Breaking the Bonds of Fate

The
immanent dialectic of the ancient Greek materialist philosopher, Epicurus
(341-270 BCE), helped inspire Karl Marx, and formed the subject of his
doctoral dissertation. Marx's detailed study of Epicurus led him to develop
his own materialist dialectic in distinction to the idealist philosophy of
G.W.F. Hegel. Until now, however, there has been no full scholarly treatment
of the relation of Epicurus to Marx, paying equal attention to both thinkers
and examining the long-term impact of Epicureanism on Marxist thought.



Breaking the Bonds of Fate: Epicurus and Marx fills this gap. Taking into
consideration today's revolution in the understanding of Epicurus-resulting
from the recovery of fragments of his major work On Nature in the carbonized
papyri that survived the burying in volcanic ash of the Roman town
Herculaneum when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE-it demonstrates that this new
interpretation corresponds closely to Marx's nineteenth-century treatment of
Epicurus. The result is to fundamentally transform our contemporary
understanding of both Epicurus and Marx.
The last (though logically the first) book to be written in a trilogy
that also includes John Bellamy Foster's Marx's Ecology: Materialism and
Nature (2000) and his The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (2020),
Breaking the Bonds of Fate: Epicurus and Marx provides a detailed historical
and textual analysis grounding the argument of all three works. Not only does
this clarify Marx's relation to materialism and ecology, but also his
analysis of the of freedom and necessity. Both Epicurus' philosophy and that
of Marx are given new meaning in our time, highlighting questions of
substantive equality, dialectical naturalism, and sustainable community.