Delhi university library

THE YOUNG HEGELIANS 63

history is world justice). So much was accepted by both sides. The schism arose over the relative emphasis to be placed on the crucial terms, ‘rational’ and ‘real’.

The conservatives, proclaiming that only the real was rational, declared that the measure of rationality was actuality, that the stage reached by social or personal institutions, as they existed at any given moment, was the sufficient measure of their excellence; so, for example, German culture as Hegel did in fact declare, was a higher, and probably ultimate, synthesis of its predecessors. Oriental and Graeco-Roman cultures., Tram which it presumably followed that the last stage being of necessity the best, the most perfect political framework yet attained by men, consisted of the highest culmination to date of that culture—the Prussian State. To wish to alter it or subvert it was morally bad, because directed against the rational will embodied in it, and in any case futile, because it set itself against a decision already made by history. This is a form of argument with which Marxism later familiarized the world.

only the rational was real. The actual, they insisted, is often full of inconsistencies, anachronisms and blind unreason: it cannot therefore be regarded in any genuine, that is metaphysical, sense, as being real. Basing themselves on numerous texts from Hegel, they pointed out that the master recognized that mere occurrence in space or time was by no means equivalent to being real: the existent might well be a tissue of chaotic institutions, each frustrating the purposes of the other, and so from the metaphysical point of view utterly illusory: their degree of reality was measured by their tendency to form a rational whole, which may necessitate


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a radical transformation on their part in accordance with the dictates of reason. These are best known to those who have emancipated themselves from the tyranny of the merely actual, and have revealed its inadequacy to its historic role as deduced from a correct interpretation of the character and direction of the past and present. This critical activity against the social institutions of his time, directed by the individual who lifts himself above them, is the noblest function of man, and the more enlightened the critic, the more searching his criticism, the more rapidly will the actual progiess towards the real. For, as Hegel had indubitably said, reality is spiritual in character and grows more perfect in the very growth of critical self-consciousness among mgn. Nor was there any reason to suppose that such progress must be gradual and painless. Citing again the [texts undeniably to be found in Hegel, they reminded their opponents that progress was the result of tension between opposites, which grew to a crisis and then burst into open revolution : then and only then did the leap into the next stage occur. These were the laws of development found equally in the obscurest processes of brute nature and the affairs of men and societies.

The plain duty of the philosopher who carries the burdens of civilization on his shoulders is, therefore, to promote such revolution by the special technical skill which he alone commands, that is by intellectual warfare. It is his task to stir men from their indolence and torpor, to sweep away obstructive and useless institutions with the aid of his critical weapons much as the French philosophers had undermined the ancien regime by the power of ideas alone. No resort must be had either tq physical violence or to the brute force of the masses

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65

to appeal to the mob, which represents the lowest level of self-consciousness reached by the Spirit among men, is to make use of irrational means, which could only produce irrational consequences: a revolution of ideas will of itself bring about a revolution in practice: Hinier die Abslraktion stellt sich die Praxis von selbst (Behind^ the abstract theory practice appears of its own accord) But since open political pamphleteering was forbidden, the opposition was driven into less direct methods of attack: the first battles against orthodoxy were fought in the field of Christian theology, whose professors had hitherto tolerated, if not encouraged, a philosophy which had shown every disposition to support the existing order. In 1835 David Strauss published a critical life of Jesus writ ten in accordance with the new Hegelian method, in which he rejected some portions of the Gospels as pure invention, regarding others as representing not facts but semi-mythological beliefs entertained in the early Christian communities, and treating the whole subject as an exercise in the critical treatment of a historically important but unreliable text. His book caused an immediate storm not in orthodox circles only, but also among the Young Hegelians, whose most prominent representative, Bruno Bauer, then a lecturer in theology in the University of Berlin, published several attacks upon it from the point of view of an even extremer Hegelianism, wholly denying the historical existence of Jesus, and attempting to explain the Gospels as works of pure imagination, as the literary expression of the ‘ideology’ prevalent in its time, the highest point reached at this period by the development of the Absolute Idea. The Prussian authorities were not in general interested in sectarian controversies among

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philosophers, but in this quarrel both sides appeared to hold views subversive of religious, and so, in all likelihood, of political orthodoxy. Hegelianism, which had previously been left in peace as a harmless, and even patriotic, philosophical movement, was suddenly accused of demagogical tendencies. Hegel’s greatest opponent, Schelling, then a bitterly reactionary old man, was brought to Berlin in order to refute these doctrines publicly, but his lectures totally failed to produce the desired result. The censorship was tightened, and the Young Hegelians found themselves driven into a position in which they were given the choice of capitulating completely or of moving farther to the political left than the majority wished to go. The only arena where the issue could be still raised were the universities, where a curtailed, but nevertheless genuine, academic freedom continued to survive. The University of Berlin was the chief seat of Hegelianism and it was not long before Marx became immersed in its philosophical politics.

He began his academic career as a student of the faculty of law by attending Savigny’s lectures on jurisprudence and those of Gans on criminal law. Savigny, the founder and the greatest theorist of the Historical School of Jurisprudence, and a convinced and rabid anti-liberal, was by far the most distinguished defender of Prussian absolutism in the nineteenth century. He was not a Hegelian in the strict sense, but agreed with the School in rejecting equally the theory of natural rights and of utilitarianism, and interpreted law historically, as a continuous, orderly, traditional development springing from, and justified by, the ideals and character of a given nation in its historical surroundings.

Marx attended Savigny’s lectures for two terms with


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great regularity, and the immense erudition and power of close historical argument for which the latter was notable was probably Marx’s first contact with the new method of historical research, which demanded minute knowledge of facts as a basis for broad general theses. Savigny’s chief professional opponent was the professor of criminal law, Eduard Gans, whose effect on Marx was more considerable. Gans was one of Hegel’s favourite disciples: he was by birth a Jew, a friend of Heine, and like him a humanitarian radical who did not share his teacher’s low opinion of the French enlightenment. His lectures, models, it seems, both of erudition and of courage, were widely attended; his free criticism of legal institutions and methods of legislation in the light of reason, with no trace of mysticism about the past, affected Marx profoundly, and inspired him with a conception of the proper purpose and method of theoretical criticism which he never completely lost.

