Ludwig Feuerbach

Description

Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classic German Philosophy was originally published by Frederick Engels in 1886. The first English translation was published in 1903 by Charles H. Kerr & Company, while the first International Publishers edition was printed in 1941.

According to Engels, the seed for this book was planted in 1846, in The German Ideology written by Karl Marx and Engels, but unpublished in their lifetimes. This book is meant as a critical analysis of German philosophy from a dialectical materialist position. Here Engels emphasizes the importance of Georg W. F. Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach and their theories.

Engels argues that Hegel’s idealist, conservative system must be distinguished from his materialist, revolutionary method of dialectics and that Feuerbach had turned to law against Hegel’s idealistic system and “the fundamental question of philosophy”: i.e., the relation of thinking and being. Additionally, Feuerbach rejected Hegel’s dialectical method, which is why his view of man and nature remained abstract and ahistorical. Accordingly, Karl Marx only kept the “rational” substance of the dialectical method and freed it from Hegel and Feuerbach’s idealistic form.

This edition of Ludwig Feuerbach includes a new Foreword by Anita M. Waters, Professor Emerita of Sociology. She has written on Caribbean political culture and historical representation, and she is currently the Organizational Secretary of the Communist Party USA.