Early Marx: Alienation, History, Freedom

Karl Marx is often approached through the economic and political concepts associated with his “mature” or so-called “scientific” writings: capitalism, surplus value, class struggle, and the dynamics of exploitation. Yet his critique of the capitalist mode of production emerged from a set of deeply philosophical questions concerning freedom, history, and the relationship between individuals and the world they produce. In his writings of the 1840s, Marx’s engagement with Hegel, Feuerbach, and classical political economy led him toward distinctive accounts of alienation, labor, human nature, historical development, and emancipation, providing an indispensable set of texts for examining the philosophical underpinnings of his mature critique of capitalism.

This course focuses on these dimensions of the “early” Marx, tracing the development of Marx’s thought from his challenge to Hegelian political philosophy through his emerging critique of political economy and dialectical materialism. We begin with Marx’s appraisal of Hegel and his analysis of political and human emancipation in “On the Jewish Question,” asking what the distinction between formal equality and substantive social relations reveals about the modern state and civil society. We then turn to the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, where Marx develops his most robust account of alienated or estranged labor and explores the relationship among labor, objectification, nature, private property, and Gattungswesen, or “species-being.” From there, we examine Marx’s movement toward a materialist conception of history in the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology, examining how Marx transforms philosophical questions about human nature, consciousness, and freedom into political-economic questions about material activity, social relations, and production.

Our course concludes by turning from Marx’s nineteenth century writings to their twentieth century “rediscovery.” Although these texts were written in the 1840s, major portions thereof were not published until the late 1920s and early 1930s—well after the publication and dissemination of Capital. We will consider how this newly available “early Marx” was taken up by critical theorists such as Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Louis Althusser, and how their competing interpretations of these works’ impact illuminate broader disagreements over what Marxism is and what the overturning of capitalist modernity ultimately requires.