Marx and the Logic of Universal Emancipation

Abstract

Marx’s political theory extended Hegel’s claim that the development of the consciousness of freedom was the inner thread running throughout the whole of human history. The revisions which this doctrine underwent in Marx’s writings reflected many different influences. From the Young Hegelians Marx derived the idea that philosophy was a critical and revolutionary activity with a cognitive interest in the promotion of universal freedom. Marx’s shift from the atheistic attack on religion to the political economy of material alienation was inspired by Feuerbach’s contention that human beings found solace by projecting their frustrated hopes and ambitions onto imaginary objects of religious worship. For Marx, the realisation of freedom and universalism, which Christianity had manifested in an alienated form, necessitated this move from the “critique of heaven” to the “critique of earth”. British political economy and French socialism were the two main doctrines which shaped Marx’s analysis of the reproduction and transcendence of the social and material constraints upon more autonomous and universal forms of life.