Sykes explains materialism as understanding ideas and society through the material conditions that shape them, contrasting it with idealism’s emphasis on ideas determining reality.
Bramen illustrates this approach through the French Revolution, where crop failures, soaring bread prices, taxation, and economic hardship intensified popular anger.
Together, the sources show how material circumstances can shape political consciousness and historical change. ⭐
Together, Sykes and Bramen show that materialism provides a way of understanding social change by starting with the real conditions in which people live.
Sykes explains the philosophy: material reality such as social relationships, production, institutions, and everyday conditions shape how people understand their world. Ideas still matter, but they do not develop independently of the society producing them. ⭐
The French Revolution makes this concrete. Crop failures in 1788 and 1789 helped push bread from roughly 50% to 88% of an average worker’s wages, while unequal taxation added to popular resentment.
These hardships did not single-handedly cause the revolution, but they intensified dissatisfaction with the existing order. At the same time, as Sykes explains, revolutionaries challenged ideas that legitimized that order, including the divine right of kings and the Church’s ideological authority. ⭐