Structuralist View of History: Hegel, Marx, Dialectics, Historical Materialism, and the Clash Between Ideology and “Everyone Else”

Structuralist View of History: Hegel, Marx, Dialectics, Historical Materialism, and the Clash Between Ideology and “Everyone Else” The basic claim of this essay is simple: history does not usually move as a neat “thesis vs antithesis” duel between two symmetrical ideologies. More often, it seems to move as “one pure, aggressive ideology vs a messy, non-ideological ‘everyone else’.” In what follows, I will sketch this alternative picture of history, with occasional help from Hegel, Marx, and modern structuralist ways of thinking. History, Science, and “Progress” (or Just Change?) History, too, is a kind of science, and the nineteenth century was the age of science. Once people started treating history scientifically, they naturally began to search for laws of historical development and to propose various hypotheses about such laws. Among those, one of the most powerful was the Marxist view of history. It is an extremely forward-looking, even optimistic, vision of history. But if we look at actual historical developments, the story often seems rather different from what that theory predicts. This essay is an attempt to spell out that difference. How Does History Change? Humans have long proposed different theories and “grand narratives” about how history changes. One famous example is Ibn Khaldun’s view in the Muqaddimah, which some people may remember from world history classes. For the Eurasian landmass he sketches a kind of cycle: militarily strong nomads from the north invade the agricultural peoples of the south the south is ruled by those nomads, politics stabilizes, and military strength gradually declines then a new strong northern people invades the settled south again …and so on, in a repeating cycle In a loose sense, even something like the current war in Ukraine can be viewed through such a lens. Hegel, Marx, and Their Historical Vision Marx’s view of history is often called historical materialism. Structurally, it is a reinterpretation of Hegel’s dialectic. In Marx’s version, history is always divided into rulers and the ruled. The ruled gradually accumulate strength, eventually overthrow the ruling class, and a new regime is born. This process repeats over and over. To construct this, Marx combined many ingredients: Malthus’s population theory the emerging socialist ideas of his time classical political economy Hegel’s dialectic Together these formed what we call Marxism. Hegel’s worldview, philosophy of history, and theory of thought are all structured by his dialectic of thesis–antithesis–synthesis. An antithesis arises against a given thesis, and the conflict between them is eventually sublated into a synthesis. Hegel believed that both human ideas and the world itself could be understood in this way. Marx takes that schema and applies it to history, attaching the economics of his own day. When capitalism matures, the proletariat develops as an antithesis to the bourgeoisie; out of that conflict, a proletarian–communist revolution emerges as the synthesis. This synthesis is then depicted as the end of history, the final form of human society. Perhaps because Marx’s grandfather was a Jewish rabbi, or because Western society is steeped in biblical friend-vs-enemy narratives, Marx imagines history as having a certain end-point or final form. Malthus’s population theory may also have played a role. In any case, history is portrayed as if “once the world becomes communist, the story is over and humanity has reached its completed form.” Japan Before and During the Cold War In postwar Japan—especially in the early decades of the Cold War—there was a strong sense that society was living in a kind of “pre-revolutionary” period. The Anpo protests were intense. The Zengakuren and other student movements were energetic and militant. But after a series of failures and disappointments— and with global events like the Hungarian Uprising, the Prague Spring, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—the air of enthusiasm gave way to a kind of disenchantment. In generational labels, people born around 1960 were at one point called the “disenchanted generation” (shirake sedai), though that may simply have been a label someone tried to popularize. Looking back, we can see that there were many leftist sects—communist, socialist, and so on—but if we zoom out, we find something like: “a single large Marxist / communist / socialist block vs a heterogeneous mass of everyone else.” What “socialism” meant was itself contested. Sometimes it referred to something like social democracy within parliamentary systems. But at the time, there was also a strong sense of socialism as an intermediate stage between capitalism and communism. Seen from that perspective, pre- and early-Cold War Japan had a rough structure of: “Marxist ideology” vs “everyone else.” And into that “everyone else” were thrown: realists capitalists non-political people conservatives and “the right” and many others who did not fit any label neatly at all If you keep that diversity in mind, it’s easier to picture what “the rest” actually looked like. The LDP under the 1955 system is a good example. As a product of the postwar regime—and in some ways a child of the Cold War itself—it stood clearly against Marxism, but contained within it a whole jumble of tendencies and interests. The world of public intellectuals was similar. On one side you had Marxist voices—newspapers like the Asahi Shimbun, publishers like Iwanami Shoten—loud across media, academia, education, and unions. On the other side you had people who simply could not swallow Marxism. They were lumped together as “everyone else.” Within that “other” camp you had those later labeled as “conservatives” or “the right,” but also: realists, liberals, capitalists, non-political types, democrats, conservatives, right-wingers, and many others who didn’t even have names as a group. They were not united by any strong positive common doctrine. If there was a shared sentiment at all, it was more like: “If a communist revolution actually happens here, we’re in real trouble.” In other words, they were a loose cluster of people with anti-revolutionary or anti-totalitarian instincts, rather than a coherent ideology. Even that may be saying too much. In practice, they were people whom Marxist ideologues simply lumped together, slapped with labels, and treated as one amorphous “other.” Hegel’s Dialectic Is Beautiful – But… Hegel is, fundamentally, a philosopher. Whatever else he may have done, historically he is read above all as a figure in the history of philosophy. His theory is a kind of culmination of German Idealism: from a given thesis and its antithesis, a new ideology—a synthesis—is produced through sublation. It is a beautifully clean model that