The Lightning of Ideas
Reason and Revolution 1835–1848
The insight then to which….philosophy is to lead us, is that the real world is as it ought to be—that the truly good—the universal divine reason—is not a mere abstraction, but a vital principle capable of realizing itself. This Good, this Reason, in its most concrete form, is God. God governs the world; the actual working of his government—the carrying out of his plan—is the History of the World….Before the pure light of this divine Idea— which is no mere Ideal—the phantom of a world whose events are an incoherent concourse of fortuitous circumstances, utterly vanishes.
—Hegel, The Philosophy of History
German philosophy is a serious matter, of concern to all mankind. Our remotest descendants alone will be able to judge whether we are to be blamed or praised for having first produced our philosophy and then our revolution. But it seems to me that a methodical people like the Germans had to commence with the Reformation. Thereafter they could occupy themselves with philosophy, and only when they had completed that task, were they in a position to pass on to political revolution. I find this sequence very reasonable. The heads which philosophy used for reflection could later be chopped off by the revolution, for its own purposes. But philosophy could never have used these heads if the revolution had first chopped them off.
—Heinrich Heine
Until now philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.
—Karl Marx
While Britain was roaming the high seas, sending its goods and its culture far and wide—and from its factories, teeming treasures of linens, cottons and woollens, coal and iron—a revolution was taking place in Germany that was to shake the world as profoundly, though in an altogether different manner, as the industrial revolution in England. This revolution, now in the making, had as yet no terrestrial abode except in the minds of philosophers—who had, as one wit remarked, taken heaven for their empire as the English had taken the earth. Had these philosophers remained in their celestial regions all might have been well, or at least quiescent, on earth. But Thought is a restless thing, even when it is transcendental and ideal. Once it descends from its empyrean lodgments, finds a congenial home and the right moment, and turns to Action—the consequences may be far-reaching.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel died of cholera in 1831, in his sixty-first year. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died in the fullness of his eighty-two years in 1832. Two mighty phenomena, they epitomize the end of a great era: Hegel the last of the philosophic encyclopedists, Goethe the last of the poet-pansophists. Of both it might be said, as Bacon said of himself, that they had “taken all knowledge to be their province.” Both constructed vast theodicies, cosmic in character, and secular, though mantled in quasi-religious garb: Hegel translating God into the ideal forms of Reason and Logic, which irresistibly, as Creator, objectified themselves in an ever-developing universe, moving toward the attainment of absolute Freedom; protean Goethe, who had completed his Faust in the year of his death, objectified the cosmic process in the titanic figure of an Übermensch, a superman, Faust, and synthesized the world’s major intellectual experiences in that scholar’s journeyings through microcosm and macrocosm. In Goethe’s work are concentrated Sturm und Drang, classical and Christian heaven and hell, medievalism and Romanticism, and the achievement, through activity, of ultimate salvation. Faust is the last embodiment of a cosmopolitan Humanitätsideal, the last evidence of that Olympianism that bridged two centuries and saw the advent of its own disintegration. Hegel, too, synthesized a world of thought and experiences, marking out an upward path toward a secular salvation. Each of them was to experience, if not personally, certainly in his creations, the questionings of a young opposition, characteristically in one case, Jung Deutschland—Young Germany; in the other, the Jung-Hegelianer—Young Hegelians. The Young Germans saw in Goethe the last representative of what Heine called the “Art Epoch” in German literature; a figure standing “above the battle,” grand in his own right but unfitted now to guide a new generation in its intellectual, political and social warfare against absolutism. A wing of the Young Hegelians will begin to batter down the mighty fortress built by the master, and attempt new structures from its huge fragments …It is not often that history materializes a portentous symbolism of an epoch, as it did when it brought three world-historic figures together within the compass of the minuscule area of a world map: Napoleon, Goethe, and Hegel—Hegel in Jena in 1806; Goethe in Weimar at the moment when the reality and fiction of a Holy Roman Empire was being shattered at the Battle of Jena. Goethe confronted Napoleon as an equal, his Jovian calm unruffled by the course of history. Hegel, philosopher-professor, wandered through Jena, carrying the completed version of his Phenomenology of Mind to his printers, probably still unaware of the meaning of the cannonade. If he saw Napoleon but at a distance, he was no less reverent toward him than Goethe….
It is not carrying the simile too far to see in Hegel a Faustian character. But what Faust strove to but could never realize, it seemed the philosopher achieved. Faust had cried out in an agony of frustration his need to discover what it was that held the world together:
Dass ich nicht mehr mit saurem Schweiss,
Zu sagen brauche, was ich nicht weiss;
Dass ich erkenne, was die Welt,
Im Innersten zusammen hält,
Schau’ alle Wirkenskraft und Samen….
That I no more with sour sweat
Need speak of things I know naught of,
That I might know what mortise binds
The world’s most inmost being,
And see its seedbed and its workings….
Like Faust, Hegel sought to grasp and hold “infinite Nature”—die unendliche Natur. It might seem heretical to speak of Romanticism in these connections, but is it not true that here the two greatest Romantics of the age meet on common ground— that Faustian romantic aspiration finds its most consummate realization in the seemingly cold abstraction of a triumphant World Reason? Both wish to raise the veil that hides “ultimate” Reality. Hegel felt that he had finally done so in piercing the unknowability of Kant’s Ding an sich, “The Thing in Itself.” The absolute idealist was now to display the structure and movement of the universe in its totality. In an age that included such remarkable polymaths as Herder and Alexander von Humboldt, this did not seem a superhuman objective…
It was not only Hegel, but his students and colleagues too, who felt that something mighty and ultimate had been attained in his work. He was the Aristotle of modern times, and after him—what? Could there be philosophy after him? So a very young student of his in Heidelberg meditated in 1818:
A terrifying gulf seemed to open up, a long sleep like that which lasted throughout the Middle Ages. Would Hegel fare like Aristotle? Would there be nothing but mechanical repetition of what he had been saying?1
Here, in Hegel, was the last expression of that cultural idealism which had been striving to achieve Freedom and thought it had found it in the realms of the mind, precluded as it was from realizing it—as yet—in the realms of action. At last, it seemed, that dichotomy which had been the nightmare of German philosophers, that of Mind and external Reality, Mind and Matter, was to be resolved. The hegemony of Mind would be preserved; but its triumphant course would be manifested in Activity. A new Unity would now emerge…
After his appointment to the University of Berlin in 1818, where he remained until his death, he dominated the philosophical horizon. He gathered around him a notable group of students and followers, some of whom were to remain faithful to the last word of the Master, with others more faithful to his memory than to his word. For the dialectical process of which he was the supreme exponent had a way of continuing to operate in forms that no doubt would have brought Hegel consternation had he been alive to see its ultimate working-out in his successors….
He was far from an eloquent speaker. Yet soon students listened and were entranced. He spoke in a dry, hesitant, rasping manner; at times he seemed scarcely aware of his audience; he leafed unintermittently through innumerable papers before him, drawing out his mighty sentences with difficulty. He seemed to be in another world. Yet at times, flashes of inspired rhetoric, a poetic analogy, a reference, an allusion, a metaphor emerged. The hard and very special terminology acquired clarity. Posterity was to note among his hearers notable names-to-be: Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Feuerbach, Eduard Gans the legal philosopher, David Friedrich Strauss. Another young student describes his feelings:
…The most wonderful streams of thought wound themselves, pressed forward, and struggled, now singly, now jointly, hesitatingly here and there, and then rushing forward in spasms, but ahead, irresistibly….Then the voice rose, the eyes shone, sharply scanning the assembled auditors, and the words flowed easily, seizing upon the heights and depths of the soul. All now seemed so clear and exhaustive, of such simple persuasion, that those who could grasp it felt as if they themselves had thought it and found it…2
To some it seemed as if they were present at some primal act of creation. Hegel appeared like some mighty demiurge brooding over the “abyss” and “making it pregnant.” With his daring genius he was unfolding the March of Mind in the process of achieving “self-consciousness”—“self-realization”—which he said was also the March of Freedom….
* * *
God the Creator was Mind, Reason, Spirit. Restless, a driving force, moving with the inexorable necessity of Logic, Reason objectified itself and manifested itself in determinate Nature and its highest product, Man. Reason was the Absolute, itself changeless yet exhibiting itself in constant Change, a continuing process of Activity whose goal was the attainment of total Self-Consciousness—Freedom. Reason’s march was toward Perfectibility. It transcended the dualism of form and content, mind and matter, self and community, the individual and the world. It realized itself in History. Reason subsumed all realms of being—the inorganic as well as the organic, Nature, Society….It represented universal unity. The world was its arena of action, and its progression was towards Absolute Truth. Its center was Man, the thinking subject. Its instrument, Change. Constant change was the means by which the living being unfolded his potentialities, developing and expanding them in a continuous process of self-knowledge, knowledge of the world. The world of history was the living theatre of this change of the potential into the actual. Such a cosmic process meant a constant struggle for mastery, as the human mind reached out for greater and greater freedom, and moved from elementary sense-certainty toward the higher stage of perception, from perception to understanding, and then to self-certainty. This ultimate stage was the Truth of Reason.
The world, then, was a purposive one. Though in constant movement, constantly changing—as was the mind of man—it was not a meaningless chaos. For its movement was of a special kind. It was a dialectical movement—a movement through inner contradiction.
For Being means Becoming. Nothing in the universe is ever at rest. Everything is in process of change. A stone changes, but the stone is not conscious that it is changing. The plant changes as it emerges from the seed, and flowers. Here the potential has become the actual; what was in the seed is potentially the ultimate flower. The change that has taken place is different from that which the stone undergoes. But the plant too has no consciousness of the process. Only man has this consciousness. Within him that consciousness is the resultant of a long process, a slow process. Only Man is conscious of the nature of change. Only he is conscious of being changed, of a changing world, or of changing the world—of the translation of the potential into the actual. He is the highest realization of Reason as Activity.
Dialectics means inner contradiction. It means that a content can be unfolded only through passing into its opposite. It is in this process of opposition and interaction that important changes take place. Something new emerges, something qualitatively new. Some of the elements of the old are still preserved; others are eliminated. All finite things contain within themselves this contradictory element. This element is “Negativity,” the “No” which is within the “Yes” of any element, which is its undoing, and its motive force of change. It is, in Hegel’s words, “the innermost source of all activity, of living and spiritual self-movement.” It is all-pervasive. It takes a triadic form of Thesis—that which is the given, the finite object or thought; its opposite, already contained within it, the Antithesis—this is the “Negative,” the destructive; and finally the higher, which emerges, the Synthesis. Such is the “untamed restlessness”—the haltungslose Unruhe—“the unrest of self-movement,” of Being, Non-Being, and Becoming. Dialectics is Reason actualizing itself in Man’s thinking. It has something godlike about it, at once terrifying and awesome, as well as exhilarating. Transformation taking place is an an ever-richer progression, ever wider, ever more creative…
Life is Death, as Death is Life. In a finite world—and finitude is an inherent quality of the world—things can develop their potentialities only by perishing and passing into another form of being. As Hegel put it,
The finite does not only change…It perishes, and its perishing is not merely contingent, so that it could be without perishing. It is rather the very being of finite things that they contain the seeds of perishing as their own Being-in-Self (Insichsein), and the hour of their birth is the hour of their death….The highest maturity or state which any Something can reach is that in which it begins to perish.3
So that,
Negation is just as much Affirmation as Negation, or…what is self-contradictory resolves itself not into nullity, into abstract Nothingness, but essentially only into the negation of its particular content.4
Such is “Pan-logism,” the movement of Thought in its contradictions. Such too, the “terrorism” of Thought—its destructiveness and its creativeness. Hegel speaks in dramatic terms of the “seriousness, the suffering, the patience and the labor of the negative,”5 and the “portentous power of the Negative,” in its progress towards Universality.
Time, too, is such a “destroyer and preserver.” In a beautiful retelling of the myth, Hegel gives us the central kernel of his idea:
It was first Chronos—Time—that ruled the Golden Age, without moral products; and what was produced—the offspring of Chronos—was devoured by it. It was Jupiter— from whose head Minerva sprang, and to whose circle of divinities belong Apollo and the Muses—that first put a constraint upon Time, and set a bound to its principle of decadence. He is the Political god, who produced a moral work—the State….Zeus, therefore, who is represented as having put a limit to the devouring agency of Time, and stayed this transiency by having established something inherently and independently durable—Zeus and his race are themselves swallowed up, and that by the very power that produced them—the principle of thought, perception, reasoning, insight derived from rational grounds, and the requirement of such ground.6
Man’s self-conscious activity, therefore, “annuls reality, the permanence of what is, but at the same time it gains, on the other side, the essence, the notion, the universal.” Hence the march of Spirit is a progressive one. Change is its essence and agent. Change imports dissolution; but it also brings new life. “While death is the issue of life, life is also the issue of death.” But the new life is not merely a resurrection or a rejuvenescence of the old. Spirit now comes forth “exalted, glorified, a purer spirit.” It is not merely changed Spirit, but “Spirit manifesting, developing and perfecting itself in every direction which its manifold nature can follow.”7 Mind is moving toward an ever-growing comprehension of itself and the world, and what holds it “together.” Its movement is toward Universality.
Spirit’s field of activity is History. Hegel now spreads out a vast canvas in which the World Spirit marches like a triumphant God—or might it be a Napoleon?—in constant process of self-development and self-consciousness, an ascent toward Freedom. Growth and decay alternate in each historic epoch or stage, each implicit in its predecessor. Here is no repetition. Here is process and progress. In this majestic advance, Reason objectifies itself in Man and in his actions. It moves with inexorable Logic toward its higher purposes. Here individuality matters not at all. What operates is the Cunning of Reason, die List der Vernunft. The human individual is the unwitting agent of a force he does not comprehend, a force that works the ultimate good. The individual may fall by the wayside. So may the political state. To the superficial eye, History may even appear as the “slaughter-bench” of happiness. It does not matter. The “Cunning of Reason” uses them as means to something higher.
The History of the World is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.8
The larger issues which the World Spirit wills become manifest and are realized in world-historic figures, the Heroes. They too are unconscious of those higher purposes. They are bearers of the Idea, while prosecuting their own aims. They are agents, rather than independent actors. But they possess insight into “the requirements of the time.” They are “thinking men,” and understand what it is that is ripe for development in their age. Driven by an irresistible passion, they fulfil their particular missions, ignorant of the fact that they are all a part of a great plan. Neither for them, nor for those innumerable lesser others, need there be “litanies of lamentation.”
What then are the stages of progress of the World Spirit and the World Will as they move through the finite and determinate world of ours? The history of the world is the “theatre,” the “possession,” the “sphere of realization,” of the World Spirit….
Spirit begins with a germ of infinite possibility, but only possibility—containing its substantial existence in an undeveloped form, as the object and goal which it reaches only in its resultant—full reality. In actual existence Progress appears as an advancing from the imperfect to the more perfect; but the former must not be understood abstractly as only the imperfect, but as something which involves the very opposite of itself—the so-called perfect—as a germ or impulse. So—reflectively, at least—possibility points to something destined to become actual….Thus, the imperfect, as involving its opposite, is a contradiction, which certainly exists, but which is continually annulled and solved; the instinctive movement—the inherent impulse in the life of the soul—to break through the rind of mere nature, sensuousness, and that which is alien to it, and to attain to the light of consciousness, i.e. to itself.9
Now, every step in this process has its “determinate principle.” In history it is the “idiosyncracy of Spirit”—that is, the peculiar national genius which in turn exhibits itself in its polity, its ethics, legislation, science, art.
Now let us further follow the World Spirit as it actualizes itself from the past to the present:
It may be said of Universal History, that it is the exhibition of Spirit in the process of working out the knowledge of that which it is potentially….The Orientals have not attained the knowledge that Spirit—Man as such—is free; and because they do not know this, they are not free. They only know that one is free….That one is therefore only a Despot; not a free man. The consciousness of Freedom first arose among the Greeks, and therefore they were free; but they, and the Romans likewise, knew only that some are free—not Man as such….The Greeks, therefore, had slaves…The German nations, under the influence of Christianity, were the first to obtain the consciousness, that man, as man, is free; that is the freedom of Spirit which constitutes its essence.10
Conformant to the three phases of the development of Freedom are the particular state forms: for the Orient, despotism; for Greece, democracy; for the German world (the present), monarchy.
