At first as I envisioned this thesis topic, I had trouble imagining the mindset of a person living in the 1800’s, so I started skimming the writings of some of the great philosophers of the day: Locke, Hegel, Kant, Darwin …
Around that time, two classmates dropped by my house for a visit. One of them left the room and returned grinning like she’d found the key to my school locker.
“Guess what Claire has in her bathroom?” She held up a dog-earred paperback. “Friedrich Nietzche!”
Oh yeah?! So guess what I sleuthed out on her bookshelf? The Marx-Engels Reader! Ha!
Oddly, the Marx-Engels Reader has been one of my favorite nineteenth century heavyweights. Karl Marx goes into painstaking detail on human history. He strikes me as ridden with angst, desperate to determine how on earth human beings landed in such a commercial industrial fix. In Marx’s early years, the pre-industrial way of life, where people devoted their lives to the betterment of their families and their village, was in rapid decline. More and more people were moving to town for factory jobs and a monetary income.
Marx saw this trend toward focus on the individual as the loss of human interdependence and cooperation. I hear an echo in our “global community” parlance of today in these words of Karl Marx, written in 1845-46 in The German Ideology:
Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.