The German Ideology

Two young men wrote this book and then let the mice eat it. Marx was twenty-seven, Engels twenty-five, and in the winter of 1845-46 they sat in Brussels and set out to settle accounts with the philosophy they had grown up inside. No publisher in Germany would touch the manuscript. Years later Marx remembered abandoning it almost cheerfully: they had achieved their main purpose, which was to clear their own heads, and they left the pages "to the gnawing criticism of the mice" all the more willingly for that.

The phrase in the title is a coinage and an insult. "The German ideology" is what Marx and Engels called the habit of German intellectuals of taking the ideas in their own heads for the moving forces of history - of imagining that if you changed people's thoughts about the world you would change the world. The book is the antidote to that fantasy, and it punctures it with the most economical image in all of Marx's early writing. It opens, in the Preface, with a joke: "Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity." Knock the idea of gravity out of their heads, declares this fellow, and drowning will cease. That, say the authors, is precisely what the Young Hegelian philosophers propose to do about the real relations that oppress real people: fight them as ideas.

This is the standard English edition, prepared by Progress Publishers, its text corresponding to Volume 5 of the Collected Works and translated from the German. It is generously equipped: the Institute of Marxism-Leninism's long introduction; both volumes of the work as Marx and Engels planned them; Engels's essay "The True Socialists", written as a continuation; four pieces of addenda, including both versions of the celebrated Theses on Feuerbach; a hundred and fifty-six numbered notes; and four full indexes.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on the book its authors thought they could afford to lose, and on what it explains about the state that later canonised it.