It may come as a shock—certainly as a seeming paradox—that the forward sweep of the Weltgeist, “World-Spirit,” toward Freedom, which had reached the realization that “Man as Man” is free, should find its objective realization in a State, with a Monarch as ruler—actually, the Prussian State and its King. But this is in fact Hegel’s logical deduction from the course of history and the historic process that brought the new concept of Freedom into being. For with the German Reformation came “the first successful attempt to introduce the principle of subjectivity into changing political relations. It placed some responsibility for his deeds on the free subject and challenged the traditional system of authority and privilege in the name of Christian freedom and equality.”11 This subjectivity was recognized, as Hegel put it, “as that which can and ought to come into the possession of the truth; and this subjectivity is the common property of all mankind….In the proclamation of these principles is unfurled the new, the latest standard round which the peoples rally—the banner of Free Spirit, independent, thought finding its life in the Truth, and enjoying independence by it…This is the essence of the Reformation: Man in his very nature destined to be free.”12
The French Revolution thought to realize this essential Freedom, but it failed because it had not yet found the Truth. It released a “self-destructive” freedom; man had not yet discovered his “true interest”—“he did not place himself under laws that secure his own freedom and that of the whole.”13
What followed, to put it briefly, was the anarchy of modern society in the emergence of the bourgeois state, a society in which individual interests clashed, in which the “universal” was lost sight of in the appetences and struggles of the “subjective,” the individual. This is our “civil society,” which reflects the conflict between the right of the whole and that of the individual. Private property clashes with common property. Accumulation of wealth posits the “growing impoverishment of the working class.” The particular, not the universal, prevails. Some other element is needed, superior to civil society, which is concerned with securing and protecting property and personal freedom, and yet bringing them under control and harmonizing the diverse interests in the name of some higher authority. It is the “universal.” This new higher element is the State. The State is here to harmonize the specific and the general interest. The State is “an autonomous and independent power”; the State is “the march of God in the world.”
What the State is to Civil Society, the Monarch is to the State. He is “outside” civil society, “exalted above all that is particular and conditional.” He is “pure ego.” Absolute, autonomous, bound by no particularity of social ties or class, he stands “above the battle.” The sovereign State is likewise autonomous, unbound by any higher law than its own. It stands in relation to other states, equally sovereign, exposed to “continuous struggle.” These states “maintain and procure their rights through their own power and must as a matter of necessity plunge into war.”14
It seems that the anarchy which Hegel had curbed within the State, explodes the moment it confronts another state! Such then is the March of Reason, as it culminates politically in the absolute state, the monarchy. Within the state man finds his true freedom. It is not as yet absolute freedom. Since Philosophy does not predict, but only surveys what is and has been, the further unfolding of Reason toward Freedom is as yet unrevealed.
Philosophy comes too late to teach the world what it should be….When it paints its grey upon grey, a form of life has already become old: and in grey and grey it can no longer be made young again but only understood. The Owl of Minerva begins its flight when the shades of twilight have already fallen.15
No matter. The Owl of Minerva has flown over vast stretches of world history and experience, even if in the twilight air. It has shown us how the abstract determinations of Logic have realized themselves through a dialectic moving through all the domains of Thought and Action—History, Art, Religion, and Philosophy itself. It has shown the upward ascent of Reason in human activities and achievements. An unceasing unrest, a haltungslose Unruhe, has characterized the irresistible flow of history. Faust’s hunger to embrace the totality of experience has been conjoined with the Mephistophelean spirit of “denial,” for was not Mephistopheles the spirit that always denied, der Geist der stets verneint, Hegel’s “Negativity”? With this principal difference, that Mephistopheles “wills evil, but creates good.” But Negativity is free of such moral coercions. It is one of the principles of creation…
Was there really no predictability in all this, save a general dialectical potentiality and actuality? Certainly the dialectic would never stop, like Joshua’s sun in Gibeon, at some fiat! Hegel might preach the Prussian State, Christianity as the ultimate religion. What if Hegelianism itself was only a moment in history—as was shown of other moments—and carried within itself the germ of its own dissolution into something higher? This Dialectic was indeed a terrible thing! Hegel might see the Prussian State as the highest embodiment of Reason and the Actual, but that too had its own Negativity. And what of the ever-unfolding of the idea of Freedom bred of the Reformation, the Freedom of “Man as Man”? Such thoughts would soon arise in Berlin not long after Hegel’s death.
But for the time being Hegel reigned as the official Prussian state philosopher, a kind of philosophical dictator. Yet he himself was not free of certain inner psychological contradictions, as more intimate students or associates observed. Now and then he would invite one or two of them to share a cup, and toast the Fall of the Bastille on the anniversary of July 14, 1789. He had not, apparently, forgotten those days at the Tübingen Seminary when, along with his fellow-students Schelling and Friedrich Hölderlin, he danced around the Tree of Liberty on the outbreak of the French Revolution. Nor perhaps those radical writings of his youth (not to be published until long after his death), in which he excoriated Christianity as a destructive force that had done away with the naturalness, homogeneity, and the social and political character of the Greek religion, and had substituted fantasies derived from a people “whose climate, whose law, whose culture, whose interest are alien to us, whose history has not the slightest connection with us.”16 But now none but himself was aware of these youthful indiscretions. How certain Young Hegelians would have rejoiced to have had these as additional ammunition to add to the Hegelian dialectic in their warfare on authority!…
Now, in Berlin, God had made his reappearance in that great secular theodicy— but God none the less, God as Reason, God as the State, God as Logic. True, he became a triadic God: as God of Christianity, he became Spirit that created its own opposite and in turn became the return of the opposite unto itself. The Triad ruled: Spirit, and its antithesis, the Son of God; Spirit “reduced to limited and particular conception…the World-Nature and Finite Spirit. Finite Spirit itself is therefore posited as a constituent element in the Divine Being. Man himself therefore is comprehended in the Idea of God….”17 Christ is Man who is God, and God who is Man.
This element, then, the sharing in the Spirit on the part of Nature and Man, will be turned to good uses by Hegel’s followers; nor was it to save Hegel himself from the suspicion of atheism…
But the magic of Hegelian doctrine reached out far and wide, in and beyond the halls of the university, in fascinating and strange adaptations and transformations. It reached into Russia, Italy, France, the Scandinavian countries, spread throughout the German lands; though it was not to invade England until much later. It would meet with merciless criticism, often vituperation, like that of Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard. It would be made the instrument of conservatism and radicalism. No domain of knowledge would be free of its influence. It would enter literature, especially the drama, and indirectly affect Henrik Ibsen, among others. In this fashion Hegelianism nourished divergent schools and divergent interests. As the official philosopher of Prussia, he outraged liberal colleagues by his reactionary political opinions, such men as Alexander von Humboldt and the great biblical scholar de Wette (whose views cost him his chair at the university). His attack on his fellow-philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries for the latter’s unorthodox political activities would not soon be forgotten. Conservative students were gratified by Hegel’s deification of Reason. In a number of them he appeared to encourage a sort of quietism, even cynicism. Thus one young enthusiast wrote to his parents in 1819:
Hegel has unified my views, and has done me a great service thereby….Hegel has given me views concerning the State, and now I know what is to be done, and what left alone. I know that a Republic, the Franchise, equality of goods, etc. are of no use at all…18
But such students as Heinrich Heine, David Friedrich Strauss, and Ludwig Feuerbach would not be deterred from drawing other conclusions when their time came. Hegel offered enough riches for them to take what they wanted and needed…They would acknowledge their debt and go beyond their teacher in their speculations. But here, too, Hegel’s figure cast its immense shadow….
Friedrich Engels was too young to have attended Hegel’s lectures, but he studied his works and understood them. His own debt and that of posterity he acknowledged in a tribute that combines the reverence of a disciple and the understanding of an opponent, and crystallizes the nature of that influence:
The newer German philosophy [he wrote] culminated in the Hegelian system, in which, for the first time—and this is its great merit—the whole natural, historical and spiritual world was presented as a process, that is, as in constant motion, change, transformation and development. From this standpoint the history of mankind no longer appeared as a confused whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable before the judgment seat of the now matured philosophic reason, and best forgotten as soon as possible, but as a process of development of humanity itself. It now became the task of thought to follow out the gradual stages of this process through all its devious ways, and to trace out the inner regularities running through all its apparently fortuitous phenomena.19
* * *
In an obituary tribute to his teacher Hegel, the legal philosopher Eduard Gans said:
Philosophy has now come full circle; its progress is only to be considered as the thoughtful working over of its material in the manner which the lately departed has so clearly and precisely indicated.20
He was wrong and unjust, if not to Hegel, who believed that his own philosophy was the “absolute reality of the Idea of Philosophy,” then at least to Hegel’s Weltgeist, the “World-Spirit” that stubbornly persisted in actualizing itself in a number of critical historic and intellectual phenomena, and even in Hegel’s last years insisted on materializing itself in an eruptive July Revolution, with repercussions all over the Continent. The July Revolution of Paris displeased the great philosopher and upset him. It also materialized itself, and was to do so with increasing vigor, in the economic transformation of the German states over the following years, no less than in the repressive actions of the various German governments, once more affrighted by the specter of revolution and intensifying their persecution of dissidents, especially writers and thinkers. That loosely joined group of writers known as “Young Germany” soon fell victim to authority, suffering imprisonment or exile or making its peace through early recantations. Enjoined from political activity, the younger intellectuals turned to philosophy, the philosophy that reigned supreme, the Hegelian. This surely was safer ground, they thought—and it was, for the moment.
Hegel had said:
To apprehend what is, is the task of philosophy, because what is, is Reason. As for the individual, every one is the son of his time; so philosophy also is its time apprehended in thought. It is just as foolish to fancy that any philosophy can transcend its present moment, as that an individual could leap out of his time or jump over Rhodes. If a theory transgresses its time, and builds up a world as it ought to be, it has existence merely in the unstable element of opinion which gives room to every wandering fancy.21
Hegel had said:
“What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational.”
It is out of the interpretation of these two statements that the progeny of Hegel split into two wings, soon named by David Friedrich Strauss the Right Hegelians and the Left Hegelians.
The right wing continued to expound the Master’s word in orthodox fashion, defended him passionately against the charge of atheism, or pantheism, and proceeded to prepare an edition of his works. They underscored the second half of the sentence above, “what is actual is rational,” to support that which was, the status-quo. For them, Hegel had said the last word.
The Left Hegelians based themselves on the Master’s word that philosophy too, like any individual, was a child of its time. If so, was this not true also of the Master’s thought? Was it not also the content of an inexorable dialectic, in which the “negativity” was already becoming apparent? And they took the first part of that celebrated sentence and underscored it: “What is rational is actual,” they said. Which they interpreted as meaning: Whatever can be shown to be rationally valid, will ultimately be realized. The world must and can be shaped to correspond to Reason!
In and around the University of Berlin these left-wing Hegelians met and argued. To Berlin came those from the outside to study Hegel. Here they proceeded to radicalize Hegelianism with results that would soon startle, appall, electrify the world, and revolutionize the form and content of European and world thought. Few periods in European intellectual history have compressed so much change in so short a span of time. Few could have suspected that already not too far off one could be dimly aware of what the Germans would call the Götterdämmerung des deutschen Idealismus— “German Idealism’s twilight of the Gods.” Few could have perceived in the soaring cloud above, in the philosophies of subjective idealism, absolute idealism, etc., the gathering storm—thunder and lightning of ideas—that would shake the foundations not only of Christianity itself, but of all Religion—and soon, too, of the political state, and society in general. Within the brief compass of less than fifteen years, what another young Hegelian, Moses Hess, called the “bridge to bring us back from heaven to earth,” was completed. The historic progression from Hegel to Strauss, and thereafter to Feuerbach, Marx, Engels, and Bakunin (to name only the most important), itself marks the accelerated convulsiveness of the philosophic transformation—from 1835, when David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus appeared, to 1848, the Communist Manifesto. Such was the unpredictable March of the Idea, as Theory became translated into Practice, and Thought into Action. Such was the lightning of Reason!
Berlin, November 15, 1831.
To whom should I be writing that Hegel is dead, if not to you of whom I have been thinking constantly, as long as I was enabled to see and hear the living one?…Imagine, how I found out. I could not get to see Schleiermacher until this morning. Naturally he inquired whether the cholera had not deterred me from coming; I replied that the reports were encouraging, and it seems it was coming to an end. “Yes,” he said, “but it has claimed a great sacrifice. Professor Hegel died of the cholera last night.” Imagine what I felt! My first thought was to leave. What would you be doing here without Hegel? But soon I bethought myself:…I have come here; I have no desire to undertake another journey. True, Hegel died here; but he is not extinct. I rejoice that I have listened to and seen the great Master before his end. I attended both lecture series of his: the History of Philosophy, and the Philosophy of Right….Friday he still held both of his sessions;…Monday it was announced that because of a sudden illness he would be away; but that he hoped to continue on Thursday….The Thursday before I visited him. When I gave him my name and my birthplace, he said at once: “Ah, From Württemberg!” And he showed his genuine pleasure….He asked me to come and visit him often…Well, tomorrow…he will be buried….22
Thus wrote David Friedrich Strauss, very recently arrived in Berlin in pursuit of his theological and philosophical education. He was twenty-three years old; like Hegel he was a Suabian; like Hegel he had studied in Tübingen. Sharply aware of the philosophical and theological currents of the time, swept along with the tide of transcendental idealism and the theological ideas of Schleiermacher, the young theological student was finally converted by the Phenomenology to Hegelianism. It was an almost blinding experience, this synthesis that Hegel offered. “Universal history unrolled before one’s eyes in a new light. Art and religion, in their varied forms, emerged in their place, and all this rich manifestation proceeded from consciousness and returned there anew, testifying to its omnipotence.”23 As a curate, he had already undergone the ordeal of self-division between his more recent beliefs and his duties to his congregation. In Berlin from 1831 to 1832 his Hegelianism was confirmed; but he was already beginning to modify it as he began planning his most important work, the Life of Jesus, at the beginning of 1832. His very close friend in Berlin, Johann Karl Wilhelm Vatke, was at work on his epochal book on the Old Testament, Die Religion des Alten Testaments, practically as fundamental for the newer criticism of the Bible as Strauss’s book was to be for Christology. Both books were published in 1835.
It has been remarked that the first significant transformations of Hegelianism into a radical criticism took the form of a critique of religion. This is indeed the case, and comprehensible. On the one hand, the historical examination of the Old and New Testaments was a part that great movement of research and reappraisal abetted and indeed made possible by the excavations, discoveries and decipherment of Egyptian and Assyrian and Babylonian inscriptions; by the examination of historical documents, the creation of historical archives, the studies of comparative civilizations, especially religions; in short, by the vast accumulation of new knowledge, including geologic, anthropologic, biologic history, that made the nineteenth century the greatest of epochs in historical research. Such an expansion of historical knowledge and questions was bound to have notable repercussions in all other fields of human activity, especially the political and social. Time-honored authorities, if not toppled, appeared shaken. Religion and religious institutions, the bulwarks of state power, were now subjected to such critical inquiry. In states, like those of Germany, where absolutism precluded political and social action, the religious establishment, traditions, and sacred texts represented the outer fortifications of power which, if taken, might open the way to vaster assaults. To scrutinize the holy texts, to assess them in the light of history, to question their authorship, and, not least, to question the historicity of events and characters in them, was indeed a first step toward an unsettling of all authority. German Protestant theologians led the way in what was to be known as the “Higher Criticism” of the Bible, in dismembering the texts and assigning them to various authors, a procedure not without its immediate dangers to their propounders, as both the great de Wette and Vatke found to their distress. It stands to reason that a similar application of criticism to the New Testament would also concentrate on the historic role, presence, and even existence—the “historicity”—of Jesus Christ.
