The Emergence of Historical Materialism, 1845–6: A New Problematic?

Abstract

Marx’s obvious curiosity about the origins and development of private property, division of labour and exchange soon culminated in a massive work in which he and Engels also attempted to provide an overall assessment of German idealist philosophy and historiography: The German Ideology, written between November 1845 and October 1846, but never published in their lifetime for want of a publisher. Meanwhile they had already collaborated in a savage polemic against the Young Hegelians, The Holy Family (1845), in which they had attempted to provide a philosophical foundation for socialism by combining Feuerbach’s humanism with the materialism of the Enlightenment.⁴² But, in the final analysis, The Holy Family failed to progress much beyond the themes already worked out in the 1844 Manuscripts.