Abstract
Marx’s political theory extended Hegel’s claim that the development of the consciousness of freedom was the inner thread running throughout the whole of human history. The revisions which this doctrine underwent in Marx’s writings reflected many different influences. From the Young Hegelians Marx derived the idea that philosophy was a critical and revolutionary activity with a cognitive interest in the promotion of universal freedom. Marx’s shift from the atheistic attack on religion to the political economy of material alienation was inspired by Feuerbach’s contention that human beings found solace by projecting their frustrated hopes and ambitions onto imaginary objects of religious worship. For Marx, the realisation of freedom and universalism, which Christianity had manifested in an alienated form, necessitated this move from the “critique of heaven” to the “critique of earth”. British political economy and French socialism were the two main doctrines which shaped Marx’s analysis of the reproduction and transcendence of the social and material constraints upon more autonomous and universal forms of life.
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Notes and References
See E. Kamenka, The Ethical Foundations of Marxism (London, 1972) p. 123.
See S. Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (London, 1968) ch. 6. See also Marx (1973) p. 161.
See M. Fleischer, Marxism and History (New York, 1973) pp. 18–19, 32–3, 65–6 and 70. See Oilman (1977) on the development of a universal language, albeit alongside local languages, and complete racial integration as crucial steps in the eradication of barriers between members of the species.
Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (London, 1904) p. 209.
Marx, quoted in R. Luxembourg & N. Bukharin, Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital (London, 1972) p. 58.
See M. Evans, Karl Marx (London, 1975) p. 74.
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Moscow, 1966) p. 12.
Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, edited with an introduction by J. O’Malley (Cambridge, 1970) pp. 139–42.
A. Gilbert, “Marx on Internationalism and War”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 7 (1977–78) p. 359.
See M. MacDonald, “Marx, Engels and the Polish National Movement”, Journal of Modern History, 3 (1941) pp. 321–34.
See A. Smith, Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Canberra, 1979) pp.132 and 142.
See W. O’Connor, The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy (Princeton, 1984) p. 13. On the subject of “historyless peoples”, see Lowy (1976) pp. 84–5, and Cummins (1980) pp. 36–46.
See The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by R. C. Tucker (New York, 1972) p. 187.
G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford, 1978). In addition, see Cohen’s later argument in Nomos, vol 26 (New York, 1983).
A. Swingewood, Marx and Modern Social Theory (London, 1975). Engels, Letter to J. Bloch, in Marx and Engels (1968) pp. 692–3.
B. Oilman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge, 1976).
M. Rader, Karl Marx’s Interpretation of History (Oxford, 1979).
Marx, Capital (London, 1970) vol. 3, p. 791–2.
This term is derived from W. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power (Oxford, 1983).
On Polanyi, see T. Skocpol (ed.) Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (Cambridge, 1984) ch. 3.
E. P. Thompson, “Notes on Exterminism: The Last Stage of Civilisation”, in Exterminism and Cold War (London, 1982) p. 2.
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© 1990 Andrew Linklater
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Linklater, A. (1990). Marx and the Logic of Universal Emancipation. In: Beyond Realism and Marxism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374546_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374546_3
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