Abstract
This chapter is in search of the evolutionary leap from animal existence to human being. First, the Marxist legacy is visited; the roots of Marxism in German Romanticist philosophy, British Political Economy, and French radical politics are recapitulated. Next the Classical Anthropogenesis from Democritus to Jean-Jacques Rousseau is described with its defining Robinson features. Then it is shown how Friedrich Engels’ essay, “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man,” is just an upgraded version of this classical story. Finally, it is concluded that nowhere in this historical corpus of Enlightenment thought is a leap into difference in kind identified.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Leontiev, ibid.
- 3.
Locke had been co-writing the constitution of the slave-owning American colony Carolina and wisely included as a man’s private property the work of the man’s employees.
- 4.
Rousseau (1754).
- 5.
La propriété, c'est le vol! A slogan coined by Proudhon in his 1840 book What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government.
- 6.
Fichte (1869, p. 9).
- 7.
Even clever students, who wanted to depart from the master, merely became converse Hegelians.
The self-confessed ‘Anti-Hegelian’ Soeren Kierkegaard, for instance, who had followed Hegel’s lectures in Berlin, remained a Hegelian, only he insisted that the individual could not leave it up to the World Spirit or God, but had to take the leap himself, the fateful leap out on the 70.000 fathoms, which became the basic tenet of Existentialism.
- 8.
Marx (1845, 4).
- 9.
Marx (1844).
- 10.
‘If you don’t like Marxism, blame British Museum,’ Mihail Gorbachev is said to have quipped.
- 11.
Engels (1888).
- 12.
Under the brand names ‘Sociobiology’ and ‘Evolutionary Psychology,’ Darwinism is still seen by many as the sole answer to the secrets of human society and human psychology.
- 13.
Galton (1869).
- 14.
Diodorus of Sicily (90 BC–30BC): Universal History http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/1A*.html, book 1, Chap. 1, p. 17.
- 15.
Plato, 350 BC, Protagoras http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/protagoras.html.
- 16.
Rousseau (1754).
- 17.
Except in Enlightenment Scotland where in Edinburgh young Darwin learned about it from a teacher and rejected it.
- 18.
Engels (1876).
- 19.
Marx and Engels (1845, Part 1A).
- 20.
Marx (1857, Introduction, part one).
- 21.
Engels (1876).
- 22.
Engels (1876).
- 23.
- 24.
Humans are characterized by the attributes x, y, z; if these are not of divine origin, they must have come about in a natural way; suggest therefore a credible route this development could have taken starting from scratch. Add to this formula your own familiarity with men and society, your own experience of learning, and the documented facts of historical progress from savagery to civilization, and the story pretty much tells itself.
- 25.
Marx (1844), first manuscript, estranged labour.
- 26.
Marx (1867, III, Sect. 1).
- 27.
Engels (1876).
- 28.
Marx (1867, I, Sect. 4).
- 29.
Engels (1876).
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Hegel, G.W.F, 1812–1816, Science of Logic, § 775.
- 32.
Vygotsky (1927, p. 330).
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Engelsted, N. (2017). The Marxist Legacy. In: Catching Up With Aristotle . SpringerBriefs in Psychology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51088-0_8
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