The Break With German Idealism
| Part of a series on |
| Marxism |
|---|
Theoretical works
|
Concepts and methods
|
Economics
|
Social sciences
|
History
|
Philosophy
|
Variants
|
Movements
|
People
|
|
Socialism portal |
The Young Marx is usually still considered part of humanist "bourgeois" philosophy, which Marx later criticized, along with German Idealism, on behalf of "social relations" which primed over individual consciousness, a product of ideology according to him. Marxist humanists stressed the humanistic philosophical foundations of Marx's thought by focusing on the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (first published in 1932, and largely suppressed in the Soviet Union until the post-Stalinist "Thaw"). Marx there expounds his theory of alienation, adapted from Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity (1841).
Althusser opposed himself to this movement, arguing that the young Marx couldn't be read while presupposing "fully-developed Marxism". He thus posed the philosophical problem of Marx's evolution as the question of how may one conceive the transformation of Marx's thought without adopting an idealist perspective which would mark a return to Hegel's spiritualist dialectics and its teleological perspective (the hen is in the egg as mature Marx would be in the young Marx, the "contents" of his dialectical materialist philosophy expressed in his earlier works under the "words" of Feuerbach's idealism).
Read more about this topic: Young Marx
Famous quotes containing the words break, german and/or idealism:
“Speak, nameless, power and might;
when will you leave me quite?
when will you break my wings
or leave them utterly free
to scale heaven endlessly?”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“I am particularly interested in the indications that the people seem to understand and approve the necessity of pursuing the course that will prevent a further effort on the part of the German peoples to continue the struggle for world domination, even though they are thoroughly beaten in this war.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“It wasn’t idealism that made me, from the beginning, want a more secure and rational society. It was an intellectual judgement, to which I still hold. When I was young its name was socialism. We can be deflected by names. But the need was absolute, and is still absolute.”
—Raymond Williams (1921–1988)