‘Last of the Schoolmen’: The Young Marx, Latin Culture, and the Doctoral Dissertation

ABSTRACT

This article examines Marx’s earliest writings, especially his doctoral dissertation on “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature” and the notebooks he kept while preparing it. Previous commentators on this material have tended to take one of two approaches: either they have used it to associate Marx with an expansive and abstract Western Tradition of philosophical inquiry, or they have located it in the narrow context of the intellectual culture of the German Vormärz. Here I seek to mediate between these extremes. These documents, I argue, suggest that Marx was less a part of a Western Tradition, or a set of abstract normative debates that ostensibly stretches from the ancients to modernity, than of what I call Latin Culture, or a Latin-speaking culture that was inscribed in practices, norms, and institutions, and that persisted in Europe from late antiquity into the nineteenth century. Placing Marx’s early writings in this context helps explain some of the tensions that characterise his thought and to clarify the practical consequences of what might otherwise appear as purely theological and metaphysical speculations.

KEYWORDS:

• Marx
• Epicurus
• Aristotle
• Trendelenburg
• atomism
• Hellenism
• Latin culture

Introduction

The fact that Karl Marx (1818–83) began his intellectual career as a student of ancient philosophy, writing a doctoral dissertation on “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature,” is relatively well-known. So too is the fact that, while preparing this project, he kept a collection of seven “Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy,” which have been preserved, and which testify to his formidable knowledge of classical antiquity. A significant body of literature on Marx’s relationship with the ancients already exists. Commentators, however, are somewhat divided as to how best to approach the issue. Some endeavour to situate Marx’s investigations of ancient atomism within their immediate context, and present his dissertation as an elaborate code for the political and theological issues that preoccupied German intellectuals during the Vormärz.¹ Others have used the same documents to suggest that Marx belongs to an expansive Western Tradition of philosophical inquiry—an, as it were, great conversation concerning human flourishing that stretches from ancient Greece to the modern world.² The first approach has the virtue of emphasising the practical implications of what might otherwise appear to be purely theoretical exercises. But it also risks confining Marx’s work within an extremely narrow historical frame. The second is attentive to long-term historical processes, but it risks detaching Marx’s writings from their concrete purposes and effects. Here I propose to mediate between these extremes. I attend to the details of Marx’s early studies of the ancients, which I treat not as rarefied reflections on supposedly perennial questions, but as practical interventions. However, along with locating those interventions amidst the intellectual struggles of Vormärz, I examine them against the backdrop of a much larger historical context that I propose to call Latin Culture.

Inasmuch as I interpret Marx’s dissertation in relation to this larger context, my approach is simultaneously microscopic and telescopic, intensive and extensive, synchronic and diachronic. The first move owes something to the method developed by Quentin Skinner and the Cambridge School of intellectual historians. The second attempts to account for some of its limitations. Skinner initially attacked two counterposed but, in his estimation, equally mistaken models: an excessively abstract history of ideas, on the one side, and an excessively reductive historical empiricism, on the other.³ His innovation was to interpret texts, not as containers of fixed semantic content, and not as ideological representations of a more substantial realm of facts, but as speech acts in J .L. Austin’s sense, or polemical moves in historically specific and specifically effective language games. This made it possible to treat the history of political theory as what, in his 1844 “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” Marx himself called “hand-to-handcombat.”⁴ At the same time, it also seemed to countenance a pulverisation of history, and presented the past as a disconnected series of atomised discourses, vocabularies, or language situations with no larger import or significance.⁵ Responding to this criticism, more recent intellectual historians have sought to widen the scope of their investigations, to return to what David Armitage calls “big history,” and even to rehabilitate elements of the history of ideas model that Skinner initially attacked.⁶ My method is similar but distinct. I preserve Skinner’s insight that texts can be interpreted as speech acts. But I place greater emphasis on the contexts that allow such acts to function. For, as Austin insisted as well, what renders a speech act effective is not the power of the words alone, but pre-existing conventions—rituals, norms, rules, and habits that are inscribed in particular institutions and recognised as legitimate by particular communities.⁷ And while such institutions and communities change, sometimes quite dramatically, the force of any given speech act relies on their endurance and stability.

The same methodological principle allows me to refine what I mean by Latin Culture and to begin to sketch Marx’s relation to it. If the Western Tradition implies a set of abstract concepts or what Arthur O. Lovejoy called “unit ideas” the development of which an historian might trace through canonical works, Latin Culture is more akin to what Ernst Robert Curtius describes in his classic study of European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages—a political, theological, and intellectual culture that was organised around the Latin language and that survived in Europe from late antiquity to the middle of the nineteenth century.⁸ While, on Curtius’s account, this culture entailed a uniform group of references and topoi, it cannot be understood as a collection of ideas. It consisted instead of what Françoise Waquet calls “a community of practices,” or what Jürgen Leonhardt calls a “Kultursprache.” It was less something communicated through a language than, as Joseph Farrell puts it, “the culture embodied by [that] language.”⁹ It existed, not in the minds of great thinkers, but in material discourses, rituals, offices, and institutions, and in the subjects who were constituted by and for them. As Curtius sees it, while it lasted more than a millennium, Latin Culture in this sense was finally eclipsed in the middle of the nineteenth century by the rise of political nationalism, on the one hand, and the natural sciences, on the other. Without subscribing fully to such a stark periodisation, I would like to argue that the young Marx both belonged to this waning culture and witnessed its dissolution. And many of the tensions that characterise his early work, perhaps his work more generally, can be understood as efforts to come to terms with a world where this culture would no longer be taken for granted.

My argument unfolds in three parts. In the first, I describe Marx’s training in ancient languages, classical literature, and Latin Culture. I explain that Marx and his generation were among its final products, and that Marx’s dissertation was in part a manifestation of it. I also note that its demise was coeval with a renaissance in Aristotle scholarship in the early part of the nineteenth century designed to re-animate Aristotle’s work by developing interpretations that broke definitively with the Scholastic tradition. While many commentators have pointed to Marx’s affinity with Aristotle, this context helps clarify the nature of that relationship. In the second part I focus on the specific arguments Marx develops in his dissertation. I situate these arguments in the context of Marx’s interest in the work of the logician and classicist Adolf Trendelenburg, whose Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations) consisted of an Aristotelian attack on Hegel’s logic—one that Marx examined closely, and to which he planned to compose a Hegelian response. I claim that traces of this looming confrontation with Trendelenburg can be discerned in Marx’s dissertation, especially in Marx’s comparison of Epicurus’s and Aristotle’s theories of the meteors. And it further helps situate Marx at a moment when Latin Culture was being displaced by a new set of institutional arrangements. In the final section I turn to Marx’s considerations of Plutarch’s polemics against Epicurus. I argue that, while Marx’s defence of Epicurus against Plutarch’s critique (especially with respect to the question of personal immortality) appears abstract at first, it in fact had very practical implications, and that these would have been recognised by Marx’s contemporaries. Indeed, the overall purpose of this article is to show that Marx was always concerned with practical issues, but that this aspect of his earliest work is obscured when we examine it independently of the Latin Culture of which it was a part.