David Friedrich Strauss was not the first to raise the question of the historicity of Christ, but his book Das Leben Jesu—The Life of Jesus—which appeared in 1835–1836, was the most sensational of its day, and the most widely influential throughout Europe and America. Its impact may be judged by the number of adversaries and replies it generated no less than by the number of converts it made. In the major religious crisis that England was soon to undergo it played an important role, particularly when it appeared in George Eliot’s translation. Without Strauss, the most widely known and popular Life of Jesus, that of Ernest Renan, would never have come to be.
It was a daring thing for a young theologian like Strauss, who aspired to a professorship at a university and was himself a preacher, to attack the historicity of the Gospels and eventually to annul the very existence of the Savior. But the Hegelian wine was very heady—the intellectual atmosphere was tense with new ideas and the political climate made for great heat in other than political discussion. The young Hegelians were ready to take chances, some of them prepared to cut themselves off from intellectual careers and security in quest of what they believed to be the truth. They were soon to recognize that the political authorities were well aware of the danger hidden in their seemingly philosophical dismemberment of religion in the name of a Hegelian dialectic; aware too of the danger of a continuing Hegelianism at the universities. In the early forties they imported old Schelling to undo the work of Hegel and bring a measure of supernaturalism into the philosophical aulae of Berlin. Hadn’t farsighted Metternich warned the French, even before 1830, of the hazards in allowing atheistic literature such wide distribution in that country?
The heavy guns of Hegelian dialectic were now turned on Christianity. In fourteen hundred pages of close analysis of the Gospels, buttressed by a thorough knowledge and scholarship of the sources and of history, Strauss began demolishing the physical reality of Christ. He was not out to destroy Christianity; he wished to purge it of its contradictions, inconsistencies, superstitions. He wished, in a Hegelian sense, to raise it to the intellectual and philosophical level it deserved to inhabit. He wished to prove that the Christ tradition, denuded of its impossible miracles, produced a Christ who was the creator of a new religion of humanity. Christ was Humanity.
Hegel had shown the way, but only partly. For Hegel, religion and philosophy were identical in essence, for they both were revelations of God; it was form that separated them. Religion reveals in symbols the rational content of philosophy. Thus the whole system of the Creation was symbolic: what Hegel called a Vorstellung—a figurative thought. God as Creator was Idea, and the creation is the externalization of this Idea in—again!—triadic form. The Idea externalizes itself in the World. The Universe—the Father—puts forth the “particular”—the Son; Son is the finite world of Nature, and man—the “other.” The incarnation and the history of Christ are the unity of Man and the Eternal. Such is the eternal timeless process. This is the transition from Logic to Nature. Thus the Hegelian Idea is God the Trinity, and Christianity represents the Kingdom of the Father, the Kingdom of the Son, and the Kingdom of the Spirit—the God-Man, materialized in the Church. “If the Kingdom of the Father was the logical Idea, God before the Creation of the world; if the Kingdom of the Son was the Idea in its Otherness—Nature; the Kingdom of the Spirit, as the third moment, is the unity of the foregoing, Church is the Kingdom of God on the earth.”24
The masses, who cannot as yet “support the startling light of pure logic,” must be satisfied with the highest kind of thinking of which they are capable, that is, figurative thought. For pure abstract thought is beyond them. Religion offers them these concrete symbols in Father, Son, Creation, Heaven and the Fall. The philosophic mind will understand these symbols as the representations of the eternal triadic Idea, with God as the Absolute Idea, and the Trinity as the symbol of the triadic dialectic movement realizing the unity of contraries. The Redemption then was the Spirit that surmounted the dualism and the contradiction, that attained to the full consciousness of itself, and thus to Eternal Truth….Philosophy, therefore, is also a divine service, but serves God in a special way….With this mighty stroke, Hegel both preserved and destroyed Christianity.
This was enough of a springboard for Strauss. Not symbol, not Vorstellung—but “Myth” was the essence of Christianity and Christ. The story of Jesus was “myth.”
What is “Myth” or “Mythus”?
Myth is the creation of a fact out of an idea…A people, a religious community, finds itself in a certain condition or round of institutions of which the spirit, the idea, lives and acts within it. But the mind, following a natural impulse, desires to gain a complete representation of that existing condition, and to know its origin. The origin, however, is buried in oblivion, or is too indistinctly discernible to satisfy present feelings and ideas. Consequently an image of that origin, colored by the light of existing ideas, is cast upon the dark wall of the past, which image is, however, but a magnified reflection of existing influences…25
Myth is the garment, the outer vestment—the historical vesture of primitive Christianity. It arose not out of an individual consciousness, but out of the collective unconscious of a people, spontaneously. It is a “naive” creation. Strauss speaks of myth as the unconscious, artless, spontaneous creation of the imagination. Myth requires distance of time for its creation. So there is a gap of at least thirty-one years between the death of Jesus and the origin of our Gospels.
Subjecting the gospels to a critical examination, Strauss concluded that neither a supernaturalistic interpretation nor a rationalistic one satisfies, particularly in reference to the miracles. The figure and the life and activities of Christ were born out of a popular imagination that drew the figure of a Messiah in the image of that conceived by the Jews. A historic character named Jesus produced upon his disciples such an impression that they took him for the Messiah, and attributed to him all the characteristic, acts, and behavior of such a figure. A myth embodies the hopes, needs, thoughts of a people in a particular period. It embodies the Idea. It actualizes a dream, which finds expression in this “collective” imagined personality. Now the Idea that is here embodied is not of an individual person—a Savior—but a Savior who stands for Humanity, for humankind. The Godhead is not One—not Jesus of Nazareth. The Godhead is Humanity.
It is out of the Hegelian system that Strauss distills his radical idea of the unity of opposites as it is manifested in the universal aspect of Christ as Man-God, which is Humanity:
Humanity is the union of two Natures—God become man, the Infinite manifests itself in the finite, the finite Spirit remembering its Infinitude. It is a child of the visible Mother and the invisible Father, Nature and Spirit; it is the worker of miracles, in so far as in the course of human history, the spirit more and more completely subjects nature, both within and around man, until it lies before him as the inert matter on which he exercises his active power; it is the sinless existence, for the course of its development is a blameless one, pollution cleaves to the individual, and does not touch the race or its history, It is humanity that dies, rises and ascends to heaven, for from the negation of its phenomenal life there ever proceeds a spiritual higher life, from the separation of its mortality as a personal, national, and terrestrial spirit, arises its union with the infinite spirit of the heavens. By faith in this Christ, especially in his death and resurrection, man is justified before God: that is, by the kindling within him of the idea of Humanity, the individual man participates in the divinely human life of the species.26
For just as Plato’s God created the world in contemplating the Ideas, the community drew the portrait of Christ, and in doing so, unconsciously kept before its eyes the Idea of Humanity in its relation to Divinity. Here are resolved the contradictions which the Church was unable to reconcile because it regarded Christ as the individual, a God-man. In the human race, these contradictions are reconciled—the finite and the infinite.
It is in this sense that Strauss sees the universality of the Idea represented by the Idea of Christ.
Shall we interest ourselves, he asks, more in the cure of some sick people in Galilee, than in the miracles of intellectual and moral life belonging to the history of the world—in the increasing, the almost incredible, dominion of man over nature—in the irresistible force of ideas, to which no unintelligent matter, whatever its magnitude, can oppose any enduring resistance? Shall isolated incidents, in themselves trivial, be more to us than the universal order of events, simply because in the latter we presuppose, if we do not perceive, a natural cause, in the former the contrary?27
And in a memorable and eloquent passage, Strauss reiterates this central idea of the universality of the God-Man and the Idea in manifesting itself not once, but in the manifold context of the generality—Man.
This is indeed not the mode in which the Idea realized itself; it is not wont to lavish all its fulness on one exemplar, and be niggardly towards all others—to express itself perfectly in that one individual, and imperfectly in all the rest; it rather loves to distribute its riches among multiplicity of exemplars which reciprocally complete each other—in the alternate appearance and suppression of a series of individuals. And is this no true realization of the idea? Is not the idea of the unity of the divine and human nature a real one in a far higher sense, when I regard the whole race of mankind as such a realization? Is not an incarnation of God from eternity, a truer one than an incarnation limited to a particular point of time?28
Such is indeed Strauss’s “apotheosis of the species.” He had enlarged the Hegelian Idea and made it manifest in the world of human beings. He had translated what appeared an individual transterrestrial event into a continuity, embodied in the “species” (Gattung) that is humanity. He had established a new kind of eternity in the ascendant mastery of Nature by man, and humanized the miracles by transplanting them into activities of the human being in achieving such mastery. Strauss had naturalized the Godhead Ideal. He had undermined a number of theories, beliefs and convictions by specifically casting doubt on the credibility of the Gospel narratives as contemporary testimonies to Christ’s workings. The philosophic consciousness found itself exhilarated by this exaltation of the Christ-idea to the sphere of the universal myth and a portion of the progressive advance of both the Idea and of Mankind. Rudolph Haym, Hegel’s biographer and severe critic, recalled how Strauss’s book had affected him upon its appearance:
It was Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu that both filled me and a number of my companions with Hegelian attitudes and also made us more and more disillusioned with theology. The spell that this book exercised over one was indescribable; I never read any book with so much pleasure and thoroughness…It was as though the scales fell from my eyes and a great light was shed on my path.29
Haym and his fellows saw the positive, the progressive contribution that Strauss was making. The spirit of the time made them receptive to his ideas, particularly such as explored the collective character of religion, as it expressed its aspirations, its hopes, its feelings and ideas in “myth”; society and humanity acquired the character of something divinely ordained, something in a constant state of progress. Humanity was given miraculous powers in triumphing over nature, in ordering and mastering matter, and also itself playing out the drama of the Ascension. The true life of the individual lay in his participation in the work of humanity, sharing the divine character of the species, and thus achieving union with Infinite Spirit. Far from being a destruction of faith, as many claimed, these adherents saw in this a restoration of faith. Strauss had done all this by using modern historico-critical methods, and had profoundly deepened the meaning of “myth” as a product of a people’s collective consciousness or unconscious. He had shown that Christianity could resolve the dualism of the human and the divine in the Man-God. History and historical development lay in the hands of the “species.” It is here on earth that the “divinity” of man is revealed. What Strauss was proclaiming, that to which he was to give greater precision five years later, is expressed in his paean to the earthly-divine:
The earth is no longer a vale of tears through which we journey towards a goal existing in a future heaven. The treasures of the divine life are to be realised here and now, for every moment of our earthly life pulses within the womb of the divine.30
But there were many more on the other side, who fell upon Strauss with vehemence and without pity. There were more than sixty replies in opposition, and it was these latter who triumphed by scotching Strauss’s university expectations and aspirations. A chair in a German university was out of the question. Switzerland seemed a likely refuge, since it had undergone radical political changes and liberalism appeared in the ascendant. He was accepted as professor of theology at the university of Zurich, but the hue and cry raised by a rabid conservative party consisting of the moneyed interests and like-minded clerics, succeeded in intimidating Strauss’s supporters into a repudiation. Strauss was forced to withdraw, but accepted a pension. His career as teacher and preacher was over.
His book was more fortunate. It fell into many hands, at critical moments in the lives of its readers, and formed a strong element in the intellectual current of the time that was carrying many a person on to new terrains. For example, a young man of nineteen from the Rhineland, brought up in a Calvinist household, was reading Das Leben Jesu in 1839. He was then in Bremen, sent by his merchant father to prepare himself for a career in business. This is what Friedrich Engels wrote to his friend Wilhelm Graeber:
Oh, William, William!…I am now an out and out Straussian!…I, poor poet, am now crawling under the wing of the gifted David Friedrich Strauss. What a chap!…Here he comes along like a young god, and brings chaos out of darkness into the light and— Adios Religion! It’s as full of holes as a sponge….If you can disprove Strauss, I’ll turn pietist again…31
It is hard for us today to appreciate or understand the feverish excitement and heated involvement that attended philosophical controversy in Germany—and particularly in Berlin—during the years of and following Hegel’s lifetime, and particularly during the 1840s. Of course, philosophical, and more particularly theological, discussions were the valves by means of which the discussants found relief for their pent-up thoughts and feelings in an atmosphere of intellectual and political repression. Yet they lived in a time astir with new ideas, movements, and exciting news from abroad. Even more surprising is it to find with what eagerness youth turned to philosophy instead of the more substantial rewards that careers such as law and theology promised. A number of them even gave up successful occupations in favor of philosophic studies. And this despite the knowledge that such preoccupations might entail hazards both personal and economic, and even worse.
It was therefore with relief, and even jubilation, that the younger spirits hailed the accession of the new king of Prussia, Frederick William IV, in 1840. Though already known as a “romantic,” a pious Christian, an ardent supporter of the Restoration governments and monarchs, a bitter opponent of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and a ruler convinced of his divine mission to teach and guide his nation, he began his reign in a rainbow aureole of promise. His first actions seemed to justify high hopes. He amnestied political prisoners and called for meetings of the provincial diets every second year. In the Rhenish provinces, always the most advanced of the Prussian states, the new regime was hailed as progressive. It was in this heady atmosphere that the Rheinische Zeitung was founded. It spoke for the more liberal and industrial elements and was soon to become the organ of the Hegelian school, drawing upon its more radical exponents.
Alas! the honeymoon was soon over. The new King showed his true colors almost immediately, and proved as uncompromising as his predecessor. The heavy hand of oppression once more bore down on the young hopefuls, and their elders.
Disenchanted, they discovered what a hazardous vocation philosophy could prove —as dangerous as politics, as dangerous as theology. Intensified censorship soon took care of the press; the police and the government authorities took care of too advanced teachers by depriving them of the right to teach.
Yet it is interesting to observe that as the government moved more and more to the right, the philosophers (at least one important group) moved more and more to the left.
Philosophy was a menace. The scandal over Strauss’s Life of Jesus was very much alive, and Strauss had gained influence and disciples. As a matter of fact, theological students were already transcending Strauss. Witness Bruno Bauer, who had begun as a right Hegelian, and was soon publishing daring but scholarly critiques of the Gospels that actually denied even the historicity of Christ, and devastated the “myth” theory of Strauss as itself the construction of another mystical religion. Removed from Berlin to Bonn, he soon was deprived of the latter chair, and proceeded to become one of the most outspoken and radical critics of both religion and society…
Yes, there was good reason to be concerned for and over these philosophers. It was urgent to counter the subversive teachings that prevailed in Berlin, and in the words of the Monarch, to extirpate the “dragon-seed of Hegelianism.” And so the aged philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling was imported into Berlin, and in November 1841 commenced his lectures on the Philosophy of Revelation. Curiosity, enthusiasm, expectancy, and other motives led to a lively attendance. Among the strongly variegated audience could be discerned the eager faces of Bakunin, Friedrich Engels, and Kierkegaard!…
In that same year, 1841, had appeared a book that was destined to dominate the thinking of a great many writers and philosophers for years to come. Another Hegelian was to do honor to his master by subverting him. This was Ludwig Feuerbach, and the book, his Essence of Christianity. It was a book that was to reach out far and wide. In England, it profoundly affected the thinking of George Eliot (who translated the work) and her circle; it was to make an even deeper impression in Russia, where a generation of thinkers was also undergoing a rite of passage from Hegel to his successors; it was to change the life and thought of many continental writers, among them the greatest of the novelists writing in German, the Swiss Gottfried Keller; and it was to revolutionize—at least for a time—the life and thought of Richard Wagner. Not the least of those affected were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It was a book that, when rediscovered in the twentieth century, was to sound forth modern notes bearing fruitfully upon contemporary theology, philosophy, and psychology.
It is not therefore in a tone of levity that one can speak of a “dramatic” element present in the course of thought that now is taking place. Here is a drama of three mighty acts, the first of which was David Friedrich Strauss and The Life of Jesus; and the second, now, Ludwig Feuerbach and The Essence of Christianity. The third was to follow soon in a climactic fortissimo. Hegel’s Absolute Idea, roaming on high, must have been startled, if not appalled, by the transformed externalizations of Itself in its progress; and Hegel himself, from the heavenly retreat allotted to philosophers, might have watched with a wry smile his brainchild, the great Dialectic, playing unforeseen, diabolical tricks. For a number of his disciples were now contending that there were actually two Hegels, one the “exoteric,” the public Hegel; the other, the “esoteric,” the “hidden” Hegel, who was in fact an atheist!
