The German Ideology (
GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, thus related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. It is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. Around the world, German is spoken by approximately 105 million native speakers and also by...
:
Die Deutsche Ideologie) is a book written by
Karl MarxKarl Heinrich Marx was a Germanphilosopher, political economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, communist and revolutionary, whose ideas are credited as the foundation of modern communism...
and
Friedrich EngelsFriedrich Engels was a German social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of communist theory, alongside Karl Marx. Together they produced The Communist Manifesto in 1848...
around April or early May 1845. Marx and Engels didn't find a publisher. However, the work was later retrieved and published for the first time in 1932 by
David RiazanovDavid Borisovich Ryazanov was a Russian Marxist and Marxologue.-From the Narodniks to the October Revolution:...
through the Marx-Engels
InstituteAn institute is a permanent organizational body created for a certain purpose. Often it is a research organization created to do research on specific topics...
in
MoscowMoscow is the capital and the largest city of Russia. It is also the largest metropolitan area in Europe, and ranks among the largest urban areas in the world. Moscow is a major political, economic, cultural, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the world, a...
.
The multi-part book consists of many satirically written
polemicPolemics is the practice of disputing or controverting significant, broad-reaching topics of magnitude such as religious, philosophical, political, or scientific matters...
s against
Bruno BauerBruno Bauer was a German theologian, philosopher and historian.Bauer investigated the sources of the New Testament and concluded that early Christianity owed more to Greek philosophy than to Judaism....
, other Young Hegelians, and
Max StirnerJohann Kaspar Schmidt , better known as Max Stirner , was a German philosopher, who ranks as one of the literary fathers of nihilism, existentialism, post-modernism and anarchism, especially of individualist...
's
The Ego and Its OwnThe Ego and Its Own is a philosophical work by German philosopher Max Stirner , first published in 1844.-Synopsis:...
(1844).
The German Ideology (
GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, thus related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. It is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. Around the world, German is spoken by approximately 105 million native speakers and also by...
:
Die Deutsche Ideologie) is a book written by
Karl MarxKarl Heinrich Marx was a Germanphilosopher, political economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, communist and revolutionary, whose ideas are credited as the foundation of modern communism...
and
Friedrich EngelsFriedrich Engels was a German social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of communist theory, alongside Karl Marx. Together they produced The Communist Manifesto in 1848...
around April or early May 1845. Marx and Engels didn't find a publisher. However, the work was later retrieved and published for the first time in 1932 by
David RiazanovDavid Borisovich Ryazanov was a Russian Marxist and Marxologue.-From the Narodniks to the October Revolution:...
through the Marx-Engels
InstituteAn institute is a permanent organizational body created for a certain purpose. Often it is a research organization created to do research on specific topics...
in
MoscowMoscow is the capital and the largest city of Russia. It is also the largest metropolitan area in Europe, and ranks among the largest urban areas in the world. Moscow is a major political, economic, cultural, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the world, a...
.
The multi-part book consists of many satirically written
polemicPolemics is the practice of disputing or controverting significant, broad-reaching topics of magnitude such as religious, philosophical, political, or scientific matters...
s against
Bruno BauerBruno Bauer was a German theologian, philosopher and historian.Bauer investigated the sources of the New Testament and concluded that early Christianity owed more to Greek philosophy than to Judaism....
, other Young Hegelians, and
Max StirnerJohann Kaspar Schmidt , better known as Max Stirner , was a German philosopher, who ranks as one of the literary fathers of nihilism, existentialism, post-modernism and anarchism, especially of individualist...
's
The Ego and Its OwnThe Ego and Its Own is a philosophical work by German philosopher Max Stirner , first published in 1844.-Synopsis:...
(1844). Part I, however, is a work of exposition giving the appearance of being the work for which the "
Theses on FeuerbachThe "Theses on Feuerbach" are eleven short philosophical notes written by Karl Marx in 1845. They outline a critique of the ideas of Marx's fellow Young Hegelian philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach...
" served as an outline. The work is a restatement of the theory of history Marx was beginning to call the "
materialist conception of historyHistorical materialism is a methodological approach to the study of society, economics, and history, first articulated by Karl Marx...
".
Since its first publication, Marxist scholars have found the work particularly valuable since it is perhaps the most comprehensive statement of Marx's theory of history stated at such length and detail.
The text
The text itself was written in 1845 and 1846 but it was not published until 1932. The manuscripts are in Engel's handwriting — but it has been suggested that this was because Marx's writing was so poor rendering it difficult to discern their relative contributions. The text in German runs to around 700 pages.
General outline
Marx and Engels argue that men distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence; what individuals are coincides with their production in both, how and what they produce. The nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production.
How far the productive forces of a nation are developed is shown by the degree to which the division of labor has been carried. Also, there is a direct link between division of labor and forms of ownership.
Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness no longer retain the semblance of independence; they have no history and no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with their real existence, their thinking and the product of their thinking.
This approach allows to cease understanding history as a collection of dead facts or an imagined activity of subjects.
See also
- German Idealism
German idealism was a philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment...
- Lumpenproletariat
Lumpenproletariat is a term first defined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The German Ideology and later elaborated on in works by Marx....
- Marxist philosophy
Marxist philosophy or Marxist theory are terms which cover work in philosophy which is strongly influenced by Karl Marx's materialist approach to theory or which is written by Marxists...
- Young Hegelians
The Young Hegelians, or Left Hegelians, were a group of Prussian intellectuals who in the decade or so after the death of Georg Wilhelm Hegel in 1831, wrote and responded to his ambiguous legacy...
- Young Marx
Some theorists consider Karl Marx's thought to be divided to a "young" period and a "mature" one. There is disagreement to when Marx's thought began to mature, and the problem of the idea of a "Young Marx" is the problem of tracking the development of Marx's works and of its possible unity...
External links
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