Delhi university library

The Jews had every reason to feel grateful to Napo^ leon; ‘'wfiei'ever he appeared he set himself to destroy' the traditional edifice of social rank and- privilege, of racial, political and religious barriers, putting in its place his newly^ promulgated legal code, which claimccT as the source of its authority the principles of rcasoi^ and human equality. This act, by opening to the Jews the doors of trades and professions which had hitherto remained rigidly barred to them, had the effect of releasing a mass of imprisoned energy and ambition, and led to the enthusiastic—in some cases over-enthusiastic—acceptance of general European culture by a hitherto segregated community, which from that day, became a new and important factor in the evolution of European society. " —''

Some of these liberties were later withdrawn by Napoleon himself, and what was left of them was for the most part revoked by the restored German princes, with

26 KARL MARX

the result that many Jews who had eagerly broken away from the traditional mode of life led by their fathers toward the prospects of a wider existence, now found that the avenue which had so suddenly been half-opened before them had as suddenly become barred again, and consequently were confronted with a difficult choice. £rhey had either to retrace their steps and painfully re-enter the Ghetto in which their families for the most part still continued to live, or else, altering their names and religion, to start new lives as German patriots and members of the Christian Church^ The case of Herschel Levi was typical of a whole generation. His father, Marx Levi, and his father before him, were Rabbis in the Rhineland, who, like the great majority of their fellow Jews, had passed__their entire existence within the confines of a pious, inbred, passionately self-centred

community, which, faced with the hostility of its

Christian neighbours, had taken refuge behind a defensive wall oPprTde -and suspicion-which had for centuries almost _wholly_ preserved them from contact with_the_dtangiflg^ life outside. The enlightenment had, nevertheless, begun to penetrate even this artificial enclave of the Middle Ages, and Herschel, who had received a sqrii)ar—ediiratinn, became a disciple of the French rationalists and their disciples, the German illummati, and was early in life converted to the religion of reason and humanity. He accepted it with candour and naivete, nor did the long years of darkness and reaction succeed in shaking his faith in God and his simple and optimistic humanitarianism. He detached himself completely from his family, changed his name to Heinrich Marx, and acquired new friends and new interests. His legal practice was moderately successful,

CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE 27

and he began to look to a settled future as the head of a respectable German bourgeois family, when the anti- Jewish laws of 1816 suddenly cut off his means of livelihood.

He probably felt no exceptional reverence for the established church, but he was even less attached to the Synagogue, and, holding vaguely deist views, saw no moral or social obstacle to complete conformity with the mildly enlightened Lutheranism of his Prussian neighbours. At any rate if he did hesitate, it was not for long. He was officially received into the Church early in 1817, a year before the birth of his eldest son, Karl. The hostility of the latter to everything connected with religion, and in particular with Judaism, may well be partly due to the peculiar and embarrassed situation in which such converts sometimes found themselves. Some escaped by becoming devout and even fanatical Christians, others by rebelling against all established religion. They suffered in proportion to their sensitiveness and intelligence. Both Heine and Disraeli were all their lives obsessed by the personal problem of their peculiar status; they neither renounced nor accepted it completely, but alternately mocked at and defended the religion of their fathers, incapable of a single-minded attitude towards their ambiguous position, perpetually suspicious of latent contempt or condescension concealed beneath the fiction of their complete acceptance by the society in which they lived.

' The elder Marx suffered from none of these complications. He was a simple, serious, well-educated man, but he was neither conspicuously intelligent nor abnormally sensitive. A disciple of Leibnitz and Voltaire, Lessing and Kant, he possessed in addition a gentle,

28

KARL MARX

timid and accommodating temper, and ultimately became a passionate Prussian patriot and monarchist, a position which he sought to justify by pointing to the figure of Frederick the Great—in his view a tolerant and enlightened prince who compared favourably with Napoleon, with his notorious contempt for ideologists. After his baptism he adopted the Christian name of Heinrich, and educated his family as liberal protestants, faithful to the existing order and to the reigning King of Prussia. Anxious as he was to identify that ruler with the ideal prince depicted by his favourite philosophers, the repulsive figure of Frederick William III defeated even his loyal imagination. Indeed, the only occasion on which this tremulous and retiring man is known to have behaved with courage, was a public dinner at which he made a speech on the desirability of moderate social and political reforms worthy of a_wise_and benevolent ruler. This swiftly drew upon him the attention of the'Prussian police. Heinrich Marx at once retracted everything, and convinced everyone of his complete harmlessness. It is not improbable that this slight but humiliating contretemps, and in particular his father’s craven and submissive attitude, made a definite impres- sion"orTKaiT, thenTixteen years-old, and left ^behind it a smouldering sense of resentment which later events fanned into a flame.