Under the influence of Gans he saw in jurisprudence the natural field for the application and verification of every type of philosophy of history. Hegelianism at first repelled his naturally positivist intelligence. In a long and intimate letter to his father he described his efforts to construct a rival system; after sleepless nights and disordered days spent in wrestling with the adversary, he fell ill and left Berlin to recuperate. He returned with a sense of failure and frustration, equally unable to work or to rest. His father wrote him a long paternal letter, begging him not to waste his time on barren metaphysical speculation when he had his career to think of. His words fell 011 deaf ears. Marx resolutely plunged into an exhaustive study of Hegel’s work, read night and day, and after three weeks announced his

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complete conversion. He sealed it by becoming a member of the Doklorklub (Graduates’ Club), an association of free-thinking university intellectuals, who met in beer cellars, wrote mildly seditious verse, professed violent hatred of the King, the church, the bourgeoisie, and above all argued endlessly on points of Hegelian theology. Here he met, and was soon on terms of intimacy with the leading members of this bohemian group, the brothers Bruno, Edgar and Egbert Bauer, Koppen, a curious figure, one of the earliest students of Tibetan lamaism and the author of a history of the French Terror, Max Stirner who preached an ultraindividualism of his own, and one or two other free spirits (as they called themselves).

]Je abandoned his legal studies, and became entirely absorbed in philosophy. No other subject seemed to him to possess sufficient contemporary significance: he planned to become a lecturer in philosophy in one of the universities, and together with Bauer to launch a violent atheistic campaign which should put an end to the timorous, half-hearted toying with dangerous doctrines to which the milder radicals confined themselves. It was to take the form of an elaborate hoax, appearing as an anonymous diatribe against Hegel by a pious Lutheran charging him with atheism and subversion of public order and morality, and armed with copious quotations from the original text. This joint work actually appeared and caused some stir; a few reviewers were genuinely taken in, but the authors were discovered, and the episode ended by Bauer’s removal from his academic post. As for Marx, he frequented social and literary salons, met the celebrated Bettina von Arnim, the friend of Beethoven and Goethe, who was

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attracted by his audacity and wit; wrote a conventional philosophical dialogue, and composed a fragment of a Byronic tragedy and several volumes of bad verse, which he dedicated to Jenny von Westphalen, to whom he had in the meantime become secretly engaged. His father. frightened by this intellectual dissipation, wrote letter after letter full of anxious and affectionate advice, begging him to think of the future and prepare himself to be a lawyer or a civil servant. His son sent soothing answers, and continued in his previous mode of life.

He was now twenty-four years of age, an amateur philosopher of no fixed occupation, respected in advanced circles for his erudition and for his powers as an ironical and bitter controversialist. He soon began to be increasingly irritated by the prevailing literary and philosophical style of his friends and allies, an extraordinary compound of pedantry and arrogance, full of obscure paradoxes and laboured epigrams, embedded in elaborate, alliterative, punning prose which can never have been intended to be understood. Marx was to some extent infected by it himself, particularly in his early polemical pieces; yet his prose is compact and luminous in comparison with the mass of neo- Hegelian patter which at this time was let loose upon the German public. Some years later he described the condition of German philosophy at this time : ‘According to the reports of our ideologists’, he wrote, ‘Germany has, during the last decade, undergone a revolution of unexampled proportions ... a revolution in comparison with which the French Revolution was mere child’s play. With unbelievable rapidity one empire was supplanted by another, one mighty hero was struck down by another still bolder and more powerful in

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the universal chaos. During three years, from 1842 to

1845, Germany went through a cataclysm more violent in character than anything which had happened in any previous century. All this, it is true, took place only in the region of pure thought. For we are dealing with a remarkable phenomenon—the decomposition of the Absolute Spirit.

‘When the last spark of life disappeared from its body, its various constituents disintegrated and entered inLo new combinations and formed new substances. Dealers in philosophy, who had previously made a living by exploiting the Absolute Spirit, now threw themselves avidly on the new combinations. Each busily began

to dispose of his share of it. Plainly this could not be

done without competition. At first it possessed a solidly commercial, respectable character; but later when the German market became glutted, and the world market, in spite of all efforts, proved incapable of assimilating further goods, the whole business—as usual in Germany ■—was spoilt by mass production, lowering of quality, adulteration of raw material, forged labels, fictitious deals, financial chicanery, and a credit structure which lacked all real basis. Competition turned into an embittered struggle, which is now represented to us in glowing colours as a revolution of cosmic significance, rich in epoch-making achievements and results.’

This was written in 1846 : in 1841 Marx might perhaps have continued to live in this fantastic world, himself taking part in the inflation and mass production of words and concepts, if his circumstances had not suffered a sudden catastrophic change: his father, on whom he financially depended, died, leaving a barely sufficient competence to his widow and youngest children. At the

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same time, the Prussian Minister of Education finally decided to condemn the Hegelian Left officially, and expelled Bauer from his post. This effectually closed the possibility of an academic career to Marx who was heavily compromised in the Bauer affair, and forced him to look for another occupation. He did not have long to wait. Among his warmest admirers was a certain Moses Hess, a Jewish publicist from Cologne, a sincere and enthusiastic radical, who was even then far in advance of even the Hegelian Left. He had visited Paris and had there met the leading French socialist and communist writers of the day, to whose views he became a passionate convert. Hess, who was a curious blend of ardent traditional Judaism with idealist humanitarianism and Hegelian ideas, preached the primacy of economic over political factors and the impossibility of emancipating mankind without pre^. viously liberating the wage-earning proletariat. Its continued slavery, he declared, made all the efforts of intellectuals to establish a new moral world unavailing, since justice cannot exist in a society which tolerates economic inequality. The institution of private property was the source of all evil; men could be freed only by the abolition of both private and national property, which must involve the removal of national frontiers, and the reconstitution of a new international society on a rational, collectivist economic basis. His meeting with Marx overwhelmed him: in a letter to a fellow radical he declared: ‘He is the greatest, perhaps the one genuine philosopher now alive and will soon . . . draw the eyes of all Germany . , . Dr. Marx—that is my idol’s name— is still very young (about twenty-four at most) and will give medieval religion and politics their coup de


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grace. He combines the deepest philosophical seriousness with the most biting wit. Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel fused into one person—I say fused, not thrown together in a heap—and you have Dr. Marx.’

