Young Marx - The Break With German Idealism

The Break With German Idealism

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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).

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