According to the philosophical or sociological doctrine of materialism only the material, or physical, world need be or can be used in the explanation of social processes and institutions. Most commonly associated with theories of Marxism (though by no means limited to them), materialism, inter alia, denies the meaningfulness of, for example, religious experience or consciousness except as projections by people of their physical experience. In one of its forms, dialectical materialism, it is the quasi-Marxist doctrine that only technical changes in the modes and means of production cause development and change in societies and economies.
Materialism thus insists that social consciousness is the product of the material conditions of life, and therefore that all other human institutions, whether legal and political systems, ideologies, religions, kinship patterns or even art forms are ultimately dependent on the economic infrastructure. Engels, rather than Marx himself, is largely responsible for the ‘materialist conception of history’ which, inverting Hegel, insists on the physical world and man’s struggle with it for survival being basic, rather than human ideas, reason and spirit. It is materialism, whether in Marxism, socialism or other ideologies, that Christianity, and especially Roman Catholicism, has always sought to combat in politics. The term itself is less often used today, being frequently replaced by the more general idea of ‘reductionism’, the material world being only one of many possible things to which ideas can be ‘reduced’ when seeking to invalidate them.
This is the complete article, containing 239 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