His" father had early become aware that while his other children were in no way remarkable, in Karl he had an unusual and difficult son; with a sharp and lucid intelligence he combined a stubborn and domineering temper, a truculent love of independence, exceptional emotional restraint, and over all a colossal, ungovernable intellectual appetite. The timorous

CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE 29

lawyer, whose life was spent in social and personal compromise, was puzzled and frightened by his son’s intransigeance which, in his opinion, was bound to antagonize important persons, and might, one day, lead him into serious trouble. He frequently and anxiously begged him in his letters to yoderate his enthusiasms, to impose some sort of discipline on himself, to cultivate polite, civilized habits, not to neglect possible benefactors, above all not to estrange everyone by violently refusing to adapt himself—-in short to satisfy the elementary requirements of the society in which he was to live his life. But these letters!-even at their most disapproving, remained gentle and affectionate; in spite of growing uneasiness about his character and career, Heinrich Marx treated his son with an instinctive delicacy, and never attempted to oppose or bully him on any serious issue. Consequently their relations continued to be warm, intimate and grave until the death of the older Marx in 1838.

It seems certain that the father had a definite influence on his son’s intellectual development. The elder Marx believed with Condorcet that man is by nature both good and rational, and that all that is needed to ensure the triumph of these qualities is the removal of unnatural obstacles from his path. They were disappearing already, and disappearing fast, and the time was rapidly approaching when the last citadels of reaction, the Catholic Church and the feudal nobility, would melt away before the irresistible march of reason. Social, political, religious, racial barriers were so many artificial products of the deliberate obscurantism of priests and rulers; with their disappearance a new day would dawn for the human race, when all men would be

30 KARL MARX

equal, not only politically and legally, in their formal, external relations, but socially and personally, in their most intimate daily intercourse.

His own history seemed to him to corroborate this triumphantly. Born a Jew, a citizen of inferior legal and social status, he had attained to equality with his more enlightened neighbours, had earned their respect as a human being, and had become assimilated into what appeared to him as their more rational and dignified mode of life. He believed that a new day was dawning in the history of human emancipation, in the light of which his children would live their lives as free-born citizens in a just and liberal state. Elements of this belief are clearly apparent in his son’s social doctrine. Karl Marx did not, indeed, believe in the power of rational argument to influence action, but there is, nevertheless, a definite sense in which he remained both a rationalist and a perfectibilian to the end of his life. He believed in the complete intelligibility of the process of social evolution; he believed that society is inevitably progressive, that its movement from stage to stage is a forward movement, that each successive stage represents development, is nearer the rational ideal than its precursors. He detested, as passionately as any eighteenth-century thinker, emotionalism, belief in supernatural causes, visionary fantasy of every kind, and systematically under-estimated the influence of such non-rational forces as nationalism, and religious and racial solidarity. Although, therefore, it remains true that the Hegelian philosophyjs the greatest single formative influence in his life, the principles of philosophicaMniToriattsm which were planted m him by his father and his father’s friends, performed a definite

CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE 31

work of inoculation, so that when later he encountered the romantic metaphysical systems developed by Fichte and Hegel, he was saved from that total surrender to their fascination which undid so many of his_con- temporaries. It was this pronounced taste, acquired early in life, for lucid argument and an empirical, approach, that enabled him to preserve a_xacasure of independence in the face of the prevalent philosophy, and later to alter it to his own more positivist pattern. This may perhaps account for his pronounced antiromantic tendency, so sharply different from the outlook common to such leading radicals of his time as Borne, Heine, or Lassalle, whose origins and education are in many respects closely analogous to his own.

