted with utilitarian thinking. Example: Arguing that taxing sugary drinks is wrong because it violates individual freedom, even if it might improve public health

Labor Theory of Value (Locke)

The idea that property and value are created when humans mix their labor with natural resources.

Labor transforms common resources into private property.

Example: A farmer who cultivates wild land creates value through labor and gains legitimate ownership of that land and its produce

State of Nature vs. Divine Order

Locke's framework bridging natural law and divine law, using both Genesis (God giving earth to humans in common) and imagined "Indians" to justify property through labor

Government House Morality

The view that the state exists as a benevolent administrator to make people happy by creating laws and institutions that maximize public welfare. Example: Bloomberg's soda tax proposals, where government acts paternalistically to improve citizens' health choices.

Negative Liberty

Freedom from restrictions on one's opinions, tastes, pursuits, and associations. Mill's conception emphasizes what you're free from rather than what you're free to do. Example: The freedom to consume whatever beverages you choose without government interference.

Anti-perfectionist (Mill)

We cannot justify coercion based on standards of excellence or virtue. Example: Not restricting junk food consumption because we think healthy eating represents a higher way of life.

Antipaternalistic (Mill)

We cannot justify coercion to prevent people from doing things we think are foolish. Example: Opposing laws that ban large sodas "for people's own good

Anti-moralist (Mill)

We cannot justify coercion to restrict conduct we find wrong, gross, or disgusting. Example: Allowing people to make "unhealthy" food choices even if we morally disapprove.

Inward Domain of Consciousness (Mill)

Liberty of thought, feeling, opinion, and sentiment.

Example: The right to believe that sugary drinks are harmless, even if scientific evidence suggests otherwise

Liberty of Tastes and Pursuits (Mill)

Freedom to frame one's life plan and do what we like (so long as we don't harm others). Example: The right to choose an unhealthy diet as part of how you want to live your life

Liberty of Association (Mill)

Freedom to associate with others of your choosing.

Example: The right to join groups that oppose public health regulations or promote certain dietary choices.

Private vs. Public Actions

• Private: Actions that affect only the individual

• Public: Actions that harm others and may justify state intervention

Example: Drinking alcohol privately vs. drunk driving, which endangers others

Harm vs. Offense

Harm: Physical injury, theft, assault (justifies restriction)

• Offense: Disgust, disapproval, insult (does not justify restriction)

Example: Smoking in your own home (may offend neighbors) vs. smoking in a crowded restaurant (may harm others' health)

Division of Labor (Smith)

Definition: The breakdown of production into specialized tasks performed by different workers

• Quote: "the greatest improvement in the productive powers of labor, the engine of national wealth, are the effects of the division of labor"

• Example: Pin factory - one person alone might make 20 pins, but 10 people working together can make 4,800 pins per day

National Wealth (Smith)

Definition: The ability of a nation's people to afford basic necessities cheaply and plentifully, measured by the produce of labor

• Quote: "The annual labor of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life"

• Key point: NOT measured in gold, silver, or money in banks

Propensity to Truck, Barter, and Exchange (Smith)

Definition: Universal human tendency to trade, stemming from reason and speech

• Quote: "Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog"

• Significance: What separates humans from animals and drives the division of labor

Labor Theory of Value (Smith)

Definition: In the "early and rude state of society," value is determined by the amount of labor time required

• Quote: "if it usually costs twice the labour to kill a beaver which it does to kill a deer, one beaver should naturally exchange for or be worth two deer"

• Note: Based on "usual" or socially average time, not individual cases

Stock/Capital (Smith)

Definition: Money invested for production and the investments therein (not just bank stock)

• Quote: "As soon as stock has accumulated in the hands of particular persons, some of them will naturally employ it in setting to work industrious people"

• Effect: Splits the value added by workers into wages and profits

Profits (Smith)

Definition: Profits are regulated by the extent of stock invested

• Quote: "They are regulated altogether by the value of the stock employed, and are greater or smaller in proportion to the extent of this stock"

