Suchergebnisse

This essay is concerned with Schiller, but it investigates themes that can also be found in other writers, especially in Hegel and Marx. All of these writers attempt (and ultimately fail) to work out a particular ideal model for labor and political institutions. This model was patterned after the ideal cultural conditions of ancient Greece and based upon modern aesthetic concepts, espe cially the concept of a synthesis between sense and reason. It was a model designed to overcome fragmentation or alienation in the modern world that had been brought about by the development of the division of labor.

In the German Ideology (1845-1846), Marx developed what he called his "materialist view of the world." Engels later called it historical materialism. This view involves many problems, and a great deal of disagreement exists over what follows from it concerning the relationship of ideas to material conditions. I would like to try to explain Marx's theory of ideas as well as the methodology connected with it, and to show that these matters can be clarified by examining important differences between the views held in the German Ideology and those held, on the one hand, earlier in the 1844 Manuscripts, and, on the other hand, later in the Griindrisse, the Critique of Political Economy, and Capital.

As Marx's thought develops, we find a series of shifts, tensions, and perhaps even contradictions in the relationships between his theories of the dictatorship of the proletariat, of the overcoming of estrangement, and of revolution. These are the issues which we propose to trace and to sort out. The aim of Marx's political writings, from 1843 on, was to overcome the estrangement of the modern state. The state should no longer stand over society, dominating it as a separate and independent power out of the control of its citizens.1 The state as an independent power should-to use Engels's later phrase-wither away. As Marx's political views developed, he came to propose a two-stage transition from the existing estranged state to the ultimate withering away of the state. Stage I, the transitional stage, he called the dictatorship of the proletariat-it has also been called the socialist stage.2 Stage II is full communism-the state having withered away. Marx makes this distinction in the Critique of the Gotha Program.3 It can also be found, if one reads carefully, in the Communist Manifesto.4