In this guide, we’ll offer an overview of materialism from ancient times, examining the materialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels before addressing major developments in materialism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, like physicalism and new materialism.
A brief history of materialism from ancient times
Materialism in various forms has existed since ancient times. In Materialism (2019), Robin Gordon Brown and James Ladyman trace materialism to the Indian tradition of Lokayata, or Carvaka, and ancient Greek atomists. The Lokayata tradition believed that reality is built upon four elements — air, earth, fire, water — from which everything, even consciousness, is ultimately derived. For those following Lokayata beliefs, knowledge was derived from sensory perception; without a higher power or human soul, the goal in life should be the fulfillment of desires.
Democritus, considered the first Greek atomist, believed that everything was material and could be broken down into tiny, indivisible particles called atoms (from “atomos” meaning indivisible). The only reality besides atoms is infinite void, vacuum. Too small to be observed with the human eye, Democritus’ atoms come in an infinite variety of shapes, sizes, and types; even human souls are built from a specific kind of atom. Collisions between atoms produce the world as we perceive it.
Epicurus built on Democritus’ philosophy by envisioning the gods as built of special atoms, part of his effort to combat the fear of death that he believed was produced by religious beliefs. Epicurus’ significant contribution to atomism was the idea of the “swerve”: all atoms move downward at a constant speed, but they occasionally swerve and collide with each other. This idea is an attempt to build human freedom into a materialist framework. David J. Furley examines these ideas of “indivisible magnitudes” and “voluntary action” in Two Studies in the Greek Atomists (1967, [2015]). The later Roman poet Lucretius (c. 99–55 BCE) articulated a version of Epicurean philosophy, perhaps combined with his own theories, in the didactic poem De Rerum Natura, or On the Nature of Things (2012). The wide-ranging poem discusses atomic theory, death, dreams, sex, disease, and natural phenomena. (For more on these philosophers, see A History of Western Philosophy.)
For about a thousand years, materialism fell out of philosophical memory. Then, in 1417, On the Nature of Things was rediscovered in a German monastery. Lucretius’ poem went on to influence figures from Niccolo Machiavelli to Michel de Montaigne, from Edmund Spenser and John Donne to Francis Bacon.
The seventeenth century saw the rise of mechanical philosophy, an alternative to Aristotelian theories of the four elements, Ptolemaic geocentrism, and supernatural alchemy. Mechanism saw nature as a clockwork machine with hidden parts and inner workings yet to be fully discovered. Notable mechanists included Marin Mersenne, Pierre Gassendi, and Robert Boyle.
Other important philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries influenced by materialism include Thomas Hobbes, who claimed to believe in a material god, and David Hume, whose worldview combined materialism and skepticism. Hume believed that, while knowledge could only be gained from sensory perceptions, the senses were also ultimately unreliable. He angered religious authorities for his arguments about the improbability of miracles because they break the laws of nature. (For more, you can see our guide on empiricism.)
By the start of the nineteenth century, several prominent scientists and philosophers had adopted at least elements of a materialist worldview. However, the influential theories of the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes also remained popular; he had proposed a dualistic worldview, separating a somewhat mechanistic physical world from the immaterial and transcendent. Cartesian binaries between mind and body, spirit and substance, seemed false to materialists.
The dialectical and historical materialism of Marx and Engels
The most significant developments in materialism in the nineteenth century — arguably, in the history of materialist thought — were proposed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, namely dialectical and historical materialism. For them, the history of philosophy was a struggle between materialism (which sees the world as reducible to material processes) and idealism (which views reality as dependent upon ideas and mental functions).
Marx and Engels proposed their materialism as a revision to an influential strain of idealism, the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel is known for his proposal in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807, [2019]) of a dialectical which shapes culture and history: thesis and antithesis are constantly at odds and responding to each other, but gradually moving toward synthesis, more sophisticated thought, and human progress.
German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach provided the critique of Hegelian idealism that Marx and Engels would build upon. As Brown and Ladyman write in Materialism,