• Power imbalance: "The masters can hold out much longer... Many workmen could not subsist a week"

Productive Labor (Smith)

Definition: Labor that adds value to an object that can be resold for "an equal quantity of labor"

• Creates: Lasting, tradeable value

• Examples: Manufacturing, agriculture

Unproductive Labor (Smith)

Definition: Labor that doesn't transform materials into something of greater value

• Quote: Includes "servants, but also prime ministers and generals... no matter how honorable and useful"

• Key insight: "Wherever capital predominates, industry prevails; wherever revenue, idleness"

Political Economy (Smith)

Definition: "A branch of the science of a statesman or legislator" with two objects

• Quote: "first, to provide plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people" and second, "to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services"

• Purpose: Part of larger science of politics - how to keep society happy and healthy

System of Natural Liberty (Smith)

Definition: Smith's vision where people are "left perfectly free to pursue his own interest in his own way"

• Quote: "Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest in his own way"

• Key limitation: Requires robust legal framework and public institutions - NOT minimal government

Egalitarian View of Human Nature (Smith)

Definition: People are born roughly equal in abilities; differences come from specialization

• Quote: "the difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of"

• Implication: Roles in life are not preordained but products of "habit, custom, and education"

Growth and Wages (Smith)

Definition: Wages rise with economic growth, not just economic size or productivity

• Quote: "It is in the progressive state, while the society is advancing to the further acquisition, rather than when it has acquired its full complement of riches, that the condition of the labouring poor... seems to be the happiest"

• States: Progressive (cheerful), Stationary (dull), Declining (melancholy)

The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) (Smith)

Smith's first book, published seventeen years before The Wealth of Nations and revised repeatedly until his death. It asks how creatures who cannot directly know one another's feelings nevertheless arrive at shared moral judgments.

The "Adam Smith Problem" (Smith)

The nineteenth-century claim that TMS and WN are incompatible, one built on sympathy, the other on self-interest. The more useful version of the question is not whether Smith changed his mind, but how conflicting human motives can be held together in a single account.

The Scottish Enlightenment (c. 1750-1800) (Smith)

A period of intellectual flourishing in which thinkers including Smith and Hume turned Newtonian empirical method on the human world.

They reasoned inductively from observed behavior rather than from revelation, scripture, or theological precept.

Moral science (the naturalistic method) (Smith)

Smith's approach of beginning with an empirical account of how we actually experience morality in order to reach conclusions about how we ought to act. Because it posits no transcendental goal to be maximized, it leaves room for moral norms to evolve and to vary across cultures.

Sentiment and reason (Smith)

The eighteenth century asked whether morality was grounded in one or the other; Smith answered both. Our first perceptions of right and wrong come from "immediate sense and feeling," but only reason, aggregating and analyzing those sentiments, yields the "general rules of morality" (VII.iii.2.7).

Sympathy (Smith)

Not pity, but the literal Greek: sun- (with) + pathos (feeling). Because we can never know directly what another person feels — not even a brother on the rack — sympathy works through imagination: we place ourselves in another's position and feel what we imagine we would feel there (I.i.1.5).

Mutual sympathy (Smith)

Smith's second sense of the term: sympathy is not only how we understand others, but something we actively want from them. We seek to have our own feelings recognized as appropriate, which is why we are "still more anxious to communicate to our friends our disagreeable than our agreeable passions" (I.i.2.3).

The mirror of society (Smith)

Smith's claim that morality is inseparable from sociability. A person raised in solitude could no more judge his own character than see his own face; bring him into society and "he is immediately provided with the mirror which he wanted before" (III.i.3)

The impartial spectator (Smith)

The internal judge Smith describes when he says that in examining his own conduct he divides himself "into two persons" — spectator and agent, judge and judged (III.1.6). Assembled out of our imagined sense of others' approval, it corrects the "natural misrepresentations of self-love" and shows us "the real littleness of ourselves."

