Contemporary wisdom placed Fichte and Marx at opposite ends of the intellectual spectrum, but in this new enlightening investigation into the 19th-century German philosophical tradition, Tom Rockmore demonstrates a profound structural parallel between the positions of the two men. Rockmore develops his discussion of this parallel in two days: thematically in terms of analysis of several related concepts in the two positions, and historically in terms of the genesis of the parallel in the wider context of the 19th-century German tradition. He notes first that both Fichte (in his concern to carry Kant's positions to its logical conclusion) and Marx (in his critique of Hegel) develop the concepts of man as finite and active. Both Fichte and Marx understand man in anti being.