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Marx and Engels, The German Ideology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Extract

The texts before us are relatively early works. They predate the famous Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1848. Their importance lies in this: that here historical materialism is outlined and defended for the first time. This new philosophy is elaborated in the course of Marx and Engels' effort to settle accounts with previous German philosophy—and, perhaps, with philosophy as such. The new outlook is developed, therefore, in the context of polemic against Hegel and Feuerbach, precisely the thinkers that they most admired earlier in fact.

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1986

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References

1 Marx, K. and Engels, F., The German Ideology, 2nd edn, Arthur, C. J. (ed.) (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1974)Google Scholar. This also contains Marx's Theses on Feuerbach and his 1857 Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy. Page numbers in the text below refer to this volume. Note the following errata: page 7 line 2, read ‘dialectic’; page 7 note 1, read ‘mystification’; page 7 one line from bottom, insert ‘2’; page 94 last line, delete last comma.

2 Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, Selected Works, 3 vols, Vol. One (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), 502504.Google Scholar

3 Selected Works, Vol. One, 113.Google Scholar

4 Selected Works, Vol. One, 504.Google Scholar

5 Marx, Karl, Capital, Vol. One (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 175176.Google Scholar

6 The Essence of Christianity [1841], trans. Evans, Marian (George Eliot) (reissued New York, 1957), 5Google Scholar. ‘Contemplation’ here=‘Beschauung’.

7 The Fiery Brook, selected writings of Feuerbach, Ludwig, trans. Hanfi, Zawar (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972), 56.Google Scholar

8 Mill, J. S., A System of Logic [1843] (London: Longmans, 1965)Google Scholar, Book 6, ‘On the Logic of the Moral Sciences’, Ch. VII, 573.

10 ‘We presuppose labour in a form in which it is an exclusively human characteristic … what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. … Man not only effects a change of form on the material of nature; he also realizes his own purpose in those materials’ (Capital, Vol. One, 283284).Google Scholar

11 Capital, Vol. One, 477.Google Scholar

12 Fourier, C., Oeuvres completes Tome VI (Paris, 19661968), 68.Google Scholar

13 Marx's Grundrisse, trans. Nicolaus, M. (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 704706.Google Scholar

14 See Capital, Vol. Three (London: Penguin Books, 1981), 958959.Google Scholar

15 Selected Works, Vol. One, 395.Google Scholar

16 Capital, Vol. One, 91Google Scholar. The necessity inheres in ‘the economic law of motion of modern society’ (92). This is misquoted, in a very significant way, by Popper, Karl, in his Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge, 1961)Google Scholar as ‘the economic law of motion of human society’ (p. 49). (My emphases.)