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  • Published: 17 May 2022
  • ISBN: 9781913462956
  • Imprint: Watkins
  • Format: Paperback
  • RRP: $36.00

The German Ideology

A New Abridgement



A new abridgement of Marx and Engels’s 1846 reckoning with the philosophical tradition, edited and with an introduction by philosopher Tom Whyman.

A new abridgement of Marx and Engels’s 1846 reckoning with the philosophical tradition, edited and with an introduction by philosopher Tom Whyman.

Edited and with an introduction by philosopher Tom Whyman, this new abridged version The German Ideology sheds new light on one of the most difficult, disputed texts in Marx’s oeuvre.

Written in 1846 and subsequently abandoned by Marx and Engels, only to be rescued in the 1930s by researchers in the USSR, The German Ideology is the high point of Marx’s philosophical thought: a brilliantly insightful, still thrillingly radical work of materialist philosophical therapy. Yet there remains no wholly satisfactory stand-alone version in English, with only a heavily abridged 1970 edition edited by C.J. Arthur, or a facsimile edition taken from Vol. 5 of the Marx-Engels Collected Works, which does not include satisfactory scholarly notes, currently available. 

In this new Repeater Classics edition, Tom Whyman seeks to remedy this. By expanding on generally-available abridgements to include the bulk of the section on Max Stirner, as well as amending the translation, adding notes and providing a new critical introduction, this new edition of The German Ideology will allow non-specialists to engage with this critical work for the first time. 

At a time when interest in Marx's work is increasing, as people look for an alternative to our currently failing political system, this new edition of The German Ideology will bring Marx's most substantial vision of what communism might actually be like to a whole new audience.

  • Published: 17 May 2022
  • ISBN: 9781913462956
  • Imprint: Watkins
  • Format: Paperback
  • RRP: $36.00

About the authors

Karl Marx

Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, Prussia. While attending university in Berlin he was influenced by the ideas of the philosopher Hegel and his critics, the Young Hegelians, but Marx eventually rejected both schools of thought. He quickly earned the reputation of a revolutionary and left Germany for Paris, where he met his lifelong friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels. Together they wrote and published The Communist Manifesto, which was published in 1848, just before the first wave of revolutions in France. Marx returned to Germany but his radical activities led to expulsion, whereupon he moved to London. There, Marx and Engels collaborated on further works on economics and contemporary politics. Marx also wrote his major treatise, Das Kapital, but only the first volume was published in his lifetime. Marx died in poverty on March 14, 1883, and was buried in Highgate Cemetery.

Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels (1820-95) was the son of a Manchester factory owner. He wrote several groundbreaking essays on contemporary social and political conditions in Britain, including The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), in which he criticised the working conditions and treatment of the urban poor. After Karl Marx' death, Engels completed and published the last two volumes of Das Kapital (1884, 1894) from his friend's surviving papers.