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Abstract
The stagist, progressive, and teleological philosophy of history of the nineteenth century, most famously and forcefully articulated by G.W.F. Hegel, is the theoretical backbone of progressive internationalism in both its liberal and Marxist variants. In the twentieth century, this same philosophy of history came under repeated and justified criticism for its totalizing theoretical tendencies and its historical complicity with imperialism and colonialism. Today, the philosophy of history is deemed highly suspicious, if not entirely bankrupt, by many critical, postcolonial, and decolonial theorists who find genealogy, deconstruction, and an emphasis on contingency more promising avenues for thinking and engaging with left politics. While keeping this critique in mind, this dissertation engages the philosophy of history as a vital theoretical tool for thinking and doing mass politics from a left-internationalist perspective. It does so by retracing the theoretical and historical development of communist internationalism from the 1840s to the 1920s, focusing on the revolutionary lives and thought of three major Marxist theorists: Friedrich Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, and Georg Lukács. All three were deeply involved in the revolutionary struggles of their day and all three relied on the philosophy of history to articulate their internationalist vision. By retracing the evolution of their thought against its immediate historical background, I recover a working notion of the philosophy of history in service of a bottom up, progressive, left-internationalist political project able to confront its own imperialist tendencies and learn from its past failures.