eliminates messiness. The question is whether actual history really works that way. If we look back at concrete history, what we often find is closer to the following pattern. “Ideology” Versus “Everyone Else” In many cases we see a highly systematic, aggressive, exclusionary ideology, very fond of labeling and proselytizing. If we call that ideology—following Hegel—the “thesis”, then its “antithesis” is not another equally coherent ideology, but rather a mass of heterogeneous “others.” Among this “everyone else” we do find people who consciously oppose the ideology. But we also find: people who simply don’t care people who are indifferent people who have never even heard of the ideology In a good sense, they are “those who can live without it.” Many are simply not involved, or choose not to be. There are also those who strive to remain neutral. This is very similar to the situation in Japan before and during the Cold War. For those who were non- or anti-ideological, the remaining forums were things like: Bungeishunjū (Bunshun) Shokun! (then an “opinion magazine”) Seiron (a more overtly conservative or right-leaning magazine) These became spaces where such writers and thinkers published, not as a single “anti-ideology” front, but as a collection of heterogeneous voices. Looking at Big Ideological Upheavals in World History If we survey major historical episodes where a new ideology reshaped society, we find that history seldom takes the form of two camps bearing symmetric ideologies, clashing and then compromising. More often, it looks like this: “Ideological absolutism” vs “a heterogeneous mass of others.” Even the word “versus” can be misleading. Sometimes there is open confrontation. But often what we actually see is one-sided attack or exclusion from the ideological side onto everyone else. Here are some examples: Christianization of the Roman Empire: “Christianity” vs “the Roman imperial order” Jewish religious purism: “a relatively fundamentalist Jewish elite” vs “the impious or lax commoners criticized in Scripture” The Reformation: “Protestantism” vs “the Old Church” The shift from medieval to modern: “Christianity” vs “modernity (science, philosophy, etc.)” The French Revolution: “Enlightenment ideology” vs “the Ancien Régime” The Russian Revolution: “Marxism / communism” vs “the Russian Empire” Interwar Italy and Germany: “fascism” vs “the Weimar Republic (and its political culture)” The Cold War: “communist states” vs “all other political systems” Political correctness and the recent liberal wave: “liberalism, SDGs, DEI, LGBTQ+ politics, etc.” vs “conservatives and the right, but also large numbers of people who are simply uninterested” The Meiji Restoration: “revere the emperor, expel the barbarians (sonnō jōi)” vs “various conservative forces” The English revolutions: “the long series of political and religious upheavals” in early modern England We could multiply such examples endlessly. Even if we look at just a handful of them, a recurring pattern appears: “a pure, absolutist ideology” vs “a multitude of people—some with their own doctrines, some anti-ideological, many simply realist or non-political, some barely aware that an ‘ideology’ even exists.” History, in other words, often divides into: a camp of ideological absolutism, and a camp of messy, heterogeneous, non-ideological or weakly ideological actors. What Happens When Thesis and Antithesis Collide? In Hegelian terms, when thesis and antithesis collide, they are sublated into a synthesis. There is a tendency to imagine that this synthesis is something higher, better, more rational. But in patterns like those listed above—“ideology vs messy others”—the synthesis that actually emerges is often quite miserable. Why does the “synthesis” so often turn out badly? There are many possible reasons, but two stand out: an ideological impulse toward violently resolving contradictions all at once, and the attempt to force the complexity of reality into a single organizing principle. When the ideological side succeeds—fully or even partially—in imposing its will, history often enters a period of prolonged confusion and instability. Take the French Revolution. From the Jacobin Reign of Terror, through Napoleon’s military dictatorship and wars of conquest, and into the subsequent history of France, one cannot help feeling that things never quite “settled.” France gave humanity beautiful slogans such as “liberty, equality, fraternity,” and that is admirable in its own way. But the after-effects at home have been… let us say, less than dazzling. (That imperfect, not-quite-together France is precisely what some of us, with a taste for wabi-sabi and incompleteness, find oddly lovable.) Or consider the Russian Revolution. Looking at Russian history since then, we may reasonably ask: “Did Russia really become happier through this process?” Watching a Russia that now looks bogged down, even on the back foot, in the war in Ukraine, that question still feels relevant. By contrast, eras in which the “messy side” wins or at least remains dominant often look more stable. They do not produce a shining, unified ideology, and thus they may be less visible in world-history narratives. But they can be more livable. There is also a notion sometimes called “cultural excavation and resonance”: social changes that dig up and reactivate elements already present in a culture, rather than imposing a wholly new ideology from outside, tend to go better. The Meiji Restoration may be an example that went comparatively well. It was, after all, a “Restoration of Imperial Rule,” not the invention of something utterly unprecedented. Similarly, after much turmoil, the English revolutions effectively ended in a restoration of the monarchy. Perhaps, then: “a pure, totalizing ideology” is less resilient than “a motley, shapeless crowd of heterogeneous forces.” The latter may possess greater inclusion and resilience. In Closing Marxism, communism, socialism—they are not just ghosts of the pre-Cold War era. They remain hot topics even now. Modern thought has strongly criticized ideology-centrism, yet ideological waves still sweep through societies like natural disasters from time to time. People say that “history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.” To “learn from history” is not just a noble humanist slogan; it is, quite selfishly, useful. For that reason, the study of history and historical world-views should not be treated as a vague “liberal education” ornament, but as a practical database for living: a way of recognizing when an absolutist ideology is on the rise, a way of understanding the likely consequences when “ideology vs everyone else” plays out yet again, and a way of deciding, for ourselves, how we wish to stand within that pattern. Having such knowledge ready at hand may turn out to be unexpectedly helpful— perhaps even life-saving—some day.