THE ONTOLOGICAL IMPOSITION IN THE PROCESS OF CONSTITUTING THE MARXIAN OBJECT OF STUDY

Abstract

Based on a reading of Lukács's later works, this article conceives of Marxist thought as a social theory. From this perspective, his elaborations offer an explanation of both the social being in its bourgeois particularity, whose economic base is constituted by the capitalist production system, and the universality of the social being, whose essential traits are independent of historical time and the distinct modes of producing material life. This study retraces Marx's intellectual trajectory up to 1844, the year in which his first systematic critique of classical political economy was published through the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. It seeks to indicate that the unease that motivated the German philosopher to confront his object of study was, above all, ontological in nature, aimed at understanding the being of sociability that arose from the ruins of feudalism.