This book doesn't mention any of the more recent philosophers that I would normally consider the best German thinkers, but it is excellent at setting Karl Marx in the context in which he went to Germany to study, dropped law for philosophy, found Hegel convincing, and attacked what he considered the "Ideology" of the Germany of that time. The distinction between philosophy and ideology is the mystery which makes this book interesting. "Ideology, Napolean asserted, was abstract speculation divorced from reality. With Napoleon the term *ideology* thus acquired a perjorative meaning that challenged philosophy's traditional sovereignty. To call philosophy `ideology' was now to say it was ineffective in the world. It operated in a dream world of abstraction." (p. 5).

The government of Germany, back in the early 1840s, was not based on elections depending on ideology to determine policies conforming to the will of those who were governed, and France, at the time of Napoleon, might be considered the greatest failure in Europe of the use of revolution to establish a government of the people. Translating anything that this book is about into practical politics is probably beyond the capacity of what Mark Crispin Miller called TV in THE BUSH DYSLEXICON (see "But there is now very little place for . . ." p. 64 of Miller). The thing I like about Harold Mah's book, THE END OF PHILOSOPHY, THE ORIGIN OF "IDEOLOGY"/KARL MARX AND THE CRISIS OF THE YOUNG HEGELIANS is that he gets the picture right from the religious perspective, which is a minor aspect of the book. The distinctions between followers of Hegel were religious as well as political:

If God as spirit developed by embodying itself in the mind of humanity and the institutions of the present, then this was entirely at odds with the Christian notion of a transcendent God who promised fulfillment in an afterlife. The debate over Hegel's supposed pantheism and whether or not his philosophy disallowed the possibility of immortality raged throughout the 1830s. In 1835, the publication of David Friedrich Strauss's LIFE OF JESUS radically transformed the controversy. Up to then, Hegelians had attempted to reconcile Christianity and philosophy, a transcendent God and immanent spirit. But Strauss asserted that reconciliation was no longer possible . . . (p. 37)

As Strauss himself later noted, the controversy over his book brought about yet another alignment in the Hegelian school. Orthodox or "right" Hegelians continued to cling to the conventional Hegelian view of the substantive compatibility of Christianity and philosophy. "Center" Hegelians tried to reach a compromise, asserting that some aspects of the two forms of consciousness could be reconciled. "Left" or Young Hegelians accepted Strauss's rejection of Christianity and his humanism. (p. 37).

That much of the book is really clear to me, and a good place to start a biography which ends with the thought:

The theory of ideology strives to remedy the intellectual's sense of being severed from the real world. Its formulation is his attempt to come to terms with a world that has forsaken him. (p. 229)

Then there are notes from page 231 to 279, citing a lot of original sources. By the time I got to the index, I was looking for things that weren't there. Fichte is only mentioned on one page, with a line of poetry that Karl Marx wrote:

Kant and Fichte soar to heavens blue . . . (p. 166).

Marx "read widely in different philosophies, including those of Kant and Fichte," but "Marx's intellectual clarification" was supposed to be "That which--in the street I find."

This book is the right size to carry along with you. The pictures are excellent. That is the good stuff. The text is dense, complex and scientifically boring. The arrangement is unusual in that it classifies the shells by the type of surface on which they live. This is no help to someone who wants to identify a shell from a certain family as only one or two are illustrated. The book does not give any indication of abundance, value or availability. It does not contain a bibliography so there is no way to track down a book that deals with a family such as the tropical cones. I was less than pleased with this purchase