ABSTRACT
We are what we are as a result of our position in the economic situation of our time; in particular, our relation to the means of material production shapes our lives and thoughts. There is no timeless, unchanging human nature. We are products of the historical period in which we find ourselves. This is the message at the heart of the first part of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The German Ideology, a book which sets out the theory of historical materialism. Most of the book is negative, attacking almost line by line the work of some German reinterpreters of Hegel’s philosophy, the so-called Young Hegelians. Much of it is devoted to a discussion of Ludwig Feuerbach, a writer who, together with Georg Hegel, exercised a powerful influence on Marx’s intellectual development.