The drama now being enacted on the stage of philosophy had many brilliant actors, to whom it would be impossible to do justice in a brief compass, for in their disparate and sometimes contradictory ways they contributed to the fervid controversies of the time: figures such as Arnold Ruge, Moses Hess; the anarchist thinkers Max Stirner and Bakunin; Bruno Bauer and his brother Edgar. Though divergent, their work in fact coalesces into a kind of turbulent unity predictive of an explosion. One may with some justice call this drama “The Descent of the Absolute Idea from Heaven to Earth,” the humanization of the Absolute, the transfiguration of Absolute Consciousness into the concrete consciousness of Man.
Among the most influential of these actors was Ludwig Feuerbach, and we may well call his achievement the second act of the “drama.”
He belonged to a family of extraordinary intellectual and artistic endowments. His father was an outstanding jurist, and another member of the family, Anselm Feuerbach, one of Germany’s most distinguished painters. Ludwig Feuerbach began, like so many of his contemporaries, as a student of theology, matriculating at the University of Heidelberg. But soon falling under the spell of Hegelianism, he went to Berlin. Like Hegel’s other disciples he felt this sense of immediacy, of urgency, and knew that Hegel would offer him satisfactory answers to many of the problems that troubled him and his generation. Like all good students of great teachers, Ludwig Feuerbach paid his master the tribute of courageous disagreement with an expansion of the Hegelian doctrines.
Writing to his father in 1825, he described his feelings: He could no longer study theology, which was like a beautiful, faded flower…
I desire to press nature to my heart, from whose depths the frightened theologian shies away; and Man, the whole man, not man as dealt with by the theologian, anatomist, or lawyer, but as object of philosophy.32
For two years, 1824 to 1826, he was in Berlin. What Hegel meant to him we have in Feuerbach’s own words: his brief sojourn had acquired a significance for “eternity” and become “a turning point of his entire life, making Berlin into a Bethlehem of the new world.”
I stood in a more intimate and influential relation toward Hegel than to any other of our spiritual forebears; for I knew him personally. For two years I attended his lectures, and listened to him with total dedication, attention, and enthusiasm. I did not know what I wanted or should do, I was so confused and divided when I came to Berlin. But I had listened to him for barely six months, when my head and heart were set to rights. I knew what I should do and what I wanted to do: Not theology, but philosophy! Not drivel and ravings, but study! Not to believe, but to think! It was in him I came to a consciousness of myself and of the world. It was him I called my second father, even as I then called Berlin my spiritual birthplace.33
The die was cast. He had made his choice. He received his doctorate from the university of Erlangen (to which city his father had removed), and was appointed to a lecturing post there in 1829. His academic career was not to be long-lived. In 1830 he published anonymously his Thoughts on Death and Immortality, in which he denied personality immortality, insisting only on the immortality of the spirit. Instead of seeking immortal men, he said, we should ask for spiritually and physically healthy human beings; for physical health was of greater importance than immortality. True religion must manifest itself in deeds here on earth. The authorship of the book soon was made manifest; the censorship went into action. With every chance of advancement closed off, Feuerbach became a freelance philosopher and writer. Marriage into a well-to-do family made it possible for him to pursue these vocations in comfort and dedicate himself to the clarification of his ideas on the nature of religion. Like a number of other Young Hegelians, he too saw religious criticism as a gateway to politics.
I remain firm in my opinion: in Germany theology is the only practical vehicle for politics, the only vehicle likely to lead to success, at least in the near future.34
And again,
The Protestant is a religious republican….When Protestantism is dissolved…it leads to political republicanism.35
It was thus necessary to take the outer bastions constituted by religious institutions before the inner citadel of the State could be assaulted.
Palestine is too narrow for me [he had written his father in 1825]. I must, I must go out into the wide, wide world, and only the philosopher carries this world on his shoulders.36
He proved true to his word. He had broken with Hegelianism in 1839, and in 1841 he published Das Wesen des Christentums—The Essence of Christianity—which was to make its way into “the wide, wide world” in a very brief time.
Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality: we only see real things in the entrancing splendor of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity. Hence I do nothing more to religion—and to speculative philosophy and theology also—than to open its eyes, or rather to turn its gaze from the internal towards the external, i.e., I change the object as it is in the imagination into the object as it is in reality.37
Homo homini Deus. “Man is God to Man.”
It is this dictum that serves as the center of all of Feuerbach’s speculation concerning Man, his Religion, and his God. For Man is the center of Feuerbach’s world, or as he himself put it, “God was my first thought; Reason my second; Man my third and last thought.”38
And the theme of the Essence of Christianity may be said to be the Alienation of Man in Religion, and his reconstitution as Man and member of his Species through an understanding and transcendence of the sources of that Alienation. And at the same time the book is intended to restore Nature to its rightful place and role as an important element in the development of human consciousness, and not merely as some degraded element, product of an “alienating” Idea. Nature, too, was to have its own, independent existence. The primacy was therefore assigned to Nature and Man.
Theology must be changed into anthropology. The doctrine of otherworldliness and of God must be turned into the doctrine of Man. Hegel had pointed the way, but only in part: Hegel too must be demystified, demythologized, for though he had transformed theology into Logic, theology remained imbedded in the concepts of Absolute Idea, Reason, and his Logic. They were there—eternal, absolute, necessary. They existed apart from Man and Nature, both of which were but externalizations of the Absolute Idea. They were not the creations of human consciousness, but its creator. Nature was something derived from the structure and movement of Absolute Thought. It was time, Feuerbach held, to reverse the process, in the name of truth; to recognize that Thought was a second reality, but Nature was the primary reality. Absolute Idea, Absolute Consciousness, Logic were the creations of the concrete human Mind. Being is an abstraction of concrete human being.
Hegel’s absolute mind—was that anything but the “finite” mind, enlarged and possessed of infinite potentiality? And its self-externalization as matter—was that not truly a kind of “incarnation”? Spirit become flesh?
Yes, Hegel’s system, Feuerbach contended, was theology: Nature, Reality were to Hegel but realizations of the Idea. Material substance was created by an immaterial substance—abstracted substance. Art, religion, philosophy were, accordingly, manifestations of the absolute spirit, they were the loftiest that we can know of Spirit. But, Feuerbach asked, can one separate art and religion from sensations, fantasy, perceptions of man; can one sever philosophy from human thinking, separate absolute spirit from the nature of man?
No. Being is subject, and Thinking is the predicate, not the reverse, as in Hegel. Thought rises out of being, not being out of Thought.
“Nothing is unquestionably and immediately certain except the object of the senses, of perception, and sensation….The object in its true meaning is given only by the senses.”39
The essence of speculative philosophy is nothing but the rationalized, realized essence of God, brought into our presence. Speculative philosophy is the true, consistent rational theology….He who does not give up Hegelian philosophy does not give up theology. The Hegelian teaching that nature, reality, is posited by the Idea is only the rational expression of the theological teaching that nature is created by God, that material being is created by an immaterial, i.e., abstract being.40
It is Man who thinks, not the Self, not Reason….When the old philosophy therefore says only the reasonable is the true and real, the new philosophy responds, only the human is the true and real, for only what is human can be reasonable. Man is the measure of reason.41
Man, along with other animals, possesses “consciousness.” But man’s consciousness is different from that of the animal. It determines his nature as Man. He is conscious of himself not only as an individual, but also as a member of the human species. He is a “species-being,” a Gattungswesen. He is conscious of himself as a member of the human species, apprehending in other men the “human essence” that is his. It is this relation to his “species,” this ability to conceive of “species,” that is fundamental in his power of reasoning. Logical truths are the fruits of Man as “species being,” the results of the concrete nature and activities of man. Truth is social in origin and in its nature. The individual human consciousness is as much a product of Nature as it is of other individual consciousnesses; and its perceptions and truths are the results of social relations and processes.
It is with these presuppositions that Feuerbach approaches the central problem of the nature of religion. Here again he differs with the Hegelian interpretation of the character of religion. The Hegelians contended that in content religion and philosophy were the same; they differed only in form. What has happened to the Hegelian insistence that content and form were one? The latter is true, Feuerbach affirms: Yes, content and form of religion are one: “The basic dogmas of Christianity are the fulfilled wishes of mankind.”
Hegel had only given a “critical” analysis of thought. Feuerbach proposes to give a “genetic-critical” analysis. The Essence of Christianity sets out to examine the origins and sources of man’s religious thought. It takes its point of departure from Man….Not Man in isolation, however, but Man who is such by virtue of his “two-fold life,” because “Man is himself at once an I and Thou.” “Man is nothing without an object.” It is through the contemplation of the “object” that man becomes acquainted with himself. “Consciousness of the objective is the self-consciousness of man.” So that in affirming anything at all, we are at the same time affirming ourselves. As Man, a species-creature, we cannot get outside our species, and whatever we predicate about others is always drawn from our own nature—projections of ourselves.42
Hence consciousness of God is also Self, and knowledge of God is self-knowledge. Historically, then, what has been happening is that what in earlier religions had been regarded as “objective,” is now recognized as “subjective,” “what was formerly worshipped as God is now perceived to be something human.” Religion, then, and more specifically, the Divine Being, are projections, objectifications of humanity’s profoundest, dearest wishes and its highest qualities.
The divine being is nothing else than the human being, or rather, the human nature purified, free from the limits of the individual man, made objective—i.e., contemplated and revered as another, a distinct being. All the attributes of the divine nature, are, therefore, attributes of human nature….Thou believest in love as a divine attribute because thou thyself lovest; thou believest that God is a wise, benevolent being because thou knowest nothing better in thyself than benevolence and wisdom; and thou believest that God exists, that therefore he is a subject—whatever exists is a subject, whether it be defined as substance, person, essence, or otherwise—because thou thyself existest, art thyself a subject.43
Does it then follow that because the existence of God is a “chimaera,” the best of human qualities and attributes, “goodness, justice, wisdom,” are also chimaeras? Not at all. A quality is divine not because God possesses it, but He possesses it because it is itself divine, and without this quality, God would be a “defective being.” “Man in religion—in his relation to God—is in relation to his own nature.”
The mystery of the inexhaustible fulness of the divine predicates [of God] is therefore nothing else than the mystery of human nature considered as infinitely varied, infinitely modifiable, but, consequently, phenomenal being. Only in the realm of the senses, only in space and time does there exist a being of really infinite qualities or predicates.44
In proportion, therefore, in which Man has attributed to his Godhead the highest virtues, capacities, attributes, he has diminished them in himself. But what Man has taken from himself is not lost; “it is preserved in God.”
To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must be nothing….What man withdraws from himself, what he renounces in himself, he only enjoys in an incomparably higher and fuller measure in God.45
But not only the best of qualities has Man transferred to God; all that Man denies in himself, human dignity, the human ego, egoism—and goodness as a quality of human nature—all these become God’s. Man is declared to be corrupt; he finds in God all the goodness he desires. But Man does not as yet observe that all these attributions are human; that what man declares concerning God he is declaring concerning himself. So it is with human activity—what he thinks he cannot do with his own strength, what he cannot achieve of himself, he once again transfers to his God. But he does not as yet realize that
He who makes God act humanly, declares human activity to be divine.
Thus man has made himself an “object” of the very image of himself he has projected, an object to God. “God is, per se, his relinquished self.”
We have reached a crucial point. We have come to see how Religion is the “disuniting of man from himself; he sets God before him as the antithesis of himself.” In Religion man contemplates his own latent nature. It must be shown that this “differencing of God and man,” with which religion begins, is a “differencing of man with his own nature.” What do we affirm when we say “God”? We affirm our highest idea, our highest power of thought, that God is “the sum of all realities.”
“To deny man is to deny religion.”
Hence, the vital elements of religion are those only which make man an object to man. Man posits the moral perfection of God—hence he is also positing his own imperfection. He is conscious of Sin. He is at disunion with himself. He is alienated from himself. How is he to overcome this inner disunity? How is he to liberate himself from this consciousness of Sin? From the “distressing sense of his own nothingness?”
Only by this; that he is conscious of love as the highest, the absolute power and truth, that he regards the Divine Being not only as a law, as a moral being, as a being of the understanding; but also as a loving, tender, even subjective human being (that is, as having sympathy with individual man).46…Love is the middle term, the substantial bond, the principle of reconciliation between the perfect and the imperfect, the sinless and sinful being, the universal and the individual, the divine and the human. Love is God himself, and apart from it there is no God.47
Love is also the true unity of spirit and nature. Love is materialism. “Immaterial love is a chimaera.” Love is a thing of flesh and blood. “Not abstract beings no! only sensuous, living beings are merciful. Mercy is the justice of the sensuous life….It is only his human blood that makes God merciful, allays his anger; that is, our sins are forgiven us because we are not abstract beings, but creatures of flesh and blood.”
This is rehabilitation of the flesh, rehabilitation of matter…Hence the Incarnation is the “practical, material manifestation of the human nature of God.” And in a beautiful image, Feuerbach describes the Incarnation as “a tear of the divine compassion, and hence….only the visible advent of a Being having human feelings, and therefore essentially human.”48 Here the divine significance of man’s nature becomes evident to him. And, in God, he learns to love man. In the Passion, he learns that “love attests itself by suffering.”
And the Trinity? The Trinity is the symbolic projection of the relationship of the “I”, the “Thou” and the idea of Community. “We can think alone,” Feuerbach asserts, “but we can love only with another.”
God the Father is I, God the Son Thou. The I is understanding, the Thou love. But love with understanding and understanding with love is mind, and mind is the totality of man as such—the total man….The third Person in the Trinity expresses nothing further than the love of the two divine Persons towards each other; it is the unity of the Son and the Father, the idea of community…49
And thus the secret of the Trinity lies in the fulfilment of a participated and participating life, which is “alone the true, self-satisfying, divine life.” The Virgin Mary rounds out the element of participation by adding the maternal principle. The feminine principle is also divine. “The Father is a truth only where the Mother is a truth.” For herein—in the feminine and maternal principle—do we encounter the deepest love, the love within living nature, the “holy necessity and depth of Nature.” Herein, then, in our conception of the Trinity we find the projection of the deepest needs and wants of human nature. Herein also is the summation and the possibility of transcendence:
The triune God has a substantial meaning only where there is an abstraction from the substance of real life. The more empty life is, the fuller, the more concrete is God. The impoverishing of the real world and the enriching of God is one act. Only the poor man has a rich God. God springs out of the feeling of a want; what man is in need of, whether this be a definite and therefore conscious, or an unconscious need—that is God. Thus the disconsolate feeling of a void, of loneliness, needed a God in whom there is society, a union of beings fervently loving each other.50
In a brilliant derivation from, and expansion of, the Hegelian symbolization of the Trinity, in which Hegel had God objectify himself in his “opposite” and thus achieve a consciousness of himself, i.e., “self-consciousness,” knowing another than himself— an act of creation—Feuerbach describes the parallel process in the human being, translating it into an important psychological as well as social thesis: the transition within Man from consciousness, to self-consciousness, then to consciousness of another—the “I”, the “Thou,” and the “Other.” In the discovery of the “Other,” his fellow man, Man also discovers the bond that ties him to the world. Thus is broken that “isolation” that also explains his former need of Heaven.
The ego, then, attains to consciousness of the world through consciousness of the thou. Thus man is the God to man. That he is, he has to thank Nature; that he is man, he has to thank man; spiritually as well as physically he can achieve nothing without his fellow-man. Four hands can do more than two, but also four eyes can see more than two. And this combined power is distinguished not only in quantity but also in quality from that which is solitary. In isolation human power is limited, in combination it is infinite. The knowledge of a single man is limited, but reason, science, is unlimited, for it is a common act of mankind; and it is so, not only because innumerable men co-operate in the construction of science, but also in the more profound sense, that the scientific genius of a particular age comprehends in itself the thinking powers of the preceding age, though it modifies them in accordance with its own special characteristics. Wit, acumen, imagination, feeling as distinguished from sensation, reason as a subjective faculty—all these so-called powers of the soul are powers of humanity, not of man as an individual; they are products of culture, products of human society….Only where man suns and warms himself in the proximity of man arise feeling and imagination.51
Having now established this basic relation of consciousness and its development to society, Feuerbach proceeded to expand this relationship to that between Man and Nature, Intelligence and Matter. And here the break with Hegelian doctrine is both final and fundamental, and the foundations laid for a materialist theory of the universe. How, he asks, if traditional idealistic and theological notions are assumed to be true, can one explain Nature, considered hitherto “impure”—“confused, dark, desolate, immoral, or….unmoral”—as originating in the pure spirit of God? How to assign a “divine origin to Nature?” Only, he answers, by positing this impurity, this darkness in God, God as possessing within Himself both the principle of light and of darkness. But since Nature is presumed to be irrational, material, how can it be explained as a result of intelligence?
