Abstract

Yet until recently very little attention has been devoted to the fact that Marx's first major theoretical work, written in 1843 at the age of twenty-five, is a detailed critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Most of the literature which relates Marx to Hegel draws its evidence either from the two essays in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher or from the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts: yet Marx's views in these writings are an outcome of his earlier confrontation with Hegel in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. This critique of §§ 261-313 of the Rechtsphilosophie had never been published in Marx's lifetime and was printed for the first time by David Riazanov in 1927. While the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 have achieved widespread recognition, this Critique remains relatively unknown, has as yet not been translated into English and remains generally neglected. My argument in this paper will be that a close look at the Critique is indispensible for an understanding of Marx's intellectual development, that most of the elements of Marx's later, "mature" social philosophy are already in existence in 1843 and that consequently some of the traditional views about the stages Marx's thought went through have to be radically revised.