8 /10 1 Votes
Language English ISBN 978-1472513953 Subject Karl Marx Editor Erich Fromm | 4/5 Goodreads Pages 263 Originally published 1961 Page count 263 Country United States of America | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Media type Print (Hardcover and Paperback) Similar Erich Fromm books, Karl Marx books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Marx's Concept of Man is a 1961 book about Karl Marx by psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, in which Fromm portrayed Marx as a humanist and existentialist thinker. The work sold widely thanks to the popularity of Marx's early writings, which was a product of the existentialism of the 1940s.
Contents
Summary
Fromm portrayed Marx as a humanist and existentialist thinker, and compared Marxism to Zen Buddhism. He praised Reason and Revolution (1941), one of Herbert Marcuse's books on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and provided selections from several of Marx's works, including a translation of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 by Tom Bottomore, professor at the London School of Economics. Fromm briefly discussed the view of Marxist philosopher György Lukács, noting that in History and Class Consciousness (1923) Lukács viewed Marx as an "eschatological thinker."
Reception
Marx's Concept of Man sold widely because the 1940s fashion for existentialism made Marx's early writings popular, according to political scientist David McLellan, who considered Fromm's work a typical example of the favorable reception of the young Marx. Alexander Welsh reviewed Marx's Concept of Man in The New Republic. Philosopher Hazel Barnes compared Fromm's view of Marx and Marxism to that of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in the introduction to her 1963 translation of Sartre's Search for a Method (1957). Rainer Funk, author of a biography of Fromm, wrote that the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 were published for the first time in English in Fromm's work, the translation by Bottomore having been done at Fromm's suggestion.