ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the content of Marx's early concept of 'society'. Marx's early critique of liberal atomism, it will be argued, operates through a philosophico-anthropological concept of 'society'. 'Society' in this sense is conceived as man's species-life, so that Marx regards society as an attribute of human nature, an attribute which is lost in the alienation of man's essence. The truly social situation, according to Marx, is the human community of communism which is attained only when the power of private property, which determines the nature of civil society, ceases to estrange man from his real social essence. An economic event parallel to the political revolution, and which had the same consequence in the generation of a social individuals, is described in the economic and philosophic manuscripts where Marx says that in the historical development of the economy movable private property, or capital, came to replace the landed property which had dominated feudalism.
