Vladimir Lenin claimed Marx's first mature work as
The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) in his own work
State and Revolution (1917). Louis Althusser, who was a champion of this young–mature dichotomy in his criticisms of
Marxist humanism (
Praxis School,
John Lewis and the like) and
existential Marxism, claimed in the 1960s that
The German Ideology (written in 1845), in which Marx criticized
Bruno Bauer,
Max Stirner and other
Young Hegelians, marked the break with this young Marx. Furthermore, the
Trotskyist Ernest Mandel in his
The Place of Marxism in History (1986) also broke Marx's intellectual development into several different stages. Althusser presented, in his
For Marx (1965), a number of other opinions:
Louis Althusser's "epistemological break" Louis Althusser popularized the conception of an "
epistemological break" between the Young Marx and the mature Marx - the point where Marx broke with
ideology to enter the domain of
science - a point generally considered to consist in his break with
Ludwig Feuerbach. However, the
epistemological break, a concept which Althusser drew out of
Gaston Bachelard, is not to be conceived as a chronological point, but as a "process", thus making the question of the distinction between a "Young Marx" and a "mature Marx" a problematic one. Althusser characterized Marx's
German Ideology and
Theses on Feuerbach, written in 1845, as "works of the break", which were then followed by a series of
transitional works from 1845 to 1857, Marx's first Mature Work being the first drafts of
Capital. Althusser noted that the interest in the Young Marx, that is in the
1844 Manuscripts and other early works, was no longer a matter of interest only for
Western Marxism, e.g.
Palmiro Togliatti, but also of Soviet studies, first of all, that the very discussion of early Marx carries political tones as the
Soviet Union's attitude to the subject is not very approving. He also noted that as
Jahn had noted that "it was not Marxists who opened the debate on Marx's Early Works", indicating the political stakes surrounding it: "For this attack surprised Marxists on their own ground: that of Marx". Althusser then criticizes the Marxist response to this attack: To discomfit those who set up against Marx his own youth, the opposite position is resolutely taken up: Marx is reconciled with his youth—
Capital is no longer read as
On the Jewish Question,
On the Jewish Question is read as
Capital; the shadow of the young Marx is no longer projected on to Marx, but that of Marx on to the young Marx; and a pseudo-theory of the
history of philosophy in the '
future anterior' is erected to justify this counter-position, without realizing that this pseudo-theory is quite simply Hegelian. A devout fear of a blow to Marx's
integrity inspires as its reflex a resolute acceptance of
the whole of Marx: Marx is declared to be a whole, '
the young Marx is part of Marxism 'as if we risked losing
the whole of Marx if we were to submit his youth to the radical critique of history, not
the history he was going to live, but
the history he did live, not an immediate history, but the reflected history for which, in his maturity, he gave us, not the '
truth ' in the Hegelian sense, but the principles of its scientific understanding. Thereby, Althusser warns against any attempts at reading in a
teleological way Marx, that is in claiming that the mature Marx was already in the young Marx and necessarily derived from him: Capital is an
ethical theory, the silent philosophy of which is openly spoken in Marx's Early Works. Thus, reduced to two propositions, is the thesis which has had such extraordinary success. And not only in France and in Italy, but also, as these articles from abroad show, in contemporary Germany and Poland. Philosophers, ideologues, theologians have all launched into a gigantic enterprise of criticism and
conversion: let Marx be restored to his source, and let him admit at last that in him, the mature man is merely the young man in disguise. Or if he stubbornly insists on his age, let him admit the sins of his maturity, let him recognize that he sacrificed philosophy to economics, ethics to science, man to history. Let him consent to this or refuse it, his truth, everything that will survive him, everything which helps the men that we are to live and think, is contained in these few Early Works. So these good critics leave us with but a single choice: we must admit that
Capital (and 'mature Marxism' in general) is ''either an expression of the Young Marx's philosophy, or its betrayal
. In either case, the established interpretation must be totally revised and we must return to the Young Marx, the Marx through whom spoke the Truth. This is the location
of the discussion: the Young Marx. Really at stake
in it: Marxism. The terms of the discussion'' : whether the Young Marx was already and wholly Marx. Althusser then criticizes the "eclectic" reading of Marx's early works, which instead of reading the text as a "whole", discompose it in various "elements" which it then judges as either "materialist" or "idealist" elements. Marx should not be read in a teleological perspective, which would be a return to Hegel's idealist
philosophy of history, thus he writes: From the Hegelian viewpoint, Early Works are as inevitable and as impossible as the singular object displayed by
Jarry:
"the skull of the child Voltaire". They are as inevitable as all beginnings. They are impossible because ''it is impossible to choose one's beginnings''. Marx did not choose to be born to the thought German history had concentrated in its
university education, nor to think its ideological world. He grew up in this world, in it he learned to live and move, with it he 'settled accounts', from it he liberated himself. I shall return to
the necessity and contingency of this beginning later. The fact is that there was a
beginning, and that to work out the history of Marx's particular thoughts their movement must be grasped at the precise instant when that concrete individual the Young Marx emerged into the
thought world of his own time, to
think in it in his turn, and to enter into the exchange and debate with the thoughts of his time which was to be his whole life as an ideologue. At this level of the exchanges and conflicts that are the very substance of the
texts in which his living thoughts have come down to us, it is as if the authors of these thoughts were themselves
absent. The concrete individual who expresses himself in his thoughts and his writings is absent, so is the actual history expressed in the existing ideological field. As the author effaces himself in the presence of his published thoughts, reducing himself to their rigour, so concrete history effaces itself in the presence of its ideological themes, reducing itself to their system. This double absence will also have to be put to the test. But for the moment, everything is in play between the rigour of a single thought and the thematic system of an ideological field. Their relation is this
beginning and
this beginning has no end. This is the relationship that has to be thought: the relation between the (internal) unity of a single thought (at each moment of its development) and the existing ideological field (at each moment of its development). But if this relationship is to be thought, so, in the same movement, must its terms. == Criticisms ==