Abstract

ABSTRACT While Marx threw off his attraction to Romanticism when he was still a teenager, scholars have detected various senses in which deep structures of Romantic thought persist in his work. These structures have frequently been taken as contributing factors to Marx’s alleged millenarianism, doctrinaire rigidity, and intolerance. The mature Marx does draw on Romantic ideas at crucial moments; but rather than reinforcing an image of Marx as an intolerant ideologue, the Romantic element in his thought, properly construed, suggests theoretical openness and humility before an unmasterable reality.