WorkKarl Marx

Theses on Feuerbach

Eleven sentences Marx scribbled in a notebook in 1845 and never published; Engels printed them after his death, and the last is carved on his grave.

by Karl Marx3 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Thesen über Feuerbach
First published: 1845(aged 27)
Original language: German

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Overview

They are not a book but eleven sentences — some only a line long — that Marx jotted in a notebook in Brussels in the spring of 1845 and never meant anyone to read. He was settling privately with Ludwig Feuerbach, the philosopher whose humanism had helped free him from Hegel and whom he was now outgrowing. Feuerbach had made materialism contemplative: the mind reflects a world it merely looks upon. Marx's objection is that human beings do not so much contemplate the world as change it through practical activity, and that they are themselves formed by the conditions they change — so the human essence is not something lodged inside each individual but, as the sixth thesis has it, the ensemble of their social relations. The notes sat unpublished for forty-three years. Engels came across them after Marx's death and printed them in 1888 as an appendix to his own short book on Feuerbach, tidying the wording and calling them the first document of a new worldview in germ. One of the eleven has outrun everything around it — the eleventh, Marx's one-line contrast between interpreting the world and changing it. It is carved on his tombstone in Highgate Cemetery in London, a public monument built from a note he wrote only for himself.

Key concepts

What does Marx mean by 'praxis'?

Practical, world-changing human activity, as opposed to mere contemplation or interpretation. For Marx, people do not primarily observe reality; they transform it through labour and action, and are themselves shaped by the conditions they alter. Truth, he says in the second thesis, is not a question the mind settles by thinking but something proven in practice. Praxis is the pivot the whole set of notes turns on.

Who was Feuerbach, and why did Marx break with him?

Ludwig Feuerbach was the philosopher whose humanism had helped free Marx from Hegel, chiefly by treating God as a human projection. But Feuerbach's materialism stayed contemplative, the mind reflecting a world it merely looks upon. Marx's objection, running through all eleven notes, is that this leaves out practical activity: human beings make and remake their world, and are made by it in turn.

Why are the Theses eleven notes rather than a book?

Because Marx never wrote them for readers. They are jottings he set down in a notebook in Brussels in 1845 while settling accounts privately with Feuerbach, and they stayed unpublished for forty-three years. Engels found them after Marx's death and printed them in 1888, tidying the wording and calling them the first germ of a new worldview. Their compression is why they read like aphorisms.

What does the third thesis mean about educating the educator?

It answers a trap in older materialism. If people are wholly products of their circumstances, then whoever would change those circumstances must themselves have been formed by them, so who educates the educator? Marx's solution is that changing circumstances and changing oneself are not two acts but one, coinciding in what he calls revolutionary practice. People remake themselves by remaking their world.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Changing the World, Not Interpreting It

Is the mind a spectator that reflects a world it merely looks upon, or are human beings formed by the practical activity through which they change it? On the answer hangs whether philosophy explains the world or remakes it.

In eleven private notes settling accounts with Feuerbach, Marx rejects a materialism that stays contemplative. People do not gaze at reality; they transform it through practice and are themselves shaped by the conditions they alter — so the human essence is no inner kernel but, as the sixth thesis has it, the ensemble of social relations. Engels found the jottings after Marx's death and printed them in 1888; the eleventh, contrasting interpreting the world with changing it, is carved on his grave in Highgate.

praxis
materialism
social change
social ontology
alienation
truth
critique of ideology
historical materialism

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 3
distinct concepts: 11
by passages held, corpus-wide: #291

What this book thinks together

Every arc around the wheel is one concept in this book. A ribbon joins two the text reaches for together, and its width is how many of its passages hold both. Strongest: materialism with praxis.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 2 concepts, joined by 1 pairing. 3 shared passages in all.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
materialism	praxis	3

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1843 Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts)
His earliest sustained work, written at twenty-five before he had read a page of political economy: a reckoning with the German idealism he had been raised inside. Its published introduction announced the proletariat; the manuscript behind it waited eighty years for a reader.
DE
1844 On the Jewish Question (Zur Judenfrage)
Written alongside the Hegel critique and published in the same short-lived Paris journal, this is Marx settling accounts with Bruno Bauer and the Young Hegelians. It marks his turn away from religion and the state toward the economic life he came to think lay underneath them.
DE
1845 The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism (Die heilige Familie oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik)
Overwhelmingly Marx's despite the shared title page, and aimed squarely at Bruno Bauer's circle. It sits on the hinge between the Young Hegelian quarrels Marx was leaving and the historical materialism he was about to work out.
DE
1845 Theses on Feuerbach (Thesen über Feuerbach) you are here DE
1848 The Communist Manifesto (Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei)
Commissioned to a deadline as revolution gathered in 1848, and the most public thing Marx ever put his name to — the opposite pole from the manuscripts he left unfinished in drawers. It states in a few pages the view of history his longer works spent decades grounding.
DE
1849 Wage Labour and Capital (Lohnarbeit und Kapital)
An early, popular run at the economics Marx would spend the next twenty years perfecting. Engels reissued it in 1891 with the term "labour-power" set where Marx had written "labour" — repairing it with a concept that arrived only later.
DE
1852 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte)
Marx as historian and political analyst rather than economist or agitator: a close reading of a single French coup, written for a New York émigré paper in 1852. It handed later Marxism its theory of the state's independence from the classes beneath it.
DE
1858 Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie)
Written a decade before Capital and unknown for almost a century: the notebooks Marx filled to clarify his own thinking, rediscovered only after 1953 and central to the Marx revival that came with the New Left.
DE
1865 Value, Price and Profit (Lohn, Preis und Profit)
A pair of lectures rather than a book — Marx answering a fellow member at the General Council of the International in 1865, in English. His daughter Eleanor found the manuscript and published it in 1898, and it became the shortest way into the economics of Capital.
DE
1867 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Das Kapital)
The work of Marx's maturity and the one book of his economics he saw into print. Volume one appeared in 1867; Engels assembled volumes two and three from the unfinished manuscripts after Marx died, in 1885 and 1894.
DE

— or open another of their works