This research will examine the relationship between the theory articulated in The Communist Manifesto and earlier traditions of Western thought, particularly the Enlightenment. The research will set forth the context in which the philosophical connections are relevant to an understanding of Marxist thought and then discuss how Marx can be said to build upon the intellectual inheritance of the Enlightenment and Western liberalism while at the same time rejecting much of the content of the inheritance, with a view toward identifying implications for Marx's belief that socialism was inevitable and necessary.
In the background of the emergence of The Communist Manifesto in 1848 was undoubtedly the intellectual and political foment surrounding the twin phenomena of rapid industrialization and urbanization on one hand and on the other the persistence of social and political rigidity that had been installed in Europe as a consequence of Napoleon's defeat in 1815 and the ascendance of Metternich's Concert System. Marx reaches even further back into European history to describe the present state of European society and political economy, and he is at some pains to establish a historical context for his explanation of widespread hostility to communism, the "spectre haunting Europe" (49). In other words, there is a basis in history for the situation of class confrontation that dominates the structure of European experience. Once that basis is explained, the rationale for revolution will have been established and a new world order, marked by liberation of the proletariat from the bonds of what Engels in a note to the main text describes as "the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labour" (50n), will have been legitimated.
An important feature of this explanation is Marx's positioning of his argument in the history of European thought. That effort is located in the intellectual inheritan...