The philosophy of Karl Marx (1818-1883) has been hugely influential throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. One of his best known concepts is the idea of “alienation” that describes how, in capitalist societies, human beings get estranged from their work and from themselves because of the way the production of goods is organised.
This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.
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The influence of Marx
Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher, economist and journalist who must surely be one of the most influential philosophers who ever lived.
Marx’s work, often barely recognisable, formed the basis for all socialist and communist regimes of the 20th and 21st centuries; but it also inspired thinkers, politicians and philosophers who were not politically Marxist or in any way radical, like Erich Fromm, Nelson Mandela and Jean-Claude Juncker, European Commission president. Juncker once said that Marx today “stands for things which he is not responsible for and which he didn’t cause because many of the things he wrote down were redrafted into the opposite” – and this is certainly true.
The problem with the work of Marx is also that it is huge and complex, and that Marx himself was always developing his theories further, often departing from positions that he had held in previous works. So when one wants to talk about what “Marx said,” one would have to specify exactly which period of Marx’s work one is referring to, and others could always dispute that Marx actually did mean what he wrote in this particular way.
This is also true of the concept of “alienation,” which we will talk about today. The ideas behind this concept come down to Marx from other philosophers, most notably Hegel, Feuerbach and, perhaps surprisingly, the English social contract theorist John Locke. Marx’s idea of alienation resurfaces much later in the work of Erich Fromm, but also in the works of French Existentialism (for example, Camus and Sartre), and we find echoes of Marx in Bertrand Russell and Richard Taylor, to name only a few.
The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm
A comprehensive overview of Erich Fromm’s philosophy of happiness. We discuss his life, his ideas and his main works, both in their historical context and how they are still relevant for us today.
The essence of capitalism
Marx’s work is large and complicated, but if we wanted to reduce Marx to one single idea, it would perhaps be this: The way a society works is determined by its economic structure.
We all can agree that a society of prehistoric hunter-gatherers is fundamentally different from the society of the European Middle Ages or today’s US society. But Marx would say that these are not only in some random way different, but that …
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