Marx thought Hess*s enthusiasm endearing but ridiculous, and adopted a patronizing tone which Hess was at first too amiable to resent. Hess was a middleman of ideas, a fervent missionary rather than an original thinker, and converted more than one of his contemporaries to communism, among them a young radical named Friedrich Engels who had not at this time met Marx. Both learnt from association with him far more than either was ready to admit in later years, when they tended to treat Hess, who was not a man of action, as a harmless but tedious fool. At this time, however, Marx found him a useful ally, since Hess, who was a tireless agitator, had managed to persuade a group of liberal industrialists in the Rhineland to finance the publication of a radical journal which should contain articles on political and economic subjects directed against the reactionary policy of the Berlin government, and in general sympathy with the needs of the rising bourgeois class. It was issued at Cologne and was called the Rheiniscke Z^ei^tunS-

Marx was invited, and eagerly consented, to contribute regular articles to this journal; ten months later he became its chief editor. It was his first experience of practical politics: he conducted his paper with immense vigour and intolerance: his dictatorial nature asserted itself early in the venture, and his subordinates were only too glad to let him do entirely as he pleased, and write as much of the paper as he wished. From a


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mildly liberal paper it rapidly became a vehemently radical one: more violently hostile to the Government than any other German newspaper. It published long and scurrilous attacks on the Prussian censorship, on the Federal Diet, on the landowning class in general: its circulation rose, its fame grew throughout Germany, and the Government was at last forced to take notice of the surprising behaviour of the Rhineland bourgeoisie. The shareholders were, indeed, scarcely less surprised than the authorities, but as the number of subscribers was steadily increasing, and the economic policy pursued by the paper was scrupulously liberal, advocating free trade and the economic unification of Germany, they did not protest. The Prussian authorities, anxious not to irritate the newly annexed western provinces, also refrained from interference. Emboldened by this toleration, Marx intensified the attack and added to the discussion of general political and economic subjects two particular issues over which there was much bitter feeling in the province: the first was the distressed condition of the Moselle vine-growing peasantry; the second, the harsh law punishing thefts by the poor of decayed timber in the neighbouring forests. Marx used both these as texts for a particularly violent indictment of the government of landlords. The Government, after cautiously exploring feeling in the district, decided to apply its power of censorship, and did so with increasing severity. Marx used all his ingenuity to circumvent the censors who were mostly men of limited intelligence, and managed to publish a quantity of thinly veiled democratic and republican propaganda, which more than once led to the reprimand of the censor and his replacement by another and stricter official. The year


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1842 was spent in this elaborate game, which might have continued indefinitely if Marx had not inadvertently overstepped the limit. The Russian Government, throughout the nineteenth century, served as the greatest embodiment of obscurantism, barbarism and oppression in Europe, the inexhaustible reservoir whence the reactionaries of other nations were able to draw strength, and consequently became the bugbear of Western liberals of all shades of opinion. It was at this time the dominant partner in the Russo-Prussian alliance, and as such was fiercely attacked by Marx in successive editorial articles: a war against the Russians seemed to him both then and later the best blow that could be struck on behalf of European liberty. The Emperor Nicholas I himself happened to come upon a copy of one of these philippics, and expressed angry surprise to the Prussian Ambassador. A severe note was sent by the Russian Chancellor upbraiding the King of Prussia for the inefficiency of his censors. The Prussian Government, anxious to appease its powerful neighbour, took immediate steps; the Rheinische Zntung was suppressed without warning in April 1843, and Marx was free once more. One year had sufficed to turn him into a brilliant political journalist of notorious views, with a fully developed taste for baiting reactionary governments, a taste which his later career was to give him full opportunity of satisfying.

Meanwhile he had been working with restless energy : he had taught himself French by reading the works of the Paris socialists, Fourier, Proudhon, Dezami, Cabet and Leroux. He read recent French and German history and Machiavelli’s Prince. For a month he was absorbed in the histories of ancient and modern art in

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order to gather evidence to demonstrate the revolutionary and disruptive character of Hegel’s fundamental principles; like the young Russian radicals of this period he looked upon them as being, in Herzen’s phrase, ‘The algebra of revolution’. ‘Too frightened to apply them openly’, wrote Herzen, ‘in the storm-tossed ocean of politics, the old philosopher set them afloat in the tranquil inland lake of aesthetic theory.’ Marx’s view of their proper interpretation had lately been affected, hovvever, by a book which had appeared during that year—the Theses on the Hegelian Philosophy, by Ludwig Feuerbach, which had been sent him to be reviewed.

Feuerbach is one of those authors, not infrequently met with in the history of thought, who, mediocrities themselves, nevertheless happen to provide men of genius with the sudden spark which sets on fire the long-accumulated fuel. His own contribution to philosophy is jejune and uninspired, but he W'as a materialist at a time when Marx was reacting violently against the subtleties of the decadent idealism in which he had been immersed during the past five years. Feuerbach’s simpler style, for all its woodenness and perhaps because of it, seemed suddenly to open a window into the real world. The neo-Hegelian scholasticism of the Bauers and their disciples suddenly seemed to him like a heavy nightmare which had but lately lifted, and the last memories of which he was determined to shake off.

