The mystery of life has intrigued man’s mind from the beginning, as his earliest ideas and beliefs show. Some men, indeed, have been so fascinated as to make it the focal point of all human experience and to see in it the basic type of reality on which everything else is modelled or to which, at least, it is ordered. There is, of course, one field in which such notions as ‘life’, ‘soul’ and ‘organism’ have a particularly powerful attraction, namely that of political philosophy. The ideal city- state of Plato is based on the conception of society as a great organism, a living universe animated by a single soul. Nor is it by accident that in his political philosophy Hegel was so greatly influenced by Plato’s thought, even if in taking it over he modified it profoundly. And Hegel, in turn, is in this matter the principal source of Marx’s thought.

If in fact we are to grasp Marx’s thought in its original contours before these became ironed out under the successive manipulations of his chief disciples Engels, Lenin and Stalin, we must try to see it in the context of the Hegelian school which was its starting point. The main lines of Marxism were laid down in the philosophic climate of Germany—more exactly Prussia—of the years 1830-1845. Hegel himself had died in 1831, but his thought dominated succeeding thinkers who could do no more than repeat the Master’s philosophy while at the same time struggling vainly against it.