The Last of the Schoolmen

Between Latin Culture and German Humanism

One minor detail from Marx’s “Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy” offers a way into the question at hand. Marx begins the fifth of these notebooks by transcribing extracts from Books Four, Five, and Six of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things. After a few pages, though, he stops the transcriptions and starts instead to compose a handful of “Philosophische Aphorismen” of his own invention. Except for the title, these aphorisms are written in Latin and appear to be a draft of an introduction to a Latin version of Marx’s dissertation.¹⁰ It seems likely that, at this point (1839), Marx intended to submit his dissertation to the University of Berlin, where Latin was the required language for all such documents. After taking more time than anticipated to finish his research, Marx eventually chose to forego the University of Berlin and submit it to the University of Jena instead. At the time, the Rector there, and one of the people who had to approve Marx’s dissertation, was the philosopher Jakob Fries. Fries was, among other things, a bitter enemy of Hegel and someone who Hegel had infamously attacked in the “Preface” to his Philosophy of Right. Under the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, he had been persecuted as a demagogue for his support of the liberal nationalist fraternities that spread through German universities following the Wars of Liberation.¹¹ It therefore might seem risky for a Hegelian like Marx to submit his work to the judgment of a figure like Fries. However, in keeping with Fries’s nationalist agenda, the University of Jena accepted dissertations in German.

Here one might be tempted to assume that Marx avoided writing a Latin dissertation because he lacked the required linguistic competence. This assumption would be mistaken. In the “Notebooks,” along with beginning to draft his dissertation in Latin, Marx transcribed countless long passages from Latin and Greek texts. Indeed the “Notebooks” heavily suggest not only that Marx was fluent in the Latin language but also that he belonged to Latin Culture. In my explanation of the term above, I emphasised in particular its material nature—its inscription in material institutions and practice designed to constitute material subjects. Marx was inculcated in Latin Culture in this sense from a young age, when he attended the Gymnasium in Trier. The early nineteenth-century Gymnasia had roughly two purposes: to promote the humanist education reforms of Wilhelm von Humboldt, which conceived of education in terms of the development of individual potential, and included training in ancient languages as a privileged method for fostering Bildung; and to preserve an older tradition of teaching Latin (and to a lesser extent Greek) to prepare students for a career in public service, as young ruling class European men had been prepared for centuries.¹²

Marx’s relationship with the former—the nineteenth-century German Hellenophilia represented by Humboldtian education, or what E. M. Butler influentially glossed as “the tyranny of Greece over Germany”—is well-known.¹³ As mentioned, there are countless studies of Marx’s reliance on ancient Greek concepts, notably ideals of Athenian democracy and Aristotle’s ontology. The most prolific contemporary proponent of this reading is George McCarthy, who uses Marx’s knowledge of Aristotle in particular to associate him with a set of normative claims about human flourishing and to connect him to a Western Tradition that ostensibly runs from the ancient Greeks through Marx to the modern understanding of human rights.¹⁴ Whether this Western Tradition refers to anything substantial or whether it was invented in the nineteenth century to fabricate a sense of “the West” at a moment when ideas of its superiority were in high demand is an open question. So too is the question of where Marx stood with respect to such issues.¹⁵ But Marx’s relationship with Latin Culture seems beyond doubt. Traces of it in his work are too numerous to itemise. Along with his training in the language at the Gymnasium and in law lectures at the Universities of Bonn and Berlin, it can be noted that Marx used Latin in his writings with the offhanded frequency of an initiate. To take just a single example: The “Saint Max” section of the manuscript called The German Ideology attacks the proto-anarchist philosopher Max Stirner. At one point Marx notes that this self-declared champion of the “unique ego” ironically has no unique ideas of his own, but “cribs” his history of philosophy from Hegel. Stirner’s school motto, Marx quips, should read: “Repetitio est mater studiorum.”¹⁶ One can certainly imagine Marx hearing that phrase for the first time from the mouth of a Gymnasium teacher standing in front of a roomful of boys, grammar in one hand and cane in the other, prepared to administer a beating to anyone who made a mistake.

While they do not put it in terms of Latin Culture, some scholars have recognised Marx’s familiarity with the phenomenon I am describing. In 1927, for example, in his Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, economic historian Richard Tawney discerned similarities between Marx’s labour theory of value and Thomas Aquinas’s economic theology. Indeed, Tawney proposed, given these similarities, Marx might be considered “the last of the schoolmen.”¹⁷ More recently, related lines of thought have been developed by Scott Meikle, who argues for what he calls “the Aristotelean philosophical foundations of Marx’s thought,”¹⁸ and maintains that, unlike Engels, Marx worked with traditional metaphysical concepts (essence, totality, form, dialectics) rather than with modern scientific ones (observation, explanation, hypothesis, induction, causation, necessity). As Meikle sees it, Marx received a “classical education” designed to prepare him for a governmental or administrative vocation within the Prussian state, whereas Engels was more of an intellectual entrepreneur, and thus susceptible to the late Victorian fad of the physical sciences. The same classical education accounts for what Meikle calls the “shock” Marx experienced when he began to study political economy in 1844, the bulk of which contravened his “underlying attitudes”:

Many of these underlying attitudes have to do with Marx’s familiarity with the ancient world, its history, its languages, Greek and Latin, and its literature, drama, and philosophy. Classical learning was common among educated people in all parts of Europe in Marx’s day. … Allusions and turns of phrase that were enough to convey entire perspectives and value systems to his contemporaries, convey little or nothing to most modern readers, who are parochially modern in comparison. These things are not just a matter of literary effect; they can make all the difference in understanding what Marx was really going on about and what had been moving him. … Greek and Latin were second nature to him. … His knowledge of the Greek philosophers, particularly of Aristotle whom he greatly admired, was very detailed, and he read and studied all of Aristotle’s scientific works for his dissertation on Epicurus. Much of the philosophical inheritance was part of the education system, in the form of the Scholastic tradition, the official philosophy of the Catholic countries of Europe, and it infused the teaching in schools and universities. Furthermore, many ethical values and social attitudes found in the Greek authors were still to be found not greatly changed all over Continental Europe in Marx’s time, especially the Rhineland.¹⁹

Clearly one could push this argument too far and propose that Marx makes sense exclusively within the context of Latin Culture. Another line of investigation would have to account for his familial experiences as the son of an enlightened Jewish father who likely converted to Protestantism to protect his career, and all the complexities of German Jewish experience during the nineteenth century.²⁰ But Meikle’s claim that Marx’s work presupposes knowledge of classical literature and the culture that preserved that literature for centuries is undeniable.

