Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Terrell Carver1,2
Abstract: The German Ideology as a book dates only from the early 1920s and
1930s. The opening chapter I. Feuerbach was factitiously constructed to solve the
problem posed by Marxs engimatic reference in 1859 to self-clarification. This was
in autobiographical passages detailing his outlook, termed by Engels the materialist
interpretation of history. Factual evidence presented here makes this framing
untenable. The German ideology manuscript materials of 18456 are best studied
not as a smooth text of the last hand but as a variant-rich text that allows access
to a laboratory where Marx and Engels were learning to think as they did.
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
The German Ideology (Die Deutsche Ideologie) by Karl Marx and Friedrich
(or Frederick) Engels has a very well established scholarly and interpretive
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reception. However, this dates from long after the authors deaths (in 1883
and 1895, respectively), and began with the archival and editorial work of
D.B. Ryazanov in the early 1920s, the initial publication of the chapter
I. Feuerbach in Russian (1924) and German (1926), and the first complete
publication as a single volume in 1932. Since that time there have been
numerous further editions and translations, the latest of which is in Marx-
Engels Jahrbuch 2003. 3 Currently a new edition is planned as MEGA2 I/5 in
1 Dept. of Politics, University of Bristol, 10 Priory Road, Bristol, BS8 1TU. Email:
T.Carver@bristol.ac.uk
2 I am indebted throughout to Daniel Blank PhD, of the University of Bristol, for his
research work, for our conversations and discussions and for reference access to his
unpublished dissertation The German Ideology by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels:
The Political History of the Manuscript and its Published Editions. While this manu-
script is referenced below as Blank, The German Ideology: Political History, I wish
to acknowledge that my work on this project has been influenced at every stage by his.
Errors and omissions are, of course, my own responsibility. My research work was sup-
ported by a Research Leave Scheme award from the Arts and Humanities Research
Council, which I acknowledge here and for which I express my thanks. I am also grateful
for a critique of my views privately communicated by Professor Georg H. Fromm of the
University of Puerto Rico, for comments from an anonymous reviewer for this journal,
and for questions and feedback from audiences at the MEGA-Symposium in Helsinki,
the Oxford Political Theory Conference, the University of California at Berkeley, The
Johns Hopkins University, the Center for the Study of Marxist Social Theory at Nanjing
University and the University of the West of England, Bristol.
3 For the most recent short, factual account of the history and reception of The
German Ideology, see Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Joseph Weydemeyer, Die
Deutsche Ideologie: Artikel, Druckvorlagen, Entwrfe, Reinschriftenfragmente und
Notizen zu I. Feuerbach und II. Sankt Bruno, Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch 2003 (issued by the
Internationale Marx-Engels-Stiftung, Amsterdam), ed. Inge Taubert and Hans Pelger
(2 vols., Berlin, 2004), Vol. 1, pp. 8*19*; hereafter referred to as Jahrbuch 2003. For a
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXXI. No. 1. Spring 2010
108 T. CARVER
by Marx and Engels, and that Marxism is a tradition of thought going back
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to Marx. With respect to both The German Ideology and Marxism, I take the
view that a deconstructive historicization will be productive of knowledge,
namely a history of the various moves through which these discursive
objects were assembled such that readers particularly those attuned to
political theory could acquire knowledge of them. It is not just that people
might disagree about the German ideology or Marxism in one way or another,
given that disagreements can be over a common object. Rather both locutions
represent considerable constructive work over many years by numerous people
such that a factuality has to date been produced through repetitions of
scholarly activity. This has been naturalized, in a sense, in interpretive works
of commentary, which are themselves in some instances canonical.
Marxism as an ism-construction originates in the later 1890s and thus
postdates the lives of Marx and Engels.6 In my view, those constructing it
relied much more on Engels work at the outset than on Marxs, for a variety
of reasons. Engels own view of Marxs thought was readily available to them
in the numerous works, prefaces, introductions and editions published by
Engels in the twelve years 1883 to 1895. In that way a tradition, framed as
philosophical system-building on certain self-styled materialist principles,
select bibliography of editions and translations, see Blank, The German Ideology:
Political History, appendix A.
