Karl marx an Intellectual Biography Rolf Hosfeld

Liberalism

One could be forced, like Themistocles when Athens was threat- ened with destruction, to leave one’s home completely and to found a new Athens at sea, in another different element, Marx wrote while still working on his doctorate.⁵⁰ In other words, he had to dedicate himself to the liberal political opposition that, as the party of the concept, was the only party in a position to make real progress.⁵¹ Marx was twenty-two years old when he put these words to paper. At twenty-four, well on his way to becoming a familiar personality in Germany, he became a political journalist.

The reason that the Prussian government not only allowed but even encouraged the publication of the Rheinische Zeitung für Poli- tik, Handel und Gewerbe (Rhenish newspaper for politics, trade, and industry) on 1 January 1842 was due to confessional disputes in the Rhineland. Since 1837, when a conflict over mixed marriages ended with the imprisonment of the refractory Archbishop Droste zu Vischering of Cologne, Berlin’s relationship with its Catholic subjects along the Rhine had been exceptionally tense. Admittedly, Friedrich Wilhelm IV had attempted reconciliation by staging the 1842 festival for the construction of the Cologne cathedral as a kind of ecumenical event in the spirit of pan-German Christian- ity. Yet the Rhineland’s independent will continued to make itself felt. In particular, the Prussians wanted to set up an effective coun- terpoise to the Kölnische Zeitung published by DuMont-Schauberg, which with eight thousand subscribers counted among the leading newspapers in Germany and in Berlin was regarded as a disruptive mouthpiece for Catholic ultramontanism. Thus the concession for the Rheinische Zeitung was approved with relative ease.

With steamships and the beginnings of railway construction, Co- logne was experiencing a noticeable rejuvenation after a long period of economic agony. Industrialists and bankers like Gustav Mevissen, Ludolf Camphausen, David Hansemann, and Salomon Oppenheim represented a self-confident stratum of the new Rhenish Großbürger- tum that was striving for political influence. Industry had gained enough strength to become an independent force, noted Mevissen in 1840, and where industry was a strong force, political power and freedom ensued. Even in political terms, a new era was inevitably approaching. Mevissen was among other things a member of the directorate of the Rhenish Railway Society and, in the judgment of

Hans-Ulrich Wehler, an early social liberal.⁵² He was undoubtedly the most interesting figure of this affiliated circle of Cologne liberals. Another member, Moses Hess, a scion of a wealthy Jewish family, is credited alongside the conservative Hegelian Lorenz von Stein with introducing France’s communist ideas to Germany.

Hess was the first communist Marx personally encountered. Both were from the Rhineland, came from bourgeois families, and were under the influence of Hegel’s philosophy. Marx made an “impos- ing impression” on Hess upon their first acquaintance in Septem- ber 1841, when Marx was still in Bonn with Bruno Bauer. After their initial encounter Hess had the sense of having met the “great- est, perhaps the only real philosopher now living,” one who would soon—Hess was referring here to the lecture halls of Bonn Univer- sity—“draw upon him the eyes of Germany.”⁵³

Hess played a leading role in the negotiations over the founding of the Rheinische Zeitung. He was actually the spirit of the whole operation, also chairing a socialist club that included Mevissen and the well-to-do solicitor Gustav Jung, a former member of the Berlin Doctor Club.

At this point, the perspectives of socialism and liberalism were still very similar. In contrast to Friedrich Wilhelm’s Christian state, liberalism and socialism stood philosophically on the ground of im- manentism—happiness on earth. Bound more to Kant’s ideas in East Prussia, and in the West more to the traditions of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period, liberalism was essentially a postrevolutionary movement, just as Hegel’s philosophy was a post- revolutionary philosophy of the French Revolution. At first glance, it must come as a surprise that even people from the upper bourgeois cir- cles around the Rheinische Zeitung therefore felt close to the radical in- tellectuals of the Hegelian school. Included among their fundamental demands were the rights to freedom of opinion and the press, whereas conservatives advocated the view that there could only be freedom for the truth as they themselves defined it. The liberals also demanded actual representative bodies, understanding them in the decidedly Hegelian sense as institutions of realized reason. Overall, as Thomas Nipperdey has noted, a kind of crypto-politics in vogue at the time was turning into actual politics. Standing behind all of the parties was basically a metapolitical philosophy, a secularized theology.⁵⁴

The coalition of the Rheinische Zeitung was also metapoliti- cal when the newspaper was summoned to life with share capital

amounting to 20,000 Taler. One of its most important members was Dagobert Oppenheim, who had fallen in with the young Hegelians in Berlin and now lived in Cologne as a co-owner of the banking house Salomon Oppenheim Jr. & Cie. He had arranged the financ- ing in 1841 with a prospectus for a limited partnership in the found- ing of a new newspaper.