Hegel had asserted that the thoughts and acts of men who belong to the same period of a given culture are determined by the working in them of an identical spirit which manifests itself in all the phenomena of the period. Feuerbach vehemently rejected this. ‘What’, he inquired in effect, ‘is the spirit of an age


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or a culture other than a compendious name for the totality of the phenomena which compose it?’ To say, therefore, that the phenomena were determined to be what they were by it, was to assert that they were determined by the totality of themselves,—the emptiest and silliest of tautologies. Nor was the case improved, he went on to point out, by substituting for this totality the concept of a pattern, for patterns cannot cause events: a pattern was a form, an attribute of events, which could themselves be caused only by other events. The Greek genius, the Roman character, the spirit of the Renaissance, the spirit of the French Revolution, what were these but abstractions, labels to describe compendiously a given complex of qualities and historical events, general terms invented by men for their own convenience, but in no sense real objective inhabitants of the world, capable of effecting this or that alteration in human affairs. The older view according to which it is the decision and action of individuals that is responsible for change was fundamentally less absurd: for individuals at least exist and act in a sense in which general notions and common names do not. Hegel had rightly stressed the inadequacy of this view because it failed to give an explanation of how the total result emerged from the interplay of a colossal number of individual lives and acts, and showed genius in looking for some single common force responsible for giving a definite direction to these wills, some general law in virtue of which history can be made a systematic account of the progress of whole societies; but in the end he failed to be rational, and ended in an obscure mysticism; for the Hegelian Idea, if it was not a tautological re-formulation of what it is intended to explain, was but a disguised name for


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the personal God of Christianity, and so lifted the subject beyond the confines of rational discussion.

Feuerbach’s next step was to declare that the motive force of history was not spiritual, but the sum of material conditions at any given time which determine the men who lived in them to think and act as they did. Their material distress caused them, however, to seek solace in an immaterial ideal world, where as a reward for the unhappiness of their lives on earth, they would enjoy eternal bliss hereafter. If this illusion was to be exposed, it must be analysed in terms of the material maladjustments which give rise to it. Like Holbach and the author of L’Homme Machine, Feuerbach’s hatred of transcendentalism often led him to seek for the crudest and simplest explanation in purely physical terms. Der Mensch ist was er isst (Man is what he eats) is his own Hegelian caricature of his doctrine: human history is the history of the decisive influence of physical environment on men in society; therefore knowledge of physical laws alone can make Man master of these forces by enabling him to adapt his life consciously to them.

Tlis materialism, and in particular his theory that all ‘ideologies’ whether religious or secular are often an attempt to provide ideal compensation for real miseries, made a profound impression both on Marx and~on Lngels, as it later did on Lenin, who read it during his Siberian exile. Feuerbach’s treatise is a badly written, unhistorical, naive book, yet after the absurdities of the unbridled Hegelianism of the thirties, its very terre & terre quality must have seemed refreshingly sane. Marx, who was still a liberaMmd an idealist at this period, was roused by it from his dogmatism. The


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Hegelian Idea had turned out to be a meaningless expression: Hegel now seemed to him to have built a specious edifice of words about words and one which jt was the duty of his generation, armed with the valuable Hegelian method, to replace by symbols denoting real .objects in time and space, in their observable empirical [relations to each other. He still believed in the efficacy of the appeal to reason and was opposed to violent revolution. He was a dissident idealist, but an idealist still: a year previously he had obtained a doctor’s degree in the University of Jena, with a highly conventional thesis on the contrast between Democritus and Epicurus, both viewed inevitably as precursors of Hegel. In it he defends a materialism far more nebulous than much of what he later himself condemned as typical idealist nonsense.

In April 1843, he married Jenny von Westphalen, against the strongly expressed wishes of the greater part of her family. This hostility only served to increase the passionate loyalty of the seiious and profoundly romantic young woman: her existence had been transformed by the revelation to her of a new world by her husband, and she dedicated her wjjole being to his_hje and his work. It was an__entircly happy marriage. SHOoved,"admired, and trusted him, and was, emotionally and intellectually, entirely dominated by him. He leaned on her ^unhesitatingly in all times of crisis and disaster, remained all his life proud of her beauty, her birth and her intelligence. The poet Heine, who knew them wefijn Paris, paid eloquent tribute to her charm and wit. In later years, when they were reduced _ to penury, she displayed great moral heroism in preserving intact the framework of a family and a-household,

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which_alone enabled her husband to continue his work.

Together they decided to emigrate to France. He knew that he had an original contribution to make to the agitating questions of the day, and that in Germany it was impossible to speak openly on any serious topic. Nothing held him back: his father was dead, for his family he cared nothing. He had no fixed source of income in Germany. His old associates of Berlin now seemed to him to be a collection of intellectual mountebanks who wished to cover the poverty and confusion of their thought by violent language and scandalous private lives. All his life he detested two phenomena with peculiar passion: disorderly life and histrionic display. It seemed to him that Bohemianism and deliberate flouting of conventions was but inverted Philistinism, emphasizing and paying homage to the very same false values by exaggerated protest against them, and exhibiting therefore the same fundamental vulgarity. Koppcn he still respected, but lost all personal touch with him, and formed a new and tepid friendship with Arnold Ruge, a gifted Saxon journalist who edited a radical periodical to which Marx had contributed. Ruge was a pompous and irritable man, a discontented romantic, who after 1848 gradually became transformed into a reactionary nationalist. As a writer he had a wider outlook and surer taste than many of his fellow radicals in Germany, and appreciated the gifts of greater men, such as Marx and Bakunin, with whom he came into contact. He saw no possibility of continuing his journal on German soil in the teeth of the censor and the Saxon police, and decided to establish it in Paris. He invited Marx to assist him in editing a new journal to be called Deutsch-Franzdsische Jahrbiicher-, Marx

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accepted the offer with alacrity. ‘The atmosphere here is really too intolerable and asphyxiating’, he wrote to Ruge in the summer of 184.3. ‘It is not easy to cringe even for the sake of liberty, armed with pins instead of a sword: I am tired of this hypocrisy and stupidity, of the boorishness of officials, I am tired of having to bow and scrape and invent safe and harmless phrases. In Germany there is nothing I can do . . . in Germany one can only be false to oneself.’ Marx left Prussian territory in November 1843, and two days later arrived in Paris. His reputation had to some extent preceded him: at that date he was principally thoughc cf as a liberal journalist with a mordant pen, who was forced to leave Germany because he had too violently advocated democratic reform. Two years later he was known to the police of many lands as an uncompromising revolutionary communist, a sworn enemy of reformist liberalism, the notorious leader of a subversive movement with international ramifications. The years 1843-5 are the most decisive in his life: in Paris he underwent his final intellectual transformation. At the end of it he had arrived at a clear position personally and politically: the remainder of his life was devoted to its development and practical realization.


