Massimiliano Muci is a PhD student at York University in Toronto, where he works under the supervision of Marcello Musto and serves as a teaching assistant in political theory. He completed his master’s studies at the universities of Bologna and Bielefeld. His work is situated at the intersection of the history of ideas and 19th and 20th century political philosophy, and in his research proposal he investigates how Marx’s philosophical position in his student years develops through a dialogue with – and in opposition to – post-Hegelian thought.
Massimiliano Muci
Doctoral DAAD Fellow
Period at the center: August 2026 – January 2027
Research Project: Seeking the Idea in Reality Itself. Historical Transformation and Objectivity in Marx’s Berlin Writings
Email: muci@yorku.ca
Research Project
Seeking the Idea in Reality Itself. Historical Transformation and Objectivity in Marx’s Berlin Writings
My research project reconstructs the philosophical position Karl Marx worked out during his years as a student in Berlin (1836–1841). The Berlin corpus contains Marx’s only writings that take philosophy in its traditional sense as their explicit subject: his dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus, the Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy, the Berlin Notebooks, and his extant correspondence.
These writings emerged as intellectuals in the German Vormärz were perceiving the collapse of Hegel’s systematic project. A central concern was the relationship between thought and historical transformation, and the role of philosophy within transformative practice. I argue that Marx’s response does not culminate in a philosophy of self-conscious subjectivity. Rather, it combines a critique of the one-sidedness of self-consciousness with an anti-systematic orientation, opening space for an independent philosophical project.
To substantiate this claim, I first approach Marx’s Berlin years historiographically, reconstructing the genesis of his conceptual constellation in relation to Hegel’s legacy and key figures of post-Hegelian thought. I then examine the doctoral dissertation’s central theoretical claims, asking how Marx’s epistemological interpretation of the Epicurean categories informs his own understanding of the relationship between thought and reality and his account of truth. I also consider whether the Berlin corpus, by uncovering the logical and dialectical foundations of Epicurean objectivity, provides resources for an alternative to post-Hegelian subjectivism. Finally, I reconstruct Marx’s conception of the role and scope of philosophy as it emerges through a mythic idiom (in his view, philosophy must be at once Prometheus and Deucalion), and compare this conception with Epicurus’ praxis of withdrawal and Bruno Bauer’s model of immanent critique.
This project is conducted as part of the Marie Curie Staff Exchange Project REACT, examining how the dynamics of the contemporary culture industry and digital capitalism expose the crisis of contemporary liberalism, reshape subjectivity, and foster authoritarian tendencies.