The German Ideology Is the High Point of Karl Marx’s Philosophical Thought
The German Ideology marked an essential turning point in Marx and Engels’s intellectual development. A major achievement in the tradition of idealist philosophy, it allowed them to get beyond philosophical systems and engage with the world to transform it.
Statues of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels at the Marx-Engels-Forum park in Berlin, Germany. (Márcio Cabral de Moura / Flickr)
What is The German Ideology? It’s a book by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Well, kind of – it was neither finished nor published in their lifetimes, and many scholars now doubt that the texts published under that name were ever intended to form part of a single coherent “book.”
What is The German Ideology? It is Marx and Engels’s most important specifically philosophical work – but it is also defiantly anti-philosophical: its purpose being, Marx once claimed, to purge him and his coauthor of their “erstwhile philosophical consciences.”
What is The German Ideology? Perhaps a better question would be: What is “the German Ideology” that the title, The German Ideology, describes? In short: the “German Ideology” is Hegelian philosophy.
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