4 For information on the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, second series (MEGA2),
which has been in progress since the 1970s, see http://www.bbaw.de/bbaw/Forschung/
Forschungsprojekte/mega/en/Startseite#gb (accessed 9 June 2009); see also http://
www.iisg.nl/~imes/intromega.php (accessed 10 June 2009).
5 I use The German Ideology to refer to the various editions of selected or complete
manuscript materials of 18456 published since 1924; on the origin of this title, see
below. I use the German ideology to refer collectively to the various manuscript materi-
als commonly assumed to be drafts for a planned work, publishable as a book; see the
detailed discussion below.
6 See George Lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (London, 1964).
THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY NEVER TOOK PLACE 109
was founded. The fit between this tradition based on Engels works and
views, on the one hand, and Marxs works and projects from 1842 until the
early 1870s, on the other hand, is open to question.7
This article is intended to adjust the overall intellectual context through
which The German Ideology has been viewed as a canonical volume for
understanding Marx and Marxism. In particular the book as we know it opens
with a philosophical chapter where puzzling but important materials are said
to mark an advance in social theory, indeed the very theory that makes Marx-
ism distinctive, the materialist conception of history. This advance is said to
have taken place through Marxs engagement there with the Young Hegelian
philosopher, Ludwig Feuerbach. David McLellan writes:
The section of The German Ideology on Feuerbach was one of the most cen-
tral of Marxs works. It was a tremendous achievement in view of the low
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
level of socialist writing and thought prevalent at the time. Marx never sub-
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7 See Terrell Carver, Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship (Brighton,
1983); see also Terrell Carver, Marx-Engels or Engels v. Marx , MEGA-Studien,
1996/2, pp. 7985.
8 David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (London, 1973), p. 151. See also
Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge, 1969),
passim.
9 Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 1, pp. 8*10*; see also Blank, The German Ideology:
Political History, ch. 3.
110 T. CARVER
My conclusions in this article thus question the canonical status of the chap-
ter I. Feuerbach with respect to existing interpretations of Marxs life and
thought. Crucially these interpretations turn on the nature and locus of the
self-clarification concerning our conception that Marx mentions autobio-
graphically in 1859. Current texts and commentary link this self-clarification
directly to the The German Ideology and its opening chapter I. Feuerbach.10
Given the facts detailed in this article, this familiar linkage is no longer
tenable.
and Engels (in that order, and not by anyone else) came to be editorially con-
structed in the 1920s.
Beginning in November 1845, Marx and Engels, as communist agitators, were
working together in Brussels, and during 1846 they continued to work jointly,
though sometimes by correspondence from various locations. During this
period the two (in conjunction with others, including Joseph Weydemeyer
and Moses Hess), planned and drafted and variously re-planned and
re-drafted a number of evolving polemical works for publication, most
probably in a multi-author special number resembling their preceding German-
French Annals (Deutsch-Franzsische Jahrbcher), edited with Arnold Ruge
and published in 1844.11
Only a tiny fraction of the manuscript material of 18456 found its way into
print in the authors lifetimes,12 and by early 1847 other works had overtaken
10 Karl Marx, Preface [to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: Part
One], in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works [hereafter referred to as CW],
Vol. 29 (London, 1987), p. 264. The phrase The manuscript, two large octavo volumes
is identified by an editorial footnote as The German Ideology; this title does not occur in
the manuscript materials, nor elsewhere in Marxs works as the title of a book; see the
detailed discussion of this passage below.
11 Inge Taubert, Manuskripte und Drucke der Deutschen Ideologie (November
1845 bis Juni 1846): Probleme und Ereignisse, MEGA-Studien, 1997/2, pp. 1213,
1620; see the detailed research on this period in Galina Golowina, Das Projekt der
Vierteljahrsschrift von 1845/1846: Zu den ursprnglichen Publikationsplnen der
Manuskripte der Deutschen Ideologie , in Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch, Vol. 3, ed. Insti-
tute for Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the CPSU and Institute for
Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the SED ([East] Berlin, 1980),
pp. 26074.