CHAPTER V

PARIS

The time wili come when the sun will shine only upon a world of free men who recognize no master except their reason, when tyrants and slaves, priests, and their stupid or hypocritical tools, will no longer exist except in history or on the stage.

CONDORCET

I

The social, political and artistic ferment of Paris in the middle of the nineteenth century is a phenomenon without parallel in European history. A remarkable concourse of poets, painters, musicians, writers, reformers and theorists had gathered in the French capital, which, under the comparatively tolerant monarchy of Louis JPhilippe, provided asylum to exiles and revolutionaries of many lands. Paris had long been notable for wide intellectual hospitality; the thirties and forties were years of profound political reaction in the rest of Europe, and artists and thinkers in growing numbers flocked to the circle of light from the surrounding darkness, finding that in Paris they were neither, as in Berlin, bullied into conformity by the native civilization, nor yet, as in London, left coldly to themselves, clustering in small isolated groups, but were welcomed freely and even enthusiastically, and given free entry into the artistic and social salons which had survived the years of monarchist restoration. The intellectual atmosphere in which these men talked and wrote was excited and idealistic. A common mood of passionate protest against the^ old jjrder, against kings and tyrants, against the

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Church and the army, above all against the uncomprehending Philistine masses, slaves and oppressors, enemies to life and the rights of the free human personality, produced an exhilarating sense of emotional solidarity,_which bound together this tumultuous and widely heterogeneous society. The emotions were intensely-cultivated, individual feelings and beliefs were expressed in ardent phrases, revolutionary and humanitarian slogans were repeated with fervour by men who were prepared to stake their lives upon them; it was a decade during which a richer international traffic in ideas, theories, personal sentiments, was carried on than during any previous period; there were alive at this time, congregated in the same place, attracting, repelling and transforming each other, men of gifts more varied, more striking and more articulate than at any time since the Renaissance. Every year brought new exiles from the territories of the Emperor and the Czar. Italian. Polish, Hungarian, Russian, German colonies throve in the atmosphere of universal sympathy and admiration. Their members formed international committees, wrote pamphlets, addressed assemblies, entered conspiracies, but above all talked and argued ceaselessly in private houses, in the streets, in cafes, at public banquets; the mood was exalted and optimistic.

The revolutionary writers and radical politicians were at the height of their hopes and power, their ideals not yet killed, nor the revolutionary phrases tarnished by the debacle of 1848. Such international solidarity for the cause of freedom had never before been achieved in any place: the poets and musicians, the historians and social theorists felt that they wrote not for themselves but for humanity. In 1830 a victory had been

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achieved over the forces of reaction. They continued to live on its fruits; the suppressed Blanquist conspiracy of 1839 had been ignored by the majority of romantic liberals as an obscure emeute, yet it was no isolated outbreak : for this seething and nervous artistic activity took place against a background of hectic financial and industrial progress accompanied by ruthless corruption, in which vast sudden fortunes were made and lost again in colossal bankruptcies. A government of disillusioned realists was controlled by the new ruling class of great financiers and railway magnates, large industrialists who moved in a maze of intrigue and bribery, in which shady speculators and sordid adventurers controlled the economic destiny of France. The frequent riots of the industrial workers in the south indicate a state of turbulent unrest due as much to the unscrupulous behaviour of particular employers of labour, as to the industrial revolution which was transforming the country more rapidly and more brutally, although in a far smaller scale, than in England. Acute social discontent, together with the universal recognition of the weakness and dishonesty of the Government, added to the general sense of crisis and transition, which made anything seem attainable to one who was sufficiently gifted, unscrupulous and energetic; it fed the imagination, and produced full-blooded, ambitious opportunists of the type to be found in the pages of Balzac, and in Stendhal’s unfinished novel, Lucien Leeuwen\ while the laxity of the censorship, and the tolerance exercised by the July monarchy, permitted that sharp and violent form of political journalism, sometimes rising to noble eloquence, which, at a time when printed words had a greater power to move, stirred the


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intellect and the passions, and served still further to intensify the already electric atmosphere. The memoirs and letters left by poets, painters, novelists, musicians— Musset, Heine, Delacroix, Wagner, Berlioz, Gautier, Herzen, Turgenev, Victor Hugo, George Sand, Liszt— convey something of the enchantment which surrounds those years marked by the acute and conscious sensibility and heightened vitality of a society full of genius, by a preoccupation with self-analysis, morbid indeed, but proud of its novelty and strength, by a sudden freedom from ancient fetters, a new sense of spaciousness, room in which to move and to create. By 1851 this mood was dead; but a great legend was created, which has survived to our own day, and has made Paris a symbol of revolutionary progress in its own and others’ eyes.

Marx had not, however, come to Paris in quest of novel experience. He was a man of unemotional, even frigid nature, upon whom environment produced little effect, and who rather imposed his own unvarying form on any situation in which he found himself: he dis- trustecTaU enthusiasm, and in particular one which fed on gallant phrases. Unlike his compatriot, the poet Heine, or the Russian revolutionaries Herzen and Bakunin, he did not experience that sense of emancipation, which in ecstatic letters they proclaimed that they had found in this centre of all that was most admirable in European civilization. He chose Paris rather than Brussels or some town in Switzerland for the more practical and specific reason that it seemed to him the most convenient place from which to issue the Deutsch- Franzosische Jahrbiicher, which was intended as much for the non-German as for the German public. Moreover,

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he still wished to find an answer to the question to which he had found no satisfactory solution either in the Encyclopaedists, or in Hegel, or in Feuerbach, or in the mass of political and historical literature which he consumed so rapidly and impatiently in 1843. What ultimately was responsible for the failure of the French Revolution? What fault of theory or of practice made the Directoire, the Empire, and finally the return of the Bourbons possible? What errors must be avoided by those who half a century later still sought to discover the means of founding a free and just society? Are there no “laws which govern social change, knowledge of which might have saved the great revolution? The Encyclopaedists had doubtless grossly over-simplified human nature by representing it as capable of being made overnight wholly rational and wholly good by enlightened education. Nor was the problem brought nearer solution by the Hegelian answer that the revolution had failed because the Absolute Idea had not then reached the appropriate stage, since no criterion of appropriateness to this or that event was given, save the occurrence of the event itself; nor did the substitution for the orthodox answer of such new formulae as human self-realization, or embodied reason, or critical criticism, appear to make it any more concrete, or indeed to add anything at all.

