page_title: Obscurantism
section_title: Marx
hierarchical_section_title: Obscurantism / Deliberate obscurity / Marx
caption_attribution_description: English: Photographic portrait of Karl Marx.Русский: Карл Маркс, 1861 год, начало мая. Лондон. Фотография датируется по письму Маркса Лассалю.
context_page_description: Obscurantism is the practice of deliberately presenting information in an imprecise and abstruse manner, often designed to forestall further inquiry and understanding. There are two historical and intellectual denotations of Obscurantism: the deliberate restriction of knowledge—opposition to disseminating knowledge; and deliberate obscurity—a recondite literary or artistic style, characterized by deliberate vagueness.
  The term obscurantism derives from the title of the 16th-century satire Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum, that was based upon the intellectual dispute between the German humanist Johann Reuchlin and the monk Johannes Pfefferkorn of the Dominican Order, about whether or not all Jewish books should be burned as un-Christian heresy. Earlier, in 1509, the monk Pfefferkorn had obtained permission from Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, to burn all copies of the Talmud known to be in the Holy Roman Empire; the Letters of Obscure Men satirized the Dominican arguments for burning "un-Christian" works.
  In the 18th century, Enlightenment philosophers applied the term obscurantist to any enemy of intellectual enlightenment and the liberal diffusion of knowledge.
context_section_description: In his early works, Karl Marx criticized German and French philosophy, especially German Idealism, for its traditions of German irrationalism and ideologically motivated obscurantism. Later thinkers whom he influenced, such as the philosopher György Lukács and social theorist Jürgen Habermas, followed with similar arguments of their own. However, philosophers such as Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek in turn criticized Marx and Marxist philosophy as obscurantist (however, see above for Hayek's particular interpretation of the term).
caption: Karl Marx in 1861
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