The corruption of moral sentiments (Smith)

Smith's name for our disposition "to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise, or at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition" (I.iii.3.1). He calls this both necessary to the order of ranks in society and the most universal cause of moral corruption.

The invisible hand (Smith)

Our belief that wealth will make us happy is mistaken — but Smith argues the error is productive, since it "rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind." The rich, intending only their own gratification, are "led by an invisible hand" to spread the necessaries of life more widely than they mean to (IV.i.10). The phrase appears here, in the moral philosophy — not first in The Wealth of Nations. Smith's clearest statement of a theme central to both books: unintended consequences.

Conspicuous consumption (Veblen)

Demonstrating wealth through very visible waste of goods, like the mansions in Newport. Veblen expected this to become increasingly common as societies grew larger and more mobile.

Conspicuous leisure (Veblen)

Demonstrating wealth through visible waste of time and effort, like fox hunting in the Gilded Age. This was more effective at projecting status in small-scale communities than in mass society.

Emulation (Veblen)

The habitual comparison of oneself to others, which can people to associate their status with visual markers of their pecuniary success.

Sex-distinction (Gilman)

Gilman's term for what happens when the survival of one sex depends primarily on its sexual relation to the other sex: natural selection reinforces sexual selection instead of checking it. Her image for the endpoint is the insect reduced to an "egg-sac."

Institutional economics (Veblen)

An approach to economics, associated with Veblen, that conceived people not as abstract individuals but as embedded in habits, customs, and relations.power

Instinct of workmanship (Veblen)

The human taste for effective work and distaste for futile effort, which can be corrupted by the effort to transmit status distinctions.

Invidious comparison (invidious distinction)

Judging one's own status against another's.

The leisure class (Veblen)

The stratum defined by its conspicuous avoidance of work.

Reform Darwinism

A view, associated with Lester Frank Ward (and influential for Veblen and Gilman), that humans can direct evolution rather than merely undergo it.

Social Darwinism

Herbert Spencer's argument that societies should not interfere with the "survival of the fittest."

Veblen goods

- Luxuries that generate more demand when their price increases, because cost heightens their power to signify wealth.

Capital intensity (Ricardo)

How much machinery and other capital an industry uses relative to labor. Ricardo argued that industries with similar capital-to-labor proportions keep the same relative prices when wages change, while industries with different proportions do not.

Example: In the lecture, barley (90 units of labor, 10 of machinery) and oats (100 labor, 10 machinery) are similar, so their relative price stays at about 1.11 when the wage doubles from 10 to 20. Cotton cloth (40 labor, 60 machinery) is far more capital-intensive, and its price relative to barley falls from about 0.51 to about 0.47.

Circulating capital (Ricardo)

Capital that is used up quickly, within a single production cycle. Because it is consumed at once, it does not depreciate over time the way machinery does.

Example: Wheat used as an input for bread is circulating capital. In the lecture's table, shoes are about 91 percent circulating capital, compared with about 38 percent for cotton.

Comparative advantage (Ricardo)

A country has a comparative advantage in a good when it can produce it at a lower opportunity cost than its trading partner. Ricardo's insight is that both countries can gain by specializing in that good and trading, even if one country is better at producing everything.

Example: In the lecture's example, France needs fewer hours than Albania for both wine (10 versus 40) and cars (30 versus 60). But a car costs France 3 wine and costs Albania only 1.5 wine, so Albania has the comparative advantage in cars and France in wine. If France makes 12 wine, Albania makes 2 cars, and they swap 2 wine for 1 car, France ends up with 10 wine and 1 car and Albania with 2 wine and 1 car. Neither country could have produced its bundle alone in its 120 available hours (France would need 130, Albania 140)

Depreciation (Ricardo)

The portion of fixed capital that is used up in a given production period. It is the cost of using a machine this period, as opposed to the full value of the machine, which stays tied up as capital advanced.

