Understanding or transforming

The eleventh of the Theses on Feuerbach overturns philosophy's vocation: interpreting the world, as philosophers have confined themselves to doing, leaves untouched the material conditions that produce misery and alienation. Critique must become practical: it must take flesh in the struggles that transform social relations, until philosophy fulfills itself by being realized.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.Theses on Feuerbach, XI (1845)

Theses on Feuerbach, XI · The German Ideology (1846)

If one seeks the engine of history, it is neither Providence nor the march of ideas that must be questioned but a contradiction internal to societies: the productive forces that men develop eventually clash with the inherited relations of production, and this collision, lived as class struggle, carries one mode of production over into the next. Marx draws from this a direction from feudalism through capitalism to communism, guaranteed by no design but extracted from the analysis of material conditions, which sets him apart both from Hegel's theodicy of history and from providential narratives: hence a strongly directional reading, with no transcendent teleology.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848

Manifesto of the Communist Party, ch. 1 · Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)

The later Sartre attempts a synthesis of existentialism and Marxism: history is not pure contingency but the dialectical process by which men make their history out of material conditions they did not choose. He nonetheless maintains the irreducibility of free praxis against any rigid historical determinism, hence a moderate directional orientation, with no guaranteed teleology.

Search for a Method (1957) and Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960)

Philosophy does not prescribe to the world what it ought to be: it always comes too late for that, when a shape of life has already grown old and can only be understood. It grasps its own time in thought, it does not run ahead of it. Hence its reserve toward reformers who set against the real the wish of an ought-to-be. And "what is rational is actual" does not bless the given: actual (wirklich) does not mean everything that exists, but what fulfills its concept.

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Preface

Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Preface · Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §6 Remark (the sense of "actual")

History is not a chaos of accidents but an oriented process: progress in the consciousness of freedom, from the Orient where one is free to the modern world where all are. Yet its direction is not imposed as a linear fate: it is accomplished through contingency and passion. This is the cunning of reason, which uses the private ends of great men to realize, unbeknownst to them, its universal end. The court of history, a phrase borrowed from Schiller, judges the peoples.

World history is the progress in the consciousness of freedom.Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Introduction

Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Introduction (Lectures) · Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §340-342