Evolution of Materialism in Modern Philosophy

Materialism – the philosophical view that physical matter is the fundamental substance of reality – did not spring up fully formed in the writings of Karl Marx. It traveled a long road across centuries and national traditions, picking up new dimensions at each stop. Beginning with the empiricist science of 17th-century England, passing through the radical Enlightenment of 18th-century France, and reaching a critical turning point in 19th-century Germany, materialism evolved from a simple doctrine about matter and motion into a powerful framework for analyzing history, society, and human liberation. Understanding this journey is essential to grasping what Marx and Engels meant when they called their own philosophy “materialist” – and why it differed so profoundly from everything that came before it.

The English roots: empiricism as the seed of materialism 🔗

The story of modern materialism begins in England, where a cluster of thinkers broke from the medieval scholastic tradition and turned philosophy’s gaze firmly toward the observable, material world. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) is often credited as the initiator of this shift. His landmark work, the Novum Organum, rejected abstract reasoning in favor of empirical observation as the basis of all knowledge, insisting that scientific inquiry must be grounded in material reality. As Marx himself would later note, Bacon was effectively the “father” of English materialism – the first to systematically argue that knowledge originates in sense experience and that all understanding must be traceable back to physical causes.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) then systematized and radicalized this Baconian impulse. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Hobbes defended a range of materialist, nominalist, and empiricist views, and produced one of the most comprehensive philosophical systems of the early modern period. In his famous work Leviathan (1651), Hobbes argued that everything in the universe – including human beings, thought, and emotion – could be explained entirely in terms of matter and motion. His dogmatic metaphysical assumption was that physical reality consists entirely of matter in motion, and from this he derived an entire classification of fields: physics, moral philosophy, and civil philosophy. Britannica describes Hobbes’s philosophy as a bold restatement of Greek atomistic materialism, applied to the realities of early modern politics in a way that would have seemed alien to its ancient authors.

John Locke (1632-1704) completed this early English phase. While Locke was more cautious than Hobbes, his contribution to the materialist tradition was substantial. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) argued that the mind at birth was a tabula rasa – a blank slate – and that all knowledge was acquired through experience and interaction with the external world. Scholars have argued that Locke’s empirically grounded claim that the mind thinks only intermittently is hard to reconcile with substance dualism, making a material basis for consciousness philosophically more satisfying on Lockean assumptions. Locke also drew a key distinction between “primary qualities” (solidity, extension, motion) which are real properties of physical objects, and “secondary qualities” (color, taste, smell) which are merely effects of those properties on our senses – a distinction that placed the material world at the center of epistemology.

In sum, as historians of materialism observe, neither Hobbes nor Locke questioned the existence of the external world: it is objects that act on the senses, generating ideas. This shared conviction formed the bedrock on which French materialism would later build.

French materialism: from empiricism to radical critique 🔗

When English empiricism crossed the Channel, it underwent a dramatic transformation. The French took Locke’s ideas about sensory knowledge and followed them to their most radical philosophical and political conclusions. French materialism became the name given to a group of 18th-century Enlightenment philosophers who believed the world was made up of a single substance – matter – whose motions and properties could explain all phenomena, including thought, morality, and society.

La Mettrie and the mechanical human 🔗

Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751) was among the first to make the move explicit. In France, materialism only came out of hiding – and still only partially – with La Mettrie’s works L’Histoire naturelle de l’âme (1745) and L’Homme-machine (1747). His central argument was that the human being, like any animal, is ultimately a machine governed by physical laws. La Mettrie held that thought was simply a property of organized matter, comparable to electricity or movement. This was a direct challenge to the theological notion that humans were specially created beings endowed with an immortal, non-material soul.

D’Holbach and the system of nature 🔗

Baron d’Holbach (1723-1789) took French materialism to its most systematic and politically subversive form. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, d’Holbach developed a deterministic and materialistic metaphysics in which human nature must be understood in terms of causal laws, and all action falls under universal determinism. His major work, Système de la nature (1770), argued that nature is the totality of all material existence, that there is no supernatural, and that virtue can only be fostered in people freed from religious illusion. The association of his materialism with atheism made it politically explosive – a direct assault on the ideological foundations of the French monarchy and the Catholic Church.

