ABSTRACT
Not only were pre-Second World War Marxists ignorant of this background and these precedents, a gap in the historical record that partly accounts for Engel's influence, neither were they aware of the intellectual process that had spawned Das Kapital. In the transition from his youthful, romantic theory to his mature analysis, Marx's approach to the question of "human nature" remained unchanged. He remained scornful of attempts to base social theory upon some version or other of a fixed, primordial, human nature that supposedly makes us behave in predetermined ways and which distinguishes us from other species: in his opinion, "Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or by anything else you like". Language, contrary to what Durkheim had supposed, does not come "ready made". What is there awaiting the new-born baby is a community of language users and, for the luckier ones born by chance into a literate society, an accumulation of texts.
