The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing (Ideas in Context) [Hardcover]

David Leopold (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 30, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0521874777 | ISBN-13: 978-0521874779 | Edition: 1

The Young Karl Marx is an innovative and important study of Marx's early writings. These writings provide the fascinating spectacle of a powerful and imaginative intellect wrestling with complex and significant issues, but they also present formidable interpretative obstacles to modern readers. David Leopold shows how an understanding of their intellectual and cultural context can illuminate the political dimension of these works. An erudite yet accessible discussion of Marx's influences and targets frames the author's critical engagement with Marx's account of the emergence, character, and (future) replacement of the modern state. This combination of historical and analytical approaches results in a sympathetic, but not uncritical, exploration of such fundamental themes as alienation, citizenship, community, anti-semitism, and utopianism. The Young Karl Marx is a scholarly and original work which provides a radical and persuasive reinterpretation of Marx's complex and often misunderstood views of German philosophy, modern politics, and human flourishing.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'This is by far the best book on the young Marx that I have read since the pioneering studies of the 1960s and 1970s. In scholarly terms, it is incomparably better. I can only hope that the book will have the success it deserves not least because it has upgraded the level of scholarship and intellectual nuance that future discussions of Marx will require, in particular the need to get to grips in detail with the political context through which Marx's early writings emerged.' Terrell Carver, University of Bristol

'The book is refreshingly free of a number of misplaced redemptive compulsions, especially on the heels of insistent gestures to the early Marx in the work of many Hegelian Marxists ...' Journal of Politics

Book Description

Karl Marx's early writings provide the fascinating spectacle of a powerful and imaginative intellect wrestling with complex and significant issues, but present formidable interpretative obstacles to modern readers. David Leopold shows how an understanding of their intellectual and cultural context can illuminate the political dimension of these works.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 338 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (July 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521874777
• ISBN-13: 978-0521874779
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,512,598 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Solid, Judicious Work, January 8, 2011

By 

Gil Hyle - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing (Ideas in Context) (Paperback)

The central theme of this book is to trace Marx's analysis in 1843-44 of the nature of the modern State and the elements of an emancipatory politics.

Some aspects of Leopold's work are unsatisfactory. The title is the first problem. The book is simply mis-titled. It doesn't have quite the broad scope that the title suggests. The sub-title doesn't make that more clear. Other problems are that he often describes a predominant stance (with which he disagrees) which is not as predominant as he suggests - such as that the 1844 manuscripts are not Feuerbachian. He relies excessively on reference to secondary works from the 1970s and is less seriously engaged with more recent writers (although he has read the main ones). He occasionally passes too quick a judgement on a matter not as definitively decided as he suggests - e.g. Marx's possible role in Bauer's Posaune. He also tries half-heartedly to introduce analytical frameworks from other writers that don't work well - Cohen on rights or Hurka on perfectionism. The absence of a bibliography of secondary sources at the end of the book is unwise.

However, those weaknesses don't add up to a bad book. This book is essentially three linked essays, the first unpacking Marx's 1843 critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, the second, a reading of Marx's On the Jewish Question in the light of a careful reading of Bruno Bauer's work to which it was a response and the third an attempt to analyse the way the concept of species being was used (or not used) by Marx to try to formulate elements of a political project of human emancipation.

Leopold provides descriptions of the 1843 Critique and the Zur Judenfrage essay which are well presented and judicious. The overall argument is that Marx's early political theory has to be seen as a rejection of Hegel's claim that if only humans understand their situation insightfully, they could reach fulfilment in the modern social world. Situating Marx in this way viz a vis Hegel has to be the correct way to look at the matter.

The details of Leopold's narrative begin with Heine's notion of `Traumgeschichte' (dream history) - a somewhat tangential narrative device allowing Leopold to describe Marx's self-conscious involvement in the hot house that was German philosophy, contrasting so strikingly with Germany's relatively slow economic and social development. Others have treated the substance of this matter better.

Leopold makes better use of the work of Manfred Reidel and Michael Hardimon on Hegel's political theory to develop a sensible narrative of the relationship between Marx's early political theory and that of Hegel. He carefully delineates Marx's 1843 critique of Hegel - although losing some of the philosophical significance of that because Leopold articulates no sense of the force of Hegel's critique of Kant. Some of the categories of his analysis are not as analytically distinct as he might wish, but that is only a matter of detail.

He then looks carefully at Marx's `On the Jewish Question', ostensibly to identify the elements of Marx's emerging idea of what a program of political emancipation would involve. In fact he has to spend much of his analysis rejecting the charge of anti-semitism often levelled at Marx because of this essay. His treatment of Marx's `On the Jewish Question' is more than welcome, even overdue, given the huge number of merely derogatory studies of Marx's essay. Leopold background reading for this analysis is excellent. His analysis is good. He shows quite clearly how Marx's essay fits into Marx's overall political project and how superficial the charges of anti-semitism are.

I quibble on one point - his attempt to overcome the charge of anti-semitism against Marx by suggesting a totally metaphorical interpretation of Marx's use of the term `den Alltagsjuden', is not quite successful. While he is on the right tracks, he misses a key methodological issue separating the two parts of Marx's essay, which, if recognised, would explain what Marx was doing more persuasively. There is a residual sense in which Marx was actually referring not just to all members of civil society but to actual German people of Jewish origin, when using this term - precisely because Marx was, by internal critique, only partially detaching the concept `juden' from its semantic moorings, rather than attaching a firm new meaning to it. However, that is a gripe with a welcome piece of work.

Leopold is significantly less successful in dealing with Marx's main 1844 private manuscripts. His third essay, for that reason, is the least successful. He makes some good points on Feuerbach and what he writes fits in with a wider pattern of improving understanding of Feuerbach. But he tries to keep his focus on the political issues that have been the focus of the early parts of the book. For that reason, he doesn't articulate for us Marx's change of focus in that period. He doesn't explain what was happening to Marx's thinking. We don't, at the end of the third essay, understand the problematic relationship between Marx's anthropological analysis of politics and his radical democratic critique of the modern State. We merely understand that there was a problem.

However, the conclusion that Marx did not, in 1844, have a clear conception of what political goal he was aiming for is fair. But Leopold then tries to draw out the significance of this by analysing Marx's rejection of utopian blueprints of the future. This whole discussion by Leopold - while making interesting use of the work of Michael Walzer - is tentative, touching on complex questions which it doesn't master. As the third essay has progressed and in these closing remarks, there is an increasing sense of Leopold's book being unfinished, that we are reading rough drafts. At the end, Leopold is just wrestling withh himself as to how Marx could have been opposed to the articulation of ideals. He can only conclude lamely that Marx's stance `lacks a theoretical justification' (P.295).

Nevertheless, the overall result is a clear picture of Marx's 1843-44 conception of the modern State. Some of the complex threads of Marx's development are missing. But what is present, is well described. Arguably, Leopold's grasp exceeds his reach. He reads carefully and this is his key virtue. He stands loosely in the tradition of analytical Marxism - a tradition which is guilty of some very distorting readings of Marx. But Leopold avoids almost all of those failings, while retaining the precision and clarity of writing which is the main virtue of that tradition. The result is a solid work, which will be of substantial use to undergraduate students, if they read it carefully and stick closely to the central theme of Marx's 1843 view of the State and political emancipation.