 For many of these intellectuals, answering this question meant a return to Marx’s early work (those texts written before 1845) in the hopes of finding the “key” to his philosophy. In pieces like “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (1844), and the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844), these thinkers found and championed a Marx obviously indebted to a Hegelian dialectical understanding of subjectivity and historical development and deeply concerned about ending human alienation. It is to this project—that of finding the true method, aim, and intent of Marx’s philosophy in his early work’s emphasis on the realization of full human freedom and potentials through dialectical historical change—that Althusser made the first of his public “interventions” into Marxist philosophy. He inaugurated this effort with the essay “On the Young Marx” (1961), which sought to demonstrate that this method of looking to Marx’s early work for the key to his philosophy was methodologically suspect and ideologically driven. Further, in this essay and in subsequent work, he developed an alternate method of investigation or “reading” that would allow Marx’s true philosophy to be revealed in its purity.