ABSTRACT
In this second chapter we begin to address some of the central themes of the book by exploring Marx on the classical world. Marx’s early studies (long before he and Engels delineated the ‘materialist conception of history’) were on Epicurus and Democritus, and his classical education was revealed across the entirety of his work. He often used classical analogies and motifs, and both he and Engels were deeply informed by the histories of Greece and Rome as well as their cultural forms. There are processes that we can observe in his early works on classical philosophy which look to be the genesis of his dialectical approach to history. There are also motifs and ideas that he would later redevelop or discard. Social theorists and analysts have generally agreed that these writings inform the emergence of later Marxist conceptions of nature and politics. But the classical analogies of Marx and Engels also reveal something else: that epochs re-emerge with similar patterns of elevation and cancellation, and that it is almost impossible to think about social theory without the re-emergence of motifs like the ghost of Achilles. We can reframe the Marxist social theory of writers like Thomson and De Ste. Croix by examining ideas of the multitude, the chorus and the idea of ‘world’ that seemed trivial to later scholars but are in fact decisive in understanding both Marx and the fate of contemporary social theory. If Ovid, is the ‘celebrant of a happy modernity’ of metamorphoses, as Richard Jenkyns has said (2015:246), then Marx uses the classics to announce a metamorphosis of rupture and departure in modernity. Marx stands between worlds on the fracture between epochs and, like Cassandra, between the worlds of the living and the dead.
