Early WritingsWritten in 1833-4, when Marx was barely twenty-five, this astonishingly rich body of works formed the cornerstone for his later political philosophy. In the Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State, he dissects Hegel's thought and develops his own views on civil society, while his Letters reveal a furious intellect struggling to develop the egalitarian theory of state. Equally challenging are his controversial essay On the Jewish Question and the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, where Marx first made clear his views on alienation, the state, democracy and human nature. Brilliantly insightful, Marx's Early Writings reveal a mind on the brink of one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history - the theory of Communism. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 43
... exchange, claims Marx. On the one hand being is reduced to thinking, the finite to the infinite: empirical, real facts are transcended, and it is denied they have genuine reality. The realm of empirical truth is transformed into an ...
... exchange-relations in order to analyse them in isolation from social relations of production. But what actually occurs is that once this abstraction has been made it is given an independent existence as though it represented the essence ...
... exchange value'. This is not a generalizing operation performed by thinkers, but something occurring within the machinery of the social order, in reality. 'Men do not therefore bring the products of their labour into relation with each.
... exchange as values, they equate their different kinds of labour as human labour. They do this without being aware of it.'55 To the separation between public and private, between society and the individual (analysed in the Critique) ...
... exchange value of commodities. At this point, the full importance of the Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State becomes plain. The criticism of Hegel in that work is – as we saw – the key to Marx's subsequent criticism of the ...
Contents
xxxii | |
Letters from | cxcvii |
On the Jewish Question 1843 | ccxi |
A Contribution to the Critique | ccxlvii |
Excerpts from James Mills | cclxv |
Economic and Philosophical | cclxxxix |
Critical Notes on the Article | cxxi |
Appendix | iii |
Chronology of Marxs Life | xviii |
Note on Previous Editions of | xxiii |