Customer Reviews

The German Ideology, including Theses on Feuerbach (Great Books in Philosophy)

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I highly recommend The German Ideology, but wish to warn buyers of this edition (Prometheus). The quality of the print in this edition is very low, the font is difficult to read, and the spacing is very tight. Perhaps most frustrating, however, is that the text is marked with numbers for footnotes that have no actual corresponding footnotes. I have written to the publisher three times about this issue and have received no response or explanation. The name of the translator is also suspiciously absent, and there is no introduction to the work--something that in this case would be very helpful. On the positive side, I think this edition provides the complete German Ideology, but Book One is really all that is necessary or ever referenced, and this can be found in other editions.

The fashionable revisions and reifications of Hegel (the "official" political theory of Germany) common to Marx's era filled him with such disgust that he and Engels penned an entire rhetoric-laced diatribe against them, "The German Ideology." This book served, for Marx and his sidekick, not only as a materialist attack on Hegelian idealism and its conceptions of history, but also served, in their words, as a "self-clarification" of their own stances on a number of issues. Foremost among these issues is the actual role of the political philosopher in society and in history. Indeed, Marx is directly referring to the legacy of his Hegelian contemporaries when he says that "philosophers have only interpreted the world . . . the point, however, is to change it."

Marx departs from Hegel and his latter-day followers (whether revolutionary or conservative) in both method and in goals. As far as methodology is concerned, Marx is an empiricist of a certain normatively world-changing brand, which obviously leaves him open to critiques from "pure" empiricism as being either an outright determinist (an obviously abhorrent concept to the entire Humean tradition) or else being merely a moral philosopher in scientist's clothing.

As for goals, while some of Hegel's followers might share a certain revolutionary telos with Marx, they cannot truly be his comrades because for Marx the revolutionary method (historical materialism) is inseparable from the revolutionary goal (communism); that is, communism cannot by nature be an "ideal" . . . "to which reality will have to adjust itself" (as it is for the Hegelians). Instead, the ideal of communism must adjust itself to reality (thus becoming no longer an ideal), and that is precisely Marx's project as expressed in the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach: through his writings, to "adjust" the real world to his view of the way it's going to be (by writing about the world the way that it has been, and the way that it is now).

This book is absolutely necessary to understand the philosophical underpinnings of Marxism. It describes how Marxism arrives at its historical world view or why Marxist theory uses as its base the relationships between human beings in a society. It is these relationships that shape our culture and form a society's morals, politics, and ideology. It was written to contrast the "German ideologues" who insist(ed) that ideas shape culture--not men and women. It's not an easy read, often disjointed and difficult to conceptualize, nor is all of it fruitful (read what you can). But there are passages and insights that can offer you a completely different perspective on society while broadening your understanding of Marxism.

the first part of this book, on feuerbach, lays out marx's conception of history, and is, for me, the best brief description of marxism available. this impacted me much more profoundly than the communist manifesto. anyway, i'd read the first part, and then skip the rest. in the latter part of the book, he does battle with forgotten german intellectuals (the part on max stirner might be worth reading), mostly upbraiding them for their idealistic view of the world. the essence of this critique, however, is dealt with in the part on feuerbach. seriously, if you'd like to know what marx is all about, but aren't sure than you're ready to commit to reading capital, read the 70 pages or so on feuerbach. if you do, feel free to e-mail me & let me know what you think.

First of all, the correct title would refer to the THESES on Feuerbach, of which there are eleven. These are terse exhortations, which Marx apparently wrote out for himself as a reminder of principles, not intended for publication. They remain brilliant and challenging to readers. The rest of the volume is taken up by *excerpts* from the vast manuscript on the German Ideology, which is an uneven early work of Marx and Engels. There are brilliant passages, crucial to Marxist thought, but there's also a lot of directionless vitriol directed at now relatively unimportant thinkers.

I disagree with the previous reviewer -- this is not an ideal intro to Marxism. Read the Communist Manifesto, then move on to the Eighteenth Brumaire, or this, or Capital, or the early works.

And by the way, get the International Publishers edition if you can find it.

If you are thinking about buying your own copy of The German Ideology I probably don't need to convince you of the value of this work. Like most things Marx wrote, it is demanding and rewarding--probably more difficult than the Communist Manifesto, less so than Capital or the Grundrisse. If you're not sure where you stand on Marx's style and difficulty preview any of his works free at marxists.org

That said, if you are looking for a copy of The German Ideology I highly recommend this one. Instead of messing around with lots of distorting introductions it just has a really nice text with footnotes to chart Marx's deletions and rearrangements. So not only does this edition give historical context for the later works like Capital, it also gives a sense of how Marx's thinking and style were changing as he wrote this book. The inclusion of deletions is particularly interesting to see what Marx didn't want to say but almost did anyway.

