Marx and ‘the Problem of Knowledge’

Abstract

‘Epistemological’ questions arise very early in Marx’s work.² For example, the notes for the doctoral dissertation (1841) pose the problem of the theoretical conditions for the possibility of Hegel’s political accommodation (CW 1:84); the 1843 critique of Hegel’s philosophy of the state provides an answer. The 1844 Manuscripts discuss the basis and development of human sense-perception. Basic questions relating to materialism and idealism are absolutely central to the brief notes (written in 1845) which Engels described, in publishing them for the first time under the title Theses on Feuerbach’, as ‘the first document in which is deposited the brilliant germ of the new world outlook’ (SW 3:336); the same is true of The German Ideology, written soon after, as of The Poverty of Philosophy (1847). Ten years later, in the ‘Introduction’ to the Grundrisse (1857–58) he discusses general questions of methodology, and in Capital ‘epistemological’ standpoints are present both explicitly and implicitly, as they are in one of Marx’s last important writings, the ‘Marginalia’ to Adolph Wagner’s Textbook of Political Economy (1879–80).