Introduction

During the century or so since Marx’s thought has been the object of widespread attention and comment, views as to what constitutes the kernel of his doctrine have been widely different. Until well on in this century, Marx was viewed as an economist, the author of Capital, who had claimed, by his analysis of the contradictions of capitalist society, to have demonstrated its inevitable collapse. This emphasis was the product both of the intellectual climate at the end of the nineteenth century and of the nature of those of Marx’s writings that were then available to the public. By the 1920s, however, interest in Hegel had revived, Lukacs and Korsch had given novel interpretations of Marx in the light of this revival, and, above all, around 1930 the publication of Marx’s early writings — doctoral thesis, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State’ and particularly the Paris Manuscripts — caused a remarkable change of emphasis. Wide discussion of the early writings was only possible after the war and the first English version of the Paris Manuscripts was not produced until the very end of the 1950s. This reappraisal may have been slow, but, in the minds of some, it was radical, and Marx was discovered to be really a humanist, an existentialist, even a ‘spiritual existentialist’.1