Structural Marxists and others inclined to see a sharp epistemological break between the young Marx, still a social philosopher, and the mature Marx, a scientist with a genuinely new method, historical materialism, often point to The German Ideology (1847) as marking the rupture between the two views. Specific individuals are of little or no interest. The emphasis is on entire social systems and the ways that individuals fit into them.

As one reads The German Ideology it is clear that class is a characteristic of an entire society, rather than a characteristic of individuals. A society may be organized into classes, but these are structured arrangements of positions to be filled by people. The positions, organized into objectively conflicting sets, are the classes. It makes little difference who occupies the positions, because human beings' historically specific nature and their life course and prospects will be determined by their class location, the role they are assigned in the process of material production.

From this vantage point, it is also useful to think of class as a societal-level relational phenomenon: capital and labor are engaged in a struggle across a broad range of fronts. Capital dominates and exploits because capital owns and controls the means of material production. Labor has nothing to offer but labor, or as Marx referred to it from The German Ideology on, labor power. The latter usage emphasizes the one-dimensional character of interchangeable laboring people in a capitalist society: they are the work they can do; that work can be assigned a dollar value; and that is their only valuable characteristic. In this way, labor power is clearly transformed into a commodity, exchangeable for other commodities, whatever they may be.

In effect, labor power is reduced to the status of a thing to be bought, sold, and used in ways that maximize productivity, minimize costs, and further exaggerate the difference between the value produced by labor power and the compensation labor receives. In this context, laboring people survive economically only at the sufferance of capital.

Again, this is all very impersonal. In the preface to the first edition of the first volume of capital Marx notes that, as a social theorist, he dealt with individual human beings only insofar as they were "personifications of economic categories, embodiments of class relations and class interests."

From The German Ideology on a heavy emphasis on determinism is quite consistent with Marx's view. Abstract dehumanization, moreover, applies to capitalists as well as to laborers. In The German Ideology Marx characterizes the 16th century forerunners of contemporary capitalists as functioning in precarious circumstances fraught with uncertainty as to the nature and stability of the emergent markets in which they participated. The high level of risk that pervaded their social and economic environment imbued them with a "haggardly, mean, and niggardly spirit." They were not born haggardly, mean, and niggardly, nor did they choose to develop these characteristics. Instead the contextually determined nature of their lives determined that they would acquire these unappealing traits.

As with the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology remained unpublished during Marx's lifetime. Now that both are available, evidence of Marx's theoretical development is evident as we move from one to the other. However, reading one after the other reveals nothing contradictory in Marx's developing thought about capitalism and the historically specific nature of human beings. Instead, the two documents seem complementary rather than inconsistent. In the Manuscripts, Marx devoted a good deal of attention to discrediting the academic economics of his day. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels did much the same thing for academic philosophy and history. I see ongoing theoretical development, but no epistemological break.

Read the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology. There is a good deal of overlap, but I benefited from both.

This edition is of very poor quality. The typeface changes by the chapter; the footnote symbols do not correspond to any actual footnotes; there is no introduction; and there is no named translator.

Clearly Prometheus Books simply copies-and-pastes existing versions of texts without any editorial oversight. This is a truly awful publishing company.

More concise and hardcore in the critique of capital than later works. Should be in every Marxist/non-Marxist library.

The German Ideology indexes Marx's 'break' from a philosophical humanism to a period of revolutionary materialism. This extraordinary book attacks the 'materialisms' of Feuerbach, Stirner, and Bauer in turn, and attempts to formulate a new conception of man as framed in terms of his alienation from the sum of productive forces. Marx's theses on Feuerbach are obviously the most read and oft quoted, and they are true landmarks in the history of political consciousness. Marx is clearly carving out a new space of empirical inquiry, a space which would give rise to a scientific analysis of the material conditions of reality-and to propose a radical political program of revolutionary change. His discussion of Stirner is laborious and painstaking; it is clearly less read and considered than it should be. It's too bad that this text is in such a poor edition-the footnotes do not lead anywhere and no one will take responsibility for the bad translation. Hopefully someone will put together a better edition in the future.