‘The German Ideology’ is a retrieved set of manuscripts by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published some 87 years after they were originally written. Some scholars argue the collection of manuscripts should not be considered a real text at all. Others, like Tom Whyman, argue the work provides the core of Marx’s thought and the primary ideas that have relevance to all of us.

If philosophy is important – if anyone in human history has ever been an ‘important’ philosopher – then Karl Marx is. The nature of philosophical thought and writing, insulated from practice in the curious way that it is, is such that philosophers must typically be anxious about the ‘real-world’ impact of their work: is there actually any point to this at all? But Marx’s ideas both have driven, and continue to drive, actual events of seismic importance to actual global human history – and in a much more direct way than those of, say, Plato or Descartes.

As Marx famously wrote in his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point is to change it.” If this is to be the measure (and leaving aside the question, which anyone on the right would ask at this point, as to whether this change must actually be good), then Marx’s philosophical career must be accounted a monumental success.