Marx’s first article in the Rheinische Zeitung, on the Rhineland Landtag’s debate over freedom of the press, appeared on 5 May 1842. Remarkable in a time of argumentative feuilletons, it reported well- researched, concrete details. One could say that it clearly indicated that its author was moving from philosophical speculation toward solid ground. Citing individual speakers and imparting a view of the narrow interests of the different estates, it concluded by persuading readers that a censorship law was not a law but rather a police mea- sure, and that in contrast, only a law granting freedom of the press could be a real law because it is the positive existence of freedom.⁵⁵ Thus was Hegelian legal philosophy applied to concrete daily events, and on this issue the Rhenish liberals around Mevissen and Camphau- sen were largely of one mind. They could feel themselves under- stood even in Marx’s sharp polemic against the historical school of law, for in reality its target was the king himself, whom Marx was accusing of representing the right of arbitrary power.⁵⁶ If there had ever been a Christian state, Marx insisted, it would have been Byzantium, for only in this caesaropapist entity were the dogmas of religion simultaneously matters of state.⁵⁷ All of this thought still followed Hegelian paths.

Yet the historical experience of Marx’s generation was already completely different from that of Hegel’s. When the latter pub- lished his Philosophy of Right, the Prussian provincial Landtäge did not yet exist. But increasingly parties began to form out of the Es- tates, something Freiherr von Stein noted as a positive development shortly before his death in 1831.⁵⁸ And although Hegel had imag- ined otherwise, the Estates themselves were less and less capable of representing bourgeois society. Basically, the Estates were “natu- ral”—or, as Marx would say, zoology—whereas parties represented the principle—appropriately suited for modernity—of the reason- able, or at least informed, spirit. “Without parties there is no devel- opment,” wrote Marx in the Rheinische Zeitung on 14 July 1842, the anniversary of the French Revolution, adding, “without demarca- tion there is no progress.”⁵⁹ In this too he could rest assured that he

was in agreement with Rhenish liberals, so much so that, even after the March Revolution in 1848, Prussian Minister of Finance David Hansemann toyed with the idea of bringing the talented young man to Berlin for the business of politics.

Marx was twenty-eight years old when, on 15 October 1842, he was appointed editor in chief of the Rheinische Zeitung. Since sum- mer he had found himself increasingly involved in editorial work, especially since Adolf Rutenberg, the chief editor at the time and Marx’s best friend from the days of the Doctor Club in Stralau, was increasingly discrediting himself with alcoholic excesses. In practical terms, Marx had already replaced Rutenberg in July. Rutenberg was absolutely incapable, he wrote at the time to Arnold Ruge, publisher of the young Hegelian Deutsche Jahrbücher (German yearbooks) in Dresden, and sooner or later he will be shown the door.⁶⁰ These words clearly anticipated the parlance of the “Dictatorship of Marx,” as the Prussian censorship authorities called the period when he was editor in chief. Mevissen described him as “domineering, impetuous, pas- sionate” and “full of boundless self-confidence,” but also “deeply ear- nest and learned.”⁶¹ But above all Marx was often internally restless and occasionally somewhat driven, as his contemporary, the jour- nalist Karl Heinzen, described him, and at the same time he enjoyed exercising his power over others. “I will destroy you,” he once hissed at Heinzen on the occasion of a controversy about the Prussian bu- reaucracy.⁶² But the dispute with Rutenberg also involved objective reasons.

Rutenberg had given his Berlin friends—“The Free” from the for- mer Doctor Club, whose behaviors were increasingly bohemian— too much free rein. In June in the Rheinische Zeitung, Edgar Bauer, for example, railed against the “juste milieu” of the upper bourgeoi- sie, the exact opposite of those who, like him, wanted radically and critically to push “principles to their extremes.”⁶³ The rhetoric was not very effective, but articles like this very much displeased the publishers, leading Marx to announce a corrective realignment of editorial policy in a letter to Dagobert Oppenheim. Under no circumstances did he want to challenge the censors with senseless provocations. Above all, though, he was fundamentally opposed to this kind of light, provocative feuilleton.