12 Inge Taubert, Die berlieferungsgeschichte der Manuskripte der Deutschen
Ideologie und die Erstverffentlichungen in der Originalsprache, MEGA-Studien,
1997/2, pp. 323; see also Blank, The German Ideology: Political History, appendix A.
THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY NEVER TOOK PLACE 111
third reference is by far the most detailed and best known, and so for that rea-
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13 See below.
112 T. CARVER
spondence of 184621 Marx mentions two volumes (Bnde), but it is less than
clear that these are volumes of a book as such, rather than numbers of a
publication (Marx uses Publication as a German word twice in this connec-
tion).22 Moreover Marx did not always list the contents of such a publication
in the same order, viz. Bauer[,] Feuerbach up to Stirner, a reversal between
14 Marx, [Declaration against Karl Grn], in CW, Vol. 6 (London, 1976), pp. 72
note b, 73; emphasis in original; the newspaper note had no title so the editors have
assigned the one in square brackets; see also Inge Taubert, Hans Pelger, Jacques
Grandjonc, Dokument: Marx Erklrung vom 3. April 1847, MEGA-Studien, 1997/2,
pp. 15461. For information on the Westphlisches Dampfboot, where Marxs review
appeared in August/September 1847, see CW, Vol. 5 (London, 1976), pp. 6045, note
128; B. Bauer is distinguished from his brother Edgar; see CW, Vol. 5, p. 610.
15 Taubert, Manuskripte und Drucke, p. 5; Jahrbuch 2003 departs somewhat from
previous practice by including Joseph Weydemeyer in the list of authors; see note 3
above; see also note 17 below.
16 Taubert, Manuskripte und Drucke, p. 19; of the last hand is a bibliographical
term signifying the authors final intentions as recorded on a text.
17 This includes the projected MEGA2 Vol. 1/5; see Inge Taubert, Hans Pelger,
Jacques Grandjonc, Die Konstitution von MEGA2 I/5 Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,
Moses Hess: Die deutsche Ideologie. Manuskripte und Drucke (November 1845 bis Juni
1846) , MEGA-Studien, 1997/2, pp. 4953.
18 Taubert, Manuskripte und Drucke, p. 12.
19 Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 1, p. 7*.
20 Taubert, Manuskripte und Drucke, pp. 5, 1112; see also Taubert, Pelger,
Grandjonc, Die Konstitution von MEGA2 I/5, p. 57.
21 Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer, 1416 May 1846, CW, Vol. 38, pp. 413; Marx to
Carl Friedrich Julius Leske, 1 August 1846, CW, Vol. 38, pp. 4851.
22 Taubert, Pelger, Grandjonc, Die Konstitution von MEGA2 1/5, p. 53.
THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY NEVER TOOK PLACE 113
Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach in the order that later editors have gener-
ally used.23
The manuscripts were mentioned by Marx for the fourth and last time (in a
letter to J.M. Weber of 3 March 1860)24 as a work [Werk] in two volumes on
latter-day German philosophy and socialism.25 Engels referred to the manu-
scripts a number of times without mentioning either a two-volume structure or
an overall title.26 The primary, and probably first, association of these manu-
scripts with the overall title The German Ideology was by Franz Mehring in
his 1902 selection of materials from Marxs literary legacy (Nachlass).27 This
was then amplified by him for his biography, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life
(Karl Marx: Geschichte seines Lebens), originally published in 1918, the first
full-length study and very widely read. In that book The German Ideology
appears as a chapter sub-heading and the two big volumes are given the now
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familiar title.28
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The third time that Marx discusses the German ideology, however, is by
far the most important. He looked back to his largely unpublished manu-
script (Manuskript) of 18456 in his brief autobiographical introduction to A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Zur Kritik der politischen
