- Length
- 600 pagesCarver and Blank, Marx and Engels's 'German Ideology' Manuscripts, Palgrave, 2014 - the Feuerbach material as manuscript
- Reading
- DemandingReadable with attention; assumes no other book
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
The German Ideology
The founding statement of historical materialism, in a book that was never a book. Marx and Engels abandoned the manuscripts to what Marx later called the gnawing criticism of the mice; eighty-six years afterwards an editor assembled them into chapters, and the result has been quoted ever since as a finished work.
- Date
- written 1845-46
- Attributed to
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
- Region
- Brussels
- Language
- German
- 1938 English, W. Lough and others First English version, from the 1932 text Consensus
- 2014 English, Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank The Feuerbach material presented as manuscript rather than chapter; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Compiled
- Method
- Genealogical — History of a concept used as a critique of it
- Transmission
- Posthumous — Published after the author died
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 5 years
Abandoned by its authors, unpublished for eighty-six years, assembled into a book by editors, and one of the most quoted texts of the twentieth century.
What the book says
A set of polemical manuscripts against three contemporaries, out of which came the first statement of the materialist conception of history. The polemic is against Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner, and most of the bulk is a line-by-line demolition of Stirner that almost nobody reads. What survives is the framework built to conduct it. Human beings are distinguished from animals, Marx and Engels write, as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, and what they are therefore coincides with what they produce and how. Ideas, conceptions and consciousness are not independent forces with a history of their own; they are the mental production of people engaged in material activity, so consciousness does not determine life but life determines consciousness. From this follows the account of ideology: the ruling ideas of an age are the ideas of its ruling class, which controls both material and mental production, and presents its own interest as the general one. The famous passage about hunting in the morning and criticising after dinner is a few lines in the middle of the Stirner polemic.
What it argues
That the way people produce their lives determines how they think, and that philosophy has had the relation backwards. The starting point is deliberately unphilosophical: real individuals, their activity, and the material conditions they find and produce. From there the argument works upward. Consciousness is from the beginning a social product and is bound up with language, which arises from the need to deal with others; the division of labour separates mental from material work and creates the illusion that thought is independent; and once a class controls the means of production it controls the means of mental production too, so that the ideas which appear as universal truths in any period are the ideas of whoever is in charge. Ideology is not lying but the systematic appearance of a partial interest as a general one.
What it answered
Feuerbach, Bauer and Stirner - the young Hegelians among whom the authors had been working and whom they now regarded as still doing theology. The deeper target is the assumption they all share, that changing how people think is what changes their situation. Stirner receives by far the most space, because his book of 1844 had argued that Feuerbach's humanity was as much an abstraction as God, and Marx needed to show that the answer was not a further retreat into the individual but a move out of consciousness altogether.
How it argues
By polemic, and this is the fact editions obscure. The framework everyone quotes appears inside a demolition of three contemporaries, most of it aimed at a writer nobody now reads, and its compression is the compression of a thing stated in passing rather than expounded. Presenting the material as a treatise with an opening chapter on method gives it a coherence the manuscripts do not have - and the coherence is what made it usable as a canonical statement of doctrine, which is why the editorial history matters philosophically and not only bibliographically.
The moment
Brussels in 1845-46, with both authors in exile - Marx had been expelled from France in February 1845 - and living on very little. They intended a journal, then a book, and could not find a publisher; the manuscripts were set aside and the two moved on to organising. Marx's account decades later was that they abandoned the work willingly, having achieved their main purpose of clarifying their own ideas, and left it to the mice.
How it travelled
By being constructed. Nothing was published in the authors' lifetimes; the eleven Theses on Feuerbach appeared in 1888 as an appendix to a pamphlet by Engels. The manuscripts were printed in full only in 1932, in Moscow and Berlin, in the first Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, whose editor David Riazanov was removed in 1931, and later arrested and executed in 1938. The book that emerged became a central text of twentieth-century Marxism, taught as the founding statement of historical materialism. Textual scholarship since the 1960s, and particularly the work published from 2004 onward, has steadily undermined the idea that it is a book at all.
The strongest objection
That the text people argue about is an editorial artefact. There is no authorial title, and the celebrated chapter on Feuerbach consists of three chapter-beginnings of about a page each, plus notes - and, as Terrell Carver has pointed out, none of that material is actually about Feuerbach; it states the authors' own presuppositions. Riazanov assembled it into a chapter, later editions preserved the arrangement, and the 2017 critical edition largely keeps the book-like order. So a doctrine has been read off a sequence that Marx and Engels did not compose. This does not show the ideas are wrong; it shows that the confident systematic reading of them rests on somebody else's arrangement, and the passages most often quoted as programmatic were written in the margins of an argument with Max Stirner.
Why read it
The opening section on the premises of the materialist method, which is where the framework is, and the Theses on Feuerbach, which take four pages. The Stirner polemic is for specialists. If the textual question interests you, Carver and Blank's presentation shows the manuscripts as they actually are and is a genuinely different reading experience.
- First printed
- 1932
- First in English
- 1938
- Digitised
- Yes
There is no authorial book. Neither Marx nor Engels ever gave the manuscripts a unifying title, and the celebrated first chapter, I. Feuerbach, was assembled from scattered fragments by the editor David Riazanov for the 1932 edition. Much of the manuscript is in Engels' hand, with probable contributions by Weydemeyer and Hess.
The standard English is in the Collected Works and in various selections, all in copyright. Carver and Blank's 2014 presentation prints the Feuerbach material as manuscript rather than as a chapter.
Where it stands
Live and unsettled. Historical materialism, ideology and the base-superstructure relation remain live in philosophy, history and social theory; and the status of the text itself is an active scholarly argument that has changed how carefully it can be cited.
On quoting this book
The German is public domain but the English translations are modern and in copyright, and the arrangement of the text is itself editorial. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Almost everything about the text's status. Whether there was ever a projected book, what its title would have been, how the fragments should be ordered, and how much is Engels rather than Marx are all disputed, with most of the surviving manuscript in Engels' hand. Whether the base-superstructure formulation is a considered doctrine or a polemical compression is argued, and Engels himself later warned against reading it rigidly. And the political history of the editions - assembled in Moscow, by an editor the state later killed, to serve as canonical doctrine - is now part of how the text is discussed.