Young Marx

Some theorists consider Karl Marx's thought to be divided into a "young" period and a "mature" one. There is disagreement to when Marx's thought began to mature, and the problem of the idea of a "Young Marx" is the problem of tracking the development of Marx's works and of its possible unity. The problem thus centres on Marx's transition from philosophy to economics, which has been considered by orthodox Marxism as a progressive change towards scientific socialism. This positivist reading has however been challenged by Marxist theorists, like members of the New Left. They pointed out the humanist side in Marx's work, and how he in his early writings focused on liberation from wage-slavery and freedom from alienation, that they claimed was a forgotten element of Marx's writings and central to understanding his later work.

Étienne Balibar claims that Marx's works cannot be divided into "economic works" (Das Kapital), "philosophical works" and "historical works" (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the 1871 Civil War in France, etc.). Marx's philosophy is inextricably linked to his critique of political economy and to his historical interventions in the workers' movement, such as the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program: the problematic is also related to Marx's rupture with university and its teachings concerning German Idealism and his encounter with the proletariat, leading him to write, along with Engels, The Communist Manifesto a year before the Revolutions of 1848. Marxism's philosophical roots were commonly explained (for example by Lenin) as derived from three sources: English political economy; French utopian socialism, republicanism and radicalism; and German idealist philosophy. Although this "three sources" model is an oversimplification, it still has some measure of truth.