Description
The novel is told by a first-person narrator in the present tense. The plot revolves around three main characters, Felix, Scorpion, and Merten, and their quest to uncover their origins. The novel seems to take an ironic polemic with philosophy. [3] It has also been described as satirical. [4]
The surviving fragments of the book's manuscript have not been well regarded. Francis Wheen in his biography of Marx characterizes the work as "a nonsensical torrent of whimsy and persiflage" which was "dashed off in a fit of intoxicated whimsy," although he notes that a paragraph from that novel appears in a slightly changed form as a "famous opening paragraph" in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte . [1]
Siegbert Salomon Prawer noted that the book is notable for being Marx's first attempt to discuss politics, and that it begins his polemic with Hegel. [5] Anna Kornbluh, however, argued that the piece is a polemic with Locke, Fichte, and Kant, but not Hegel. [3] She also commented more positively on the novel, concluding that it shows how even a young Marx "pursued logico-formal connections behind the veil of the visible, how thoroughly he tracked different forms of appearance of the real within ontologically positive reality". [3]
The novel was never finished. [6] Only some chapters of the novel survive to the modern day. [7] Parts of the novel could have been burned by Marx himself, along with some other early works of his. [2] The parts that survive are those fragments that Marx included as a supplement when he published his Book of Verse (1837).
The surviving fragments of Marx's novel were published in English for the first time in 1975 as part of Volume 1 of Marx-Engels Collected Works. [8]
Karl Marx was a German-born philosopher, political theorist, economist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His best-known works are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and his three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894); the latter employs his critical approach of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism, in the culmination of his intellectual endeavours. Marx's ideas and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have had enormous influence on modern intellectual, economic and political history.
Friedrich Engels was a German philosopher, political theorist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He was also a businessman and Karl Marx's lifelong friend and closest collaborator, serving as a leading authority on Marxism.
Dialectic, also known as the dialectical method, refers originally to dialogue between people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing to arrive at the truth through reasoned argumentation. Dialectic resembles debate, but the concept excludes subjective elements such as emotional appeal and rhetoric. It has its origins in ancient philosophy and continued to be developed in the Middle Ages.
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is a short book first published in 1880 by German-born socialist Friedrich Engels. The work was primarily extracted from a longer polemic work published in 1878, Anti-Dühring. It first appeared in the French language.
Jenny Laura Marx was a socialist activist. The second daughter of Karl Marx and Jenny von Westphalen, she married revolutionary writer Paul Lafargue in 1868. The two committed suicide together in 1911.
Helene or Helena Demuth was a German housekeeper who worked for Jenny von Westphalen and Karl Marx, and later served as the household manager and political confidante of Friedrich Engels.
The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature is a work completed in 1841 by German philosopher Karl Marx as his doctoral dissertation at the University of Jena. The thesis is a comparative study on atomism of Democritus and Epicurus on contingency and dedicated to Marx's friend, mentor, and future father-in-law Ludwig von Westphalen. Francis Wheen describes it has "a daring and original piece of work in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom of philosophy". His thesis advisor was his fellow Young Hegelian and personal friend, Bruno Bauer.
Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution is a 5-volume work (1977–1990) about the philosopher Karl Marx by the Marxist writer Hal Draper. First published by the Monthly Review Press, the book received positive reviews, praising it as a fair and well-written work that discredited misconceptions about Marx and his work.
Marxist humanism is an international body of thought and political action rooted in a humanist interpretation of the works of Karl Marx. It is an investigation into "what human nature consists of and what sort of society would be most conducive to human thriving" from a critical perspective rooted in Marxist philosophy. Marxist humanists argue that Marx himself was concerned with investigating similar questions.
The correct place of Karl Marx's early writings within his system as a whole has been a matter of great controversy. Some believe there is a break in Marx's development that divides his thought into two periods: the "Young Marx" is said to be a thinker who deals with the problem of alienation, while the "Mature Marx" is said to aspire to a scientific socialism.
Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach was a German anthropologist and philosopher, best known for his book The Essence of Christianity, which provided a critique of Christianity that strongly influenced generations of later thinkers, including Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Engels, Mikhail Bakunin, Richard Wagner, Frederick Douglass, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
The Poverty of Philosophy is a book by Karl Marx published in Paris and Brussels in 1847, where he lived in exile from 1843 until 1849. It was originally written in French as a critique of the economic and philosophical arguments of French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon set forth in his 1846 book The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty.
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon is an essay written by Karl Marx between December 1851 and March 1852, and originally published in 1852 in Die Revolution, a German monthly magazine published in New York City by Marxist Joseph Weydemeyer. Later English editions, such as the 1869 Hamburg edition with a preface by Marx, were entitled The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The essay serves as a major historiographic application of Marx's theory of historical materialism.
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, also known as Capital and Das Kapital, is a foundational theoretical text in materialist philosophy and critique of political economy written by Karl Marx, published as three volumes in 1867, 1885, and 1894. The culmination of his life's work, the text contains Marx's analysis of capitalism, to which he sought to apply his theory of historical materialism "to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society", following from classical political economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. The text's second and third volumes were completed from Marx's notes after his death and published by his colleague Friedrich Engels. Das Kapital is the most cited book in the social sciences published before 1950.
Marxist philosophy or Marxist theory are works in philosophy that are strongly influenced by Karl Marx's materialist approach to theory, or works written by Marxists. Marxist philosophy may be broadly divided into Western Marxism, which drew from various sources, and the official philosophy in the Soviet Union, which enforced a rigid reading of what Marx called dialectical materialism, in particular during the 1930s. Marxist philosophy is not a strictly defined sub-field of philosophy, because the diverse influence of Marxist theory has extended into fields as varied as aesthetics, ethics, ontology, epistemology, social philosophy, political philosophy, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of history. The key characteristics of Marxism in philosophy are its materialism and its commitment to political practice as the end goal of all thought. The theory is also about the struggles of the proletariat and their reprimand of the bourgeoisie.
Dialectical materialism is a materialist theory based upon the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that has found widespread applications in a variety of philosophical disciplines ranging from philosophy of history to philosophy of science. As a materialist philosophy, Marxist dialectics emphasizes the importance of real-world conditions and the presence of functional contradictions within and among social relations, which derive from, but are not limited to, the contradictions that occur in social class, labour economics, and socioeconomic interactions. Within Marxism, a contradiction is a relationship in which two forces oppose each other, leading to mutual development.
Historical materialism is Karl Marx's theory of history. Marx located historical change in the rise of class societies and the way humans labor together to make their livelihoods.
Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Marx's work in economics laid the basis for the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and has influenced much of subsequent economic thought. He published numerous books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Communist Manifesto. Marx studied at the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin, where he became interested in the philosophical ideas of the Young Hegelians. After his studies, he wrote for a radical newspaper in Cologne, and began to work out his theory of dialectical materialism. He moved to Paris in 1843, where he began writing for other radical newspapers and met Fredrick Engels, who would become his lifelong friend and collaborator. In 1845 he was exiled and moved to London together with his wife and children where he continued writing and formulating his theories about social and economic activity. He also campaigned for socialism and became a significant figure in the International Workingmen's Association.
Painted Youth is a 1929 German silent drama film directed by Carl Boese and starring Toni van Eyck, Wolfgang Zilzer, and Olga Limburg. It was shot at the National Studios in Berlin. The film's sets were designed by Karl Machus.
Henriette Marx was a Dutch-born woman who was the mother of the communist philosopher Karl Marx.
