Marx's Concept of Man
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Marx's Concept of Man is a 1961 book about Karl Marx's theory of human nature by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. The work sold widely thanks to the popularity of Marx's early writings, which was a product of the existentialism of the 1940s.
Summary
Fromm provides selections from several of Marx's works. He also praises Reason and Revolution (1941), one of Herbert Marcuse's books on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Fromm briefly discusses the Marxist philosopher György Lukács, noting that in History and Class Consciousness (1923) Lukács viewed Marx as an "eschatological thinker."
Reception
Marx's Concept of Man sold widely because the 1940s fashion for existentialism made Marx's early writings popular, according to the political scientist David McLellan, who considered Fromm's work a typical example of the favorable reception of the young Marx. Alexander Welsh reviewed Marx's Concept of Man in The New Republic. The philosopher Hazel Barnes compared Fromm's view of Marx and Marxism to that of the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in the introduction to her 1963 translation of Sartre's Search for a Method (1957). Rainer Funk, author of a biography of Fromm, wrote that the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 were published for the first time in English in Fromm's work, the translation by Bottomore having been done at Fromm's suggestion.
