Marx's Attempt to Leave Philosophy

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by Daniel Brudney

Harvard University Press

Due/Published August 1998, 480 pages, cloth

ISBN 0674551338

Post-Hegelian thought from Feuerbach through Bruno Bauer to Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, and The German Ideology is the subject of Brudney's work. He focuses on the transmutations of a set of ideas about human nature, the good life, and our relation to the world and to others; about how we end up with false beliefs about these matters; about whether one can, in a capitalist society, know the truth about these matters; about the critique of capitalism that would come from such knowledge. Brudney shows how Marx, following Feuerbach, attempts to show humanity's nature and what would count as the good life, while polemicizing against "philosophy." He suggests that Marx tried to avoid philosophy--that is, any concern with metaphysics and epistemology--as early as 1844, and the central aims of his texts are the same through The German Ideology--thus there is no break between an early and a late Marx, no "materialist" Marx, no Marx who subscribes to a metaphysical view. Rather, in all the texts of this period, Brudney argues, Marx tries to develop a compelling critique of the present while avoiding the dilemmas central to philosophy in the modern era.