“The concrete theory,” he informed Oppenheim, “must be made clear and developed within the concrete conditions and on the basis of the existing state of things.”⁶⁴ He demanded the demonstration

of more expert knowledge and not, for example, en passant and inap- propriately smuggling communist and socialist doctrine into theater reviews and similar edifying articles.⁶⁵ Briefly put, he wanted jour- nalism that was well grounded and empirically detailed, in contrast to the style of his old friends, whom he soon mocked as the inspired congregation of a new holy family. “As you already know, every day the censorship mutilates us mercilessly, so that frequently the news- paper is hardly able to appear,” he reported at the end of November to Ruge:
Because of this, a mass of articles by “The Free” have perished. But I have allowed myself to throw out as many articles as the censor, for Meyen and Co. sent us heaps of scribbling, pregnant with revolution- izing the world and empty of ideas, written in a slovenly style and sea- soned with a little atheism and communism (which these gentlemen have never studied). Because of Rutenberg’s complete lack of critical sense, independence and ability, Meyen and Co. had become accus- tomed to regard the Rheinische Zeitung as their own, docile organ, but I believed I could not any longer permit this watery torrent of words in the old manner. This loss of a few worthless creations of “freedom,” a freedom which strives primarily “to be free from all thought,” was therefore the first reason for a darkening of the Berlin sky.⁶⁶
Ruge replied: such “absurdities of student shallowness,” carelessly bandied about with buzzwords like “atheism, communism, decapita- tion, and guillotining,” must at all costs be kept at arm’s length.⁶⁷ The last report in the Rheinische Zeitung from the pen of one of Berlin’s “The Free” ran on 8 December 1842.⁶⁸ It was Marx’s first great politi- cal divorce for reasons of principle, though many more would follow.

Once the Rheinische Zeitung had departed from the form of the zeitgeist’s argumentative Berlin feuilleton and increasingly turned to questions of the real state, practical questions,⁶⁹ and the specific prob- lems of the Rhineland, the newspaper’s circulation noticeably in- creased—from under a thousand copies in October to over three and half thousand prior to Christmas in 1842. From its very incep- tion, interference and prohibitions would threaten the newspaper time and again, but for the moment its basic pro-Prussian, North- German–oriented spirit,⁷⁰ directed against the ultramontanism of the Kölnische Zeitung, gave it special status, even for Eichhorn.

While working there, Marx grew familiar with concrete poli- tics: the Landtag with its Estates—distinguished by virtue of sta-

tus and property—and its narrow-minded interests, whose reality completely contradicted the ideal condition of Hegelian political philosophy. One subject he chose to address, as the Landtag de- bated laws regarding the theft of wood, was a preindustrial prob- lem that incidentally also preoccupied Mevissen: the hardship of pauperism, which, alongside child labor and poorly paid women’s labor, was widespread. Indeed, since 1830 poverty had become a massive problem in Germany, and by the mid 1840s the Cologne Poor Roll listed around 25,000 persons—out of a city population of 95,000.⁷¹ But Marx chiefly provoked irritation by justifying a Mosel correspondent’s report on the misery of the peasants in the Mosel region, caused by the open borders of the German Customs Union. He began by stating that given a lively press movement, the entire truth would become apparent bit by bit.⁷² The details, facts, and sta- tistics he provided penetrated all the way to Berlin and even embar- rassed the king’s uninformed advisors, who rambled on somewhat helplessly about unavoidable transitional phenomena. The fact that these matters were even made public was in itself scandalous, for Friedrich Wilhelm IV had made it known that Prussia was to be regarded as a blessed and fortunate country. As a rule, the censors energetically suppressed reports of social distress, including the fam- ine in Upper Silesia.

Thus the modest freedoms of the liberal Cologne press came to an end in the wake of the investigative reports from the Mosel, which stultified censors and the state’s highest officials; the sharp criti- cism of censorship itself; and not least the pressure the czar brought to bear personally. Dr. Marx, with his “extraordinary talents” and “admirable dialectic,” noted the Mannheimer Abendzeitung, had undoubtedly been the guiding spirit of the Rheinische Zeitung and endowed it with its first historical significance.⁷³ But the banning of the “Hurenschwester” (sister-of-a-whore),⁷⁴ as Friedrich Wilhelm put it, meant the end of Marx’s exclusive weapons of criticism for the time being.