The Aristotle Renaissance and the Logic Question

Whether or not Aristotle can be said to have provided Marx with his “philosophical foundations,” Meikle’s claim that Marx “admired” Aristotle is equally impossible to deny. To understand that admiration, though, it is helpful to situate it in the context not only of the long history of Scholasticism but also amidst the struggles and debates that characterised Aristotle scholarship in Marx’s own time. Crucial steps towards the first project were taken by Ernst Bloch in his Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left.²¹ As Bloch made clear, what is at stake is not simply the influence of Aristotle in general, but that of a particular history of Aristotle interpretation—specifically a left or materialist interpretation that simultaneously makes possible and gets excluded from the official Christian Scholastic one. The second project, which is the one I will take up here, must begin by noting that Marx began his university career amidst an Aristotle “renaissance” during the early nineteenth century.²² The key figure in this renaissance was the philologist August Immanuel Bekker, whose complete edition of Aristotle’s works appeared between 1831 and 1836, and who is best known for having inspired the “Bekker numbering” method of referring to Aristotle’s texts. Around Bekker circulated a larger constellation of scholars who sought to dismantle the Scholastic reading and to opening Aristotle’s work up afresh. The two figures most important for Marx were (obviously) Hegel, whose philosophical system could be interpreted as an effort to apply Aristotle’s ontology of “potential” and “actual” or dynamis and energeia to human history and the modern world, and another crucial but underappreciated Aristotelian philosopher named Adolf Trendelenburg. There is a massive literature on Hegel and Marx; but there is very little on Trendelenburg and Marx.²³ It therefore seems reasonable to explain who Trendelenburg was, what he contributed to the Aristotle renaissance, and how he is related to Marx.

Trendelenburg was a philosopher and classicist who established his reputation with his 1833 critical edition of Aristotle’s De Anima.²⁴ Composed in Latin, this volume went beyond even Bekker’s standard of rigour and included an elaborate scholarly apparatus that explained and contextualised Aristotle’s Greek. It was the crowning achievement of the Aristotle renaissance; it wrenched Aristotle from the embrace of the Scholastic tradition and brought his arguments to life unencumbered by their more mechanical interpretation. But Trendelenburg’s most important work was his 1840 Logische Untersuchungen, which deflated the pretensions of what Frederick Beiser calls the “rationalist-speculative” line of post-Kantian philosophy, or the encyclopaedic systems of figures like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.²⁵ It characterised philosophy not as a privileged study that comprehended all others, but as a way of validating the methods of the empirical sciences. Philosophy was not the queen of the sciences, but its handmaid. To accomplish this task, Trendelenburg mounted a savage attack on Hegel’s logic—an attack that, as Beiser notes, did more than any other text to destroy the dominance of Hegelianism.²⁶

Understanding how Trendelenburg differed from Hegel requires understanding what they had in common. Trendelenburg and Hegel were both representatives of a movement in post-Kantian philosophy that Stephan Käufer calls “logical radicalism.”²⁷ The logical radicals were critical of the traditional formal or syllogistic logic that had derived from Aristotle and that had been rendered systematic by the Scholastics. On their account, traditional formal logic, while accurate in many respects, had grown moribund. Rather than treating logic as a set of mechanical techniques that students could memorise, the logical radicals sought both to provide it with metaphysical and epistemological grounds and to conceive of logic as a crucial component of metaphysics and epistemology. During the 1820s and 1830s, the preeminent work in this field was Hegel’s Science of Logic, which originally appeared between 1812 and 1816, providing Hegel with a reputation strong enough to garner him a prestigious University of Berlin professorship, and which became the keystone of his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences.²⁸ While he was also a logical radical, this was the aspect of Hegel’s work that Trendelenburg’s Logische Untersuchungen set out to destroy.

This is not the place to attempt a full explanation of Trendelenburg’s arguments. But it is worth emphasising that many of them revolve around his interpretation of Aristotle, and his claim that Hegel either misunderstands or distorts logical principles that had been recognized since Aristotle. Trendelenburg’s central proposition concerns Hegel’s approach to negation or contradiction. Hegel’s logic purports to begin, as Hegel puts it, “without presuppositions,” or with a dialectic between the pure, unmediated thought of being, on the one hand, and the pure, unmediated thought of nothing, on the other. For Hegel, the contradiction between these concepts can generate the concept of becoming. And the rest of Hegel’s logic follows.²⁹ Trendelenburg describes this dialectic of being, nothing, and becoming, and by extension the entirety of Hegel’s dialectical logic, as nonsense. Since Aristotle, he maintains, it has been known that contradiction has two different meanings: either it means what Trendelenburg calls “logical negation,” or a contradiction between a statement and its negation in which one must be true and the other false with no third alternative (A or not-A); or it means what he calls “real opposition,” or a contradiction between two states of affairs in which one excludes the other, but both can also be false, or either true under different circumstances (A or B).³⁰ But neither corresponds to Hegel’s dialectical contradiction as neither results in the affirmation of a new, third term. Put differently, in pure logic or the realm of “logical negation,” it is possible to claim that one term is determined by its difference from another, or through purely logical negation. Being has meaning insofar as it is not nothing, and nothing insofar as it is not being. But the same is not true in nature or the realm of “real opposition.” For in nature there are no negative terms, only positive facts. The natural existence of a cat, for example, cannot be found in the idea “not dog.” It can only be found in an empirical description of a cat. On Trendelenburg’s account, Hegel’s dialectic operates by smuggling examples of “real opposition” into its treatment of “logical negation,” meaning that Hegel’s logic “without presuppositions” does have presuppositions, or content derived not from pure thought, but from empirical intuition. And while the rules of logic that had been designed by Aristotle, systematised by the Scholastics, and transmitted for centuries in Latin culture did not exhaust the study, Trendelenburg believed that they were still the rules: thus, Hegel was not permitted to break them simply because he employed a particularly obtuse idiom.

While, on rare occasions, the secondary literature on Marx mentions some of these developments in nineteenth-century classicism and logic, Marx’s awareness of them has not been explored in sufficient depth. But there is no question that Marx was aware of them and took them seriously, especially between 1839 and 1842, or the period when he was completing his dissertation and preparing for an academic career. We have letters from both Marx’s mentor Bruno Bauer and his friend Karl Friedrich Köppen dated March 29, 1841 and June 3, 1841 respectively (immediately after Marx submitted his dissertation in March, 1841), indicating that Marx had been studying Trendelenburg and was composing a critical response.³¹ Perhaps here we might follow Meikle’s speculation concerning the “shock” Marx experienced upon beginning his study of political economy and propose that it was preceded by another “shock,” namely the one he experienced upon reading Trendelenburg’s demolition of Hegelian philosophy—a philosophy to which Marx had committed himself, and around which he had organised his dissertation. Perhaps we might go further and speculate that, when the young Marx encountered Trendelenburg’s claim that, pace Hegel, there is no logic “without presuppositions,” and that all knowledge, no matter how systematically organised, relies on empirical intuitions that can never be fully comprehended by reason alone (and that this was a basic principle of the method of the natural sciences, which would soon become synonymous with science as such), he also realised, however dimly, that this claim placed a solid nail in the coffin of the Latin Culture to which he belonged—that the closed and ordered world of that culture was about to be invaded by the infinity of observations, explanations, and inductions that constitute the physical sciences, and that its cities were about to be sacked, its temples desecrated, its population enslaved, and its treasures carted off to the ends of the earth, never to be retrieved. But to substantiate such speculations, we would first have to assess Marx’s own contributions to Latin Culture, especially his dissertation.

