CONCEPT OF NATURE IN THE WORKS OF MARX AND EMERSON PHILOSOPHY ESSAY   pt1   1700w

Given the salience of current debates in the philosophy of social theory concerning the necessity or impossibility of grand narratives, or universalising theory, and the utility or dis-utility of the post-structural, relativist approach, I find it surprising that no one has yet stumbled upon the idea of comparing the works of Karl Marx and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the former the producer of the most influential grand-narrative in recent world political and economic history, and the later one of the more forceful exponents of experiential truth as elaborated upon by Nietzsche, and of historical relativism as practised by Foucault.

A comparison of the work of these two individuals is justifiable on more grounds than their respective contributions to the development of contemporary sociological thought. Both witnessed the modern age, what appears to many “as the culminating point of human development… announc[ing] the secret of human history, hitherto concealed from the eyes of its participants,” (Kumar, 81) but both witnessed it from very different perspectives.