Review: Early Writings — the young Marx, and where alienation comes from
★★★★☆4.3 / 5.0 (editorial rating)
Verdict: the volume where the philosophy lives. The 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, with their account of alienated labour, are the humanist ground beneath everything Marx wrote later. Read once you have the map: harder than the introductions, and the payoff is understanding why Capital matters at all.
- Title
- Early Writings (Penguin Classics)
- Author
- Karl Marx, tr. Rodney Livingstone & Gregor Benton; introduction by Lucio Colletti
- Publisher
- Penguin Classics (originals: 1843–1844)
- Length
- Primary source · ~460 pp.
- Difficulty
- Intermediate ★★☆ — philosophical, but self-contained
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What it is — in three lines
This Penguin volume collects the work Marx wrote in his mid-twenties, before he was "Marx the economist": the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, "On the Jewish Question," the Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State, and shorter pieces, with an introduction by the philosopher Lucio Colletti. These are the texts in which Marx breaks from Hegel and the Young Hegelians and finds his own subject. The origin point of the whole project — and the documents that reshaped twentieth-century readings of Marx when they were rediscovered.
Why this is the philosophical heart
The centre of the book is the theory of alienated labour. Marx argues that under existing conditions the worker is estranged in four linked ways: from the product of the work, from the act of working, from other people, and from what he calls our "species-being" — our nature as freely creative beings. This is philosophy, not yet economics, and it is where Marx's moral force comes from. When later, in Capital, he dissects the commodity and surplus-value, he is giving a rigorous account of the machinery that produces exactly this estrangement.
Reading the Early Writings after Singer's introduction is the difference between being told "alienation matters" and watching Marx work the idea out on the page. It is also why so many readers who care nothing for the economics still care about Marx: the humanism is here, in his own words.
Three highlights
1. The 1844 manuscripts
The estranged-labour section is short, intense and quotable — the single most influential piece of the young Marx, and the seed of the "humanist Marx" that dominated much twentieth-century interpretation.
2. The break with Hegel
You can watch Marx turning Hegel "the right way up," keeping the dialectic while grounding it in material life. It clarifies a relationship that Singer can only summarise.
3. A reliable scholarly edition
The Livingstone and Benton translations are standard, and Colletti's introduction is a serious philosophical essay in its own right — the reason to prefer this volume to scattered online extracts.
What to watch out for
Two honest notes. First, there is a real scholarly debate about continuity: some readers (following Althusser) argue that the mature Marx of Capital broke sharply with this humanist early work, while others see one continuous project. You do not need to settle it, but know that "the young Marx" is a contested figure, not simply "the real Marx." Second, these are early and sometimes unfinished texts — the 1844 manuscripts were never published by Marx himself — so read them as a workshop, not a finished system. This site presents the debate rather than taking a side in it.
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