Modern Aristotelianism and Ancient Meteorology

Here again I begin with a minor detail to introduce an aspect of Marx’s early work that has typically been ignored. Along with the “Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy,” we have another notebook Marx kept while working on his dissertation called his “Berliner Hefte,” as he composed it in Berlin in 1840. In this notebook Marx transcribes passages from Leibniz, Hume, Spinoza, and Karl Rosenkranz’s Geschichte der Kantshen Philosophie, probably while preparing for the exam that would qualify him to lecture at German universities. However, the same notebook also contains the beginnings of a German translation of Aristotle’s De Anima.³² Marx translates the entirety of Book Three and then returns to Book One and starts from the beginning. While some commentators have noted its existence and attempted to use it to elucidate the references to Aristotle in Marx’s later work, no one has offered an explanation as to why Marx pursued this project at all.³³ But once we place Marx within the context proposed herein, a rather obvious answer becomes apparent. For we know that, around 1840, Marx was reading and preparing a Hegelian response to Trendelenburg’s Logische Untersuchungen, and that Trendelenburg’s reputation was based on his edition of De Anima. Anyone who wanted to challenge Trendelenburg, then, would have to come to terms with that text and present an alternative reading. It seems plausible that Marx began to translate De Anima for this reason.

Although the Logische Untersuchungen was probably the work that Marx planned to address most extensively in his critique of Trendelenburg, Marx’s dissertation shows that he was familiar with Trendelenburg’s edition of Aristotle’s De Anima. Indeed, Marx refers to “Trendelenburg’s … commentary on Aristotelian psychology” explicitly.³⁴ But to understand what is at stake in that reference, we must get a sense of the broad argument of Marx’s dissertation. Marx compares the atomist ontologies of Democritus and Epicurus, or their characterisations of the unseen substance of reality as an infinite number of indestructible atoms falling downward in a void. As Marx notes, previous scholars proposed that Epicurus simply copied Democritus, adding only the absurd notion that, on occasion and for no reason, atoms swerve away from their downward trajectory and collide with others, thus allowing for change and difference. Marx argues that Epicurus develops a distinct and superior ontology. Indeed, for Marx, the Epicurean theory of the declination of the atom is not absurd, but a necessary condition of any consistent atomism. For, in atomist ontology, the atom is defined as a singularity with no external determinations. But if the atom falls downward in a line, it is determined by the line in which it falls. Thus, for the atom to be an atom, it must swerve from its downward trajectory and collide with other atoms (48–49).³⁵ For Marx, the ethical and political analogues to these claims are transparent. Just as the atom only becomes singular when it leaves its determined trajectory and collides with other atoms, so too does the individual subject only become free when it breaks away from the determined constraints of social norms and natural necessity and enters into free relations with other subjects. Our individual freedom is consubstantial with our free social existence (62).³⁶

It is important to note that Marx was working prior to the publication of a number of crucial compendia of ancient philosophers produced in the late nineteenth century—works like Hermann Usener’s 1887 collection of Epicurea, which assembled in one place every reference to Epicurus in ancient documents, and Hermann Diel’s 1879 Doxographi Graeci and 1903 Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, which did the same with the others.³⁷ Marx therefore had to dig through the original texts and uncover those references himself. On the level of bibliography alone, then, the dissertation represents a considerable labour. Marx’s discussion of Trendelenburg appears in this context, when he is attempting to piece together Democritus’s claims, many of which have been preserved because Aristotle criticised them. In the passage in question, Marx attempts to determine Democritus’s relationship with empiricism, or whether he thinks sensuous experience gives us knowledge of the truth or conceals and distorts a deeper, hidden truth. “The opinion of Democritus concerning the truth and certainty of human knowledge seems hard to ascertain” (38; emphasis in original) Marx maintains:

There are contradictory passages, or rather not the passages, but Democritus’s views contradict each other. For Trendelenburg’s assertion in his commentary on Aristotelian psychology, that only later authors, but not Aristotle, knew of such contradiction, is factually incorrect. In Aristotle’s Psychology it is stated: “Democritus posits soul and mind as one and the same, since the phenomena is the true thing;” in the Metaphysics, on the other hand: “Democritus asserts that nothing is true or that it is concealed from us.” Do these passages of Aristotle not contradict each other? If the phenomenon is true, how can the truth be concealed? The concealment begins only when the phenomenon and truth separate. (38)

Trendelenburg argues that only philosophers after Aristotle recognised the contradictory nature of Democritus’s approach to sensation and truth, or the way he claims both that the two are identical and that they are separated by an unbridgeable gulf. However, Marx notes, Aristotle’s texts explicitly describe both sides of the contradiction. So how could Aristotle have not recognised it?

The substance of Marx’s claim is less interesting than the fact that he was willing to go toe-to-toe with the reigning champion of Aristotle scholarship over an exegetical detail. It suggests that Marx was preparing to present himself as an expert not only on atomism but also on Aristotle and the ancient world more generally. The significant range of materials Marx compiles in his “Notebooks” add credibility to this speculation. For there, along with transcribing extensive passages from primary sources on the philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus (Diogenes Laertius, Sextus Empiricus, Eusebius, Simplicus, Stobaeus, Lucretius, Seneca, and Cicero), Marx sketches any number of different histories of ancient philosophy, which he locates alongside and embellishes with parallel narratives of the development of ancient Greek culture and society. The lines of thought that Marx introduces in these sketches are suggestive, but they are also incomplete. It is rarely clear where Marx thinks he has made a discovery, and where he abandons his ideas after recognising their inadequacy. But first it is necessary to consider the arguments that Marx advances in his dissertation itself, or the claims he was willing to stand behind in public.

