BIBLIOGRAPHY
K. Marx, and F. Engels, The Holy Family (Moscow, 1956),
pp. 168-76. For the original text see DieHeilige Familie
(1845) in Marx-Engels Werke, (Berlin, 1959), 2, 132ff. T. B.
Bottomore and M. Rubel, Karl Marx—Selected Writings in
Sociology and Social Philosophy (London, 1956; New York,
1964), gives a selection of relevant passages on various
aspects of historical materialism. Although conventionally
attributed to both Marx and Engels, The Holy Family was
almost entirely composed by Marx, and the remarks cited
in the text represent a “materialist” and post-Hegelian view
on the subject of French naturalism as the ultimate source
of “socialism and communism”: the latter term carrying
more specific implications concerning the abolition of pri-
vate property. See also Karl Marx—Early Writings, trans.
and ed. T. B. Bottomore, with a foreword by E. Fromm
(New York, 1964), passim. The rather overworked theme
of Marx's views on human “alienation” is best approached
by consulting the Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844 in the edition prepared and introduced by Dirk J.
Struik (New York, 1964) on the basis of Martin Milligan's
translation from the German text, as first published in
Marx-Engels, Gesamtausgabe (hereafter MEGA), Abt. I,
Band 3 (Berlin, 1932). An excellent analytical and critical
introduction to the topic of historical materialism in gen-
eral, and Marxian sociology in particular, is to be found
in Karl Korsch, Karl Marx (New York, 1963), passim.
Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845), posthumously pub-
lished by Engels as an Appendix to his own Ludwig Feuer-
bach (1888), now in Werke, Vol. 21 (Berlin, 1962), 263ff.
(without the Appendix); see MEGA, I, 5, 533ff., for the
original German text of the Theses. For an English-language
edition of Engels' essay and of the Theses, see Marx-Engels
Selected Works (Moscow, 1951), II, 324ff. For Marx's critique
of Feuerbachian materialism see The German Ideology, in
MEGA, I, 5, and the various translations. See also Marx's
letter to Engels of 24 April 1867 (MEGA, III, 3, 383), where
he observes that “the cult of Feuerbach” notable in the
Holy Family now seems rather out of date. It is fair to
say that Feuerbach's critique of religion was of greater
importance for Engels than for Marx, who took his materi-
alism straight from the British and French philosophers of
the eighteenth century. On this subject see Korsch, op. cit.,
pp. 172ff.; Sidney Hook, From Hegel to Marx (New York,
1950), pp. 220ff.
Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy (Berlin, 1859); see Marx-Engels, Selected Works
(Moscow, 1958), 1, 361ff. The subject is discussed from a
Marxist standpoint in Korsch, op. cit., pp. 183ff., and from
a positivist one in Z. A. Jordan, The Evolution of Dialectical
Materialism (London and New York, 1967), pp. 111ff. It is
undisputed that in the 1840's Marx received his decisive
intellectual stimulus towards what was later called the
materialist conception of history from Henri de Saint-Simon
and his pupils. The latter had once included A. Comte,
whose Cours de philosophie positive (1830-42) was then
unknown to Marx and made no impression on him when
he finally read it, many years later, in Littré's edition of
1864. Jordan (op. cit., pp. 125ff.) suggests that the Comtean
notion of social physics has its counterpart in the Marxian
approach, and that for Marx—as for Comte—“society is the
true reality, and the individual the abstraction” (p. 132).
The present writer is unable to accept these conclusions.
Neither does it seem to him that the 1859 Preface constitutes
a retreat from the sociological realism of Marx's earlier
writings in favor of a neo-Hegelian philosophy of history
(Jordan, op. cit., p. 299).