Little is known of his childhood and early years in Trier. His mother played a singularly small part in his life; she belonged to a family of Hungarian Jews settled in Holland, where her father was a Rabbi, and was a solid and uneducated woman entirely absorbed in the cares of her large household, who did not at any time show the slightest understanding of her son’s gifts or inclinations, was shocked by his.xadtcalisia^-and.inJater years appears to have lost all interest in his existence. Of the eight children of Fleinrich and Henrietta Marx Karl was the second; apart from a mild affection as a child for his eldest sister Sophia, he showed little interest in his brothers and sisters either then or later. He was sent to the local High School where he obtained equal praise for his industry and the high-minded and earnest tone of his essays on moral and religious topics. He was moderately proficient in mathematics and thcoic>g\, but his main ^interests were literary and artistic: a tendency due principally to the influence of twcTmen from whom

32 KARL MARX

he learned most and of whom all his life he spoke with affection and respect. The first of these was his father; the other was Freiherr Ludwig von Westphalen who lived in the same street as Heinrich Marx and was on friendly terms with the amiable lawyer and his family. Westphalen belonged to that educated and liberal section of the German upper class whose representatives were to be found in the vanguard of every enlightened and progressive movement in their country in the first half of the nineteenth century. He was a distinguished Prussian government official, and an attractive and cultivated man. He belonged to the generation dominated by the great figures of Goethe, Schiller and Holder- lin, and under their influence had wandered beyond the aesthetic frontiers so strictly established by the literary mandarins in Paris, and shared in the growing German passion for the rediscovered genius of Dante, Shakespeare, Homer and the Greek tragedians. He was attracted by the striking ability and eager receptiveness of Heinrich Marx’s son, encouraged him to read, lent him books, took him for walks in the neighbouring woods and talked to hin?T about dischylus, Cervantes, Shakespeare, quoting long passages to his enthusiastic listener. Karl, who reached maturity at a very early age, became a devoted reader*'oF'the new romantic literature: the taste he acquired during these impressionable years remained unaltered until his death. He was in later life fond of recalling his evenings with Westphalen, during what seemed to him to have been the happiest period of his life. He had been treated by a man much older than himself on terms of equality at a time when he was in particular need of sympathy and encouragement; when one tactless or insulting act

CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE 33

might have left a lasting mark, he was received with rare courtesy and hospitality. His doctorate thesis contains a glowing dedication to Westphalen, full of gratitude and admiration. In 1837 Marx asked for the hand of his daughter in marriage and obtained his consent without difficulty; an act which, owing to the great difference in their social condition, is said to have dismayed her relations. Speaking of Westphalen in later life Marx, whose judgements of men are not noted for their generosity, grew almost sentimental. Westphalen had humanized and strengthened that belief in himself and his own powers which was at all periods Marx’s single most outstanding characteristic. He is one of the rare revolutionaries who were neither thwarted nor persecuted in their early lifel Consequently-, in spite of his abnormal sensitiveness, his amour-propre, his vanity, his aggressiveness and his arrogance, it is a singularly unbroken, positive and self-confident figure that faces us during forty years of illness, poverty and unceasing warfare.

He left the Trier school at the age of seventeen, and, following his father’s advice, in the autumn of 1835 became a student in the faculty of law in the University of Bonn. Here he seems to have been entirely happy: he announced that he proposed to attend at least seven courses of weekly lectures, among them lectures on Homer by the celebrated Schlegel, lectures on mythology, on Latin poetrt/Tftis-modern art. He lived the gay and dissipated life of the ordinary German student, played an active part in university societies, wrote Byronic poems, got into debt and on at least one occasion was arrested by the authorities for riotous behaviour. At the end of the summer term of 1836 he left Bonn

34 KARL MARX

and in the autumn was transferred to the University of Berlin.

This event marks a sharp crisis in his life. The conditions under which he had lived hitherto had been comparatively provincial: Trier was a small and pretty town which had survived from an older order, untouched by the great social and economic revolution which was changing the contour of the civilized world: the growing industrial development of Cologne and Dusseldorf seemed infinitely remote; no urgent problems, social, intellectual, or material, had troubled the peace of the gentle and cultivated milieu of his father’s friends, a placid preserve of the eighteenth century which had artificially survived into the nineteenth. By comparison with Trier or Bonn, Berlin was an immensely large and populous city, modern, ugly, pretentious and intensely serious, at once the centre of the Prussian bureaucracy and the meeting-place of the discontented radical intellectuals who formed the nucleus of the growing opposition to it. Marx retained all his life a considerable capacity for enjoyment and a strong if rather ponderous sense of fun, but no one could even at that time describe him as superficial or frivolous. He was sobered by the tense and tragic atmosphere in which he suddenly felt himself, and with his accustomed energy began at once to explore and criticize his new environment.