Faced with the question, Marx acted with characteristic thoroughness: he studied the facts, and read the historical records of the revolution itself; he also plunged headlong into the colossal mass of the polemical literature written in France upon this and kindred questions, and with characteristic thoroughness accomplished both tasks within a year. His leisure, since his schooldays,

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had been mainly spent in reading, but the extent of his appetite in Paris surpassed all limits: as in the days of his conversion to Hegelianism, he read night and day in a kind of frenzy, filling endless notebooks with extracts, and abstracts, and lengthy comments on which he largely drew in his later writings. By the end of 1844 he had made himself familiar with the political and the economic doctrines of the leading French and English thinkers, examined them in the light of his own still semi-orthodox Hegelianism, and finally established his own position by sharply defining his attitude towards these two irreconcilable tendencies. He read principally the economists, beginning with Quesnay and AcLam Smith, and ending with Sismondi, Ricardo, Proudhon and their followers. Their lucid, cool, unsentimental style contrasted favourably with the confused emotionalism and rhetoric of the Germans; the combination of practical shrewdness and emphasis on empirical investigation, with bold and ingenious general hypotheses, attracted Marx and strengthened his natural tendency to avoid all forms of romanticism and accept only such naturalistic explanations of phenomena as could be supported by the evidence of scientific observation. The influence of French socialist writers and English economists had begun to dispel the all-enveloping mist of Hegelianism.

He compared the general condition of France with that of his native land and was impressed by its infinitely higher level of intelligence and capacity for political thought: ‘in France every class is tinged with political idealism’, he wrote in 1843, ‘and feels itself a representative of general social needs . . . whereas in Germany, where practical life is unintelligent, and intelligence

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unpractical, men are driven to protest only by the material necessity, the actual chains themselves . . . but revolutionary energy and self-confidence are not sufficient by themselves to enable a class to be the liberator of society—it must identify another class with the principle of oppression ... as in France the nobility and priesthood were identified. This dramatic tension is absent in German society . . . there is only one class whose wrongs are not specific but those of the whole of society—the proletariat.’ He declares that the Germans are the most backward of western peoples. The past of England and of France is faithfully mirrored in the German present: the real emancipation of the Germans, who stand to more advanced peoples as the proletariat to other classes, will necessarily entail the emancipation of the whole of European society from political and economic oppression.

But if he was impressed by the political realism of those writers, he was no less shocked by their lack of historical sense. This alone, it seemed to him, made possible their easy and shallow eclecticism, the remarkable unconcern with which they introduced modifications and additions into their systems with no apparent intellectual discomfort. Such tolerance seemed to him to show a lack either of seriousness or of integrity.” His own view was at all times clear cut and violent, and was deduced from premisses which permitted of no vagueness in the conclusions; such intellectual elasticity, it seemed to him, could be due only to insufficient grasp of the rigorous framework of the historical process. The assumption made by the classical economists that the contemporary categories of political economy held good of all times and all places struck him as particularly

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absurd. As Engels later put it, ‘the economists of the day speak as if Richard Coeur de Lion, had he only known a little economics, might have saved six centuries of bungling, by setting up free trade, instead of wasting his time on the crusades’, as if all previous economic systems were so many blundering approximations to capitalism, by the standards of which they must be classified and assessed. Such inability to grasp the fact that every period can be analysed only in terms of concepts and categories peculiar to itself, is responsible for Utopian socialism, for those elaborate schemes which turn out to be so many idealized versions of bourgeois or feudal society with the ‘bad’ aspects left out; whereas the question to ask is not what one would wish to happen, but what history will permit to happen, which tendencies in the present are destined to develop and which to perish; one must build solely in accordance with the results of this strictly empirical method of investigation.

Nevertheless Marx found the moral taste of these writers sympathetic. They, too, distrusted innate intuitions and appeals to sentiments which transcend logic and empirical observation: they, too, saw in this the last defence of reaction and irrationalism; they, too, were passionately anti-clerical and anti-authoritarian. Many of them held oddly outmoded views about the natural harmony of all human interests, or believed in the capacity of the individual freed from the interference of states and monarchs to secure his own and othcis’ happiness. Such views his Hegelian education had made wholly unacceptable; but in the last resort these men were the enemies of his enemies, ranged on the side of progress, lighters for the advance of reason.

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II

If Marx derived from Hegel his view of the historical structure—that is, of the formal relations between the elements of which human history consists, he obtained his knowledge of the elements themselves from Saint- Simon and his disciples, notably Thierry and Mignet. Saint-Simon was a thinker of bold and original views: he was the first writer to assert that the development of economic relationships is the determining factor in history—and to have done this in his day in itself constitutes a sufficient claim to immortality—and further to analyse the historical process as a continuous conflict between economic classes, between those who, at any given period, are the possessors of the main economic resources of the community, and those who lack this advantage and come to depend upon the former for their subsistence^ According_tO Saint-Simon, the ruling class is seldom sufficiently able or disinterested to make rational use of its resources, or to institute an order in which those most capable of doing so apply and increase the resources of the community, and seldom flexible enough to adapt itself, and the institutions which it controls, to the new social conditions which its own activity brings about. It therefore tends to pursue a short-sighted and egoistic policy, to form a close caste, accumulate the available wealth in a few hands, and, by means of the prestige and power thus obtained, to reduce the dispossessed majority to social and economic slavery. The unwilling subjects naturally grow restive and devote their lives to the overthrow of the tyrannical minority; this, when the conjunction of circumstances favouts them, they eventually succeed o

