In early 1841, while working on his dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus, Marx compiled several notebooks of excerpts from modern philosophers: some works of Leibniz, Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature, Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus and epistolary, and Rosenkranz’s History of Kantian Philosophy. As Matheron has already demonstrated with re-gard to the Spinoza Notebook, Marx’s extracts constitute an attempt to appropriate the thought of the philosophers studied in order to adapt it to one’s own theoretical-political purposes.
