China Social Science Review

No.3, 2022

On the Basic Ideas of the Early Stage of the Materialist Conception of History

(Abstract)

Omura Izumi

The main body of the manuscript of the Feuerbach chapter of“The German Ideology” is H5, which is not a coherent manuscript, but the combination of three different manuscript fragments (H5a, H5b, and H5c). If one reads the manuscript in the order inferred from MEGA2 I/5, it can be said that the first manuscript fragment to express the basic ideas of the materialist conception of history is M22-24 of H5a, which predates the criticism of Steiner, and that manuscripts H5b and H5c are a continuation and expansion of H5a. Therefore, the view in MEGA2 I/5 that it was not the critique of Feuerbach but that of Steiner that played a decisive role in the formation of the materialist conception of history is questionable. The theory of “economic base--superstructure,” which is the core of the materialist conception of history, took shape at the time of the German-French Yearbook. It can be said that Marx had already conceived the basic framework of the materialist conception of history before he wrote “The Outline of Feuerbach” in the spring of 1845. At the beginning of its formation, the materialist conception of history was not so much the “law of the development of human history,” as Engels called it, as the “general result” of Marx’s direction of his own research work.