Marxism and the Individual

“Like Marx, Cem Eroğul has a philosophical vision of human history centring on the individual, and an activist engagement with the political structures through which humanity negates its best qualities as a species. This book finds more individualism in Marx than many Marxists would like, and more reason to celebrate it. For both writers the anger at repression has—fortunately for us—stimulated critique and fostered inspiration.”
—Terrell Carver, Professor of Political Theory, University of Bristol, UK

"Cem Eroğul's Marxism and the Individual is a highly valuable contribution in the present era of Marx revival. This is so not only because of the author's great erudition and meticulous writing, but for his deep consideration of Marx's conceptions of the individual, the human, and species being. Departing from the current convention of situating Marx mainly in the areas of political economy, history, and philosophy, but by no means unaware of them, Eroğul makes an original contribution by drawing extensively from areas currently neglected in Marxism studies, such as sociology both classical and new, social psychology, and theories of human evolution, among others. He shows how these disciplines of social sciences have benefitted from Marx's critical methods, but also how they can enrich Marxism studies. Eroğul, in the manner of Marx and Engels, sees Marxism as 'science’ without positivist connotations. After a long period of neglect of a genuine interest in international readings of Marx, we have in Marxism and the Individual an example of another way of reading which attempts to address that gap. Cem Eroğul brings to us from Turkey a valuable reading of Marx's critique and social analysis which overcomes the current binary perception of Marxism as Eastern and Western.”
—Himani Bannerji, Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar, Department of Sociology, York University, Canada
This book attempts to develop a Marxist theory of the human individual. It contends that the standard description of the human as a bio-psycho-social being is fundamentally deficient as it doesn’t specify which of these attributes is the determining one. As long as this is not done, the real nature of humanity cannot be uncovered.
Cem Eroğul is a retired professor of constitutional law at Ankara University, and author of textbooks and monographs on constitutional law and comparative government (in Turkish), including An Essay on the Nature of the State (1981).