Humanist and Anti-Humanist Discourse after Marx

Abstract

This paper is concerned with evaluating humanist and anti-humanist discourse after Marx and assessing Louis Althusser’s contention of having identified an epistemological break in the work of Marx, assigning Marx’s early work to an ideological humanism and his late work to a scientific historical materialism, the science of social formations. Althusser held that the function of philosophy was precisely to distinguish ideological concepts from scientific ones and that the early Marx wrote captive by the humanist ideology of Feuerbach. Other writers held that precisely the early writings of Marx gave socialism its humanist content and thus constituted a theory of liberation, which an economism based only on the later writings had missed. Consequently, a look at the sources, meaning Marx’s works, and at the humanist interpretation of Marx, exemplified in the works of Georg Lukacs, Raya Dunayevskaya, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, as well as the anti-humanist interpretation of Marx found in Althusser, is necessary in order to evaluate Althusser’s claims. Are Marx’s early writings ideological and his later writings scientific or is there a continuity in Marx’s writings? What function did the focus on either the early or the late writings serve? What was the mode of existence of these discourses?