The first thing to note is that Marx introduces the dissertation as one part of a larger “presentation of the Epicurean, Stoic and Sceptic philosophies as a whole and in their total relationship to earlier and later Greek speculation” (29). Marx’s aim is to rehabilitate the Hellenist philosophers who followed those of the Greek Classical Age, or Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Scholars have often suggested that Marx planned to take this direction because he saw a parallel between Aristotle’s relationship to the Epicureans, Stoics, and Sceptics, and Hegel’s relationship to the schools of Hegelianism that emerged after his death. While there is some evidence that this is so, it does not exhaust Marx’s intention. The more important point Marx made concerned the concept of “self-consciousness.” The standard interpretation of the ancient world among nineteenth-century historians, including Hegel, held that, while the Greek and Roman philosophers had initiated the process of separating individual subjects from the moral substance of the community, it was only with Christianity and its concept of an internal faith that genuine self-consciousness or subjective freedom became possible.³⁸ On Hegel’s account, this element of the Christian revelation had to be worked out through history. But its inspiration was Christ. Marx’s planned exploration of “the cycle of Epicurean, Stoic and Sceptic philosophy” was to show how “all moments of self-consciousness are represented completely” in that cycle, and that “these systems in their totality form the complete structure of self-consciousness” (35). Read in the context of the nineteenth century, the consequences of this claim are as obvious as they are incendiary: the Christian revelation is not required for the realisation of subjective freedom. Its theoretical foundations were established in the rational philosophies of the ancients. In short, we can be free without God.

Marx’s discussion of Democritus and Epicurus appears within this larger narrative. While he privileges Epicurus over Democritus, he does not subscribe uncritically to Epicurus’s views; he presents Epicurus as one moment within a “cycle” of philosophies the “totality” of which provides a full account of “self-consciousness.” Here Marx is explicitly working within the framework of Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy. But he is not uncritical of Hegel’s framework either. Hegel begins his Lectures on the History of Philosophy with a survey of other histories. He claims that his approach is innovative because, while others treat the history of philosophy as a series of discrete systems generated by individuals, he conceives of those systems as moments within the speculative “inner movement” of Spirit.³⁹ As Hegel’s contemporaries were also quick to note, what this approach gains in terms of overall coherence it often loses in terms of philological acuity. For example, Hegel proposes that medieval philosophy worked out the mysticism of the Neo-Platonists, but he ignores the fact that Plato’s texts were not available during the period.⁴⁰ Marx agrees with this assessment of Hegel. Thus, he begins with a “Foreword” in which he stakes his claim to originality. He indicates that, while Hegel had “correctly defined the general aspects” of the Hellenist philosophies, and while his “great and bold” history of philosophy was the one “from which alone the history of philosophy can in general be dated,” the scope of Hegel’s project made it “impossible” for him “to go into detail.” More importantly, Marx says, this “giant thinker was hindered by his view of what he called speculative thought par excellence from recognising in these systems their great importance for the history of Greek philosophy and for the Greek mind in general” (29–30). In other words, Hegel’s concern with the speculative “inner movement” of Spirit compelled him to overlook the functions of Hellenist philosophies among those who promulgated them. Marx proposes to remedy this deficiency by engaging in “microscopic examinations” of the differences between two thinkers who previous historians, including Hegel, had characterised as almost identical, or showing that, despite the “interdependence” of their thought, an “essential difference” between them “extend[s] to the smallest details” (36).

To elucidate this “essential difference,” Marx adapts terminology from Hegel. He proposes that Democritus is a representative of the position Hegel calls “scepticism” while Epicurus is a representative of “dogmatism.”⁴¹ Both thinkers hold that the true but unseen substance of reality consists of atoms. But Democritus emphasises the sense in which we can never empirically access this underlying truth, leaving him sceptical with respect to the possibility of human knowledge, whereas Epicurus proposes that, since we know we can never access the underlying truth, we should dogmatically (without concern for further explanation) affirm the way the world appears. Displaying his familiarity with Latin culture, Marx elaborates on this distinction by referring to biographemes from a formidable array of sources (Diogenes Laertius, Cicero, Eusebius, Demetrius, Antisthenes). These suggest that Democritus’s scepticism led him to a boundless pursuit of empirical knowledge. “Dissatisfied with philosophy,” Marx writes, “he throws himself into the arms of positive knowledge.” Thus, “we see Democritus wandering through half the world in order to acquire experiences, knowledge and observations” (40). Epicurus, on the other hand, is shown to be “satisfied and blissful in philosophy.” He “has nothing but contempt for the positive sciences, since in his opinion they contribute nothing to true perfection. He is called an enemy of science, a scorner of grammar. He is even accused of ignorance.” While Democritus seeks teachers among the “Egyptian priests, Persian Chaldeans, and Indian gymnosophists,” Epicurus “prides himself on not having had a teacher, on being self-taught.” Similarly, “while Democritus is driven into all parts of the world, Epicurus leaves his garden in Athens scarcely two or three times.” Finally, “while Democritus, despairing of acquiring knowledge, blinds himself, Epicurus, feeling the hour of his death approaching, takes a warm bath, calls for pure wine and recommends to his friends that they be faithful to philosophy” (40–41, emphasis in original).

Such displays of erudition notwithstanding, the basic objection that Marx raises to Democritus bears a family resemblance to the objections those Beiser calls the “rationalist-speculative” post-Kantians raised against Kant’s dualist or two-tiered distinction between phenomenal appearances and the noumenal thing-in-itself: that it is contradictory to propose that knowledge can posit a limit to its own operation, or a realm into which knowledge cannot penetrate (the atoms, the noumenal) without transgressing that limit in the same gesture. Marx argues that, while Epicurus’s commitment to an atomist ontology makes it impossible for him to resolve this contradiction, he does recognise the problem, and attempts at crucial moments to address it. Thus, while “Part One” of Marx’s dissertation focuses on the general differences between Democritus’s scepticism and Epicurus’s dogmatism, “Part Two” examines Epicurus’s philosophy, and consists of five chapters, each of which addresses an aspect of that philosophy where this contradiction comes to the fore. These include: his theory of the declination of the atom, considered above; his ascription of qualities such as weight or size to the atoms, which compromises their status as singular and atomic (for here they would be externally determined by their qualities); his characterisation of the atoms as both atomoi archai, or origins, and atoma stoicheia, or elements; his concept of time, and thus of change, as something that does not belong to the atoms, but is instead the “pure form or the world of appearance” (63); and his theory of the meteors, or anything pertaining to the firmament or sky, including everything from the apparently regular movements of heavenly bodies such as the sun, moon, and stars, on the one hand, to apparently irregular occurrences of weather, lightening, and what we call meteors, on the other.

