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
... commodities or capital. 'I can still remember even today the overwhelming effect produced in me by Marx's statement,' he writes.17 Now it is true that the mistake in question had invalidated some of the assumptions of History and Class ...
... commodities'. In both places – the analysis of the modern State and the analysis of modern commodity-production – it is not simply the theories of Hegel and the economists which are upside down, but reality itself. In both places Marx ...
... commodities. The process is always the same. Whether the argument deals with fetishism and alienation, or with Hegel's mystifying logic, it hinges upon the hypostatizing, the reifying, of abstractions and the consequent inversion 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 bourgeois economists. It ...
... and (finally) his critique of the fetishism of commodities and capital can all be seen as the progressive unfolding, as the ever-deepening grasp of a single problematic. There is an obvious risk of over-emphasizing the factors of.
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 |