CHAPTER III

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SPIRIT

Was Ihr den Geist der Zeiten heisst Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln.

(What you call the spirit of the age is in reality one’s own spirit, in which the age is mirrored.)

GOETHE

La raison a toujours raison.

(Reason is always right.)

I

The dominant intellectual influence in the University of Berlin, as indeed in every other German university at this time, was the. Heggliao—philosophy. The soil for this had been prepared by gradual revolt from the beliefs and idiom of the classical period, which had begun in the seventeenth, and was consolidated and reduced to a system in the eighteenth centurThe greatest and most original figure in this movement among the Germans was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, whose ideas were developed by his followers and interpreters into a coherent and dogmatic metaphysical system, which, so their popularizers claimed, was logically demonstrable by deductive steps from simple premises, in their turn self-evident to those who could use that infallible intellectual intuition with which all thinking beings were endowed at birth. This rigid intellectualism was attacked in England, where no form of pure rationalism had ever found a congenial soil, by the most influential philosophical writers of the age.

36 KARL MARX

Locke, Hume, and, towards the end of the century, Bentham and the philosophical radicals agreed in denying the existence of any such faculty as an intellectual intuition into the real nature of things. No faculty other than the familiar physical senses could provide that initial empirical information on which all other knowledge of the world is ultimately founded. Since all information was conveyed by the senses, reason could not be an independent source of knowledge, and was responsible only for arranging, classifying and fitting together such information, and drawing deductions from it, operating upon material obtained without its aid. In France the rationalist position was attacked by the materialist school in the eighteenth century, and while Voltaire and Diderot, Condillac and Helvetius freely acknowledged their debt to the free-thinking English, they constructed an independent system whose influence on European thought and action continues into the present day. Some did not go to the length of denying the existence of knowledge obtained otherwise than by senses, but claimed that, though such innate knowledge itself exists and indeed reveals valuable truth, it provides no evidence for the propositions whose incontrovertible truth the older rationalists claimed to know, a fact which careful and scrupulous mental self-examination would show to any open-minded man not blinded by religious dogmatism or political and ethical prejudice. Too many abuses had been defended by appeals to authority, or to a special intuition: thus Aristotle, appealing to reason for confirmation, had maintained that men were by nature unequal, that some were naturally slaves, others free men; and so too the Bible, which taught that truth could be revealed by supernatural means,

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SPIRIT 37

afforded texts which could be invoked to prove that man was naturally vicious and must be curbed—theses used by reactionary governments to support the existing state of political, social, even moral inequality. But experience and reason, properly understood, combined to show the precise opposite of this. '.Arguments could be produced to show beyond any possible doubt that man was naturally good, that reason existed equally in all sentient beings, that the cause of all oppression and suffering was human ignorance, produced partly _by social and material conditions, which arose in the course of natmarTnstoncal^development, partly through the deliberate suppression of the truth by ambitious tyrants and unscrupulous priests, most frequently by the interplay of both. These influences could, however, by the action of an enlightened and Benevolent government, "be exposed and thereby annihilated. ..For, left to themselves, with no obstacles to obscure their vision and to~frustrate their endeavours, men would pursue virtue and know- ledge; justice—apd ^quality would take the place of authority and privilege, competition would yield to co-operation, happiness and wisdom would become universal ^possessions. The central tenet of this semi- empirical rationalism consisted in boundless faith in the power of reason to explain and improve tEe~world, all previous failure to do~so being" explained as a result of ignorance of the laws which regulate the behaviour of nature, animate and inanimate. Misery is the result of ignorance not only of nature but of the laws of social behaviour. To abolish it one measure is both necessary and sufficient: the employment of reason and of reason alone in the conduct of human affairs.

This task is admittedly tar i'roitreasy; men have lived