Commentators on Marx’s dissertation have often drawn attention to Marx’s discussion of the declination of the atom, largely because it introduces an element of contingency that mitigates against the apparently teleological conception of history and deterministic conception of society and the individual in his work.⁴² But if we read the dissertation in context and without subsuming it under the totality of Marx’s larger body of work, it seems that the more important, if also more complicated chapter is the final one on “The Meteors.” Marx begins by claiming that, when the Greeks worshiped the regular cycle of the heavenly bodies, they were also worshiping the rational aspect of “their own mind” (66). Even Aristotle, the most rational philosopher of the Classical Age, claimed in On the Heavens that the cycle of the heavenly bodies was eternal, making those bodies “immortal” representatives of “eternal time” and “the One” substance that subtends all others. While myths and personifications had been fabricated to explain this insight concerning “the One” to “the masses,” Aristotle nevertheless held that the heavenly bodies pointed towards an eternal substance, and that the idiom of the gods had been invented to describe this substance, which constitutes the ontological foundation of reality (67). As Marx explains, Epicurus repudiated all of this, and thereby the entirety of Greek cosmology, theology, and ontology. He held that the motion of the heavenly bodies indicates that they do not point towards “the One,” for if “the One” did exist, it would have to do so in tranquillity and bliss (it would have to remain unmoving, for where would it move if there was no void beyond it), and “actions do not accord with bliss, but … occur due to causes most closely related to weakness, fear and need” (67).

In the context of Marx’s encounter with Trendelenburg, whose work, as noted, was organised around Aristotle, and who Marx was planning at precisely this time to criticise, this contrast between Aristotle and Epicurus should not be overlooked. While it forms the argumentative spine of “The Meteors,” the contrast is already foreshadowed in “Part One” of Marx’s dissertation. There Marx justifies his intention to pursue a larger study of the Hellenist philosophers (who others consider corruptions of their Classical Age predecessors) by criticising the (Aristotelian, essentialist, organicist) “commonplace” assumption “that birth, flowering and decline constitute the iron circle in which everything human is enclosed.” Marx agrees that, if we accepted this commonplace, it would not be “surprising” to find that “Greek philosophy, after having reached its zenith in Aristotle, should then have withered.” But “birth, flowering and decline are very general, very vague notions under which, to be sure, everything can be arranged, but through which nothing can be understood.” And this is so because “decay itself is prefigured in the living; its shape should therefore be just as much grasped in its specific characteristic as the shape of life” (35). In other words, it is not just Aristotle’s arguments in On the Heavens concerning “the One” substance that Marx uses Epicurus to condemn. It is the entire Aristotelian or essentialist principle that natural and social processes, including the history of philosophy, follow one pattern or narrative, proceeding in a linear fashion from birth to flowering to decay.

This last point becomes crucial to Marx’s explanation of the difference between Aristotle’s and Epicurus’s conceptions of the meteors. Aristotle insists that, with respect to the meteors and indeed to every phenomenon, there must be one cause and one correct explanation. But Epicurus contends that such a stringent approach results in “myth,” or the conviction that a single but indiscernible truth lies hidden behind our multiple perceptions and interpretations of the world. And “myth,” Epicurus maintains, leads to “fear,” which in turn disturbs “tranquillity” or ataraxia, which for Epicurus is the only absolutely justified axiom—the one truth that should regulate our search for truth. Against Aristotle, Epicurus thus recommends that the philosopher abandon the search for a single truth and affirm instead the plurality of perceptions—“the great number of explanations, the multitude of possibilities”—of phenomena. “Thus,” Marx writes,

while Aristotle, in agreement with other Greek philosophers, considers the heavenly bodies to be eternal and immortal, because they always behave the same way; while he even ascribes to them an element of their own, higher and not subjected to the force of gravity; Epicurus in contrast claims the direct opposite. He reasons that the theory of the meteors is specifically distinguished from all other physical doctrine in this respect, that in the meteors everything occurs in a multiple and unregulated way, that everything in them is to be explained by a manifold of indefinitely many causes. (69)

The movement of the meteors is not regular but irregular. They do not signify “the One” substance, but the many. They are susceptible to multiple explanations because they are multiple. And in this sense, they not only represent but directly manifest in sensuous being the otherwise hidden realm of the atoms. As Marx puts it: “Their only action is motion, and, separated by empty space, they swerve from the straight line, and from a system of repulsion and attraction while at the same time preserving their own independence. … The heavenly bodies are therefore the atoms become real” (70, emphasis in original).

But just as soon as Marx announces this highest moment in Epicurus’s thought, he notes that it introduces an intractable problem. For here—where the truth (or the infinitely multiple truths) of the atoms can be discerned in the meteors, Epicurus’s atomist ontology, which presupposes a distinction between the invisible realm of the atoms and the visible realm of appearances—falls apart. Epicurus can only complete his philosophy by destroying it. The concluding paragraphs of Marx’s dissertation are therefore marked by an ambivalence with respect to Epicurus. On the one hand, Epicurus is praised as the destroyer of religion. Here Marx approvingly quotes Lucretius, who characterises Epicurus as the “first to raise mortal eyes in defiance” of religion, and who proclaims that “fables of the gods did not crush him, nor the lightening flash and growling menace of the sky,” but rather “religion” was “crushed beneath his feet, and we by his triumph are lifted level with the sky” (73).⁴³ On the other hand, Epicurus is criticised for remaining committed to a dualist, atomist ontology, and for attempting to spackle over the contradictions that this ontology generates by insisting on the abstract, subjective principle of tranquillity. For, while that ontology is superior to Democritus’s philosophy, which compelled its founder to take up a futile pursuit of empirical information and ultimately to blind himself in despair, it also forecloses the possibility of science. Put differently, the moment Epicurus presents the heavenly bodies as direct manifestations of the atoms is also the moment when the subjective foundation of his philosophy, or the sense in which he reduces all knowledge to the tranquillity of individual self-consciousness, gets exposed. And on Marx’s account, this leads the philosophy down one of two equally false paths: either to relativism, and the claim that there is no objective, universal knowledge of nature independent of the subjective perspective of individual self-consciousness; or, as happens with the Stoics and their doctrine of universal reason, to speculate that nature itself possesses self-consciousness, thereby leaving “the door … open wide to superstitious and unfree mysticism” (73).

The conclusion of Marx’s dissertation thus points towards the next instalment of his project on “the cycle of Epicurean, Stoic and Sceptic philosophy,” which presumably would have addressed the insights and limitations of the Stoics. Unfortunately, Marx never had a chance to complete that study. His plan to become an academic was destroyed almost as soon as it was made, in part because of the position he took in his dissertation, which he completed at the moment when Hegelians like Bauer were being purged from the universities.⁴⁴ And this means that, in terms the longer arc of Marx’s career, Epicurus himself was something of a meteor. He briefly and spectacularly lit up the firmament, but quickly burned out and plummeted to the ground. Latin Culture, on the other hand, and Aristotle in particular, was more akin to the sun. It disappeared at night, but also returned at regular intervals. For those who belonged to it, including the young Marx, it must have seemed all but indestructible, as if its warmth would never be diminished, its benefits never exhausted, and the world it illuminated never destroyed. But, as the successes of the physical sciences soon revealed, it was not permanent. It was a sun like any other sun—one star among an infinity of stars, all of which seem from our earthbound perspective to be unchanging and almost immortal, but all of which, like everything else we perceive, eventually die.