Example: In the lecture's cotton example, a 260 machine adds only 26 of depreciation to this period's costs, but the whole 260 still counts as capital on which the owner expects a profit.

Ecological limits on agriculture (Ricardo)

Ricardo held that nature limits how much capital can be profitably employed in farming, because food must eventually be grown on land of worse quality. Manufacturing faces no comparable natural limit. The lecture presents these ecological limits as portending the end of capitalism.

Example: In the lecture's quotation, nature has limited the amount of capital that can profitably be engaged in agriculture but has placed no limit on capital employed in procuring the "conveniences and ornaments" of life. As farming moves onto worse land, the price of corn rises in proportion to the increased difficulty of growing it.

Falling rate of profit (Ricardo)

Ricardo's claim that the natural tendency of profits is to fall as society grows. More and more labor must be sacrificed to obtain the additional food required, and without profit there is no motive to accumulate capital.

Example: The lecture quotes Ricardo saying the farmer and manufacturer can no more live without profit than the laborer without wages. He adds that this "gravitation" of profits downward is checked at intervals by improvements in machinery and by discoveries in agricultural science that let us relinquish some labor formerly required.

Fixed capital (Ricardo)

Capital that is used up slowly over many production cycles, such as ships, engines, and machines. It loses value gradually through depreciation. Ricardo argued that the more fixed capital an industry uses, the more its relative price falls when wages rise.

Example: Cotton in the lecture's table uses a 260 machine, versus only 20 for shoes. When wages rise 25 percent and the general profit rate falls, cotton loses more profit because profit is charged on its larger capital advanced, so its price falls relative to shoes.

Gross produce (Ricardo)

The total output of society, which includes the wages paid to workers as well as the surplus left over (net produce).

Example: In the lecture's machinery argument, machines are productive, so a factory using them can raise gross output even while the surplus available to the capitalist shrinks.

Labor theory of value (Ricardo)

The idea that the exchangeable value of commodities depends almost exclusively on the comparative quantity of labor expended in producing them. Ricardo begins from this rule but then shows that it needs modification once capital is introduced.

Example: In the lecture's hunter example, if the weapon needed to kill a beaver takes much more labor to make than the one for a deer, one beaver is worth more than two deer, precisely because more labor is needed to kill it.

Machinery problem (Ricardo)

The question of whether improvements in machinery help or harm workers. Ricardo argued that machinery can be detrimental to workers, and that the working class's opinion to this effect is not prejudice or error but conforms to the correct principles of political economy.

Example: In the lecture's quotation, if machinery lets workers' shoes and clothing be made with one fourth of the labor, their prices would fall about 75 percent. Yet workers would not consume four times as much, because competition and population growth would soon adjust wages to the new, lower value of necessaries.

Market price of labor (Ricardo)

The wage actually paid to workers, determined by the supply of and demand for labor. Ricardo argued that it can fall even when labor's natural price does not.

Example: The lecture quotes Ricardo saying that in the natural advance of society the supply of laborers keeps increasing at the same rate while demand for them increases at a slower rate, so wages tend to fall insofar as they are regulated by supply and demand.

Natural price of labor (Ricardo)

The wage that allows the worker population to remain stable, an idea the lecture sets up through the contrast between Malthus and Ricardo. It is tied to the cost of the goods workers need to live.

Example: In the shoes and clothing passage from the lecture, when improvements make necessaries much cheaper to produce, competition and population growth adjust wages down to the new value of those necessaries.

Net produce (Ricardo)

The surplus left after wages are paid. It is the source of profit, so Ricardo judges machinery by what it does to net produce as well as to gross produce.

Example: In the lecture's machinery argument, machines are fixed capital that must be replaced as they depreciate. If that depreciation is higher than wages, the surplus is reduced and profits fall even though gross output is higher.

Opportunity cost (Ricardo)

What must be given up in order to obtain something else. In trade theory, comparing opportunity costs across countries shows who has the comparative advantage in each good.

