HISTORY AND CLASS CONSCIOU PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION (1967) ging our knowledge of the insights thus acquired. That Hegelian philosophy and the True Socialists who were often ay, I took up again the criticism that the young Marx had closely associated with it. This also helped me to bring the phil levelled in The Holy Family at the idealist thinkers who had sophical definition of economic problems more forcefully into the allegedly refuted Hegel. Marx's criticism was that such thinkers foreground. My uncritical attitude towards Hegel had still not believed subjectively that they were makir an advance been overcome; my criticism of Hess, like History and Class Con- Hegel, while objectively they simply represented a revival of sciousness, is based on the supposed equation of objectification and Fichtes subjective idealism. Thus it is characteristic of the con- alienation. The advance on my earlier position assumes a some- servative aspects of Hegels thought that his history of philosophy what paradoxical form. On the one hand, I make use of those endencies in Hegel which emphasise the point that economic ively, therefore, there was certainly something revolutionary categories are societal realities as a stick with which to beat about the impulses that lay behind Fichtes philosophy of history Lassalle and the radical Young Hegelians. On the other hand, with its definition of the present as the age of total degradation I launch a sharp attack on Feuerbach for his undialectical criti oised between the past and a future of which it claimed to cims of Hegel. This last point leads to the position already have philosophical knowledge. Already in the review of Lassalle affirmed: that Marx takes up the thread where Hegel left off it is shown that this radicalism is purely imaginary and that as while the first leads to the attempt to define the relationship far as knowledge of the real movement of history is concerned between economics and dialectics more closely. To take one Hegel's philosophy moves on an objectively higher plane than example relating to the Phenomenology, emphasis is placed on egel's worldliness in his economic and social dialectics as opposed social and historical mediating factors that produce the present to the transcendentalism of every type of subjective idealism is more real and less of an abstract intellectual construct than In the same way alienation is regarded neither as"a mental Fichte's manner of pointing towards the future. Lassalle's sym construct nor as a reprehensible' reality"but"as the immediately given form in which the present exists on the way to overcomin overall view of the world; it refuses to concern itself with the tself in the historical process". This forms a link with an objective worldliness that results from a view of history based on economic. In order to give full force to the distance separating Marx and ness concerning mediation and immediacy in the evolution of Lassalle, I quoted in the review a statement made by Lassalle in society. The most important aspect of such ideas is that they the course of a conversation with Marx:"If you do not believe alminate in the demand for a new kind of critique which in the immortality of the categories, then you must believein God. already searching explicitly for a direct link-up with Marx's This sharp delineation of the retrograde features of Lassa Critique of Political Economy. Once I had gained a definite and hought was at the same time part of a theoretical polemic against undamental insight into what was wrong with my whole approach currents in Social Democracy. For in contrast to the criticism in History and Class Consciousness this search became a plan to Marx levelled at Lassalle, there was a tendency among the social vestigate the philosophical connections between economics Democrats to make of Lassalle a co-founder of the socialist view and dialectics. My first attempt to put this plan into practice of the world, on a par with Marx. I did not refer to them explicitly came early in the thirties, in Moscow and Berlin, with the first but I attacked the tendency as a bourgeois deviation. Thi draft of my book on the young Hegel(which was not completed helped to bring me closer to the real Marx on a number of issues til autumn 1937). 13 Only now, thirty years later, am I attempt than had been possible in History and Class Consciousnes ing to discover a real solution to this whole problem in the The discussion of Moses Hess had no such immediate p ontology of social existence, on which I am currently engaged. relevance. But having once taken up the ideas of the early Marx I am not in a position to document the extent to which these felt a strong need to define my position against that of his tendencies gained ground in the three years that separate the contemporaries, the left wing that emerged from the ruins of Hess essay from the Blum Theses. i just think it extremely unlikely