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in doing. But they grow corrupted by the long years, of servitude, and become incapable of conceiving ideals higher than those of their masters, so that when thef acquire power, they use it no less irrationally and unjustly than their own late oppressors; in their turn they create a new proletariat, and so at a new level lh^ struggle continues. Human history is the history of such conflicts: due_ ultimately—as Adam Smith and the eighteenth-century French philosophers would have1 said—to the blindness of both masters and subjects to! the coincidence of the best interests of both under aj rational distribution of economic resources. Instead 0^ this the ruling classes attempt to arrest all social change,1^ lead idle and wasteful lives, obstructing economic \ progress in the form of technical invention which, if only it were properly developed, would, by creating unlimited plenty and distributing it scientifically, swiftly ensure the eternal happiness and prosperity of mankind. Saint-Simon, who was a far better historian} than his encyclopaedist predecessors, took a genuinely evolutionary view of human society, and estimated past epochs not in terms of their remoteness from the civilization of the present, but in terms of the adequacy of their institutions to the social and economic needs of their own day; with the result that his account of, for example, the Middle Ages is far more penetrating and sympathetic than that of the majority of his liberal contemporaries. But a social order which responded to genuine needs in its own day may tend to hamper the movements of a later time, becoming a straitjacket the nature of which is deliberately concealed by the classes protected by its existence. The army and the Church, organic elements in the mediaeval hierarchy, are now obsolete survivals,


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whose functions are performed in modern society by the banker, the industrialist, and the scientist; with the consequence that priests, soldiers, rentiers, can survive only as idlers and social parasites, wasting the substance and holding up the advance of the new classes, and must therefore be eliminated. • In their place industrious and skilful experts, chosen for their executive ability, must be placed at the head of society: the financiers, engineers, organizers of large, rigorously centralized, industrial and agricultural enterprises, must constitute the government/ Finally the laws of inheritance which lead to undeserved inequalities of wealth must be abolished: but on no account must this be extended to private property in general: every man has a right to the fruit of his own personal labour. Like the makers of the Revolution, and Fourier and Proudhon after them, Saint-Simon firmly believed that the ownership of property furnished at the same time the sole incentive to energetic labour and the foundation of private and public morality. Bankers, company promoters, industrialists, inventors must be adequately rewarded by the State in proportion to their efficiency: once the economic life of the society is rationalized by the specialist, the natural virtue of human nature, the natural harmony of the interests of all, will guarantee universal justice, contentment and equality of opportunity for all men alike,'/

Saint-Simon lived at a time when the last relics of feudalism in Western Europe were finally disappearing before the advance of the bourgeois entrepreneur and his new mechanical devices. He had endless faith in the immense possibilities of technical invention and in its naturally beneficent effect on human society: he


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saw in the rising middle class able and energetic men animated by a sense of justice and disinterested altruism, hampered by the blind hostility of the landowning aristocracy and of the Church, which trembled for their own privileges and possessions, and so became enemies to all justice and to all scientific and moral progress.

This belief was not so naive then as it may now seem to be. As Marx was himself later to repeat, in the actual moment of struggle for social emergence, the vanguard of the rising class naturally identifies its own cause with the whole mass of oppressed humanity, and feels, and to a certain degree is, the disinterested champion of a new ideal, fighting at the furthest outpost of the progressive front. Saint-Simon was the most eloquent prophet of the rising bourgeoisie in its most generous and idealistic mood: he naturally set the highest value on industry, initiative and capacity for large-scale planning: but he also sharply formulated the theory of the class struggle, little knowing to what application this portion of his doctrine would one day be put. He was himself a landed aristocrat of the eighteenth century, ruined by the Revolution, who had chosen to identify himself with the advancing power, and so to explain and justify the supersession of his own class. His most celebrated follower, Charles Fourier, was a commercial traveller who lived in Paris during those first decades of the new century, when the financiers and industrialists, upon whom his master had placed all his hopes, so far from effecting social reconciliation, proceeded to sharpen class antagonism by the creation of strongly centralized monopolist concerns. By obtaining control of cicdit, and employing labour on an unprecedented scale, they created the possibility of mass production and mass

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‘ distribution of goods, and so competed on unequal terms with the smaller traders and artisans, whom they systematically drove out of the open market, and whose children they absorbed into their factories and mines. The social effect of the Industrial Revolution in France was to create a rift and a state of permanent bitterness between the grands and the petite bourgeoisie, which dominates the history of that country from that date. Fourier, a typical representative of the ruined class, inveighs bitterly against the illusion that capitalists are the predestined saviours of society. His older contemporary, the Swiss economist Sismondi, had pointed out and defended with an immense mass of historical evidence, at a period when it required something akin to genius to have perceived it, the view that, whereas all previous class struggles occurred as a result of the scarcity of goods in the world, the discovery of new mechanical means of production which would flood the world with excessive plenty, would themselves, unless checked, lead to a class war before which previous conflicts would pale into insignificance. The necessity of marketing the ever-growing produce would lead to a continual competition between the rival capitalists, who would be forced systematically to lower wages and increase the working hours of their employees in order to secure even temporary advantage over a slower rival, which in turn would lead to a series of acute economic crises, ending in social and political chaos, due to the internecine wars between groups of capitalists. Such artificial poverty growing in direct proportion with the increase of goods, above all the monstrous trampling on those very fundamental human rights, to guarantee which the great revolution was made,