On the contrary, it is the basis of intelligence, the basis of personality, without itself having any basis; spirit without Nature is an unreal abstraction; consciousness develops itself only out of Nature.52
In the same way, personality, individuality, consciousness are nothing without Nature. Nature is nothing without body. A body does not exist without flesh and blood, and flesh and blood is nothing “without the oxygen of sexual distinction.” “If God is not polluted by Nature, neither is he polluted by being associated with the idea of sex.”
The individual is limited; the species unlimited. The individual dies; hence he longs for the assurance of some sort of immortality. He posits the Resurrection, and thus satisfies this longing for an immediate certainty of his personal survival after death. Let him now see that though his life is bound to a limited time, that of humanity is not. For the history of mankind represents the continuous and progressive conquest of limits, and in its progress reveals that the alleged or apparent limits were limits only of individuals. Consider the history of philosophy and science! “The species is unlimited; the individual alone is limited.”
He therefore who lives in the consciousness of the species as a reality, regards his existence for others, his relation to society, his utility to the public, as that existence which is one with the existence of his own essence—as his immortal existence. He lives with his whole soul, with his whole heart, for humanity. How can he hold in reserve a special existence for himself, how can he separate himself from mankind? How shall he deny in death what he has enforced in life? And in life his faith is: Nec sibi sed toti genitum se credere mundo.53
“Born not for himself, but for the whole world.” “The beginning, middle and end of religion is Man.”
Homo homini Deus est: this is the great practical principle—this is the axis on which revolves the history of the world. The relations of child and parent, of husband and wife, of brother and friend—in general, of man to man—in short, all the moral relations, are per se religious. Life as a whole is, in its essential, substantial relations, throughout of a divine nature. Its religious consecration is not first conferred by the blessing of the priest…Let friendship be sacred to thee, property sacred, marriage sacred—sacred the well-being of every man; but let them be sacred in and by themselves….It needs only that the ordinary course of things be interrupted in order to vindicate to common things an uncommon significance, to life, as such, a religious import. Therefore let bread be sacred for us, let wine be sacred, and also let water be sacred! Amen.54
With these words, Feuerbach concluded his epoch-making book. It rang forth like a battle-cry, a call to arms; it acted also as a new Book of Revelations. The “I” now saw in the “Thou” the world itself, and knew itself only through that world.
Not many books have had such an immediate impact. David Friedrich Strauss, from whose views those of Feuerbach represented so sharp a departure, wrote: “Today, and perhaps for some time to come, the field belongs to him. His theory is the truth for this age.”55 Friedrich Engels was no less excited:
Then came Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity….One must himself have experienced the liberating effect of this book to get an idea of it. Enthusiasm was general; we all became Feuerbachians….56
And Karl Marx himself, writing in 1842:
To you, speculative theologians and philosophers, I give this advice: free yourselves from the concepts and prejudices of previous speculative philosophy if you wish really to discover things as they are, that is, if you wish to discover the truth. And there is no other way to truth and freedom than through the “river of fire.” Feuerbach is the purgatory of the present time.57
The impress of Feuerbach as thinker can be gauged from Engels’ essay, written years later, in which he deplores Feuerbach’s geographical isolation in the years following the Essence of Christianity in a small Bavarian town far removed from the main currents of thought, particularly the revolutionary contributions of science. But for these deficits, his influence and importance might have been even greater and more permanent.
Yet the implications of the Essence of Christianity were far-ranging for the thinkers of Feuerbach’s day. They transcended the province of religion and extended to a critique of society as a whole. They exposed the dangers and falseness of man’s unconscious creations, especially so far as the sanctities of state and the social organism were concerned. If the “beginning, middle and end of religion is Man,” is he not also those things, say, for the State, or for Society in general? And if, as Feuerbach held, productive activity is the “positive essence of one’s personality,” then how better to realize that productive activity than in the effort fully to realize Man as Man?
It was therefore with some justice that Karl Marx wrote in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, with Feuerbach in mind:
The criticism of religion ends in the teaching that man is the highest being for man, it ends, that is, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, contemptible being.58
Durch Himmel und durch Hölle deinen Gang
Hast du gemacht, wie jener grosse Dante.
Von göttlicher Komödie sprach man lang,
Bis sie als menschliche dein Blick erkannte.
Through Heaven and Hell you made your way,
In the wake of the great Dante.
Long men spoke of his Comedy as Divine,
Until as Human your keep eye perceived it.
Thus the German poet Georg Herwegh, on Feuerbach’s death in 1872.59
But Feuerbach wrote his own best epitaph in 1846:
Enjoy the good things of life, and reduce, so far as you are able, the evils thereof. Believe that things can be better on earth than they are, and they will really be better. Do not expect that the best will come from death, nor from an imagined immortality, only from yourselves! Those evils that are eradicable—evils that have their roots in the indolence, badness, and ignorance of men—these are evils that are the most terrible. Death that is conformable to nature, death that is a culmination of the fullest development of a lifetime, is no evil. But Death that results from necessity, from vice, from crime, from ignorance—that is the Death that you must abhor.60
The third act of our philosophical drama also opens with a letter to a father. It was dated Berlin, November 10, 1837, and was written by a student of law and jurisprudence at the university there:
Dear Father: There are moments in one’s life that represent a border-line of the past, and at the same time clearly indicate a new direction. In such a period of transition we feel ourselves compelled to consider the past and the present with the eagle eye of thought, in order to realize our true position. Indeed, History itself loves such retrospect and self-inspection, which often gives her the appearance of standing still or going backwards, while she is merely throwing herself into an armchair, in order to understand herself and penetrate into her own mental processes.61
Karl Marx was then nineteen. He had left his native town of Trier, spent a year at the University of Bonn, and was now in Berlin. He had become secretly engaged to the lovely Jenny von Westphalen, was deeply in love, and unhappy at the separation. But he was also deep in his studies of law at the celebrated institution whose juridical stars were Friedrich Carl von Savigny, who represented the “historical” school of law, and Eduard Gans, the Hegelian. Like so many young Germans in love, Marx was also composing sentimental lyrics, in the style, but not with the genius, of Heine. In philosophy, he had already left Kant and Fichte behind, and at first had shied from Hegel’s “grotesque crag-like melodies.” But then, when his strenuous studies were taking their toll, he was advised to rest.
During my illness, I got to know Hegel from beginning to end, along with most of his disciples. Through several gatherings with friends in Stralow I obtained entry into a doctorate club….In the discussions here many contradictory views became manifest, and I became more and more attached to the current philosophy that I had thought to escape…
He was still compliant with his father’s wishes that he follow a legal career, but felt himself more fitted for jurisprudence than for public administration. At the same time, philosophy became more and more enticing….
The letter was intended to reassure his father that this need “to come to grips with philosophy” was a necessary concomitant of, and prerequisite to, his mastery of the philosophy of law. A voracious reader and indefatigable student, he also impressed his companions and teachers with his sharp intellect. The atmosphere of the Doktorenklub, which met in a café, was exhilarating; for here, among other bright intellectuals, was also the redoubtable Bruno Bauer, teacher, theologian and Hegelian, who was soon to shock with his radical interpretations of the New Testament. More and more, Marx’s eyes were turning toward a university career, as the letter to his father hinted; and the latter, himself an eminent lawyer in Trier, was without doubt disturbed by this radical suggestion of a detour. But Heinrich Marx died in 1838, an overwhelming loss to Karl, who was deeply attached to him; and while his father’s death freed him from a professional commitment, it also exposed him to the worry of sustaining himself and, should he marry, his future wife. Bruno Bauer had accepted a university post at Bonn and was soon urging Karl Marx to complete his doctoral dissertation and join him. Aside from a brilliant young philosopher, Bauer needed also a courageous and liberal supporter in the battles he was anticipating. And so in 1841, Marx went to Bonn; he was twenty-three, hopeful, vigorous, eager, and anxious to establish himself. Bauer’s admiration was equalled by others who met him at this time. Moses Hess, whose Sacred History of Mankind (one of the very first socialist books published in Germany) had appeared in 1837, was even more extravagant in his praise. He was writing to his friend, the novelist Berthold Auerbach:
This man has made a most extraordinary impression….the greatest, the only true philosopher now living, who, on public appearance, will attract the eyes of all of Germany. He surpasses….D. F. Strauss, and even Feuerbach, which is saying a great deal. He will deliver the coup de grâce to religion and medieval politics.
In short, he continues, Marx is an amalgam of Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel!62
And all this about a very young man who only recently achieved his doctorate at Jena with a dissertation on “The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Natural Philosophy”!
But Bruno Bauer, as a result of his works critical of Christianity, soon lost his post at the University of Bonn, and Marx, too, realized that an academic career was closed to him. He began to engage in politics.
Marx’s first political article was to appear in 1842 in the Deutsche Jahrbücher edited by Arnold Ruge. It contained a sharp criticism of the newly promulgated censorship laws of Frederick William IV. His own intellectual world had been undergoing a constant change. Ludwig Feuerbach now loomed large as an influence; and though he was never to replace Hegel, he became an important element in rounding out Marx’s development. It was on Hegel and Feuerbach that Marx was now sharpening his mind, gradually also removing himself from most of the Young Hegelians (who now called themselves Die Freien, “The Free Ones” and, from Berlin, were promulgating highly romantic, frantic, and unrealistically militant theories, but seemed as far away as possible from concrete political engagement). The ferment that was within Marx led him more and more to an incisive examination of politics and immediate political situations, while at the same time he was enlarging his theoretical vision. Since we are now in possession of many of his writings unpublished or believed lost during his lifetime, we can follow the astonishing growth he underwent in the course of the few years preceding the events of 1848.
Two elements contributed to this unprecedented efflorence: an insatiable appetite for knowledge, and an incessant application and genius for combining the theoretical and the practical. These were conjoined with an uncompromising capacity for self-criticism, which accounts for his suppression of many of his most illuminating writings until he felt himself ready to publish them. He was forever testing his insights, ever on the alert to support them critically and factually. He possessed a thorough classical training, and his interest in literature was wide. As a polemicist he would soon have few equals. There seemed no limit to the energies he was ready to expend in the fulfilment of a task he deemed important—whether in the study of books in the British Museum, or in humdrum but necessary labors of organization. He was the embodiment of his own worldview, the fusion of Theory and Practice.
To himself, however, his growth must have seemed slow, as he continued gathering his forces. Personal insecurity beset him on all sides: his mother was reluctant to support what she deemed a vagrant career; Jenny suffered untold difficulties at home, for though her father, Ludwig von Westphalen, favored Marx, other members of the family regarded her unwavering attachment as an aberration, considering her superior social position. But she remained steadfast in her attachment.
As for Marx himself, he possessed the essential quality of genius—daring. He was in love and beloved. But he was under no illusions that his journalistic career on which he was embarking would be an easy one. The political situation in the Rhenish provinces was tense; censorship was on the watch. He would be a marked man. Already Arnold Ruge was unable to publish Marx’s article on the Prussian censorship in his Hallesche Jahrbücher, and was forced to transfer it to another publication, the Anekdota, in Switzerland, where it appeared in 1843.
* * *
Marx was now embarking on his hazardous course of political involvement, with its constant risks of persecution, or banishment—a life of wandering. He was fortunate in the devoted companionship and support of his wife Jenny. It was a life filled with incessant economic hardships—in short, a life that would draw upon all the inner strength he and Jenny could muster.
The stages of Marx’s growth toward achieving a “synthesis” can be clearly mapped, a growth that persisted throughout his life to the very end, when so much of what he had planned still remained unfulfilled. The elements of the ideas and activities that would find their consummation in Das Kapital, in 1867, and in the “First International” of 1864, are all to be found in ovo before 1848.
He drew intellectual nourishment from innumerable sources—and was glad to acknowledge them; but the richest of them are represented progressively by Hegel, thereafter Feuerbach, and finally the early socialists and the bourgeois economists— though such a sketch is unjust to many other important though lesser tributaries. Not less significant and determinant was the changing history of his own times, of Europe, of the Continent and of England; and, after 1844, the lifelong association and friendship of Friedrich Engels, whose practical experience and interest in economics inspired a more profound study of that subject in Karl Marx. Thus the journey took him from abstract philosophy to politics, and then into economics—all of which he absorbed into his projected synthesis and eventually transformed.
Hegel was his touchstone and his mind’s whetstone. On the dialectical method, on the Logic, on Hegel’s philosophy of history, of law and of the state, Marx sharpened his own theories, setting down his own critique item by item. His devotion and reverence for Hegel never wavered, though he was to prove his sharpest critic; as would also be the case for Feuerbach, whom he regarded, after Hegel, as the outstanding influence in his early development. From Feuerbach, Marx took the critique of religion; Feuerbach’s partial materialism; and his view of Man as a “species-being.” Unlike Strauss and Feuerbach, unlike even Engels, Marx was not preeminently concerned with religion as such. Though he came of a family which on both sides was descended from distinguished Jewish savants and rabbis, his father belonged to that group of post-Napoleonic Jews who had severed their religious ties with Judaism, and in the face of the renascent oppressions and persecutions of the Restoration, threw in their lot with either Protestantism or Catholicism. Heinrich Marx, a disciple of Voltaire and the Enlightenment and a worshipper of Kant, indifferent to religious dogma and threatened with professional ostracism, entered the Prussian official church. By the time Marx began a serious study of society, he already considered the critique of religion as over and done with.
A number of his predecessors among the Young Hegelians had already begun to withdraw from Hegelian abstract idealism and its consummation in the Hegelian philosophy of state. In view of the challenging political situation in Germany, they demanded a conversion of theory to practice. But with few exceptions, such “practice” remained purely abstract, impractical, and merely noisy and vapid. It remained moored to an abstract discussion of “consciousness,” without bringing that consciousness to bear upon direct political or social action.
Even Feuerbach, brilliant as were his insights, had gone no farther than his critique of religion, although more than any other of the post-Hegelians he had penetrated into the social nature of consciousness and its manifestations in religious projections and sublimations. Yet Marx no doubt read with approval Feuerbach’s statement, made in a letter to Arnold Ruge:
What is theory, what is practice? Wherein lies their difference? Theoretical is that which is hidden in my head only, practical is that which is spooking in many heads. What unites many heads, creates a mass, extends itself and thus finds its place in the world. If it is possible to create a new organ for the new principle, then this is a praxis which should never be missed.63
Practical knowledge and practical experience in politics and economics were enlarged for Marx when he became a contributor to, then editor of, the Rheinische Zeitung during 1842 and 1843. This was the organ of the more enlightened industrialists and commercial interests of the Rhineland, who sought to obtain greater influence and more viable economic and political concessions from the Prussian government to which they were subject. As already noted, this preeminently Catholic section of Prussia was industrially the most advanced of the German states and at variance with the more backward attitudes and policies of Prussia. For a time, Marx found in the Rheinische Zeitung, issued in Cologne, a particularly appropriate forum for his already brilliant polemics—directed now against the Prussian state and its censorship laws, and the hypocrisy of the provincial diets, whose constitution by the upper classes was in blatant contradiction to its representative pretensions. More and more he became aware of the interrelations of economic and political power, and of the plight of the lower classes. The official censorship counterattacked by suppressing a number of his articles. The rival and conservative Kölnische Zeitung smelled out Young Hegelian blasphemies and radicalism, giving Marx the occasion for an eloquent defense of philosophy as against religion. Philosophy, he contended, was not something divorced from the world; it was the bone and marrow of social, economic and political life and had played, and was playing, an important role in the progress of a society. At the same time, as editor, Marx began paying attention to the social problems of the Rhineland; attacked the Rhenish Parliament on its proposal to rescind the right of the populace to collect fallen timber and to punish offenders severely; he called attention to the economic plight of the Moselle wine-growers. At this moment he was warding off polemical attacks on the part of the Berlin Freien and was still embroiled in troubles at home. But worse was in the offing.
