Conscienceism (1964) was the first comprehensive and progressive enterprise of systematizing facts and ends that independent Negro-African states, but still threatened and vulnerable, had to organize and accomplish.

 In this new edition (1969), Kwame Nkrumah, without changing anything from his initial words, nevertheless thought it necessary to adjust his thinking to the new situation created in Africa by the liberation movements.

 Founded on dialectical materialism, Conscienceism lays the theoretical bases of the social revolution in Africa, it releases at the conceptual level the matrix of a practice which will bring the African "conscience" to integrate, without getting lost in it, the forces which it work contradictorily. It is therefore a question of the theory of a practice, of a policy. Class struggle in ideology, the conquest of cultural identity against all the forces which obscure or reveal it, these are the essential objectives.

 Paradoxically, calling a theory "philosophical conscientism" whose foundation is matter, and dialectic the motor, marked in NKRUMAH the concern, imposed by African reality itself, to enhance - against a certain reductive Marxism - the role of superstructures ( ideology, art, ethics ...) in the liberation struggle.