The Road to Freedom: On Marx’s philosophy
Author: An Qinian
Publisher: Renmin University of China Press

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This is a book about Marx’s philosophy rather than Marxist philosophy. Studies on Marx’s philosophical ideas have been frequently seen in Chinese philosophical academia since the reform and opening up. This is partly because there is some variance in interpretations of concepts of Marxist philosophy among scholars. In big socialist counties like China and the former USSR, conflicts frequently occurred amid different schools of thought. Uniform Marxist philosophy has never existed.

The basic point of The Road to Freedom: On Marx’s Philosophy can be summarized as follows: the core idea of Marx’s philosophy is the macroscopic materialist conception of history. The concept holds that history is the interaction between nature, society and human beings based on practice. The theoretical foundation of this view of history is practical dialectics with the goal of human liberation.

The book aims first to illustrate the significance of practice in Marx’s philosophy. I discarded the traditional method of illustration where argumentation follows a proposition, but focused on representing how Marx gradually formed his ideas. As early as middle school, Marx thought about the contradiction between “what we have” and “what we should have,” and looked for ways to the latter. He thought he had found the answer, but changes in life and his refreshed understanding of new experiences contradicted the previous answer, and he had to depart again and again went looking for new answers. Marx’s philosophical thoughts thus grew mature in this repetitive exploration.

The book also explains why practice can be the key to revealing the mysteries of history. Marx’s view on practice is often emphasized. This view embodies the subjectivity and initiative of man, which is the difference between Marx’s philosophy and other old forms of materialism. In fact, practice in Marx’s philosophy is important because it explains the coordinated development between human and the nature, which is indeed the formation of history. It not only pointed out that humans changed the environment, but the changed environment changed humans in turn. The latter link is particularly important because it reveals the mechanisms of human development. The only thing Marx is interested in is the development of human beings, and the secrets of human development lie in the counteractive effects of the changed environment on humans. However, the relationship between these two links has seen little research so far.

The last four chapters respectively examined the relationship between Marx and dialectical materialism, the systematic nature of Marxist philosophical thought, the influence of the macroscopic materialist conception of history as the core philosophy of Marx on his position in the history of philosophy, and the methodological value of the macroscopic materialist conception of history and practical dialectic.

This book is entitled “The Road to Freedom” because Marx’s philosophy aims not to reveal the laws of the movement of the material world, but instead searches for the road to freedom in a world where human beings are dominated by materials.