Philosophy+technology Book

Searching for an essential argument and thread of internal continuity binding together the writings of Karl Marx across the span of his career as a theorist and polemicist of social revolution, Robert Tucker turns to Marx's posthumously-published Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. He discerns there the genealogical traces indivisibly linking Marx's image of political economy to Hegel's philosophy of Geist realizing itself in world history, albeit transposed by Marx into the trajectory by which humanity alienates, and ultimately reclaims, its own essential nature as creative producer.

Looking forward then to Marx's influential later writings, Tucker offers a critical analysis of their explicit historical materialism as it relates to the theory of self-alienation formulated in 1844. He finds not only continuity, but indeed presents a bold – if contentious – argument for a radically mythic mode of thought informing Marx's analysis of class antagonism in Capital, projecting the internal alienation of productive potentiality from absolutist ego onto the relational structure of society itself.

Tucker's original reading of Marx, if not readily assimilable to most orthodox interpretations, is nonetheless quite thought-provoking. Moreover, it is integrally joined to expositions of both Hegel and Marx's dialectical theories, and the nature of the relationship between the two, that are most welcome in their clarity and coherence.