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 Heinrich Marx was a German-born philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and revolutionary socialist. His best-known works are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894); the latter employs his theory of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism, representing his greatest intellectual achievement. The founder of Marxism, Marx's political and philosophical thought has had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic, and political history.
Friedrich Engels was a German philosopher, historian, political theorist, critic of political economy, and revolutionary socialist. He was also a businessman, journalist, and Karl Marx's closest friend and collaborator.
Dialectic, also known as the dialectical method, is a discourse between two or more people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing to establish the truth through reasoned argumentation. Dialectic resembles debate, but the concept excludes subjective elements such as emotional appeal and rhetoric. Dialectic may thus be contrasted with both the eristic, which refers to argument that aims to successfully dispute another's argument, and the didactic method, wherein one side of the conversation teaches the other. Dialectic is alternatively known as minor logic, as opposed to major logic or critique.
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.
Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume III: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole, is the third volume of Capital: Critique of Political Economy. It was prepared by Friedrich Engels from notes left by Karl Marx and published in 1894.
Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume II: The Process of Circulation of Capital is the second of three volumes of Capital: Critique of Political Economy. It was prepared by Friedrich Engels from notes left by Karl Marx and published in 1885.
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, Richard Wagner, 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 "materialist conception of history".
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, also known as Das Kapital or simply Capital, 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 laws of modern society", following from classical political economists such as Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. 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.
The political slogan "Workers of the world, unite!" is one of the rallying cries from The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A variation of this phrase is also inscribed on Marx's tombstone. The essence of the slogan is that members of the working classes throughout the world should cooperate to defeat capitalism and achieve victory in the class conflict.
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.
Anti-Dühring is a book by Friedrich Engels, first published in German in 1877 in parts and then in 1878 in book form. It had previously been serialised in the newspaper Vorwärts. There were two further German editions in Engels' lifetime. Anti-Dühring was first published in English translation in 1907.
Historical materialism is Karl Marx's theory of history. Marx locates historical change in the rise of class societies and the way humans labor together to make their livelihoods. For Marx and his lifetime collaborator, Friedrich Engels, the ultimate cause and moving power of historical events are to be found in the economic development of society and the social and political upheavals wrought by changes to the mode of production. Historical materialism provides a challenge to the view that historical processes have come to a close and that capitalism is the end of history. Although Marx never brought together a formal or comprehensive description of historical materialism in one published work, his key ideas are woven into a variety of works from the 1840s onward. Since Marx's time, the theory has been modified and expanded. It now has many Marxist and non-Marxist variants.
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 Pressburg later on marriage, Henriette Marx, was the mother of the communist philosopher and economist Karl Marx.
