The German Ideology
Frederick Engels [...] arrived by another road (compare his Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England) at the same result as I, and when in the spring of 1845 he too came to live in Brussels, we decided to set forth together our conception as opposed to the ideological one of German philosophy, in fact to settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience. The intention was carried out in the form of a critique of post-Hegelian philosophy. The manuscript, two large octavo volumes, had long ago reached the publishers in Westphalia when we were informed that owing to changed circumstances it could not be printed. We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly since we had achieved our main purpose – self-clarification.
— Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, 1859, Preface[1]
The German Ideology (German: Die deutsche Ideologie) is a set of unpublished manuscripts written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels around April 1846. It consists of two volumes. The first is subtitled "Critique of Modern German Philosophy According to Its Representatives," and attacks Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner, and Bruno Bauer, all thinkers associated with the Young Hegelians. The second is subtitled "Critique of German Socialism According to Its Various Prophets," and deals with the "True Socialists" Hermann Semmig, Rudolph Matthäi, Karl Grün and Georg Kuhlmann.
The first sections of the first volume contain an early statement of Marx's materialist conception of history.
Notes
References
- ↑ Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie: Preface, 1859.