ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an account of Marx's early left-Hegelianism, which has been more influential on Western Marxism - and hence on literary theory - than his mature economic science. It also considers the problem of moving from an idealist philosophical system, whether intended to provide a rationale or a critique of the existing social order, to a putative science of society, intended as a basis for overthrowing the existing order, and establishing scientific socialism. I take as main text for discussion the Theses on Feuerbach — the brief unpublished early notes which Engels later retrieved. In their very brevity, incompleteness, and suggestiveness, these probably represent Marx at his most philosophically profound, though there is surely no excuse for taking them as defining Marxism.
As we shall see in later chapters, Western Marxists returned to the early Marx because they wanted, not a science of society, but a critical philosophy; and literary theorists have tended to follow them. I would like to have a materialist science of society, though I doubt if Marxism is it; and use the Theses to raise again the question of whether it is possible. Faced with the difficulties posed by nineteenth-century determinist concepts of science, Marx evolved the materialist dialectic: an adaptation of Hegel's dialectic which obviously will not work. Modern physics, and the mathematics of chaos theory, which extends far beyond physics, suggest different terms for this problem: a theory of society which is fully materialist and economically reductive, but neither dialectical nor determinist. There is an odd parallel here with Marx's early thesis on Democritus.