The Rheinische Zeitung had by now doubled its subscription readership and was no longer a negligible thorn in the side of the authorities. King Frederick William IV by this time had second thoughts on his quasi-liberal attitude toward the press, which in his eyes was now becoming more and more rampantly offensive. He struck out at the editors of newspapers in Mannheim and Königsberg, ordering his provincial authorities to look closely at their local publications. The President of the Rhineland province took the instructions to heart and found ready pretext at hand for action: the article by Marx on the theft of wood, and a subsequent one dealing with divorce, the more liberal laws of which the King was secretly planning to restrict. There was a brief quietus, and then the conditions became intolerable for Marx, who was regarded as a bête noire. On March 18, 1843 he published a declaration in the newspaper that he was retiring from the conduct of the Rheinische Zeitung. He had before this begun to plan residence abroad. The newspaper ceased publication on March 31, concluding its valiant existence with a poetic flourish depicting the brave sailors with heads un-bowed, promising to sail other vessels….
The “sailing” would also have to be in other waters. In Germany there was no prospect of free expression. One after another, reviews and journals fell under the censor’s axe. Arnold Ruge’s Jahrbücher was one of the victims, and it seemed prudent to transplant it to Switzerland. Julius Froebel, a distinguished Swiss professor of mineralogy and a publisher of great courage and liberalism, was interested in bringing Marx to Zurich. In the end Marx and Ruge agreed on a new publication which would represent the best that France and Germany could offer in conjoint liberal thought, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher—Franco-German Annals. It would appear in Paris…
On June 12, 1843 Karl Marx and Jenny von Westphalen were married at Kreuznach, where she was then living. They had waited seven years…On to fresh fields and fresh enterprises! Assured of financial support from Ruge and his associates for the proposed publication of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, and of such gifted collaborators as Ruge, Moses Hess, Karl Froebel, and the poet Georg Herwegh; hopeful of attracting leading French socialists, and such liberals as Lamennais and Lamartine; Marx and Jenny set off for Paris, where they arrived in October 1843 and settled in the rue Vanneau 38. Jenny was already pregnant.
Here they were, in Paris, smithy of revolutions! Winds of controversy blew hard and fast; the cauldrons of ideas were ever a-boiling; doctrine clashed with doctrine; the barricades of 1830 had not been forgotten; storms were in the offing…Socialist and even more radical ideas found full expression; the names of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Considérant, Louis Blanc, Blanqui, Proudhon became battle cries…Paris was the asylum of political exiles from all over, even from Russia. Paris was the city of organizations, of societies, of “clubs”—like the German “League of the Just.” Here literature was politics and politics was literature. Here lived Germany’s greatest poet, Heinrich Heine. Here had lived and died Germany’s foremost journalist, Ludwig Börne. In Heine, Marx soon found another contributor to the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.
What a change from the stagnant apathy that prevailed in the German lands!
Here Marx rounded out the first stages of his education—the attainment of that “reform of consciousness” (a term of his invention) which was to represent a strong leap forward into new regions of thought and action…
In the roster of contributions to the first issue of the journal was one from Friedrich Engels, sent from England, forging the first links in that chain of association which was to prove epochal not only for the lives of both men, but for history. They had met casually two years before in Cologne, but without establishing a bond. Paris brought them together in a lifetime friendship, association and collaboration.
The Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher appeared in a double number in March 1844. Alas! this was its first and last appearance. It had not secured the cooperation of the French socialists; Froebel withdrew his support after the first issue, Ruge was in disagreement with its radical policies and articles, and the Prussian government brought representations upon French minister Guizot to suppress it and, failing that, took measures to bar the journal from German territories, confiscated a number of issues, and publicly declared Ruge, Marx, Heine and others guilty of high treason and subject to immediate arrest upon crossing the border. The remarkable first and last issue had contained Heine’s bitterly satirical poems on King Ludwig of Bavaria; the important essay by Marx, the “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”; Engels’ article on Political Economy, and his review of Carlyle’s Past and Present.
Though deprived of this particular source of income, Marx was not left destitute. Friends in Cologne rallied and contributed to his support. Jenny had given birth to a daughter in May 1844, and soon thereafter had returned to Germany with the child to visit her family.
Marx’s studies were now, if anything, intensified. The charged atmosphere of Paris proved a mighty auxiliary in his development: the presence of a strong and active working class, an advanced economy, and not least, the ineradicable revolutionary tradition of France. He began a thorough study of the French Revolution, as well as of the bourgeois economists, spurred on to the latter by Engels’ profound investigations of British capitalism. The tempo of his intellectual progress and understanding may be gauged by the fact that Paris marked the crucial, revolutionary stage of his development: his total break with the Young Hegelians. By the time he left the city in 1845, he had not only completed his studies of Hegel (and achieved a break with and a critique of that philosopher), but was also working out his ideas in the remarkable series called the “Paris Manuscripts of 1844.” He culminated that period with The Holy Family, in collaboration with Engels, and elaborated his theories of dialectical materialism.
Before leaving for Paris, Marx had written to Ruge in September 1843:
Our slogan, therefore, must be: Reform of consciousness, not through dogmas, but through an analysis of the mystical consciousness that is unclear about itself, whether in religion or politics. It will then become evident that the world had long dreamed of something, of which it only must become conscious in order to possess it in actuality. It will become evident that there is no big gap between the past and the future, but rather a matter of carrying out the thought of the past. It will be evident, finally, that mankind does not begin any new work, but accomplishes its old work consciously.64
In Paris, he labored to flesh out that slogan. The tasks that were on the current agenda of Humanity had been set for some time by History. “If our business is not building the future and its perfection for all time to come, what we do have to accomplish now is all the more certain: I mean the relentless critique of all that exists, relentless in the sense that the critique is neither afraid of its own results nor of coming into conflict with the powers that be.”65
Yet if it was a “relentless” or “reckless” critique of the “existing,” it was also a critique that produced, gradually, a fresh and new “synthesis” centering upon Man and Mankind. This was “historical materialism.” Many elements went into its making, but what emerged was something new. The element that fused all the discrete materials into one “totality” came from the combined genius of Marx and Engels. The stages of progress that led to the final achievement might be marked out as Philosophy, Anthropology, and Economics. Hegel’s dialectical method, his historical view of “process,” was now appropriated, as was Feuerbach’s anthropology and his theory of “alienation,” and their full light was turned upon the activities of the human being as a productive being, in relation to the forces that make up society. The starting point was now not the Absolute Idea, Absolute Reason, Spirit as it externalized itself in determinate Nature, Man, and Man’s consciousness, but concrete Man and his consciousness, man as a productive being, man as a product also of the varied forces that made up society and history.
For Marx, too, as for Hegel, the goal was Freedom; but freedom as actualized in the rehabilitation of man as man, man as member of society, man as the creative being, whose expanding “consciousness” was such as to make him ever more aware of his own powers to master nature and his environment and to attain to an understanding and knowledge of the laws of nature and society so as to “universalize” his humanness. Hegel had seen the consummation of Freedom as achieved in the present political State; in Marx’s view, this was only epitomizing the nature and character of the bourgeois society of Hegel’s time. Marxian critique had now to be directed toward examining the basis of that state, and of that society, in an effort to discover their internal contradictions as they revealed the potentialities for the next steps in the attainment of Freedom.
Relentlessly, Marx proceeded to a critique of present society, beginning with that of Germany and proceeding thereafter to a more general critique of all of bourgeois society. Like the other Young Hegelians he recognized the role a critique of religion had played as prologue to a subsequent critique of the state and the social order. It was necessary now to proceed to a reclamation of Man as Man by freeing him from illusions induced by his failure thus far to recognize that an “inverted world” had produced within him an “inverted” view of reality. That which man had “alienated” from himself—the qualities of “universal” humanity—and attributed to transterrestrial powers, must be restored to him. But how?
For Germany [Marx wrote], the criticism of religion has been essentially completed; and the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism…Man, who has found in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a superhuman being, only a reflection of his own self, will no longer be inclined to find only a semblance of himself—a non-human being—where he seeks and must seek his true reality.
But Man is not an abstract being, outside of this world. He is the “human world, the state, society.” Man makes religion; religion does not make man. Religion is the “fantastic realization” of man, because the human being does not possess the true reality. But religion is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Here occurs that celebrated (or notorious) epithet, which, taken out of its true context, has done so much to distort Marx’s true meaning:
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world, as much as it is the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Religion, then, is itself the evidence for and an implicit critique of a world that makes for human misery. It is now the task of history, and its auxiliary, philosophy, to unmask this unreal world and the self-alienation of man in its “secular” form, now that it has been unmasked in its “sacred” form.66 The backwardness of Germany politically is in sharp contrast to its forward position in speculative philosophy. And this critical, speculative philosophy of right leads on to tasks which can only be solved “by means of practical activity.”
The problem then is not merely of raising Germany to the “official level”—political and social—of modern nations, but also to the “human level, which will be the immediate future of those nations.” Can Germany be capable of such a revolution, imbedded as she is in an ancien régime? Theoretically she has reached that stage; but practically? Materially?
Material force can only be overthrown by material force; but theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses. Theory is capable of seizing the masses when it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp things by their root. But for man the root is man himself.
Germany has exhibited its radicalism in theory in it its criticism of religion, and beginning with the “resolute positive abolition of religion,” it has moved toward the doctrine that “man is the supreme being for man.”
It ends, therefore, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all those conditions in which man is an abased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being….
But who, indeed, is to be the bearer of this revolutionary idea, who is to represent this revolutionary force? Which is the class capable of undertaking a general emancipation of society? Such a class as can arouse in itself and in the masses the enthusiasm and sentiment so that it is recognized as “the general representative of that society”? In other words, a class that “universalizes” its sufferings into universal suffering or wrongs? A class that can speak for all?
Thus is announced the world-emancipating role of the proletariat….
Where is there, then, the real possibility of a German emancipation? We reply: In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class in civil society that is not a class of civil society; an “estate”which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere of society which has a universal character because of its universal sufferings, and which does not lay claim to a particular right, because the injustice it suffers is no particular injustice, but injustice in general. A sphere of society which does not lay claim to a historical status, but only a human status…a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all the other spheres of society, without, also, emancipating all other spheres of society, which in a word, is a total loss of humanity and which can only recover itself through a total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society, as a particular class, is the proletariat.67
And Marx concludes: “The emancipation of Germany will be the emancipation of Man. Philosophy is the head of this emancipation, the proletariat its heart. Philosophy cannot be realized without the dissolution of the proletariat, the proletariat can only be abolished by the realization of philosophy. When all inner conditions are fulfilled, the day of German resurrection will be heralded by the crowing of the Gallic cock.”
* * *
We have thus, with Marx, passed beyond Hegel as well as Feuerbach in the conversion of theory into practice. Practice is made tangible by its application to the masses of mankind, under the leadership of the most oppressed class. Alienated man has thus abolished alienation, and restored himself to himself, in his universal action of emancipation.
But what, in truth, is Alienation? And who is he who is the greatest sufferer of it in our society? Marx asks. Obviously, looking at modern industry, the worker. He is the proletarian; that is, he lives without capital or rent, solely from labor. Traditional political economy treats him solely as a worker, so that, like a horse, he must receive just as much “as will enable him to work.” It does not deal with him as a human being, as one with free time, but “leaves that aspect to the criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics and the work-house beadle.” The impoverishment of the contemporary worker is an open book to anyone capable of reading it. And this phenomenon is all the more striking as it shows itself in the fact that he becomes poorer and poorer the more wealth he produces for others. In proportion as the value of the things he makes increases, his own human world is devalued. And so we are faced with this particular reality: The worker has not only produced goods; he has produced himself as a commodity, as well as his labor.
In considering the various aspects of Alienation as reflected in the capitalist society of his day, Marx, as a matter of fact, is exposing a central problem for the modern world, with its manifold implications for psychology, sociology, ethics and morality; a situation particularly aggravated since Marx’s time by the amazing technological advances on the one hand, and the greater concentration of economic power in giant monolithic enterprises on the other; a situation foreseen and analyzed by him. For the first time, he was enabled to establish the nexus between a contradictory society and the process of dehumanization and atomization of the individual member as a resultant of the social forces at work. In our computerized, automated world his conclusions strike out with particular force and pathos.
In a commodity economy, the worker has become a commodity. As producer he has become a product; a product as inanimate as the product he has produced. And his product has become something alien to him (multiply this by division of labor, mechanization, speed-up). His product is no longer a “part of his nature,” his creation, his self-fulfilment, his means to a higher consciousness of himself and the world. It has become a “means” for the satisfaction of other needs—it has become forced labor. As a producer and as a product he has now been appropriated. He is owned. And in the process, he is dehumanized as a civilized being—“free” only in his animal functions and pleasures, so called, not because these are not genuinely human in themselves, but because they are dissociated from other human functions that contribute to a total fulfilment of the self. Isolated, dehumanized, alienated from himself, he is also alienated from his fellows. Appropriated by his owners, the owners of his labor, he is also alienated from “property,” which comes to be something outside of himself. That which his hands have made, his product, acquires a character of independence and, instead of appearing as a product, now appears as an ominous force, a power. But it is not only the expropriated producer that is dehumanized; he who buys labor is also distorted as human being. Human beings as well as objects are turned into objects of “egoistic” possession and acquisition. Thus all social relations of individuals are transformed into commodities, into their value, into functions of money. In religion, God was conceived as the author of the historical process; now it is money that maneuvers and moves Man around as object. Money is man’s alienated self. Money reduces all human qualities to interchangeable quantities and values.
What then of property? Hegel had maintained that property was the realization of the human personality through objectification in the “external, phenomenal world.” Property represented human freedom. Lack of property inhibits man’s participation in the universality represented by the State, therefore in the universality of Reason. “If property constitutes the first endowment of a free person, the proletariat is neither free nor a person, for he possesses no property.”68 In like manner, he is severed from art, religion, philosophy—hence from man’s very essence—and therefore he represents the “complete loss of man.” Such then is the contradiction which the unpropertied class reflects in bourgeois society; a revelation of how the mode of labor on which it is founded totally vitiates it, and “represents a total negativity” (in Hegelian terms) challenging the reality of Reason, of Truth. Thus, too, history and social reality “negate” speculative philosophy, which can no longer be the instrument of a critique of society. Such a task falls to “socio-historical practice.”69
What, according to Marx, does history reveal about “Spirit,” “Consciousness,” “Reason”? History reveals that “Spirit” is not antecedent to history, but that its emergence represents a late stage in the evolution of man. “It is a product of the power of development immanent in the ‘species life,’ generated and impelled by man’s life in society, the development which accounts for constant growth and ever new achievement.”70 Consciousness is therefore not a static thing:—it is an ever-growing, ever-developing attribute of Man, the resultant of Man’s interaction with Nature and with other members of the species through Practice—Activity. And since History begins with Production and the Process of Production, Production is the defining characteristic of Man. It causally brings about History and (to invert the Hegelian idea), as Practice, becomes revolution “actualizing the idea of Reason.”71 Practice changes consciousness, raises it to a new level of comprehension, so that it is thus enabled to change reality and ultimately achieve true Freedom.
Men have always freed themselves to the extent to which not their ideal of humanity, but the existing forces of production, prescribed and permitted. All previous liberations have been based upon limited forces of production, whose products, insufficient for the whole of society, made development possible only by some satisfying their needs at the expense of others, and consequently, the former, the minority, obtained the monopoly of the development, while the others, the majority, through the continued struggle for the satisfaction of their urgent needs, for the time being—that is, till the creation of new revolutionary forces of production—were shut out from all development. So society has hitherto always developed within an opposition, which, among the ancients was that of freemen and slaves, in the middle ages, between nobles and serfs, in modern times, of bourgeoisie and proletariat.72
The “reform of consciousness,” so far as the proletariat and (through the proletariat) the world at large is concerned, will be achieved when, through praxis, the former develops a new consciousness that comprehends that, under the existing form of production (capitalism), he is degraded to a mere object, a commodity. With the attainment of this comprehension the worker ceases to be an object, a commodity, and becomes a “subject.” Instead of being a passive recipient, he becomes an active agent. Through understanding the theory, he has been enabled to proceed to revolutionary practice. Bringing to an end the alienated experience, he emerges as the complete, free man, a “universal” being with the readiness to fulfil all his potentialities. History is the history of class struggles, and in abolishing private property and its system, he has also abolished his class. He has abolished Alienation.
