Atomic Theory and Realistic Man: Marx’s Transcendental Viewpoint and Its Emerging Logic Towards Communism
Zhang Zhongyuan, Xiao Guangpan
Abstract
This article, Atomic Theory and Realistic Man: Marx’s Transcendental Viewpoint and Its Emerging Logic Towards Communism, reconstructs the formative intellectual development of the young Karl Marx, arguing that the foundations of his later communist theory were already present in his student years. Zhang Zhongyuan and Xiao Guangpan challenge prevailing scholarship that attributes Marx’s early worldview primarily to external influences such as Hegelianism or French socialism, demonstrating instead that Marx’s philosophical revolution emerged from a dialectical synthesis of three lived intellectual contexts: Protestant ethics, Enlightenment rationalism, and German Romanticism. Through a detailed analysis of Marx’s early writings, legal studies, and engagement with ancient Greek philosophy — especially Epicurus’s atomic deviation theory — the authors show how Marx moved from idealist conceptions of freedom toward a material and historical understanding of human self-development. The essay argues that Epicurean philosophy provided Marx with the conceptual breakthrough to overcome both Kantian dualism and Hegelian speculative idealism, enabling him to reconceive freedom as a concrete, self-determined human activity rooted in everyday life. This transition laid the groundwork for Marx’s later inversion of Hegel, his critique of Feuerbach, and the emergence of a scientific conception of communism centered on the comprehensive development of real individuals. By situating Marx’s early intellectual evolution within its concrete historical and biographical context, the article contributes to Marxist scholarship by illuminating the intrinsic logic through which Marx’s concept of “realistic man” formed, well before his mature works.
Keywords
young Marx, Epicureanism, human freedom, dialectical development, origins of communism, Zhang Zhongyuan, Xiao Guangpan
