ABSTRACT
The quest for elucidation of the 'unholy forms' of alienation brought Karl Marx to the economic studies that were to occupy him the rest of his days. His analysis of the state as an unholy form of the phenomenon was merely a transitional episode on the way to his rendezvous with another unholy form that he soon began to call 'material' or 'political-economic alienation'. In the essay 'On the Jewish Question', he touched upon this theme. This chapter discusses Marx's creation of the unpublished early philosophical version of Marxism, which revolves around the idea of human self-alienation in the economic life. He was preceded in this direction, and deeply influenced as well, by an older Young Hegelian, Moses Hess, who became known in the circle as the 'communist rabbi'. Hess was the originator of the German philosophical communism. Hess was an enthusiastic disciple of Ludwig Feuerbach, and constructed the doctrine of philosophical communism as an extension of Feuerbach's 'humanism'.