konomie, 1859).29 In that Preface (Vorwort) he formulated a guide to the
intellectual content of his work in order to help his readers along. He began
this account with his stint as editor of the liberal paper Rheinische Zeitung in
Cologne in 18423, saying:
I first found myself in the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is
known as material interests . . .[regarding TC] thefts of wood and the
division of landed property . . . the condition of the Mosel peasantry . . . the
debates on free trade and protective tariffs [which TC] caused me in the
clusion was:
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mice all the more willingly since we had achieved our main purpose
self-clarification.40
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At this point the editors of CW refer the reader to The German Ideology,41
published as a book by Marx and Engels (only), such as various editors have
produced since the first complete publication of this material in volume for-
mat in 1932.42
of 1846, some time after most of the German ideology manuscripts were
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Possibly at this point, or possibly earlier when listing the Nachlass after
Marxs death,49 Engels wrote I. Feuerbach: Gegensatz von materialistischer
& idealistischer Anschauung [I. Feuerbach: Opposition of the Materialist
and Idealist Outlooks]50 in pencil on a page of the manuscript.51 In his Pref-
ace to his pamphlet Ludwig Feuerbach he seems to give only an ambiguous
assurance that those incomplete manuscript pages on what he termed the
materialist conception of history52 represent something that would have gone
into a critique of Feuerbach, had the two completed their apparent plan of
spring 1846 to write one. In any case it is not clear at all exactly which manu-
script pages Engels was examining in the 1880s (other than the one on which
he made his note).53 The manuscript pages that were arranged as the chapter
I. Feuerbach by later editors (and variously re-arranged, along with other
materials), comprise several distinct runs of pages and fragments that are in
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
writings and are contained, as Engels says, in a separate notebook. Contrary to editorial
opinion summarized in CW, Vol. 5, pp. XIV, 585 note 1, these Theses were not part of
the German ideology project as initially conceived, since the original targets in that
manuscript sequence were Bruno Bauer and then Stirner and later others, such as Grn,
and only eventually, Feuerbach; Taubert, Pelger, Grandjonc, Konstitution von MEGA2
I/5, p. 55; Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 1, pp. 6*7*; cf. McLellan, Karl Marx, p. 143, and
Golowina, Das Projekt.
49 Taubert, Die berlieferungs der Manuskripte, p. 34.
50 The usual English translation of this phrase is Outlooks, whereas Anschauung is
singular.
51 Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 1, p. 100.
52 Engels, Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, CW,
Vol. 16, p. 469.
53 Taubert, Die berlieferungsgeschichte der Manuskripte, p. 34.
54 Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 1, p. 8*; see also Taubert, Manuskripte und Drucke, p. 23;
and Taubert, Pelger, Grandjonc, Konstitution von MEGA2 I/5, pp. 512; see the
detailed discussion below.
55 C.N. Starcke, Ludwig Feuerbach (Stuttgart, 1885).
118 T. CARVER
The work is a still more discursive super-polemic than The Holy Family56
even in its most arid chapters, and the oases in the desert are still more rare,
though they are by no means entirely absent, whilst even when dialectical
trenchancy does show itself it soon degenerates into hair-splitting and quib-
bling, some of it of a rather puerile character . . . [Mehring then compares
Marx and Engelss very small circle with that of Shakespeare {! TC}
and his dramatic contemporaries] . . .
