Marx útja a kritikai kritikától a tudományos marxizmusig
Marx’s Intellectual Development from Critical Criticism to Scientific Marxism

Summary/Abstract: This paper gives an overview of Marx’s intellectual development from his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right to his opus magnum, The Capital. This is a fascinating scholarly journey starting from a bourgeois liberal position, joining the young Hegelians “critical criticism” and eventually rejecting both Hegel and the young Hegelians and culminating in his effort to offer a scientific “proof” that capitalism is destined to fall and the proletariat will be “compelled” to carry out the anti-capitalist revolution and implement the “universal human emancipation”. Already in 1844 (The Paris Manuscripts) Marx made a fascinating attempt to turn Hegel’s theory of alienation from an “idealist” one into a “naturalist” one (later called “materialist”), but his fully developed "historical materialism" takes only shape in the work co-authored with Engels, The German Ideology (1846). Some ten years later, in an astonishing unpublished manuscript (Grundrisse, 1857-58), Marx offers his most sophisticated theory of the historical evolution of societies. Finally, ten more years later, in Volume I of The Capital he is ready to offer a scientific analysis of the capitalist system. Much to his own disappointment, it explains more convincingly why capitalism keeps reproducing itself rather than why it will inevitably fall. While it did not achieve the political goals of Marx and Marxists, it is an impressive demonstration of the dedicated scholarship of Karl Marx.

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