The German Ideology

A large, unfinished manuscript written by Marx and Engels in Brussels in 1845–46 to settle accounts with the Young Hegelians. It found no publisher and was left, as Marx later joked, to the gnawing criticism of the mice; it was first published in full in 1932. The opening part, on Feuerbach, matters most, because it gives the first full statement of the materialist conception of history. Its starting point is real individuals who must produce their means of life. Forms of property and the division of labour develop through tribal, ancient and feudal stages, and consciousness depends on material life rather than the reverse. The ruling ideas of each age are the ideas of its ruling class. A well-known passage imagines a communist society in which one could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon and criticise after dinner. Most of the remaining text attacks Bruno Bauer and, at great length, Max Stirner. Marx's short Theses on Feuerbach are usually printed with it.

It is where historical materialism first appears in full, and its claims about ideology and the ruling class remain central to social theory and to debates about how ideas relate to power.