Emancipation and consciousness : dogmatic and dialectical perspectives in the early Marx

This analysis of Marx’s earliest conception of the relationship between social being and consciousness seeks both to uncover some of the theoretical roots of the present crisis in Marxism and to suggest some new directions for contemporary radical practice.

Dr Sherover-Marcuse argues that Marx’s conception of emancipatory consciousness—those attitudes, dispositions and beliefs that lead to radical social transformation—is characterized by a tension between a dogmatic and a dialectical perspective.

The author traces the development of Marx’s theory of emancipatory consciousness from his first discussion of the problem of poverty in 1842 to his first analysis of then possibilities of a radical revolution. She treats Marx’s discussion in the context of both the Hegelian and the Jacobin traditions of political thought and contrasts his conception of the social origin of mystified consciousness with Feuerbach’s a-political understanding of this phenomenon. Sherover-Marcuse contends that the tension between a dialectical and a dogmatic understanding of emancipatory consciousness remains an issue for the Marxist tradition.

In the decades after Hiroshima and Nagasaki the development of a (collective) human consciousness that could inspire and guide a liberating social practice has become a vitally important matter. Sherover-Marcuse argues that questions which are raised in embryonic form by Marx’s early theory of emancipatory consciousness present an increasingly urgent challenge to contemporary movements for fundamental social change.
—from the front flap of the dust jacket