F. Engels, Anti-Dühring. Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolu-
tion in Science (Moscow, 1954), p. 369. For the original
German text see Werke (Berlin, 1962), 20, 248ff. For an
account of what Marx intended by his “materialist” method
of investigation see Korsch, op. cit., pp. 167ff.; Bottomore,
Karl Marx—Selected Writings..., op cit., pp. 14ff. For
an extensive specimen of Marx's actual historical investi-
gations, see Karl Marx: Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations,
trans. Jack Cohen, edited and introduced by E. J. Hobsbawm
(London, 1964). This presents a brief extract from the bulky
manuscript composed by Marx in 1857-58 in preparation
for Capital (1867-94). While part of this material was used
by him for his Critique of Political Economy (1859), and
some minor excerpts appeared in Kautsky's Neue Zeit in
1903-04), the entire manuscript saw the light only in
1939-41, when it was published in Moscow under the title
Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ükonomie. Virtually
ignored at the time, it was republished in its entirety in
Berlin in 1953 (in a volume running to over 1,000 printed
pages) and translated into Italian in 1956. Its importance
for the concept of historical materialism lies in the fact that
in it Marx, for the first and last time, dealt at some length
with the structure of non-European societies. He thus sup-
plied a basis for some of the startling generalizations of the
1859 Preface. Antedating Capital by a few years, the
Grundrisse already belong to his mature period, and their
study is essential for an understanding of his peculiar fusion
of history, sociology, and economics. They also cast some
light on the concept of the “Asiatic mode of production”
briefly adumbrated in the 1859 Preface, and subsequently
ignored in Soviet literature for reasons apparent to anyone
conversant with the circumstances of the Stalinist era. For
a dispassionate critique of the Marxian approach from an
empiricist standpoint, strongly marked by the influence of
Max Weber, see J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism,
and Democracy (New York, 1942), passim. This work, how-
ever, antedates the publication of the Grundrisse in an
edition available to Westerners, and thus does not entirely
come to grips with the problems raised by Marx's investi-
gations.
Z. A. Jordan, The Evolution of Dialectical Materialism:
A Philosophical and Sociological Analysis (London, 1967)
is the best introduction to this subject. Starting from the
now generally accepted distinction between the original
approach of Engels and that of Marx, the author traces in
considerable detail the exfoliation of Engels' unsystematic
essays into the fully developed system of “dialectical mate-
rialism” first outlined by G. V. Plekhanov and subsequently
codified by Lenin and his successors, down to and including
Stalin. Gustav A. Wetter, Dialectical Materialism: A Histori-
cal And Systematic Survey of Philosophy in the Soviet Union
(London, 1958), offers an equally learned, but differently
organized, account of the topic, the author giving little
space to Marx and Engels, while centering attention upon
the evolution of Soviet philosophy since 1917. Unlike
Jordan, he deals at some length with Bukharin, Deborin,
and some lesser figures. For a critique of Engels' philo
sophical writings see Sidney Hook, “Dialectic and Nature,”
in his Reason, Social Myths and Democracy (New York,
1950), pp. 183ff. For the impact of Leninism on the philo-
sophical and scientific discussions in the USSR before the
full rigor mortis of Stalinism set in, see David Joravsky,
Soviet Marxism and Natural Science 1917-32 (London, 1961).
For a more recent and less technical discussion of Marxism-
Leninism as a pseudo-ontological system of speculation
about nature and history see A. James Gregor, A Survey
of Marxism (New York, 1965). The brief reading list ap-
pended to this work provides a guide to official Soviet
literature on the subject, as well as to works by Western
authors and a few “revisionist” critics of Leninism who have
retained the Hegelian-Marxist approach antedating the
formulation of Soviet orthodoxy in the 1930's. For a brief
but pregnant discussion of this latter theme, see Eugene
Kamenka, “Philosophy in the Soviet Union,” Philosophy
(Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy), 38, No. 143
(Jan., 1963).
GEORGE LICHTHEIM
[See also Determinism; Economic History; Enlightenment;
Evolutionism;
Ideology; Marxism; Positivism;
Revolution;
Romanticism, Post-Kantian;
Social Democracy.]