Something of the sort is probably the explanation of the tone which Marx
and Engels consciously or unconsciously adopted when dealing with Bauer
and Stirner and others of their old companions in the art of purely intellec-
tual gymnastics. What they had to say about Feuerbach would have been
much more interesting because it would have been something more than
purely negative criticism, but unfortunately this part of the work was never
completed.57
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Mehring thus established a very clear break between the presumed (but
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thereafter, though never published. The two authors seem to have retained
some printers sheets62 from the latter, numbered by Engels, whereas other
printers sheets from this work are not preserved. The exact reason for pre-
serving certain sheets is not obvious, but later editorial supposition has gener-
ally been that they were retained because of their possible relevance for a
subsequent Feuerbach-critique.63 They are apparently divided up with the
words Feuerbach, History, and Bauer.64 Some sections of text on these
pages were subsequently marked as deleted because they had been copied out
again for insertion into the subsequent fair copy when Marx and Engels
started their critique of Bauer afresh. This eventually became the critique
Saint Bruno,65 which is extant in fair copy manuscript and appears in
Volume I of complete editions of The German Ideology as II. Saint
Bruno.66
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
At around the same time in early 1846 Marx and Engels were also working
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their fair copy critiques of Bauer and Stirner, merely preserving some materi-
als that might prove useful later in composing a Feuerbach-critique such as
they were planning? The latter seems more likely, especially since there are
three other very short, quite separate opening salvos specifically on Feuer-
bach. These fragments appear to inaugurate this process of beginning a
Feuerbach-critique in the summer of 1846.71 The process of composition
seems to have got no further after that, and to have produced no extensive
reference back to the so-called Feuerbach materials amongst those eventually
left aside, other than some very brief notes appended on the last page, which
do not mention Feuerbach at all.72
What is crucial then is that the three parts of the so-called main manuscript
(as through-numbered by Marx), which has formed the core of the so-called
Feuerbach chapter in successive editions, are not only discontinuous with
each other, but all three runs of printers sheets derive from Marx and Engels
critiques of Bauer and Stirner. These extractions from manuscript printers
sheets are thus already at a considerable remove from a direct critique of
Feuerbach such as Marx and Engels were apparently planning to write later on
in 1846, but never did. Why then the intense editorial determination to produce
69 Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 2, pp. 1735; this fair copy critique appears in Volume I of
most editions of The German Ideology as III. Saint Max.
70 Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 2, p. 163; Taubert, Manuskripte und Drucke, pp. 1314,
234; Taubert, Pelger, Grandjonc, Die Konstitution von MEGA2 I/5, pp. 512.
71 For these three texts, see Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 1, pp. 10410; for dating, see Vol. 2,
pp. 300, 308, 315; these three short texts in rough draft are the original source for
I. Feuerbach as the numbered chapter heading within Marx and Engels plans of
1846 for a sequence of German ideology critiques. In most editions of The German
Ideology they are editorially amalgamated and then incorporated into the text of
I. Feuerbach as a single Preface (Vorrede).
72 Taubert, Pelger, Grandjonc, Die Konstitution von MEGA2 I/5, p. 52; Jahrbuch
2003, Vol. 1, pp. 99100.
THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY NEVER TOOK PLACE 121
revisions by the authors, and all the manuscript materials are therefore a col-
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lection of starts, some of which are quite fragmentary, some of which are
extractions from longer sequences of printers sheets, and some of which are
fair copy (but of exactly what?). This means that a process of fitting all the
surviving materials together into a book-length scheme authored by Marx
and Engels alone is factitious. In the absence, then, of a finished product
authorially titled and specifically ordered as fair copy and/or published text,
the editorial urge to construct a publishable book by Marx and Engels (only),
and in particular its supposedly crucial opening chapter, has nonetheless been
as overwhelming as it has been misplaced.
The process began with Ryazanov, who introduced his work on these
manuscripts by abbreviating Engels account even more than Mehring had
done, evidently rejecting Engels and Mehrings shared conclusion about
their irrelevance to a Feuerbach-critique. From 1923 Ryazanov communi-
cated through his announcements and his editorial productions the impression
that he had identified in the manuscripts of 18456 the earliest account and
originary schema of the materialist interpretation of history, the scientific
and political value of which would be enormous in the hands of the workers
movement, and in particular in the hands of the emerging socialist state in
Russia. His view was that the key to this lay in a critique of the materialist
philosopher Feuerbach, and that some manuscript pages were in fact drafts of
a chapter I. Feuerbach, however incomplete and discontinuous they might
be.73 The chapter was assembled and published in German in 1926,74 and
from that point on, scholarship on the German ideology has generated com-
mentaries on how to present it as a book (or something very like a book), by
Marx and Engels alone. In particular there has been intense effort expended
on exactly which materials, and in exactly what order, a crucial opening
(1909), especially after the Bolshevik Revolution. Ryazanov was also battling
for scarce resources for his scholarly projects, so the discovery of a manu-
script that could be editorially linked with the defining principles of Marxism
was of obvious strategic utility.77
The editors of the Jahrbuch 2003 edition declare that they are breaking, in
principle, with this constructionist approach, announcing that their text will
be edited as Marx and Engels left it and therefore as text-instances
(Textzeugen).78 The editors are at considerable pains to justify their ordering
of these text instances according to a systematic structure, rather than
according to an order based on strict chronology, which would contradict this
and would include other materials. Moreover they apply their hybrid reason-
ing to a grouping of manuscripts from the period which they consider to be
authorially formative for a book The German Ideology, albeit newly sub-
titled Manuskripte und Drucke (November 1845 to June 1846), and with the
inclusion of Weydemeyer as an author. They include some thirteen text
instances separately listed but recognizably tracing a structure laboriously
deduced by them from fragmentary comments about plans and incomplete
Last Hand(s)?
