Martineau James (1805–1900), English philosopher of religion and ethical intuitionist. As a minister and a professor, Martineau defended Unitarianism and opposed pantheism. In A Study of Religion (1888) Martineau agreed with Kant that reality as we experience it is the work of the mind, but he saw no reason to doubt his intuitive conviction that the phenomenal world corresponds to a real world of enduring, causally related objects. He believed that the only intelligible notion of causation is given by willing and concluded that reality is the expression of a divine will that is also the source of moral authority. In Types of Ethical Theory (1885) he claimed that the fundamental fact of ethics is the human tendency to approve and disapprove of the motives leading to voluntary actions, actions in which there are two motives present to consciousness. After freely choosing one of the motives, the agent can determine which action best expresses it. Since Martineau thought that agents intuitively know through conscience which motive is higher, the core of his ethical theory is a ranking of the thirteen principal motives, the highest of which is reverence. See also INTUITIONIS. J.W.A. Marx, Karl (1818–83), German social philosopher, economic theorist, and revolutionary. He lived and worked as a journalist in Cologne, Paris, and Brussels. After the unsuccessful 1848 revolutions in Europe, he settled in London, doing research and writing and earning some money as correspondent for the New York Tribune.
In early writings, he articulated his critique of the religiously and politically conservative implications of the then-reigning philosophy of Hegel, finding there an acceptance of existing private property relationships and of the alienation generated by them. Marx understood alienation as a state of radical disharmony (1) among individuals, (2) between them and their own life activity, or labor, and (3) between individuals and their system of production. Later, in his masterwork Capital (1867, 1885, 1894), Marx employed Hegel’s method of dialectic to generate an internal critique of the theory and practice of capitalism, showing that, under assumptions (notably that human labor is the source of economic value) found in such earlier theorists as Adam Smith, this system must undergo increasingly severe crises, resulting in the eventual seizure of control of the increasingly centralized means of production (factories, large farms, etc.) from the relatively small class of capitalist proprietors by the previously impoverished non-owners (the proletariat) in the interest of a thenceforth classless society.
Marx’s early writings, somewhat utopian in tone, most never published during his lifetime, emphasize social ethics and ontology. In them, he characterizes his position as a ‘humanism’ and a ‘naturalism.’ In the Theses on Feuerbach, he charts a middle path between Hegel’s idealist account of the nature of history as the selfunfolding of spirit and what Marx regards as the ahistorical, mechanistic, and passive materialist philosophy of Feuerbach; Marx proposes a conception of history as forged by human activity, or praxis, within determinate material conditions that vary by time and place. In later Marxism, this general position is often labeled dialectical materialism.
Marx began radically to question the nature of philosophy, coming to view it as ideology, i.e., a thought system parading as autonomous but in fact dependent on the material conditions of the society in which it is produced. The tone of Capital is therefore on the whole less philosophical and moralistic, more social scientific and tending toward historical determinism, than that of the earlier writings, but punctuated by bursts of indignation against the baneful effects of capitalism’s profit orientation and references to the ‘society of associated producers’ (socialism or communism) that would, or could, replace capitalist society. His enthusiastic predictions of immanent worldwide revolutionary changes, in various letters, articles, and the famous Communist Manifesto (1848; jointly authored with his close collaborator, Friedrich Engels), depart from the generally more hypothetical character of the text of Capital itself. The linchpin that perhaps best connects Marx’s earlier and later thought and guarantees his enduring relevance as a social philosopher is his analysis of the role of human labor power as a peculiar type of commodity within a system of commodity exchange (his theory of surplus value). Labor’s peculiarity, according to him, lies in its capacity actively to generate more exchange value than it itself costs employers as subsistence wages. But to treat human beings as profit-generating commodities risks neglecting to treat them as human beings. See also MARXISM , POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY , PRAXI. W.L.M.