Published in 1846, The German Ideology is Marx and Engels’s first public attempt to outline the basics of Marxist theory as we now understand it. Here we find both the familiar political polemics around class warfare and proletarian revolution, but also an attempt to delineate a sophisticated theoretical framework of social and historical analysis, one capable of elaborating a critique of capitalist society as a whole. Yet the text is complicated as a theoretical statement by its more immediate, polemical purpose as an extended attack on Marx’s contemporaries, the “Young Hegelians.” The entire work, which consists of three volumes, spans over 700 pages. Most readers, however, only ever encounter an edited version of the first volume, which contains the bulk of the theoretical exposition of Marx and Engels’s materialist conception of history. Though some scholars disagree, the general consensus is that the rest of the work—which consists of an often highly specific and equally vicious attack on Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner, and a slew of other peers and contemporaries—is of little interest to the non-specialist.
Though published under the names of both Marx and Engels, The German Ideology is generally considered to be primarily the work of Marx. His ironic, biting, and often nearly literary style is evident throughout, and many passages appear to reproduce rather closely some of the complex, not fully worked out conceptual knots of the unpublished notes we now know as The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
