A primer of the often overlooked yet significant writings of Marx on religion.

This work brings together new translations of Marx's most important texts in political philosophy written after 1848. Marx challenged political theory to its very fundamentals, as his works do not follow traditional models for exploring politics theoretically. In his introduction, Terrell Carver situates Marx in a politics of democratic constitutionalism and revolutionary communism. The works are presented here complete, according to the first editions or the earliest manuscript state, and include the Manifesto of the Communist Party, the preface of 1859 to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, The Civil War in France, and the little-known Notes on Adolph Wagner. More than most political theorists, Marx made contemporary politics the focus for his theoretical work. He created a distinctive kind of political theory, and this volume aims to make it accessible today.

Document from the year 2015 in the subject Sociology - Religion, , language: English, abstract: Without the fear of contradicting anyone, it can generally be held that academicians worldwide describe Karl Marx as an atheist. This point needs not to be challenged or scrutinised in great depths. The reason is that Marx’s personal mentality or intellectual bending does not profoundly affect the making of Marxism and its applications to the real world. The first country to embrace scientific socialism along Marxist lines came into existence in the form of erstwhile Soviet Union. The Soviet Union or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was a country that began taking shape in the year 1917. However, Marx had died rather long ago, in the year 1883. So any attempt to find a direct, personalised connection between Marx and USSR is nothing but academically irrelevant. This irrelevance is further bulged when it is considered that Marx was especially interested in the affairs of Germany. According to Marx, only well-developed capitalist economies were expected to be at the verge of a socialist revolution (Desai 2004). However, when the Bolsheviks of a backward capitalist country like Russia managed to establish the USSR, Marx’s predictions came under close scrutiny by the contemporary thinkers (Desai 2004). In the current research work, the economic importance of this development is not the main focus area. The main focus area is Marxism and religion. The main point of contention is not what Marx thought about religion. Overwhelming majority of scholars think that Marx was a decided atheist. However, the main point of contention is what Marxists should actually do while handling religion. Religion, even in its simplest form, has the capability of manifesting as both personalised and socially dispersed phenomena. While exploring a possible alternative to capitalism, Marxist and pro-Marxist leaders contemplated on various societal issues, which included religion and theology as well (Desai 2004; Lobkowicz 1964). So it is a complex yet necessary pursuit to understand how Marxism needs religion to be handled. If Marxism were completely antireligious, then most of the world’s socialist governments would not have allowed religious freedom (at least officially). For example, even the Soviet Constitution did never authorise the state to destroy religion or persecute people on religious grounds (Ginsburgs 1982). This kind of approach cannot be simplified just on the basis of a longing for internationalism.

Includes the complete Communist Manifesto and substantial extracts from On the Jewish Question, the German Ideology, Grundrisse, and Capital, a broad representation of his letters, and lesser-known works, especially his long-unavailable, early works.

PROSE 2020 Single Volume Reference Finalist! Philosophers throughout history have debated the existence of gods, but it is only in recent years that the absence of such a belief has become a significant topic of philosophical analysis, in particular for philosophers of religion. Although it is difficult to trace the historical contours of atheism as the lack of belief in a higher power, the reasoned, reflective, and thoughtful rejection of theism has become commonplace in many modern intellectual circles, including academic philosophy where disciplinary data indicates that a large majority of philosophers self-identify as atheists. As the first book of its kind to bring together a collection of writing on the philosophical aspects of atheism both historical and contemporary, the Companion to Atheism and Philosophy stages an explicit, constructive, and comprehensive conversation between philosophy and atheism to examine the ways in which atheist thought intersects with ideas and positions from a variety of philosophical and theological sub-disciplines. The Companion begins by addressing the foundational questions and lingering controversies which underpin philosophical thought about atheism, exploring the implications of major developments in the history of philosophy for the modern atheistic worldview. Divided into eight distinct sections, essays consider a range of thinkers who were widely believed to have been atheists—including David Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton—and survey different kinds of objections to theism and atheism, including logical, evidential, normative, and prudential. Later chapters trace the relationship between atheism and metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy oriented around topics such as pragmatism, postmodernism, freedom, education, violence, and happiness. Deftly curated and thoughtfully composed, A Companion to Atheism and Philosophy is the most ambitious and authoritative account of philosophical thinking on atheism available, and is a first-rate resource for academics, professionals, and students of philosophy, religious studies, and theology.

The relationship between religion and modern culture remains a controversial issue within Christian theology. Using the concept of “cultural modernity,” Francis Ching-Wah Yip reconstructs Paul Tillich’s interpretation of modernity and shows that Tillich’s notion of theonomy served to underscore the problems of modernity and to develop a response.