Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Introduction

Marx wrote these notebooks in Paris in 1844, in his mid-twenties, while studying political economy for the first time; he never prepared them for publication. They appeared only in 1932, in two German editions almost at once, and changed the image of Marx. The fragments read Adam Smith and other economists against the grain and describe how workers are estranged from the product of their labour, from the activity of labour itself, from their “species-being” and from one another. A final section discusses Hegel’s Phenomenology. After 1945 the manuscripts became the basis of humanist readings of Marx, and the target of Althusser’s thesis of an “epistemological break”.

Connections

Builds on

• The Essence of Christianity1841 · Ludwig Feuerbach

Criticizes

• The Wealth of Nations1776 · Adam Smith
• Phenomenology of Spirit1807 · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Taken up in

• Marx in the Mid-Twentieth Century1967 · Gajo Petrović
• Critique of Critical Philosophy1979 · Li Zehou

Criticized in

• For Marx1965 · Louis Althusser

More works by Karl Marx

• 1845Theses on Feuerbach
• 1848The Communist Manifesto
• 1867Capital