Did Marx come to disavow aspects his earlier writings, i.e. The German Ideology?

November 12, 2010 8:36 PM

Is anyone aware of the specific elements of The German Ideology that the later Marx is said to have disavowed or been unproud of? I understand that Marx's economic understanding was developed far beyond what it was at the time of this writing due to his research on the matter, but I'm concerned about if Marx came to feel any different on the historical materialism expressed within his earlier works? I could've sworn I had saw one reference that reflected how Marx felt about his early work (specifically, The German Ideology) but I can't find it now, and I know that I couldn't trace that observation into any sort of specific elements that Marx came to disavow.
posted by SollosQ to Religion & Philosophy (3 answers total)

Best answer: Martin Nicolaus wrote in a 1968 essay 'The Unknown Marx' on the Grundrisse in the NLR (behind a paywall there but PDF here) that Marx: "... referred to the manuscript of The German Ideology (1846) without naming its title as a work which he and Engels gladly abandoned to the mice." Perhaps this was the reference you recall?
Unfortunately the footnote seems to be missing in the PDF version I link to so not sure where Marx is supposed to have said that; anyway Nicolaus' essay goes on to set out those aspects of the Grundrisse which he feels show Marx developing beyond and critiquing his earlier work, though Nicolaus writes generally rather than specifically of this or that prior text.
posted by Abiezer at 2:45 AM on November 13, 2010

Best answer: Marx wrote in the Foreword to Kritik der politischen Ökonomie: „Wir überließen das Manuskript der nagenden Kritik der Mäuse um so williger, als wir unsern Hauptzweck erreicht hatten – Selbstverständigung.“ [We relinquished the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly because we had reached our main goal—self-understanding.] The term Selbstverständigung is an uncommon one; Wikipedia says here of a usage by Brecht that it "can be translated both as acquiring understanding of oneself as an individual as well as elaborating common understanding within a group."
posted by languagehat at 7:51 AM on November 13, 2010

Best answer: First of all, the sentence languagehat quoted about "the gnawing criticism of the mice" is the exact one that everyone always points to about this, and rightly so: as they say there, the function of writing The German Ideology for Marx and Engels was, primarily, to clarify for themselves their critique of, and position relative to, the Young Hegelians. This is why, as it's sometimes easy to forget, the actual text is so much longer than the juicy fifty-ish introductory pages that we all still read (in fact it's often hard to find a complete text); it's primarily made up of painstakingly detailed critical commentary on Bauer and Stirner. You could almost think of it as Marx's marginalia and notes rather than a freestanding book.

While it's easy enough to point to some specific elements of Marx's thought that changed significantly around and after the time of The German Ideology (e.g. the abandonment of concepts like "species-being" and "alienation"), your question suggests to me that you'd do well to read over a trustworthy introduction to Marx's thought and its development. (For instance, "historical materialism" is a phrase that Marx himself never used, and that few people would apply to his early work in any case.) I'd especially recommend Etienne Balibar's The Philosophy of Marx.
posted by RogerB at 8:38 AM on November 13, 2010