Personal Immortality or the Immutable Atoms

I will begin these concluding remarks with one last detail that, upon close inspection, reveals a great deal—one already outlined in my introductory remarks. Along with the final two chapters of “Part One,” the only extant copy of Marx’s dissertation is also missing an “Appendix.” Why it was removed remains a mystery. However, we have Marx’s table of contents and a handful of endnotes that refer to the missing “Appendix.” Thus, we know that it was called “Critique of Plutarch’s Polemics Against the Theology of Epicurus,” that it included sections on “The Relationship of God to Man” and “Individual Immortality,” and that it addressed, not only Plutarch’s polemics against Epicurus, but parallels between those polemics and debates that were raging among German intellectuals, especially with respect to personal immortality and the existence of a personal God. Today we might be tempted to characterise such debates as abstractly theological or metaphysical, and of little practical consequence. At the time, they reverberated across politics, law, morality, and economics. Without personal immortality and the personal god, many believed, there could be no person of the sovereign endowed with absolute authority, no personal responsibility predicated on the hope of personal salvation, and no personal property guaranteed by the law.⁴⁵ Moreover, when Marx addressed these issues in the “Appendix” of his dissertation, he was not using coded language in order to avoid detection. He was employing the technical political-theological vocabulary of Latin Culture. To be certain, in Germany at the time, there were severe restrictions on translating this vocabulary into popular discourse and disseminating it in the popular press.⁴⁶ But those in Marx’s intended audience, or university-trained intellectuals, would have had no trouble understanding what his words meant, or what they implied for politics, law, morality, economics, and public policy.

Here Marx’s “Notebooks” become especially relevant. For much of what Marx claimed about Plutarch in the missing “Appendix” is outlined in those notebooks. It would be impossible to survey every line of thought that Marx opens in the “Notebooks.” As noted, they include many dropped threads, or moments where Marx attempts to situate his study of atomism within larger histories of ancient and modern philosophy. In these, Marx suggests that the development of philosophy entails the emergence of autonomous self-consciousness, or a series of stages through which self-consciousness distinguishes itself from heterogenous determination by either the physical substance of nature or the moral substance of the community. Marx thus contends that the Pre-Socratic “wise men” first made the natural and social worlds intelligible by proposing that they were subtended by intelligible substances; that Socrates was the first to establish his own autonomous self-consciousness by submitting such substances to rational critique; and that the Epicurean, Stoic, and Sceptical philosophers took this process further, either by elevating individual self-consciousness to the highest principle (Epicurus’s ataraxia) or by proposing that the world was governed by a universal self-consciousness (the Stoics’ universal reason).⁴⁷ In each instance, what Marx pointedly excludes is any suggestion that Christianity represents a pivotal moment in this process, or this emergence of self-consciousness and subjective freedom. Rather, Marx characterises the return to theology among late Roman and early Christian philosophers as a regression, the consequences of which continue to impact the modern world. It is in this context that Marx begins to examine Plutarch’s polemics against Epicurus.

Marx’s discussion of Plutarch in the “Notebooks” focuses on two works: Moralia: The Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible, which deals with the question of pleasure and pain; and Against Colotes, which argues for personal immortality, or the immortality of the individual soul. In both instances Marx defends Epicurus and suggests his philosophy comprehends whatever minimal truths might be found in Plutarch. Thus, whereas Plutarch’s Moralia claims that the possibility of future pain destroys one’s present pleasure or tranquillity, and that present health is an illusion, Epicurus, Marx retorts, argues that future pain is never a worthwhile concern, and that illness is the illusion and health the natural state. “Epicurus,” Marx writes, “desires no eternal life; how much less can it matter for him that the next instant may conceal some misfortune.” For Epicurus, “time” itself is “only the accident of accidents; how could its shadow penetrate into the solid phalanx of ataraxia?”⁴⁸ Similarly, whereas Plutarch’s Colotes argues that only belief in personal immortality vanquishes the fear of death, Marx argues that only Epicurus’s notion that it is not individual persons but the atoms that last for eternity that can vanquish that fear. In fact, Marx maintains, the only way Plutarch can consistently hold his own position vis-à-vis immortality and the afterlife is by unwittingly accepting Epicurus’s account of finite individuals and infinite atoms. For Plutarch claims that, when the body dies, its soul leaves behind all finite determinations of this world and becomes infinite, eternal, and pure. But if that soul retains the personality of the individual, then it also retains the determinations that constitute that personality. Marx elaborates:

Plutarch says outright that it is not the content [but] the form that matters, but the being of the individual. To be, even though torn to pieces by Cerberus. What is then the content of his teaching on immortality? That the individual, abstracted from the quality which gives him his individual position, persists not as the being of a content, but as the atomistic form of being; is that not the same as what Epicurus says, namely, that the individual soul becomes dissolved and returns into the form of the atoms?⁴⁹

Thus, according to Plutarch’s own principles, the only thing that could be pure and eternal is not the individual soul but the atoms. “Plutarch,” Marx concludes, “teaches the Epicurean doctrine in his polemic against Epicurus.” He “everywhere says something other than what he means to say and at bottom also means something other than what he says.” The “polemic” he wages against Epicurus “can in effect be called a panegyric in favour of Epicurus.”⁵⁰

In order to avoid the assumption that such arguments about the nature of pleasure and the immortality of the soul pertained exclusively to theological matters, it is helpful to consider their implications for practical ones such as sovereignty or inheritance law. For Epicurus’s claim that, not the personal soul, but only an infinity of impersonal atoms are immortal would clearly cause difficulty for political-theological principles such as the one Ernst Kantorowicz dubbed “the king’s two bodies,” or the notion that the “mystical body” of the king remains intact after the death of any particular king.⁵¹ It would cause similar difficulty for laws of primogeniture, which were increasingly enforced in Germany in the early part of the nineteenth century, and which attempted to preserve the stability of the traditional social order by dictating that both the crown and the noble estates were to be inherited intact by the eldest son.⁵² Thus it should come as no surprise to discover that, at the same moment when Marx was composing his dissertation and advancing radical arguments against personal immortality, the conservative jurist Friedrich Julius Stahl was developing a constitutional theory that placed “personality” at the centre of the political, legal, and economic order, and organised state and society around a personal “monarchical principle.”⁵³ We do not know why someone removed the “Appendix” from Marx’s dissertation. But we can speculate that whoever did so knew exactly how inflammatory it was, and exactly what kind of havoc it would wreak on the Christian State should it ever be allowed to inform policy. Given Marx’s institutional position at the time, there was no chance of that happening. But authorities were poised to deal with the situation in any case. Marx and his ilk would never advance in the German university. If they had already obtained positions, like Bauer, they would be stripped of them. If they were waiting to be offered positions, like Marx, they were waiting in vain. They would have to pursue their agenda on different terrain. Which is, of course, precisely what Marx went on to do.

