In the eighteenth century, Germany came under the spell of the mysterious and alluring world of classical antiquity in the imaginations of Winckelmann, Lessing, Novalis, Goethe, Schiller, and Hölderlin. But the spell was focused in the areas of literature and art. By the nineteenth century, however, this strange attraction of the Greeks began to pervade German political and economic theory, as well as its ethics and social philosophy. These German thinkers critically evaluated the principles and structures of modernity in light of a perceived failure to conform to (or at least confront) the ideals of the ancients; economic and political institutions were increasingly examined through the paradigm of classical aspirations and philosophical expectations. "Marx and Aristotle" brings together an outstanding multidisciplinary collection of recent scholarship to look further behind this historical veil by examining the influence of classical Greek philosophy, especially the thought of Aristotle and Epicurus, on the works of the nineteenth-century social theorist Karl Marx.

 

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