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Moses Hess

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Moses Hess

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German philosopher (1812–1875)

Person · Open Library

Born
1812
Died
1875
Works
51

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

Type
Person

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Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners
1
Total plays
1

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Quotes

  • The vocation of man, as that of any other creature, is to be active in all his being. But man cannot act as an individual. The essence of his life activity is cooperation with other individuals of his species. Outside this cooperation, outside of society, man does not achieve any specific human activity. But so long as this co-operation is arbitrarily ruled by accidentality, so long as it is not organized, man remains limited and constricted in his life-activity....
  • The focus of all life is its economy, the mode through which every living creature produces its material existence. I know no other criterion for the evaluation of social life except that of social economy. In society, just like anywhere else, the mode of production is the focus around which revolve all the modes of life: in the historical life of conscious beings, it is also the focus of all modes of consciousness.

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Key facts

Born
21 January 1812, Bonn , France
Died
6 April 1875 (aged 63), Paris , France
Resting place
Kinneret Cemetery, Israel
Spouse
Sibylle Pesch
Education
University of Bonn
School
Young Hegelians , Socialism , Zionism
Main interests
Political philosophy
Notable works
Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question
Notable ideas
Labor Zionism

via Wikipedia infobox

Wikidata facts

Image
Moses Hess.jpg
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Commons category
Moses Hess
date of birth
1812-01-21
date of death
1875-04-06
Commons gallery
Moses Hess
name in native language
Moses Hess
Sources (7)

via Wikidata · CC0

~27 min read

Article

Moses Hess (21 January 1812 – 6 April 1875) was a German-Jewish philosopher, a writer on socialism, and in later life, a forerunner of the political movement that became known as Zionism. His intellectual journey included significant contributions to the early development of socialist theory, and he was a close collaborator and an important influence on Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In his later life, Hess's focus shifted towards Jewish nationalism, culminating in his seminal 1862 work, Rome and Jerusalem.

Born in the French-occupied Rhineland, Hess was raised in a traditional Jewish home but broke away in his youth to pursue a path of philosophy and radical politics. His first book, The Holy History of Mankind (1837), proposed a socialist society founded on a synthesis of Jewish and Christian ethics, mediated through the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. In the 1840s, he became a central figure among the Young Hegelians, where he developed a theory of "ethical socialism" and was one of the first thinkers in the German tradition to articulate a sophisticated theory of alienation rooted in social and economic conditions.

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