Abstract
The fundamental challenge facing any attempt to build a theory of the human is to develop a methodology assuring that the individual and social aspects of humanity are never disjoined while allowing at the same time a thorough study of their specificities. I found out the key to solve this problem in Marx’s Grundrisse where he endeavours to elucidate the nature of production and consumption by studying their relation. I named this approach dialectical identity via specificity and showed how to use it in the elaboration of the individual-society couple. This chapter gave me also the opportunity to present a series of different methodological tools that I had developed earlier and used again in this book: social customs and individual habits, active and passive determinations, conversion of quantity into quality, and level of abstractness/concreteness.
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Notes
- 1.
“The Method of Political Economy”. Marx (1973, pp. 100–108).
- 2.
Marx and Engels (1998, p. 41).
- 3.
Marx (1852, p. 96).
- 4.
p. 21. As already indicated this text is accessible through this web address: cemerogul.wordpress.com
- 5.
Marx (1991, p. 449).
- 6.
Incidentally this provides the logic of the necessity of elaborating a specific theory for each different dimension of social life: a theory of families, a theory of gender, a theory of language, a theory of literature, a theory for each art, etc. A theory limiting itself to the exposition of the active determination by the mode of production would indeed remain quite short if it were not every time supplemented by the specific theory explicating the functioning of the passive determinations particularly relevant to the object under study.
- 7.
Marx (1859, pp. 181–182).
- 8.
Marx (1991, pp. 442–443).
- 9.
Marx (1973, pp. 107–108).
- 10.
Marx (1988, p. 105).
References
Marx, K. (1852). The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Selected Works in One Volume (pp. 94–179). Lawrence and Wishart, 1970.
Marx, K. (1859). Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Selected Works in One Volume (pp. 180–184). Lawrence and Wishart, 1970.
Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse. Random House, Inc.
Marx, K. (1988). Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto. Prometheus Books.
Marx, K. (1991). Capital Volume Three. Penguin Books in association with New Left Review.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1998). The German Ideology. Prometheus Books.
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Eroğul, C. (2022). Chapter I: Cognitive Tools. In: Marxism and the Individual. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83662-7_2
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