Individual and society

The names of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels are inseparable from the social thought of the twentieth century. Every coming generation realises afresh that the heritage of the founders of scientific communism retains and will continue to retain its relevance, constantly opening up new horizons in our vision of the world, and again and again shaming its critics who proclaim Marxism's obsolescence in this age of atomic energy, space exploration and computers and dis miss the Marxian ideal of the man of communist society as utopian.
The interrelation of the individual and society is one of the central themes in the works of Marx and Engels, a theme to which they applied themselves throughout their creative life.
Society as the product of the interaction of men, man and social relations, the role of labour in forming man, the division of labour and man, man and the forms of property, man and the state, the alienation and self-alienation of man, the role of the masses and of the individual in history-these are only some of the subjects dealt with in this collection.
It is compiled on the chronological principle, which makes it possible to compare the writings of the young Marx and Engels with their mature works and trace their evolution, to see how the basic propositions of the Marxist theory of society were gradually crystallised, enriched in content and given greater depth.