Diderot and the social dimension 🔗

Denis Diderot, best known as the co-editor of the great Encyclopédie, moved through deism and pantheism before arriving at an atheistic and materialist outlook. As Rutgers scholars note, French materialism at its height was engaged in a two-pronged assault: against religion and theology, and against the 17th-century metaphysics of Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibniz. In Marx’s own reading of the French tradition, Cartesian materialism (rooted in Descartes’s physics while rejecting his metaphysics) developed through figures like La Mettrie and d’Holbach into a school of thought that viewed human beings and human society purely in terms of physical causes. The second strand of French materialism, flowing through Helvétius, connected more directly to social theory and ultimately, Marx argued, to socialist and communist thought.

What made French materialism philosophically revolutionary was not only its denial of God or soul, but its insistence that if humans are entirely shaped by material conditions – environment, education, experience – then changing those material conditions is the path to human improvement. This was, in embryo, the logic that would find its fullest expression in Marx.

German philosophy: idealism, critique, and the bridge to Marx 🔗

While England generated empiricism and France produced radical materialism, Germany’s philosophical development took a different path – one that would ultimately prove most decisive for Marxian thought. As August Thalheimer observed, the highest stage of bourgeois philosophy was reached in Germany, precisely because Germany’s later economic and political development allowed it to absorb the lessons of English and French thought under more advanced ideological conditions. The two figures who bridge German philosophy and Marxian materialism are Hegel and Feuerbach.

Hegel’s dialectic: idealism with revolutionary potential 🔗

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was not a materialist. He was, in fact, the most ambitious idealist philosopher of the modern period – arguing that Geist (Spirit or Mind) was the ultimate reality, and that history was the unfolding of this Absolute Spirit through a dialectical process of contradiction and resolution. Yet Hegel’s dialectical method – the idea that reality develops through the clash and resolution of opposing forces – contained what Engels called a “revolutionary side.” According to Wikipedia’s account of dialectical materialism, Marx developed Marxist dialectics by emphasizing the materialist view that the concrete world shapes socioeconomic interactions, which in turn determine sociopolitical reality – in direct contrast to Hegel’s idealist emphasis on the mind’s perceptions. The key move Marx made was to take Hegel’s dialectical method and place it on a material, rather than spiritual, foundation.

Feuerbach: the bridge between Hegel and Marx 🔗

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) was the pivotal transitional figure. He rejected Hegel’s idealism and insisted that nature and the material human being – not abstract Spirit – must be the starting point of philosophy. His most famous argument was that religion was a projection of human essence onto an imaginary divine being: humanity attributed its own powers, reason, and love to a God it had itself invented. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes Feuerbach’s “new philosophy” as derived through a dialectical inversion of the Hegelian system – turning idealism on its head by insisting that finite, corporeal human subjects, not abstract spirit, are the true subject of philosophy.

Engels famously recalled the liberating impact of Feuerbach’s work on his and Marx’s generation: as Columbia scholar Bernard Harcourt recounts, Marx understood Feuerbach as a “can-opener” who could lead thinkers raised on Hegelian idealism to become materialist. But Marx and Engels quickly recognized Feuerbach’s limits. As Thalheimer put it, what Feuerbach lacked, in contrast to Hegel, was dialectics. Feuerbach could think materialistically about nature, but he could not give a materialistic interpretation of history. His materialism was a natural-science materialism that, in the historical realm, slid back toward idealism. He still saw society as governed by ideas and feelings – love, in particular – rather than by material forces.

Marx and Engels: dialectical materialism as a synthesis 🔗

Marx and Engels took what was valuable in each of these traditions and forged something genuinely new. From Hegel, they inherited the dialectical method – the understanding that reality is not static but developing, driven by internal contradictions. From the English and French materialists, they inherited the insistence that the material world, not God or abstract Spirit, is the primary reality. And from Feuerbach, they received the critical turn toward the concrete, embodied human being. The synthesis was dialectical materialism.

