Journal of the History of Philosophy

The Marxism of Marx's Doctoral Dissertation JOHN L. STANLEY ALTHOUGH THE AMOUNT OF SCHOLARSHIP on Marx's doctoral dissertation is small in comparison to what has been done in regard to his later writings, interpretation of this earliest systematic work is not inconsequential for our understanding of the controversies surrounding his later texts. Completed in 1841 , the dissertation, Diff erenz der demokritischen und epikureischen Naturphilosophie, ~is relevant , not only for studies of Democritus and Epicurus, but for the debate over the question of freedom versus determinism in Marx. Generally speaking, that debate is between commentators who are intent on seeing Marx as primarily a "humanist" thinker stressing the free self-constitution of man against the "materialism " of the more old-fashioned Marxists who have stressed Marx's inevitable laws of development. 2 The present study will address the issue of freedom3 and attempt to show that the interpreters of the dissertation have generally underestimated the extent to which its author is already a materialist whose 1Marx-Engels Werke, Ergiinzungsband, First Part (Berlin: Dietz, 1973). Hereafter cited as MEWE. Dissertation, ~57-373; Heft., 13-~55. The English translation, which I shall generally follow, is Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, and is by Richard Dixon and Dirk and Sally Struik in: Marx and Engels, CollectedWorks, Vol. 1 (New York: International , 1975). Hereafter cited as CW x. Dissertation, a3-1o7; the 1839 Notebooks, 4o3-5o9 . The work was planned as part of a larger study which was never completed. The original manuscript has been lost. The extant copy, by an unknown hand, lacks Parts 4 and 5 of the first part, most of the appendix and some notes. ' For a depiction of these two general tendencies, see Alvin W. Gouldner, The Two Matxisms (New York: Oxford University Press, 198o). 3There are already extensive discussions of the validityof Marx's interpretation of Epicurus and Democritus. See especially Jean-Marc Gabaude, Le jeune Marx et le maWtmlisme antique (Toulouse: Privat, x97o). See also Cyril Bailey, "Karl Marx on Greek Atomism," Classical Quarterly 2~ 0928): ~o5-~o6, and Rolf Sannwald, Marx und die Antike (Zurich: Polygraphischer Verlag, 1957), Ch. 4. While Sannwald says that Marx has made a valuable contribution, but is wrong in details, Gabaude is more critical, arguing that Marx exaggerates the difference between the two thinkers (7l). 134 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33: i JANUARY 1995 view of praxis is based on the idea (later espoused by Engels) that freedom is the appreciation of necessity.4 Briefly stated, Marx's thesis is that Epicurus's doctrine of freedom, derived from an analogy with the atomic "swerve," opposes the strict causality and necessitarian "positive science" of Democritus--even though the views of the two thinkers had long been held to be virtually identical. In interpreting this treatise, on the one hand those whom we shall loosely call the "humanist" writers have for the most part sided with Kolakowski's view that the idea of the free acting subject implicit in Marx's "Promethean" anthropocentrism and epistemology of praxis, is not the same as the supposedly passive subject implicit in Engels's deterministic "positivism." These same interpreters have then projected this distinction back to the dissertation: For Kolakowski, Marx sides with the Epicurean doctrine of the free subject which, not passively submissive to the existing facts, contains "the germ" of the concept of praxis.5 For Thomas that doctrine of freedom opposes Democritian "positivist" determinism in much the same way that Marxian praxis opposes Engels's "billiardball atomism.''6 On the other hand, it is argued by Sannwald,7 and by an otherwise disparate group whom we might generally identify as the "proto-historical materialist " interpreters of the thesis, such as Cornu and Gabaude,8 that the Marx of the dissertation asserts the dialectical polarity between freedom and necessity, which Marx accuses Epicurus of failing to overcome, and points toward the materialist conception of history. However, these interpreters have not only generally resisted the positivist caricature of them by "humanists"; they also agree with the humanists that the pre-I84I Marx remains, in Gabaude's 4Cf. Frederick Engels, Anti-D~ring (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959), 157ff...