SOURCE: Taylor, Charles. “Feuerbach and the Roots of Materialism.”¹ Political Studies 26, no. 3 (September 1978): 417-21.

In the following review, originally broadcast on January 6, 1978, Taylor reviews Marx W. Wartofsky's influential work Feuerbach, and suggests that Feuerbach should not be seen as merely a transitional figure between Hegel and Marx.

Feuerbach is one of those figures who appears again and again in the footnotes and introductory paragraphs of works on other philosophers, but is very rarely studied for himself. Everyone knows him as a transition figure: principally as the most important of the ‘young Hegelians’ of the 1840s who gave a human-centred twist to Hegel's thought, and thereby provided Marx with one of his reference points—but also of course as one of the originators of a modern tradition of debunking and reinterpreting religious myth in terms of man, and one of the inspirers of the contemporary school of the theology...