Book description
Written 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.
This translation fully conveys the vigour of the original works. The
introduction, by Lucio Colletti, considers the beliefs of the young
Marx and explores these writings in the light of the later development
of Marxism.
Karl Marx (1818-1883). The core of Marx's economic analysis found
early expression in the konomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem
Jahre 1844 (Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844). There, Marx
argued that the conditions of modern industrial societies invariably
result in the estrangement (or alienation) of workers from their own
labor. In his review of a Bruno Baier book, On the Jewish Question
(1844), Marx decried the lingering influence of religion over politics
and proposed a revolutionary re-structuring of European society. Much
later, Marx undertook a systematic explanation of his economic theories
in Das Kapital (Capital) (1867-95) and Theorien ber den Mehrwert
(Theory of Surplus Value) (1862).