Conclusion

The exact story of how Marx’s hopes of becoming an academic were destroyed has been lost to history. It even may have been deliberately erased. When Marx began his dissertation in 1839, he was working closely with Bauer, who was employed as a lecturer at the University of Berlin. In 1839, Bauer published a book called Herr Dr. Hengstenburg, which was deeply critical of the powerful theologian and University of Berlin professor Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenburg.⁵⁴ To protect the untenured scholar from professional retaliation, the then Minister of Culture and patron of the Hegelians Karl von Altenstein had Bauer transferred to the University of Bonn. A series of twelve letters that Bauer wrote to Marx from Bonn between December 1839 and December 1842 have been preserved. In them, Bauer offers his protégé advice on his research, makes plans for collaborative projects, and conspires to ensure that, upon completion of his dissertation, he is also offered a lectureship at Bonn. We do not, however, have Marx’s side of the exchange, which Bauer must have either neglected to preserve or decided to destroy. Bauer’s letters extend through the period when he published his 1841 Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker (in which he claimed that the Gospels contain no historical truth, but are literary inventions), came under investigation for espousing atheism, refused to retract his views, and, in 1842, had his licence to teach revoked.⁵⁵ At no point, however, does Bauer indicate the precise moment when, presumably because of his association with his defamed mentor, Marx’s chances of securing a lectureship also vanished. But vanish they did, and by the spring of 1842, Marx had begun writing for the Rheinische Zeitung, a journal that he would soon come to edit. Here, Marx would recall in the 1859 “Preface” to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the recently minted doctor “first found [himself] in the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known as material interests.”⁵⁶ The mistake that commentators on Marx’s earliest writings routinely make is to assume that he ever discussed anything else.

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Notes on contributors

Charles Barbour

Charles Barbour, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University, Australia. Along with numerous journal articles and book chapters, he has published The Marx-Machine: Politics, Polemics, Ideology (Lexington Books, 2012) and Derrida’s Secret: Perjury, Testimony, Oath (Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

Notes

¹ McLellan, Marx Before Marxism, 83–85; Fenves, “Marx’s Doctoral Thesis”; Stanley, “Marx’s Critique”; Breckman, Marx, 262–70; McIvor, “The Young Marx”; Heinrich, Karl Marx, 299–322.

² Sannwald, Marx und die Antike; Baronovitch, “German Idealism”; Meikle, Essentialism; McCarthy, Marx and the Ancients; McCarthy, ed., Marx and Aristotle; Pike, From Aristotle to Marx, 21–30; Rockmore, Marx After Marxism; Rockmore, Marx’s Dream.

³ Skinner, Visions of Politics.

⁴ Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” 171 (emphasis in original).

⁵ Meiksins Wood, Citizens and Lords, 8–11; Meiksins Wood, Liberty and Property, 26–31; Femia, “Historicist Critique”; Wood, “Social History.”

⁶ Armitage, “Big Idea”; McMahon and Moyn, eds., Rethinking; Guldi and Armitage, History Manifesto; Whatmore, Intellectual History.

⁷ Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 8–9, 12–16.

⁸ Curtius, European Literature.

⁹ Waquet, Latin, 30; Leonhardt, Latin, 12; Farrell, Latin, 7. See also Grafton, Defenders.

¹⁰ Marx, “Notebooks,” 490–93; Marx, “Hefte zur epikureischen Philosophie,” 99–102.

¹¹ Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 14–15, 382–83 n. 6; Beiser, “Jakob Fries,” 54–63.

¹² Stein, “Education.”

¹³ Butler, Tyranny of Greece.

¹⁴ McCarthy, Marx and Aristotle; McCarthy, Marx and Social Justice. For a recent, vehement version of the argument that Marx belongs to the Western Tradition, see Rockmore, Marx’s Dream.

¹⁵ Anderson, Marx at the Margins.

¹⁶ Marx and Engels, “German Ideology,” 186.

¹⁷ Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 36.

¹⁸ Meikle, “Engels,” 84.

¹⁹ Meikle, “Marx,” 57.

²⁰ Avineri, Karl Marx, 1–17; Sperber, Karl Marx, 1–25; Rose, Jewish Philosophical Politics, especially chap. 4.

²¹ Bloch, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left. There is a large question here, beyond the scope of this article, concerning how critical theory sits in relation to Latin culture. It is certainly significant that the first to appreciate the importance of Aristotle vis–à–vis Marxist philosophy was arguably Herbert Marcuse. See Marcuse, “Concept of Essence.”

²² Thouard, ed., Aristote au XIXe Siècle; Hartung, King, and Rapp, eds., Aristotle Studies.

²³ Other articles that discuss Marx and Trendelenburg include Jaulin, “Marx lecteur d’Aristote”; Arndt, “Hegels Wesenslogik.” See also Rossi, Da Hegel a Marx, 56–63.

²⁴ Trendelenburg, Aristotelis De Anima.

²⁵ Beiser, Genesis of Neo–Kantianism, 12–13.

²⁶ Beiser, Late German Idealism, 60–69.

²⁷ Käufer, “Post–Kantian Logical Radicalism”; Martin, “Nothing More.”

²⁸ Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic.

²⁹ Ibid., 135–45.

³⁰ Trendelenburg, Logische Untersuchungen, 31.

³¹ Bauer and Marx, March 29, 1841, 354; Köppen and Marx, June 3, 1841, 361.

³² Marx, “Exzerpte aus Aristoteles,” 155–82.

³³ Depew, “Aristotle’s De Anima,” 133–87.

³⁴ Marx, “Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy,” 38. Hereafter page references are cited in the text.

³⁵ Marx, “Notebooks,” 472–75.

³⁶ Ibid., 473–75.

³⁷ Usener, Epicurea; Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker; Diels, Doxographi Graeci.

³⁸ Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 430–53; Hegel, Lectures: Medieval and Modern, 1–9.

³⁹ Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume One, 11–15.

⁴⁰ Leo, Historiographical Concept, 196.

⁴¹ Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume Two, 233–36.

⁴² Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 21–65; Althusser, “Underground Current,” 163–207.

⁴³ Marx, “Notebooks,” 468.

⁴⁴ Moggach, Bruno Bauer.

⁴⁵ Breckman, Marx.

⁴⁶ Bunn, “Censorship.”

⁴⁷ Marx, “Notebooks,” 432–41.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 449.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 454.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 457.

⁵¹ Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies.

⁵² Berdahl, Politics, 182–310.

⁵³ Stahl, Monarchische Prinzip; Breckman, Marx, 80–89; Berdahl, Politics, 348–73.

⁵⁴ Moggach, Bruno Bauer, 62–65.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 65.

⁵⁶ Marx, “Critique of Political Economy,” 261–62.