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At any point in the chain of events people could move towards liberalism and market economies, then become more prosperous. We've even got case studies where that was tried - the USSR - and a lot went wrong but it still went much better than most of the other experiments out of the 1900s. China too, eventually, where we can't really say what the end result is going to be but it has been an amazing journey so far.
The issue wasn't with these thinkers, it looks a lot more like any deviation from liberalism is a terrible mistake and it is really only a competition for who can be most liberal on the important issues (which, unfortunately, are only revealed with a little hindsight).
Considering that the "liberal values" were the ideology upon which China was previously attacked and destroyed by western powers, and that the KMT, under more liberal values did the Shangai Massacre against the comunists, ending their alliance, this would be improbable. Yeah, history show how progressive is the liberal ideology and their champions...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_idealism
But yeah, you could probably argue that the empiricist approach never quite went away. Even today, analytic philosophy (which is predominantly an Anglo-American phenomenon) is notoriously uninterested in politics and "big society" questions.
William Lawvere is also a post-hegelian.
You just need to jump through a few more hoops to get to the self-consciousness and then you'll see, it all makes sense in hindsight
(like the preface to the phenomenology, this comment will only make sense once you've read the whole damn thing)
All I am saying Hegel established a framework which eased the works of some scum.
"You notice I haven’t given an analysis of the Enlightenment but of
modernity, of modernisation, of the advance of capital, because
four pedants don’t make an age. And two or three weird philosophers
don’t give birth to a century of unreason. You know, Nietzsche
didn’t, you know, from his drawing room give birth to a century of
cannonade, slaughter, concentration camps, CIA subterfuge, the
raping and the murdering of nuns, the bombing of continents, the
despoiling of beaches and the ruin of a planet! Four or five
pedants do not have that much power, and never have. That’s just a
sort of bugbear. They didn’t 'unleash unreason on the world'
Jesus... how crazy can some people get. I mean, even in the
postmodern world you shouldn't be that crazy, to say that three or
four pedants invented this stuff. " -- R. Roderick Nietzsche’s
Progeny (1991)A world where Karl Marx isn't responsible for millions of deaths is a world where the existence of intellectuals is ultimately pointless. There, a wise potentate could send philosophers into labor camps and he'd only benefit from the elimination of waste.
If you believe that ideas matter, then you should allow for spectacularly bad ideas to have spectacularly bad real world consequences.
But just out of curiosity, what exactly Marx said that you deem so dangerous? Can you show some quotes?
Well, we can start with this problematic statement. Taken to its literal conclusion, it's not surprising to think it could end up with mass graves. Granted, it originated from Mephistopheles, but Marx wasn't being poetic in his recitations.
The constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and red republicans, the heroes of Africa, the thunder from the platform, the sheet lightning of the daily press, the entire literature, the political names and the intellectual reputations, the civil law and the penal code, liberté, egalité, fraternité, and the second Sunday in May, 1852 – all have vanished like a phantasmagoria before the spell of a man whom even his enemies do not make out to be a sorcerer. Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for the moment, so that with its own hand it may make its last will and testament before the eyes of all the world and declare in the name of the people itself: “All that exists deserves to perish.” [From Goethe’s Faust, Part One.]
Can you explain, in your interpretation, what was Marx trying to say?
Any accounting scheme which assigns Marx blame for the consequences of his poorer ideas, has to assign far more to "wise potentate" believers. Or even people who unironically use words like "wise potentate" at all.
to me this seems to imply ideas don't matter, or we wouldn't be living in a market-oriented society. I suppose there's still room for global warming to demonstrate your point.
The fact that people still hang on to the outdated epistemology of the dialectic is absurd given the domination of empiricism in real world
I am asking genuinely on your stance because I don't see why you consider them to be evil.
Still, at best I see him as a naive person, not evil.
Hegel is useful to me as a shortcut to knowing that anything or anyone deriving from his ideas is awful. I seem to recall Bertrand Russell didn’t seem fond either, Hegel’s entry in the History of Philosophy certainly wasn’t a glowing review.