Example: In the lecture's example, one car costs France 30 hours, which is 3 wine at 10 hours each, so the opportunity cost of a car is 3 wine. In Albania a car takes 60 hours, or 1.5 wine at 40 hours each.

Standard measure of value (Ricardo)

A fixed yardstick against which the value of all other goods could be measured. Ricardo found that neither labor nor gold works perfectly as such a standard, so relative value remained unsatisfying to him.

Example: In the lecture's quotation, Ricardo says gold could be a near-perfect measure if we suppose the varying quantities of labor removed from its production. This would give "as near an approximation to a standard measure of value as can be theoretically conceived."

Transformation problem (Ricardo)

The puzzle of how to get from labor values to actual prices. If capital type and structure change prices as wages and profits change, labor is not the only driver of prices, and the labor theory of value cannot alone explain them.

Example: In the lecture's shoes and cotton tables, the two industries sell at the same price of 224 at a 10 percent profit rate, even though cotton uses far more fixed capital. When wages rise 25 percent, their prices diverge although the labor employed has not changed.

Value in exchange (Ricardo)

The power of an object to purchase other goods. Ricardo, following Adam Smith, distinguishes it from value in use. It is the sense of value that Ricardo's discussion of prices is about.

Example: In the lecture's quotation, gold, though of little use compared with air or water, will exchange for a great quantity of other goods.

Value in use (Ricardo)

The utility of an object, meaning how useful it is. Ricardo, following Adam Smith, notes that use value does not determine exchange value.

Example: In the lecture's quotation, water and air are abundantly useful, indeed indispensable to existence, yet under ordinary circumstances nothing can be obtained in exchange for them.

Owl of Minerva (Hegel)

Athena's owl, which takes flight only at dusk. Hegel's image for philosophy arriving too late to instruct the world how it ought to be: a form of life can be understood only once it has grown old, which makes philosophy a product of history rather than a set of timeless universals.

Subject-object distinction (Hegel)

A longstanding problem, running from Descartes' deceiving demon to Kant's transcendental idealism: the self can never be certain that things in themselves are as they appear. Hegel rejects this premise, arguing instead that reason is embedded in everything, and that it becomes visible through the historical unfolding of the whole.

Dialectic (Hegel)

— Not Socratic argument between people, nor thesis-antithesis-synthesis. It is the movement of reality itself: a totality wrenched into parts riven with contradiction, then reabsorbed into a new whole, with the antitheses more often partial fragments than true opposites.

World Spirit (Hegel)

The totality of the cosmos invested with a collective consciousness of its own. History is the working-out of what that spirit is potentially — as "the germ of the plant carries within itself the entire nature of the tree" — and at moments Hegel identifies it with God.

Theodicy (Hegel)

A justification of the ways of God, accounting for evil in a world that follows a divine plan. Hegel's work can be seen as a theodicy: present irrationality and abomination are artifacts of a moment in historical time, and will be revealed as infused with Reason once the full story is written.

Cunning of Reason (Hegel)

Reason's trick of remaining in the background and letting human passions do its work. The world-historical individual commits unreservedly to one purpose and "must necessarily trample on many an innocent flower," advancing a universal he never intended. Evident in Napoleon, who was "the world spirit on horseback."

Recognition (Hegel)

"Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; it exists only in being acknowledged." There is no genuine selfhood alone, so a mature society must rest on mutual recognition.

Master-slave dialectic (Hegel)

Hegel's story of how that mutual recognition is reached, from the section on lordship and bondage. Two self-consciousnesses fight for recognition; the one who risks life becomes master, the one who chooses life becomes slave. Both are left partial, the master all idea and no action, the slave action without intention.

"Positive" and "negative" freedom (Hegel)

Isaiah Berlin's 1958 distinction between freedom as the absence of coercion and freedom as the capacity to realize oneself. Hegel is usually associated with positive freedom — "the individual finds his liberation in duty" — though some interpreters read him as seeking a synthesis of the two.

