• Robbie McClintock, Instructor
  • Office hours @ 2nd floor, Gottesman Library
    Thursdays 4:00 to 6:00 pm and by appointment
    
• Frank Moretti, Instructor
  • Office hours @ 603 Lewisohn Hall, by appointment
    (Call Teresa Gonzales, 212 854 1962, or email her teresa@columbia.edu)

Meeting 2  •  September 9 — Karl Marx (1818-1883) & Friedrich Engels (1820-1895)

Karl Marx (1839)
Think of Marx as a youth,
forming his intellectual enterprise.

Much of our reading will draw on and contend with the concerns and ideas of Marx and Engels, a large and complicated body of work. It is a useful warm-up to accomplish two things this week: first to get a sense of the scope and animating questions of their intellectual enterprise and second to engage a bet with Marx, thinking, using a brief, early text in which he was working out his understanding of what was happening to the human experience of work under the conditions of life emerging in the nineteenth century.

• Antonio, Robert J. "Karl Marx." The Blackwell Companion to Major Classical Social Theorists. George Ritzer, ed. (Blackwell Publishing, 2003). Blackwell Reference Online.

• Marx, Karl. "Estranged Labour." Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Karl Marx. www.marxists.org/archive/

• Marx, Karl. "Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly. Third Article. Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood." Articles by Marx and Engels in the Rheinisches Zeitung (1842-3). www.marxists.org/archive/
  • Consider these articles as documents giving some insight into significant formative experiences for Marx as he took part in efforts by the press to gain the right to cover legislative debates and as he closely observed how changing economic interests drove the transformation of legal prerogatives, expropriating some and empowering others.
• Carver, Terrell. The Cambridge Companion to Marx. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Cambridge Collections Online.

• Thomson, David. "Social and political thought." Chapter IV, Material Progress and World-wide Problems 1870–1898. Ed. F. H. Hinsley. The New Cambridge Modern History. Vol. 11, Cambridge University Press, 1962. Cambridge Histories Online.