Marx in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Introduction

“Marx in the Mid-Twentieth Century” (1967) presented essays by Petrović from the mid-1960s to English-speaking readers, at a time when the journal “Praxis” and the Korčula Summer School were attracting international attention. The book sets two readings of Marx against each other: a Stalinist “dialectical materialism” that claims to describe objective laws of nature and history, and a philosophy of the human being as a being of praxis – free, creative, self-creating activity – that Petrović finds above all in the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts” of 1844. Alienation, in this reading, remains a problem of socialist societies too. Other essays deal with the concept of man, with freedom and with the relation between philosophy and revolution. The book became one of the best-known statements of Yugoslav humanist Marxism in the West.

Connections

Builds on

• Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 18441844 · Karl Marx