With the abolition of this society, what Marx calls the pre-history of mankind will come to an end. Man’s actual history will commence….
In one of his very few predictive passages on the nature of a future devoid of present-day forces of alienation, Marx speculated:
Suppose we had produced things as human beings; in his production each one of us would have twice affirmed himself and the other. (1) In my production, I would have objectified my individuality, and its particularity, and during this activity, I would have enjoyed an individual life, for in viewing the object I would have experienced the individual joy of knowing my personality as an objective, sensuously perceptible, and indubitable and exalted power. (2) In your satisfaction and your use of my product I would have had the direct and conscious satisfaction that my work satisfied a human need, that it objectified human nature, and that it provided an appropriate object for another human being. (3) I would have been the mediator between you and the species, and for you, therefore, a completion of your own nature and a necessary part of yourself. And I would have been affirmed in your thought as well as in your love. (4) In my individual life’s activity, I would also have created your life’s activity, and realized my true human and social nature….My labor then would be a free manifestation of life, and an enjoyment of life….imposed upon me not by external and accidental necessity, but by an internal and determined necessity.73
We have here, in brief, an epitome of the new ethics, aesthetics, psychology of the fulfilled individual and an unalienated society. The abolition of the present system, through an abolition of private property—that is, through “communism”—therefore represents the “real appropriation of human nature through and for man.” Communism “is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be this solution.”74
Nothing could have been farther apart from the quietness of Trier—its agrarian vineyard environs, and the family life into which Karl Marx was born—than the surroundings and life that fell to the lot of Friedrich Engels. The small town of Barmen also belonged to the Rhineland, but it lay in the valley of the Wupper, in the heart of Germany’s industrial region.
Two years younger than Marx, Engels, who was born in 1820, was brought up in a highly comfortable cotton manufacturer’s family; in a household that, like a great part of the Barmen community and the adjoining manufacturing town of Elberfeld, was penetrated by a deeply religious pietism. In Engels’ home prevailed a strict Calvinism, ascetic in character; and its devotions were almost evenly divided between the formal pieties of home and church, and the more secular pieties of business and work. It was to be expected that the bright offspring of such a family would, after a preliminary general education, enter upon the same career as was so prominently blazoned forth in the firm names of Engels in Barmen, and “Engels and Ermen” in Manchester, England. Barmen proudly called itself the Manchester of Germany, as displayed in its less populous but none the less busy life, its fuliginous chimney stacks, its factory workers, children included, its long working hours, its frequent inebrieties and occasional violence, its poverty, as well as its Sunday devotions, punctuated by no less frequent admonitory sermons—all the evidences of advanced industrialism and its triumphs. Thus unlike Marx, young Engels was brought early into direct contact with the conditions and effects of the modern factory system. Also unlike Marx, he began the battle for mental emancipation and personal self-realization with a religious crisis, before he could enter upon the more secular philosophical pilgrimage and achieve intellectual freedom.
He received a thorough preparatory education in Barmen and at the gymnasium in Elberfeld, the latter, unfortunately, terminated at the behest of his father before graduation. But not even dreary provincial Barmen, and the slightly less provincial Elberfeld, were immune to intellectual disturbances from abroad; in fact, Elberfeld workers had on one occasion during Friedrich’s boyhood vented their fury and frustrations in highly alarming riots. Neither town could establish a cordon sanitaire against ideas. Young Engels wanted to be a poet and sought to satisfy the cravings of his imagination by composing poems and plunging into a reading of heroic literature. His preferred heroes were Siegfried, Faust, and the Wandering Jew. An intransigent and unsympathetic father watched these aberrations with suspicion, then with resentment, especially as the young man began to show strange religious leanings and an evident reluctance to follow his father’s steps as a life’s vocation. None the less, Engels acquiesced for a time. He could hardly have anticipated to what uses he would eventually put the lessons he learned, first in his father’s offices, then in the offices of the export firm of Heinrich Leupold in the shipping center of Bremen. Actually, he was already living two lives: the practical life of a future manufacturer and the private life of imagination and intellect that had already turned from pietism to a kind of vague agnosticism. He read widely; he had even begun a minor journalistic career. He knew himself to be a writer (for the time at least). Though his formal education had been interrupted, he continued educating himself indefatigably and relentlessly. He became a linguist, got to know French, Italian, English, Spanish, even Portuguese—Latin and Greek of course, even a little Hebrew. He read Strauss’s Life of Jesus and was converted. From Strauss it was natural then to go to Hegel and the Young Hegelians, Feuerbach among them. Already his eyes were turned toward Berlin.
In literature he became a disciple and admirer of the writers of the Young Germany school: of the still radical novelist Karl Gutzkow, of Heinrich Heine, and especially of Ludwig Börne, whose political liberalism and republicanism he admired. Under the name “Friedrich Oswald,” Engels acquired a local reputation through a number of vivid sketches in Gutzkow’s Telegraph depicting life in the Wupperthal. When the military claimed him, he volunteered and was thus enabled to choose a locale for his activities. He joined the artillery, was stationed in Berlin, and here began developing an interest in military science that was to remain with him and serve him well in his later analyses of the tactics and strategies of European and American armies.
He was in Berlin from September 1841 to August 1842. There he attended lectures at the university as auditor, became a frequenter of the Young Hegelian Doktorenklub, and began to contribute to the Rheinische Zeitung. What Strauss had begun, Moses Hess completed. Under his influence, Engels was converted to socialism. Hess envisioned the approach of revolution as emanating from the converging influences of three countries: England and its economics; France and its political radicalism; and Germany with its philosophy. In fact, Engels was soon to find himself in the role of mediator between philosophy and economics. To the English he would very soon try to clarify the meaning of German philosophical radicalism; to the Germans, the nature of economics as revealed in what was taking place in England. In his knowledge and understanding of the true nature of industrialism and capitalism he was, of course, far ahead of any of his associates in Berlin, as well as of Marx himself at this stage. A brief meeting in Cologne in 1842 did not begin their partnership; it took two years, and Paris, to make for the beginning of a lifelong association. For the present, Engels was off to England—to Manchester. The most crucial, critical, and productive part of his education was about to commence.
England was to be very close to him. He had taken Shelley and his poetry to heart. Poets were for him the great missionaries of human emancipation and salvation; Shelley was the poet as revolutionary. He, too, felt himself one of “the free singers.”
Like other young intellects of the time, he was astir with the new thoughts and movements within and outside of the country. “Ich kann des Nachts nicht schlafen vor lauter Ideen des Jahrhunderts.” “The ideas of the century keep me from sleeping nights.”75 He was always to be intoxicated by new ideas. He felt that way when he came upon Hegel’s philosophy, especially Hegel’s notion of God, and in his twentieth year interpreted it in the light of a pantheism. It was an electrifying experience:
When the God-idea of the last of philosophers first became manifest to me—this giant-idea of the nineteenth century…, then the depths of speculation lay before me like an impenetrable ocean, from whose very bottom the eye cannot avert its eager gaze…We felt that all around us and we ourselves are suffused with God.76
He had also been present at the Berlin lectures of Schelling on Revelation, which that philosopher directed against Hegel and his followers. Engels then published a diatribe against Schelling and at the same time affirmed his faith in the future opened up for him by his master Hegel:
The world that had seemed like a prison, now revealed itself in its true aspect, as a magnificent palace, open now to all of us, to enter and to leave, for rich and poor, for high and low…This belief in the omnipotence of the Idea, in the victory of eternal Truth, this firm assurance that it can never waver or yield, even though the whole world stood up against her, this is the true religion of a true philosopher, this is the basis of the positive philosophy, the philosophy of world history.77
His boldness was greater than his knowledge, for he was scarcely competent as yet to judge Schelling; nor was he advanced in his understanding of Hegel. The fervor of the Doktorenklub was upon him. Marx, who had left Berlin shortly before Engels’ arrival, was no longer there to set him right; but Engels made up in zeal what he still lacked in learning. History was also a valuable teacher, especially that of his own day, for many important things were happening in France and England. News had come of the unsuccessful insurrectionary attempt on the part of the radical Frenchman Blanqui in Paris in May 1839; there was the Chartist agitation in England, especially the great strike in the textile industry of 1842. The contemporary novels of Dickens, George Sand, and Eugène Sue were read, discussed, and admired for their pronounced social declarations. All these and many other influences now affected him and helped form him as he prepared to join his father’s firm in Manchester. Here he was to find a “university,” not bound by classrooms or lecture halls, but no less enlightening and formative than Berlin with its university and its Doktorenklub. He had already made the acquaintance of Karl Marx’s critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. He was prepared to test his theoretical knowledge against the practical experiences and observations derived from the economic realities of the greatest workshop in the world. Many years later he described what he had learned there:
While in Manchester, I was forcibly brought to realize that economic facts, which have so far played no role or only a contemptible one in the writing of history, are, at least in the modern world, a decisive historical force; that they form the basis for the origin of the present-day class antagonisms; that these antagonisms, in the countries where they have become fully developed, thanks to large-scale industry, especially therefore in England, are in their turn the basis of the formation of political parties and of party struggles, and thus of all political history.78
From Manchester he conveyed his newly acquired knowledge and observations to Marx through his contributions to the Rheinische Zeitung and the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.
In England originated or were brought to completion some of the most significant of Engels’ works, based upon his experiences in that country: Letters from England, “The Condition of England,” Outlines of a Critique of National Economy, a review of Carlyle’s Past and Present and, of the greatest moment, the volume on The Condition of the Working Class of England in 1844, published in 1845. In addition, he contributed articles to the Owenite journal The New Moral World, and entered into close relations with the Chartist leader and editor George Julian Harney. As we have noted, Engels was the bridge that linked Continental socialist movements with those of the English working class. He became deeply involved in the appalling plight of the Irish workers in England. He wrote glowingly of their courage.
Whoever has not seen the Irish, cannot know them. Give me 200,000 Irishmen, and I won’t give the whole of the British Monarchy much of a chance.79
Here, in England, he claimed, was the most advanced, the best-organized working-class movement in the world. Here the social conditions glaringly displayed the misery, the deprivation, the degradations of millions of beings. Here were man and women schooled in the bitter lessons of proletarian conflict, defeats, and ever-continuing counterattack—intelligent, enlightened masses, eager to learn the truth and act upon it. Unfortunately they were bogged down in their efforts because they relied on political action to solve their social problems. If only they could master the theories of class-struggle and revolution! For Engels believed that England was on the verge of a mighty revolution. It seemed to him that the necessary forces were present there already.
He was deeply impressed with Thomas Carlyle’s writings and recognized in their author a moral force of great importance and influence. Somewhat recklessly he called him the only English writer worthy of being read. It was therefore with a respectful though critical spirit that he reviewed Carlyle’s Past and Present. He understood that in his political ideas Carlyle was more Tory than Whig. “This is certain,” Engels wrote. “A Whig could never have written a book half so human as Past and Present.” In his review, which was to be published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Engels fully approved of Carlyle’s violent rage against a society that worshipped Mammon and was bound only by the “nexus” of cash; against an aristocracy that was lazy and indifferent, as well as inefficient; against manufacturers and traders concerned solely with their profits. He was all sympathy with Carlyle’s outrage at the poverty and misery only too prevalent in England. But he rejected Carlyle’s attempted solutions to these problems; raised severe objection to his idealization of a medieval society, with its alleged greater cohesion and humanity, and particularly to his demand for a return to religion. Carlyle, Engels stated, who knew so much about German literature, had failed to see its completion and its consummation in German philosophy, particularly that of Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, about whom he seemed to have no knowledge. Had Carlyle searched more deeply into the causes of the great crisis of the day, he surely would have found them in the state of religion itself. He would have perceived that though the question hitherto had been “What is God?”—German philosophy had resolved it in its discovery that God is Mankind. “We see in history not the revelation of God, but of man, and only of man.” Carlyle was seeking “heroes” to guide mankind; had he truly conceived of man in his infinity, in his totality, he would not have fallen back upon an ignoble conception that divided mankind into sheep and goats, ruler and ruled, aristocrat and mob. He would not have clung so closely to the notion that property was sacred. Like Carlyle, Engels added, “we carry on a battle to the death,” with all the evils of the day, “but we have a greater chance of success than he, for we know what we want.”80
It was a Feuerbachian still speaking. Engels’ sojourn in England from the end of 1842 till August 1844 gave him an unequalled opportunity to extend both his knowledge and his understanding of the British economy and polity. With a fine scalpel he began removing the outer layers of English political and social life to bare its true insides. For the German newspaper Vorwärts, published in Paris, he wrote a series of brilliant analyses of the “Condition of England,” bringing to light some of the illusions he believed surrounded the idea of the British Constitution, and the alleged “democracy” inherent in British institutions. In substance, he asserted, all these concealed the true rulers of England: the House of Commons, the real organ and instrument of the conquering manufacturers and commercial interests. All the powers of “the Constitution, the Crown, the House of Lords, the House of Commons” were “deceptions,” the masks of privilege. “The democracy that will triumph in England is a social democracy. Simple democracy is incapable of curing social evils. Democratic equality is a chimaera, and the struggle between the poor against the rich cannot be resolved by means of political democracy. This represents only a transitory phase, whence will be born a new element—a principle that will transcend every political element—the principle of socialism.”81
In even fiercer terms Engels excoriated the hypocrisy of the British bourgeoisie, with its claim that it had destroyed the “barbarism of monopoly, and carried civilization to the farthest corners of the world, and enlarged the brotherhood of man, and diminished wars.” Yes, Engels said, addressing himself to such pious braggarts,
You have destroyed the little monopolies, in order to allow the greater and basic monopoly, property, to act more freely and without restraints. You have civilized the corners of the world, in order to win new territories for the better expansion of your abysmal greed; you have brought brotherhood to peoples, a brotherhood of thieves; you have diminished wars, in order to obtain the greater gains of peace, in order to push the enmity of the individual—the dishonorable war of competition—to its highest point…Where have you ever been virtuous, without advancing your own interests, without concealing your immoral, egoistical motives?82
Major turning points in history are not always signaled by articulated fanfare, or even observed at the time. The ten-day meeting of Engels and Marx in Paris in August 1844, when Engels was returning home, passed practically unnoticed except by a number of their associates. Yet it marked a most significant moment in the history of socialist thought and action, an affirmation of intellectual identity on the part of the two thinkers; the beginning of actual collaboration that set forth and clarified the theoretical elements and joined them to practical realization. In their own ideas they achieved that “reform of consciousness” that transcended absolute idealism and brought forth historical and dialectical materialism both as theory and practice. Granted that the theories were true, and substantiated by history and fact, they were useless unless translated into practice—that is, the creation of a movement. In the unpublished manuscripts of 1844, the so-called “Paris” manuscripts, Marx had already seen the need of these ideas to catch hold of the masses, who, through their “reformed” or “heightened” consciousness, would turn them into concrete realities— that is, bring about a revolution.
It would be futile and meaningless here to enter upon a discussion as to which of the two was the greater or the more original genius, which contributed most, and which originated this or that particular idea or notion. Both men were geniuses of a high order, and each contributed in accordance with the richness of his own particular powers and in the interchange through which they drew upon one another’s resources. Genius, is, after all, just such a “reform of consciousness,” a new perception of fundamental relationships in whatever world it deals with: science, art, philosophy. It is a leap forward in creation, made possible by the springboard of the times and its antecedents. In turn it affords an expansion of consciousness on the part of the recipient—an expansion that may take different forms, depending upon the particular cultural form. The full impact of such innovations may not become apparent until some time after their appearance or proclamation. It is a fact that the most influential of all the Young Hegelians between 1840 and 1848 was not Marx, nor Engels, but Ludwig Feuerbach, who in turn represented historically one of the preliminary stages of preparation for the ideas of Marx and Engels.