Wikipedia’s entry on dialectical materialism notes that the term itself was coined in 1887 by Joseph Dietzgen, and first used prominently by the Russian Marxist Plekhanov in 1891 – it was not a phrase Marx himself regularly used. Yet the philosophical content was unmistakably Marx’s. In his Theses on Feuerbach (1845), Marx contrasted the “old materialism” – which understood the world as an object of contemplation – with his new approach, which understood the world as the product of human practical activity, praxis. As the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes, Marx contrasted “old” or “contemplative” materialism with the practically oriented materialism that would form the basis of the proletarian movement.

As Engels explained in his reading of this tradition, with Marxism, materialism is for the first time carried out consistently across all domains. Rather than simply rejecting Hegel as Feuerbach had done, Marx brought forward the revolutionary philosophy of dialectics and placed it upon a material base – turning Hegel’s philosophy, as the famous phrase goes, from its head onto its feet. Unlike the old 18th-century materialism, Marxism saw not only objects but processes. Everything is always coming into being and passing away. Through this process, all things develop – and crucially, human beings, through collective labor and struggle, actively participate in and transform that process.

The practical implication was enormous. Where French materialism had argued that changing the environment changes human beings, Marx extended this: it is humans who change the environment, and the science of this mutual transformation – of how economic structures shape history and how class conflict drives historical change – became historical materialism, the distinctive contribution of Marxian thought to the long tradition of materialist philosophy.

From mechanism to dialectics: the key shift 🔗

Looking back across this entire arc, the most important transformation is the move from mechanistic to dialectical materialism. The English and French traditions, for all their radicalism, largely conceived of matter as inert stuff governed by fixed mechanical laws – bodies hitting bodies, sensations producing ideas, environment molding behavior. This was a physics of billiard balls applied to human life. As Encyclopedia.com explains, Engels objected that 18th-century mechanical materialism was the product of an era when the most highly developed natural science was mechanics – and it showed. It reduced even the richness of human history to the operation of fixed physical forces.

Dialectical materialism replaced this static picture with a dynamic one. Matter is not inert; it is in constant movement, full of contradictions that drive change. The three laws of dialectics that Engels drew from Hegel – the unity and conflict of opposites, the transformation of quantity into quality, and the negation of the negation – were meant to describe the actual processes by which matter develops, whether in nature or in human history. This was not a retreat into idealism; it was an attempt to capture the dynamic, historical character of the material world itself.

The evolution of materialism from Bacon’s empirical science to Marx and Engels’s dialectical and historical materialism is therefore not merely a story about changing philosophical positions. It is a story about the deepening of the materialist project: from the claim that matter exists and is knowable, to the claim that matter moves and develops, to the claim that human beings are themselves part of that material development – agents who both shape and are shaped by the historical process.

What do you think? If all human consciousness and morality are ultimately products of material conditions, does that undermine the possibility of genuine moral responsibility – or does it simply shift where that responsibility lies? And does the transition from mechanistic to dialectical materialism represent a genuine philosophical advance, or does it introduce its own form of determinism?

References

1. https://philarchive.org/archive/MANFBQ
2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hobbes/
3. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Western-philosophy/Philosophy-of-nature
4. https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/materialism-from-hobbes-to-locke/
5. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/help/mean09.htm
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_materialism
7. https://press.ici-berlin.org/doi/10.37050/ci-20/yuva_history-of-philosophy.html
8. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/holbach/
9. https://crab.rutgers.edu/users/mhabib/Litcrt/MATERIAL_BLK_htm.htm
10. https://www.marxists.org/archive/thalheimer/works/diamat/07.htm
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism
12. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/
13. https://the1313.law.columbia.edu/2024/10/14/bernard-e-harcourt-marxs-theses-on-feuerbach-introduction-to-marx-1-13/
14. https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/dialectical-materialism/v-1
15. https://communistusa.org/ludwig-feuerbach-reading-guide/
16. https://www.encyclopedia.com/philosophy-and-religion/philosophy/philosophy-terms-and-concepts/dialectical-materialism