Guizot’s “Social History”,in The Context Of Marxism

In the view of Plekhanov,Guizot’ s philosophy of history is his most important creation in the history.Guizot contributed three propositions to the development of historical materialism: property relations are the foundation of the political system,class struggle is the driving force of historical development,and the masses of the people are the heroes of history.As for Guizot’ s political philosophy,Plekhanov believed it merely an extension of Guizot’s wrong ideas on the history.Plekhanov’ s work profoundly influenced the Marxism philosophical community,most later writers would like to repeat Plekhanov’ s statement without any reflection.But after 1960 s,some of the western scholars,especially Fran?ois Furet,made some different points.Furet believed that the politics is the real theoretical basis of Guizot,so we should think of Guizot as a political scientist or a political philosopher,and there are no irreconcilable contradictions between his political theory and history.In fact,while talking about Guizot’ s political ideas,those western scholars ignored the unavoidable contradictions between political theory and history.Guizot is not a conformist of traditional political philosophy,instead,he tried to revolutionize the political philosophy with a ‘social history’ through his historical work on social foundation.The disagreement between Plekhanov and Furet roots in the internal contradictions of Guizot’ s ideology.The‘social history’ could not deal with the major issue about historical movements and the causes of progress of history.Guizot has no way to abandon metaphysical methodology altogether,or his ideological construction would collapse.In the view of Marx,all science has a premise beyond its theory,and a historical science could not get development with a political metaphysics.Marx’ s rejection of state doctrine in political philosophy does not means the lack of treatment of the premise of his theory,in fact,he restricted the limits of the political philosophy through the practical research on society.For Marx,antinomies between scientific exposition of the functioning of society and the ideas beyond the existing society would not break his theoretical structure like things happened to Guizot,instead,they became a long-lasting self-reform power of Marx’ s theory.