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could only be prevented by State intervention, which must curtail the right of accumulating capital and of the means of production. But whereas Sismondi was a liberal who believed in the possibility of a centrally organized, rationally conducted human society, and confined himself to general recommendations, Fourier distrusted all central authority, and declaring that bureaucratic tyranny is bound to develop, if the government units are too large, proposed that the earth should be divided into small groups which he called phalansteries, each self-governing and federated under larger and larger units; all machinery, land, buildings, natural resources should be owned in common. His vision, an odd blend of eccentricity and genius, at its most apocalyptic moments remains elaborate and precise: a great central electric plant will by its power do all the mechanical labour of the phalanstery: profits should be divided between labour, capital and talent in the strict proportion 5:3:2, and its members, with no more than a few hours of daily work, will thus be free to occupy themselves with developing their intellectual, moral and artistic faculties to an extent hitherto unprecedented in history. This is at times interrupted by bursts of pure fantasy, such as the prophecy of the emergence in the immediate future of a new race of beasts, not dissimilar in appearance to existing species, but more powerful and more numerous—‘anti-lions’, ‘antf-bears’, ‘anti-tigers’, as friendly and attached to man as their present ancestors are hostile and destructive, and doing much of his work with skill, intelligence and foresight wanting to mere machines. The thesis is at its best at its most destructive. In the intense quality of its indignation, its sense of genuine horror at the wholesale


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destruction of the life and liberty of the individual by the monstrous regime of financiers and their hirelings, the judges, the soldiers, the administrators, Fourier’s indictment is the prototype of all later attacks on the doctrine of the unchecked laissez-faire, of the great denunciations of Marx and Carlyle, no less than of the communist, fascist, and Christian protests against the substitution of new forms of privilege for old, and the enslavement of the individual by the very machinery designed to set him free.

,/ The Revolution of 1830, which expelled Charles X and brought Louis Philippe to the throne of France, revived public interest in social questions once more. During the decade which followed, an endless succession of books and pamphlets poured from the presses, attacking the evils of the existing system, and suggesting every kind of remedy from the mildly liberal proposals of Lamartine or Cremieux to the more radical semisocialist demands of Marrast or Ledru Rollin and the developed State socialism of Louis Blanc, and ending with the drastic programmes of Barbas and Blanqui, who in their journal L’Homme Libre, advocated a violent revolution and the abolition of private property. La Reforme was dominated by the Saint-Simonist tradition, and preached economic reorganization as being of infinitely greater importance than political reform. Fourier’s disciple Considerant proclaimed the imminent collapse of the existing system of property relations; and well-known socialist writers of the time, Pecqueur, Louis Blanc, Dezami, and the most independent and original figure among them, Proudhon, published then- best known attacks on the capitalist order between 1839 and 1842, and were in their turn followed by a host of


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minor figures who diluted and popularized their doctrines. In 1834 the Catholic priest Lamennais published his Christian socialist Words of a Believer, and in 1840 appeared the Bible of Freedom by the Abbe Constant, fresh evidence that even in the Church there were men unable to resist the great popular appeal of the new revolutionary theories.

The sensational success of Louis Blanc’s Ten Tears, a brilliant and bitter analysis of the years 1830-40, indicated the trend of opinion. Literary and philosophical communism began to come into fashion: Cabet wrote a highly popular communist utopia called Voyage to Icaria. Pierre Leroux preached a mystical egalitarianism to the novelist George Sand, and Heine discussed it with sympathy in his celebrated vignettes of social and literary life in Paris during the July monarchy.

The subsequent fate of these movements is of small importance. The Saint-Simonists, after some years of desultory existence, disappeared as a movement; some of them became highly prosperous railway magnates and rentiers, fulfilling at least one aspect of their master’s prophecy. The more idealistic Fourierists founded communist settlements in the United States, some of which, like the Oneida community, prospered and attracted leading American thinkers and writers; in Ihe sixties they had considerable influence through their newspaper, the New York Tribune.

.j Marx familiarized himself with these theories, and tested them as best he could, by acquiring knowledge of the details of recent social history from all available sources, from books, from newspapers, by meeting writers and journalists, and by spending his evenings


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among the small revolutionary groups composed of German journeymen which, under the influence of communist agitators, met to discuss the affairs of their scattered organization and more vaguely the possibility of a revolution in their native country. In conversation with these artisans he discovered something of the needs and hopes of a class, of which a somewhat abstract portrait had been drawn in the works of Saint-Simon and his epigoni. He had given little thought to the precise parts which the petite bourgeoisie and the proletariat were to play in the advance of reason and improvement of society. There was in addition the unstable, declasse element, composed of marginal figures, members of odd trades, bohemians, unemployed soldiers, actors, intellectuals, neither masters nor slaves, independent and yet precariously situated on the very edge of the subsistence level, whose existence had hardly been recognized by social historians, still less accounted for or analysed. His interest in the economic writings of the socialists who formed the left wing of the French party of reform turned his attention to these questions. Ruge had commissioned him to write an essay for his periodical on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. He wrote it together with an essay on the Jewish question, early in 1844. The essay on the Jews was intended as an answer to Bruno Bauer’s articles on this topic. Bauer had declared that the Jews, lagging historically one stage behind the Christians, must be baptized before they could reasonably claim full civil emancipation. Marx in his reply declared that Jews were no longer a religious or racial entity, but a purely economic one, forced into usury and other unattractive professions by the treatment they received from their neighbours, and


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could, therefore, be emancipated only with the emancipation of the rest of European society; to baptize them would be but to substitute one set of chains for another; to give them solely political liberties would play into the hands of those liberals who see in these all that any human being can hope, and indeed ought, to possess. It is a dull and shallow composition, but it shows Marx in a typical mood: he was determined that the sarcasms and insults to which some of the notable Jews of his generation, Heine, Lassalle, Disraeli, were all their lives a target, should, so far as he could effect it, never be used to plague him. Consequently he decided to kill the Jewish problem once and for all, so far as he was concerned, declaring it to be an unreal subject, invented as a screen for other more pressing questions: a problem which offered no special difficulty but arose from the general social chaos which demanded to be put in order. He was baptized a Lutheran, and was married to a Gentile: he had once been of assistance to the Jewish community in Cologne: during the greater part of his life he held himself aloof from anything remotely connected with his race, showing open hostility to all its institutions.

The critique of Hegel is more important: the doctrine which it expounds is unlike anything he had published before. In it he had begun, as he himself declared, to settle his account with the idealist philosophy. It was the beginning of a lengthy, laborious, and thorough process which, when it reached its culminating point four years later, proved to have created the foundation of a new movement and a new outlook, and to have grown into a dogmatic faith and a plan of action which dominates the political consciousness of Europe until this day.

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