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Karl Marx Stole Some of His Ideas
Marx wasn’t as original as you might think
Despite the barbarity caused by many communist revolutions during the twentieth century, the philosophy of Karl Marx still has a popular following. However, not all of Marx’s ideas were original. Whilst he’s regarded by those on both sides of the political spectrum as a revolutionary thinker, some of his ideas came from a very specific place:
The Scottish Enlightenment.
The four stages of history
In Adam Smith’s Glasgow lectures (delivered in the early 1760s and published in 1763), the famous economist outlines four stages of history: ‘…hunting, pastoral, farming, and commerce.’ Smith also highlights these stages in Book V of The Wealth of Nations, which was published in 1776.
In The German Ideology (a work that was written in 1845 and 1846 but not published until 1932), Marx uses these four stages for his “Materialist Conception of History.” He doesn't lay out the stages as explicitly as Smith does, but there’s a clear overlap between the two.