The three estates (Hegel)

Hegel's replacement for the feudal division of society: the agricultural estate (peasantry), the commercial estate (bourgeoisie), and the universal estate (bureaucracy), oriented respectively toward nature, the marketplace, and the common good. He insisted these divisions were porous, but in Marx they harden and become hostile.

Left- and right-Hegelianism (Hegel)

The warring camps his interpreters split into after his death in 1831. The left seized on history advancing through the working-out of contradiction, and on the state founded in reason rather than tradition; the right on his approval of monarchy, natural estates, and duty.

Alienation/Estranged Labor (Marx)

The structural condition of wage labor under capitalism where workers become disconnected from their human essence as creative beings. Not just a feeling, but a structural condition. Four types:

1. From product of labor: “Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore the greater his product, the less is he himself”

2. From act of production: labor as “an activity of suffering” where worker “does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind”

3. From species being: work reduced to survival rather than social affirmation

4. From other humans: “Each man views the other in accordance with the standard and the position in which he finds himself a worker”

Key quote: “The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates.”

Bourgeoisie (Marx)

The capitalist class; owners of capital; agents of capital; the class that inhabits the logic of capital

"They “have played the most revolutionary part” by destroying feudalism and establishing wage labor. They “pitilessly [tore] asunder the motely feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’” and introduced relations where nothing stood between man and man except “naked self-interest” and “callous ‘cash payment.’”

“The modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”

Class Consciousness (Marx)

Workers’ awareness of themselves as a class with shared interests. Develops through combination and organization as workers form unions, clubs, and associations. “Every class is a class struggle.”

Class Struggle (Marx)

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” between oppressors and oppressed. Under capitalism, simplified to bourgeoisie vs proletariat. Human history is defined by class struggle; what makes modern class struggle distinctive is its simplification into two classes.

Communism

“The positive transcendence of private property, or human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e. human) being — a return to become conscious, and accomplished within the entire wealth of the previous development.”

Not utopian retreat but historical necessity.

“Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.”

A synthesis where “labor as the category in which every person is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community.”

“This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man.”

Crisis (Marx)

Periodic crises of overproduction under capitalism. “In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of overproduction.” Resolved by “enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces” and “conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.”

Crude Communism (Marx)

Marx’s term for French utopian socialism, which he critiques as insufficient and “necessarily doomed to failure” because it retreats from society and lacks class revolution. Basically like the small town utopias not a big thing

Crude Materialism (Marx)

The Hobbesian view that humans are simply assemblages of matter in motion, their behavior just a function of circumstances. Little room for rationality or human will to shape the world.

Dialectical Materialism (Marx)

Marx’s theory that consciousness is a product of material conditions, and ideas can in turn transform the material world. Rejects both crude materialism (humans as passive matter) and Hegelian idealism (ideas drive history).

“In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh.”

“Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.”

Hegelian Idealism (Marx)

The view that ideas drive change and history progressively moves toward greater freedom and self-awareness. Marx critiques this as failing to understand historical contingency and how ideas are shaped by the material world.

Hegemony (Marx)

How the ruling class maintains control through ideas and achieves legitimation, making their rule appear to serve the common good.

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”

“the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.”

“Every new class, therefore, achieves its hegemony only on a broader basis than that of the class ruling previously.”L

Labor (Marx)

Essential to human beings; life activity that reflects our will. “We work, we exert effort in order to meet our needs but also externalize our ideas and transform the world around us. We make more than we need, because it is a ‘life activity.’ It reflects our ‘will.’”

Labor Power (Marx)

The capacity to work that workers sell as a commodity to capitalists. Workers “have nothing to sell but their time.”

Luddites (Marx)

Workers who “destroy imported wares that compete with their labor, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.” Reactionaries who want to turn back “the wheel of history.”

Means of Production (Marx)

Physical instruments used to produce something (plow, machine, factory).