The First Marx: A Philosophical Introduction
by Peter Lamb (Author), Douglas Burnham (Author)

About the Author
Douglas Burnham is Professor of Philosophy at Staffordshire University, UK. He is author of The Nietzsche Dictionary (Bloomsbury 2014).
Peter Lamb is Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at Staffordshire University, UK. He is author of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto: a Reader's Guide (Bloomsbury, 2015).

About this book
Marx's early work is well known and widely available, but it usually interpreted as at best a kind of stepping-stone to the Marx of Capital. This book offers something completely different; it reconstructs, from his first writings spanning from 1835 to 1846, a coherent and well-rounded political philosophy. The influence of Engels upon the development of that philosophy is discussed. This, it is argued, was a philosophy that Marx could have presented had he put the ideas together, as he hinted was his eventual intention. Had he done so, this first Marx would have made an even greater contribution to social and political philosophy than is generally acknowledged today.
Arguments regarding revolutionary change, contradiction and other topics such as production, alienation and emancipation contribute to a powerful analysis in the early works of Marx, one which is worthy of discussion on its own merits. This analysis is distributed among a range of books, papers, letters and other writings, and is gathered here for the first time. Marx's work of the period was driven by his commitment to emancipation. Moreover, as is discussed in the conclusion to this book, his emancipatory philosophy continues to have resonance today. This new book presents Marx in a unique, new light and will be indispensable reading for all studying and following his work.

Brief contents
Chapter One Introduction
    The task of this book
    The way the task will be undertaken
    Why write this book?
    The first Marx’s intellectual environment
    The first Marx in his intellectual environment
Chapter Two Production
    The history of the concept of production
    Production in Kant and Hegel
    Feuerbach and Marx on ‘species-being’
    Production in Marx’s writings of 1844
    Production in The German Ideology
    The question of holism and the individual
Chapter Three Alienation
    Hegel and Marx
    Feuerbach and Hess on alienation
    The significance of On the Jewish Question
    Alienation in the writings of 1844
Chapter Four Exploitation
    The meanings of exploitation: reflecting on Buchanan’s three-way distinction
    The meanings of exploitation: looking beyond Buchanan’s categorization
    The systematic meaning of exploitation in Marx
Chapter Five Change
    Materialism
    Epicurus and Hegel
    Consistent naturalism or humanism
    Materialism and communism
    Dialectics
    Social change
Chapter Six Emancipation
    Emancipation from the doctoral dissertation to On the Jewish Question
    Emancipation in Marx’s works of the mid-1840s
    Emancipation and The German Ideology
Chapter Seven Conclusion
    Continuity and change in the first Marx
    A précis of the first Marx
    Marx and existentialism
    The first Marx today
References
Index

Length: 240 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic (November 15, 2018)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1350029610
ISBN-13: 978-1350029613