The Manuscripts provide a critique of classical political economy grounded in the philosophies of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach.

[3] While the text's importance was often downplayed by orthodox Marxists as being "philosophical" or "anthropological" rather than "scientific", the notebooks provide insight into Marx's thought at the time of its first formulation.

Several members of the philosophical milieu that he then belonged to, the Young Hegelians, had moved to Paris in the previous year to establish a journal, the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher.

[8] It was in this period that Marx made the acquaintance of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Louis Blanc, Heinrich Heine, Georg Herwegh, Mikhail Bakunin, Pierre Leroux and most importantly, Friedrich Engels.

[4] The notebooks are a fragmentary, incomplete work, consisting of four manuscripts that range from extracts from books with comments, loosely connected notes and reflections on various topics, to a comprehensive assessment of Hegel's philosophy.

[10] The text marks the first appearance together of what Engels described as the three constituent elements in Marx's thought: German idealist philosophy, French socialism, and English economics.

[11] In addition to Hegel, Marx addresses the work of various socialist writers, and that of the fathers of political economy: Francois Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Jean-Baptiste Say and James Mill.

[1] At the time of their first publication, their most striking feature was their dissimilarity to the philosophy of dialectical materialism that was official within the Soviet Union and the European Communist Parties.

[5] The Manuscripts offer a trenchant analysis of Hegel that is far more difficult and complex than the "dialectics of nature" that Georgi Plekhanov and his disciple Lenin had derived from Engels's Anti-Dühring.

[17] Christopher J. Arthur comments that the term, which appears in Hegel's Science of Logic, has in ordinary language the double meaning of "to abolish" and "to preserve".

[20] Christopher J. Arthur notes that Entäusserung is an unusual German word that can also be translated as "renunciation", "parting with", "relinquishment", "externalization", "divestiture" or "surrender".

Arthur believes "externalization" is the closest of these translations, but he avoids using this word as it may be confused with a distinct term that Marx uses elsewhere: "Vergegenständlichung" or "objectification".

[18] The dialectical structure of Marx's theory is another difficulty of the text, as the definition of certain key concepts can be hard to understand for those trained in positivist and empiricist philosophical traditions.

Marx's notebooks provide a general philosophical analysis of the basic concepts of political economy: capital, rent, labor, property, money, commodities, needs, and wages.

First, German liberal writer Wilhelm Schulz on the pauperization of workers, the dehumanizing effects of machinery, and the growing number of women and children working.

In the second section, Marx focuses on the “Profit of Capital.” He quotes Adam Smith to define capital as the power to command labor and its products.

Marx criticizes the classical economists for having an abstract and superficial understanding of labor, arguing that their theories miss the deeper connections between various economic factors.

Unlike classical economists, who start with presuppositions and offer general laws, Marx aims to explain the essential connections among private property, competition, division of labor, capital, and land ownership.

He criticizes the economists for constructing an abstract, fictitious state of nature, similar to how theology explains the origin of evil through the fall of man, instead of understanding the historical and necessary development of economic factors.

It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be the solution.Marx discusses three aspects of his conception of communism in depth: its historical bases, its social character and its regard for the individual.

[47] Marx secondly claims that the relation of man to himself, to other men and to what he produces in an unalienated situation shows that it is the social character of labor that is basic.

[51] Marx believes the supersession of private property will be a total liberation of all human faculties: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking, observing, feeling, desiring, acting and loving will all become means of appropriating reality.

[53] A full and harmonious development of man's cultural potentialities will arise, where abstract intellectual oppositions — "subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and passivity"[54] — will disappear.

[57] Marx deems it necessary to discuss the Hegelian dialectic because Hegel has grasped the essence of man's labor in a manner that was hidden from the classical economists.

[12] Hegel understands that the objects which appear to order men's lives — their religion, their wealth — in fact belong to man and are the product of essential human capacities.

[63] Marx rejects Hegel's notion of Spirit, believing that man's mental activities — his ideas — are by themselves insufficient to explain social and cultural change.

The immediate impact of their publication was tempered by the rise of Nazism in Germany in 1933, where the work might have had its greatest reception, and by the start of Stalin’s purges in Russia in 1934.

[76] In this period, Galvano Della Volpe was the first to translate and discuss the Manuscripts in Italian, propounding an interpretation that differed greatly from that of Lukács, Marcuse and Lefebvre and that inspired its own school of thought.

[80] In the US, the Manuscripts were embraced enthusiastically in the late fifties and early sixties by the intellectual current subsequently known as the New Left,[81] with a volume containing an introduction by Erich Fromm published in 1961.

[84] Conversely, the Soviet Union largely ignored the Manuscripts, believing them to belong to Marx's "early writings", which expound a line of thought that had led him nowhere.