Having undertaken a historical examination of the framing of the manu-
script materials of 18456 as crucially significant, and of their factitious
construction as a book The German Ideology with an opening chapter
I. Feuerbach, I turn briefly to strategies for reframing and republication.
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
biographer,84 and had a stake in his subjects reputation and standing within
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cases the fold and folded-over condition survive, though in some instances the
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fold has deteriorated into a tear and the resulting two pages (recto/verso) sur-
vive separately. At some, probably early stage of their work, Engels himself
numbered each printers sheet in arabic numerals, and it is his sequencing
which presumably reflects a rough chronological order of composition.90
All editions, including Jahrbuch 2003, follow Marxs later numbering of
manuscript pages per printers sheet. This was because Marx was re-numbering
page-remnants per printers sheet, given that he and Engels had evidently
decided to have some materials on some manuscript pages (in some cases
whole manuscript pages) copied afresh and put back into a fair copy of their
redrafted Bauer-critique and Stirner-critique. This was presumably because
the extracted Bogen contained material that was mostly (but not wholly)
unwanted for the polemical plans of the moment. In common with other
editions Jahrbuch 2003 omits these copied out sections from their reproduc-
tion of the manuscript pages that were counted as contributions to the chap-
ter I. Feuerbach (or text-instances in a systematic structure) such as
various editors have been constructing since 1924. Jahrbuch 2003, however,
uniquely reproduces these copied out sections separately in Volume 2, with
a diagrammatic visual indication of where on each original manuscript page
of each Bogen they would have sat.91
Obviously this is an improvement in terms of making information available
to readers, but it raises an acute question concerning the methodology of the
last hand. Are readers necessarily interested in the final state of the text as
89 See Terrell Carver, Communism for Critical Critics? A New Look at The German
Ideology, History of Political Thought, IX (1) (1988), pp. 12936; see also Terrell
Carver, The Postmodern Marx (Manchester, 1998), pp. 98107.
90 Engels numbering per-Bogen clearly follows the draft discussions as they devel-
oped on paper, though Marx and Engels may, of course, have composed or re-composed
some passages out of sequence; Jahrbuch 2003 records some editorial inferences about
this with reference to particular passages.
91 Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 2, pp. 178211.
126 T. CARVER
Conclusions
While texts written before or after the manuscript polemics of late 1845 to
mid-1846 record and discuss the crucial insights of the new conception of
human life, history and future society that Marx and Engels were developing,
the precise moment of self-clarification, and its precise terms, have always
proved elusive. The German ideology manuscripts, as Marx says,93 were
part of this process. But the factitious chapter I. Feuerbach of the two-
volume book The German Ideology, as I have shown above, was not.
The broader project in Marxism of framing the new conception of soci-
ety, history and politics as a philosophy, crucially resting on a critique of
Feuerbach and Hegel, is itself questionable. Ryazanovs chapter I. Feuerbach
of 1924 was touted as a solution to the problem of what exactly in philosophi-
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cal terms Marxs new conception actually was. Even if this is a valid problem,
and even if there is a solution to be found, my conclusion is that the manu-
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