One might say that what now emerged as theory and practice was in fact a fulfilment of Moses Hess’s anticipation. Three elements had been fused: German philosophy, French revolutionary political thought and revolutionary tradition, and England’s industrial triumphs—England as economic fact, Germany as theory, and France as revolutionary practice. To his collaboration with Marx, Engels brought his practical experience in industry and his vast knowledge of economics; Marx on his side contributed his philosophical acumen, wide knowledge of history, and extraordinary theoretical insights.
Let us remember too that Marx and Engels labored under severe pressures and urgencies. The political horizon was clouded, and a storm, many felt, was imminent. In this approaching explosion what was needed was theoretic clarity, particularly when so many clashing doctrines were in the air and acrimonies raged far and wide. Polemics were sharp and, to modern ears, unusually raucous and intolerant at times. Much of the argumentation directed by Marx and Engels against Proudhon, Bakunin, German Utopians, German idealists, messianic socialists, appears outdated today, but at the time seemed of paramount importance, when the task was not only to counter intellectual opposition, but also to convey viable ideas to the working classes in order to move them to fruitful activity. The astounding fact was that such work was productive, both theoretically and practically. The almost inexhaustible energies spent upon it did bear epoch-making fruit: a political and social manifesto of unequaled importance for that and the following century, and an organization that was destined in one form or another to effect untold radical changes in the entire world. It must also not be forgotten that such works were undertaken, begun and completed in an atmosphere of uncertainty: at any moment an order might be issued by the government that would mean expulsion for its proponents and removal to a new and strange home…
And indeed it happened to Marx. Engels went back to Barmen to carry on political activity and education—in the end to find himself in difficulties with the police (not to mention his father). Marx had become an important contributor to the German newspaper Vorwärts appearing in Paris. He and Heinrich Heine had become intimate, and it was under Marx’s influence, and for that newspaper, that the poet composed some of his most trenchant and moving political poems and prose works—notably the poem “The Weavers,” aroused by the revolt of the Silesian workers in 1844. Engels’ contributions on England had also appeared in that journal. Vorwärts, under the editorship of Bernays, had become an outspoken radical organ with a number of left-wing contributors. An indiscreet article concerning the attempted murder of King Frederick William IV by a certain Burgomaster Tschech inspired the Prussian government to ask France for the prosecution of editor Bernays. Guizot took advantage of Bernays’ failure to post the required security demanded of newspapers, and had him jailed and fined. The other editors of Vorwärts thereupon changed the journal into a monthly, which was not subject to such restrictions. In response, Guizot ordered the Minister of the Interior to proceed and expel editors and contributors Heinrich Heine, Bernays, Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, Ruge, and others. The order was issued on January 26, 1845, and of these only Marx and Bakunin suffered final expulsion. Marx left Paris on February 1, 1845 and arrived in Brussels on the ninth. Another critical but even more fruitful period was to commence. He was joined by his wife and daughter, and settled in a Brussels suburb. He was not to be alone, for in addition to his family there were friends he knew in Brussels already. Soon others would arrive, like himself either involuntary or voluntary exiles. Here Marx was to remain until 1848, except for a brief stay in England in the company of Engels.
In Barmen Engels carried on political agitation, along with Moses Hess; made speeches, and organized meetings which were well attended by members of the middle class, though workmen stayed away. Enthusiastic over their reception, Engels and Hess tended to overestimate the practical effects of these meetings and the proximity of political action. Patiently speakers explained the meaning of “communism,” but revolution was toned down. Engels’ father was outraged. The son, on the other hand, still bound to the counting-house, felt himself to be an exploiter. He was happy only when he was out in Elberfeld or beyond, spreading the new doctrine, or when adding another chapter to his book on the Condition of the Working Class in England. Early in February 1845, the local authorities became seriously concerned and forbade further gatherings. Unhappy at home and apprehensive of further trouble, Engels betook himself to Brussels in April.
In the light of our later knowledge, it is impossible to overrate the significance of the Brussels period, and the interdependent relationship of Marx and Engels. It was marked in 1845 by the publication of Engels’ Condition of the Working Class, and by the collaboration of both Engels and Marx on what was to be called the theory of historical materialism. Unfortunately the work in which these ideas were developed at the time, The German Ideology, was not to see the light of day until 1932. Its authors regarded it as a personal working-out of their thoughts, though on the basis of their conclusions they proceeded to put these thoughts into practice. Both thinkers now set out to act upon Marx’s celebrated statement in his Theses on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” It was time to begin to organize like-minded radical groups, scattered and fragmented as they were, into some unity, and to make them the practical arm of socialist theory.
The fundamental theory of historical materialism, as set forth in The German Ideology, was precisely and eloquently summarized as follows:
In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, we here ascend from earth to heaven…We set forth from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable, and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology, and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain their semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter along with their existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.83
In the way individuals manifest their lives, such they are. What they are coincides therefore with their production, with what they produce as well as how they produce. What individuals are depends on the material conditions of their production.84
Man is the basic, primary element of history. What he produces and how he produces is what makes history. The satisfaction of his basic needs, and the creation of modes of production to satisfy them, in turn create new needs—hence new instruments of production. Concomitantly, his social relations develop and change and are enlarged. He stands in relation to Nature and to Society. The reciprocal transformation that takes place—between the individual, changing and changed Nature, and the social milieu (for in transforming Nature man also transforms himself)—represents the essential content of history. He cannot satisfy his growing needs individually, hence he must enter into relations with other human beings; enter, so to speak, into social relations of productions. The development of the forces of production determines, as it also transforms the social relationships, man’s consciousness and thought. Consciousness and language are social products. The resultant change in the consciousness of man is the product of its interaction with Nature and Society, a response to the changes in the forces and modes of production. The course of history is the result of a dialectical process, for as the forces and means of production change to meet new needs, prevalent social relationships become a clog on the new forces of production and must be replaced by newer social relationships. This contradiction between the forces of production and social relations is the source and origin of political and social struggles, which constitute the motor of history. Such transformations do not take place automatically, nor does replacement of one form by another occur immediately. The old will persist by the side of the new: water-powered machinery by the side of steam-powered machinery. The same is true of ideas, modes of conduct, mores, etc. Domestic industry will persist for a time side by side with the factory, feudal systems side by side with a triumphant bourgeois economy. The central element in all these transformations is struggle—struggle carried on by human beings—a struggle of classes. It is a struggle of possessors and non-possessors. Often these struggles are masked in religious or political forms, thus concealing their essentially social character, but they are class struggles none the less. The dominant class creates in the state and its political organs means to subserve its own interests, hence every ascendant class must perforce appropriate the state, i.e., its army, police force, its legal and judicial apparatus. The modern state takes form at a time when private property has become capital. The domination extends not only to the physical or material elements of society, but also to its very ideas and thinking.
The thoughts of the ruling class are in every period the ruling thought, i.e., the class that is the ruling material power of society, also is the ruling spiritual and intellectual power…The ruling thoughts are but the ideal expression of the ruling material relations…The division of labor, which we have already found to be one of the principal forces of history to date, also expresses itself in the ruling class as division of the spiritual and material labor, so that within this class one part comes forward as the thinkers of that class (the active conceptual ideologues thereof)…while the others behave towards these thoughts and illusions more passively and receptively, because they are in reality the active members of that class, and have less time to form illusions and thoughts about themselves.85
Hence, the proletariat has no chance of making a successful revolution until it frees itself totally from the illusions and mystifications by means of which the bourgeoisie seeks to divert it from struggle, and until it is guided solely by its own class interest. But that class interest, as we have seen, is according to Marx and Engels a “universal” interest. The principal condition for revolutionary success lies in the total development of the capitalist system, which will permit the proletariat to appropriate the totality of the productive forces arrived at the highest degree of their development, and to become by their employment of it universal men, and give communism a universal character corresponding to that which capitalism had taken on.86
Such were the conclusions at which Marx and Engels had arrived by 1845–1846.
For Engels, the experiences of Manchester had been paramount in determining his conception of history. So that his comprehensive work, The Condition of the Working Class of England in 1844 was, in fact, the factual complement of the theories Marx had been developing. Engels’ book was based on a first-hand acquaintance with the situation he was describing, as well as a thorough study of published sources and official documents. It was projected not only as a description of the effects of the triumphant industrial revolution and of capitalism in the most advanced country in the world, but also as supporting and justifying socialist theory. For the German socialists it was especially important to know the reality of modern capitalism in its most highly developed form. For it was only in Great Britain, and England in particular, that the conditions appeared in their “classical” form and were there consummated. Interest in the conditions of the laboring classes ran high in those days, particularly stimulated by the recent revolt of the Silesian weavers, as well as by numerous studies of English industrial life by foreigners and Englishmen. Engels’ book went beyond those of other observers in not merely providing a graphic description of factual conditions, but also drawing practical conclusions from them. Here was exhibited how the changes in the forces and modes of production that had taken place, not only in industry but in agriculture as well, had effected changes in human relations in every sector of the society and, in many instances, in other parts of the world. Here were exhibited the evidences of sharpening differences between the classes. The wretched condition of the industrial worker in Lancashire was matched by the wretchedness of the agricultural worker. Pauperism, starvation, slums, disease, moral, physical and spiritual degradation of the masses, depopulation of Ireland—these were only a portion of the effects. A new form of slavery had come into being. But it was far from a passive form. A new class had been created which was becoming conscious of itself as a class, and in the process of asserting itself, as against the makers of their condition. Its two arms were trade unions and socialism. Its strength had already become manifest, even in the signal Chartist defeat of 1842, for it had not been destroyed. What it lacked was a theoretical understanding of its own historic role and how to act upon it. But it was potentially a revolutionary class, which, through its “reformed consciousness,” would be enabled to change the structure of society. A great crisis was in the making: Engels predicted it for the years 1846–1847—when it did, in fact, take place. Such crises were bound to occur with greater and greater frequency, particularly as other nations (America, for example), entered into competition with Great Britain. Thereafter, a revolution would take place that would make that of France look like child’s play. Engels expressed the hope that by that time communist thought and communism would have sufficiently penetrated the working classes to enable them to make the revolution without bloodshed.
That a major crisis was imminent was apparent not merely to radical thinkers, but to conservative and liberal thinkers as well. Reactions, of course, differed greatly. One merely has to compare Carlyle’s “Signs of the Times” and Past and Present with Engels’ utterances, to see how antipodal interpretations and conclusions could be. No less diverse were the opinions and theories of the various schools of socialism, anarchism, liberalism, and other movements of reform.
Isolated as they were in Brussels, with few companions of a like mind, Marx and Engels realized that their primary duty was to bring some measure of unity and cohesion to the various groups generally sympathetic to their socialist ideas, though not by any means in accord with them. Looked at from any perspective, what they finally achieved before 1848 was no less prodigious. A great deal of bitterness and heartache, but also an incalculable amount of energy and effort, were expended in the process, but both men and their associates worked tirelessly. Both of them possessed immense reparative capacities, so that neither change of locale nor occasional setbacks could divert them from their projected goals.
They began to establish firmer contacts with various groups of the “League of the Just.” This organization of German artisans and workingmen of Paris had succeeded in establishing branches in Germany and Switzerland, especially under the leadership of Wilhelm Weitling. A tailor whose apocalyptic socialist vision drew many to him, Weitling was the author of a number of very influential works such as Humanity as It Is and Should Be, Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom, and The Evangel of a Poor Sinner. Along with his own personal fervor and persuasiveness, these found unusual response. The London branch of the League was particularly strong, and sympathetic to the call for unity. Engels had already formed a close association with the British Chartists and such of its leaders as Harney and Watts.
Marx and Engels had formed a Correspondence Committee in Brussels which brought them into contact with various other groups. In August 1846 Engels settled in Paris to carry on the work of propaganda and organization. What emerged from these efforts of contact, association, and correspondence was, in fact, a kind of international workers’ movement—the first of its kind. The London branch of the “League of the Just,” which had begun to free itself from Weitling’s influence, was very active, open to new ideas, and ready for cooperation. Thus Paris, London, Brussels, and other cities were joined in a common exchange of ideas, opinions and plans. When the Paris groups were subjected to police persecution, the headquarters of the “League of the Just” shifted to London. It was here, at the suggestion of the Brussels Correspondence Society, that an international congress of communists was called for May 1847. The times were urgent, and the needs were pressing. Marx and Engels joined the League, and Engels went to London to attend the congress, which was actually held between June 2 and 7, 1847. The name of the organization was now changed to Der Bund der Kommunisten—“The League of Communists.” For the first time the slogan of “Proletarians of All Countries Unite!” appeared in the statutes of the congress. The key words were no longer “love for humanity, but organization; no longer equality, but solidarity.”87 With the consciousness of growing strength based on the existence of militant groups in London, Marseilles, Lyons, Brussels, Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Munich, Leipzig, and other cities, there came the call for a second congress in London for the end of 1847. Marx and Engels were present, and the program of the League was promulgated. Karl Marx, entrusted with the responsibility of drawing up a “confession of faith,” returned to Brussels and, basing himself upon an earlier draft by Engels, set about perfecting a work that was completed in February 1848. The manuscript was printed in London in German. Called Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, it is now known as The Communist Manifesto. Rarely has such a seminal document appeared at such a historic moment. A few days after its publication, the February Revolution broke out in France.
The pamphlet’s appearance was overshadowed by mighty historic events; it was not to have its true effect until many years after, until an international socialist and working-class movement came into being. Thereafter it was to become the vademecum of socialism around the world, and translated into all the world languages.
In its eloquent brevity, appositeness and clarity, it set forth concisely the principles of socialism, the role of the working class, and historical relations in political economy and society that made the revolutionary triumph of the working classes not only necessary but inevitable in view of the accentuated crises of bourgeois society. History was to amend its predictions—sometimes tragically—as it was to amend the ideas and theories of its authors in years to come, though it would never alter its essential value as theory and description of society as constituted, nor of the need for radical change. Nor was it ever to shake the confidence of its authors in the potential future fulfilment of its prophecies. Its celebrated slogans were to re-echo year after year as the unintermittent battle of classes continued, ultimately embracing East and West, eventually to change the face of the world. Its succinct formulations became axiomatic battle-cries, from its initial statement:
A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police spies,
to its first section:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,
and on to
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand…has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.”
(Thus is Carlyle put to new uses!) And
Not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class, the proletariat.
And,
The workingmen have no country….
down to the celebrated conclusion:
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!
In this pamphlet are embodied many ideas derived from previous socialist thinkers, men like Saint-Simon and Babeuf, as well as others; and Marx never claimed to have invented all of them.
As far as I am concerned [Marx wrote to Weydemeyer in 1852], I cannot claim the honor of having discovered the existence either of classes in modern society or of the struggle between them. Bourgeois historians a long time before me established the historical development of this class struggle, and bourgeois economists its economic anatomy.88
But he did lay claim to certain important contributions: To wit, “that the existence of classes is bound to definite historical phases of the development of production, that class struggle leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that this dictatorship is itself only a transition to the abolition of all classes and leads to a classless society.”89
The Manifesto, then, constituted a brief compendium of the history of society to the point of bourgeois triumph through modern industrial transformations, the emergent crises and anarchy, as well as its insoluble problems, which it believes it can solve by such means, among others, as the conquest of new markets, and more thorough exploitation of old ones. They thus forge new weapons of their own destruction, and also have “called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons.”
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: the formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.90
The first step then is “to win the battle of democracy.” And the immediate measures proposed include, among others, the “abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes; a heavy progressive or graduated income tax; abolition of all right of inheritance; centralization of credit in the hands of the State; centralization of the means of communication and transport in the State; equal liability of all to labor; combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; free education for all children in public schools; abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form…”
Then follows a critique of contemporary and past socialist theories and movements. The Manifesto concludes with the expectation of a proximate bourgeois revolution in Germany which “will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.” The Communists, it is made clear, fight for the attainment of the immediate aims and interests of the working class; hence, without losing sight of the ultimate objectives, they support whatever progressive movements there are that are struggling for political, national, or economic and social emancipation.