Karl marx an Intellectual Biography Rolf Hosfeld

The Riddle of Modernity

The Rheinische Zeitung, Marx observed after the crackdown, had only ever asserted claims that according to its conviction were reason- able, whether they proceeded from one side or the other. In contrast,

he saw the monarchy’s reaction as resembling a reprise performance by those obscurantists who at one time, in defiance of all reason, had put the Copernican world system on the Index, declaring it invalid.⁷⁵ The banning of the Rheinische Zeitung had clearly shown that the use of force would assure that the ideas prevailing in Prussia would be those of the current ruling class, regardless of how unreasonable and outdated they were. Marx’s first idea—that of reasonable free- dom—had failed because of the Prussian circumstances of his time. It was this failure that led him toward the path of revolution.

As Jenny von Westphalen, his wife of many years, wrote to him when he became an editor for the Rheinische Zeitung, he had gotten mixed up in the most dangerous (Halsbrechendste mengelirt) thing imaginable, namely, politics. His hopes of finally attaining the re- spectable position of a good match as a husband had suddenly van- ished. He rejected an offer, presumably made through Jenny’s half brother, Ferdinand (later the Prussian interior minister), to enter the state service in Berlin, refusing to allow himself to be bought by Prussia.⁷⁶ As the Cologne censor Saint-Paul wrote with covert admiration in his final evaluation to Berlin, Marx was someone who might be accused of “anything, but not a lack of principles.”⁷⁷ Mean- while, Arnold Ruge had a plan: now that his Deutsche Jahrbücher was also suppressed, he would continue his project abroad “as long as this police fury lasts”⁷⁸ in order to thereby escape the “self-castration of the German spirit.” “Could you get by with a fixed income of 550 or 600 Taler?” he inquired of the still editor in chief of the Rheinische Zeitung.⁷⁹ Including the honorariums he could expect to receive as a writer, Marx could count on an annual income of 850 Taler as copublisher of Ruge’s new project. Once the contract was finalized, this would provide an acceptable basis for his long-desired marriage. “I have been engaged for more than seven years,” he informed Ruge in mid March, “and for my sake my fiancée has fought the most vio- lent battles, which almost undermined her health, partly against her pietistic aristocratic relatives, for whom ‘the Lord in heaven’ and the ‘lord in Berlin’ are equally objects of religious cult, and partly against my own family, in which some priests and other enemies of mine have ensconced themselves.”⁸⁰

To escape the pressure against this liaison from Jenny’s half brother Ferdinand, Jenny’s sympathetic mother, Caroline von West- phalen, promptly brought her daughter along for a long stay at the spa in Kreuznach, whose fashionable new bathhouse had just been

completed that year. Without family—and without the Civil Code ceremony that was common on the left side of the Rhine—the mar- riage took place on 19 June 1843 in Kreuznach’s St. Paul’s Church on the bank of the Nahe. After a honeymoon of several weeks in Switzerland and Baden, the couple returned to Kreuznach and re- mained there for another quarter of a year in the house of Jenny’s mother.

Now that the Rheinische Zeitung was no more, Marx seized this op- portunity to withdraw from the public stage to my study, which meant flooding his mother-in-law’s salon with books, excerpts, and manu- scripts so that, in the wake of his recent Prussian experiences, he could grapple more intensely with Hegelian legal philosophy. Sum- marizing the laboratory of his thoughts at the time, he later wrote:

My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life, the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English and French thinkers of the eighteenth century, embraces within the term “civil society”; that the anatomy of this civil society, however, has to be sought in political economy.⁸¹

In other words, he found himself on the way to his second idea— historical materialism.

But the steps taken in his studies in Kreuznach initially led him from liberalism toward a systematic theory of democracy. For a cer- tain period, this position brought him into proximity with Arnold Ruge. The latter’s demand to elevate “in all spheres the free person to a principle and the people to a purpose”—in short, a “dissolution of liberalism into democratism”⁸²—had led to the prohibition of his Deutsche Jahrbücher in early 1843. The fronts of the Vormärz began increasingly to radicalize. Even Marx concluded from his Kreuzn- ach engagement with Hegel’s constitutional law that only in a de- mocracy could a constitution be what it essentially needed to be, namely, a free product of man. “Hegel proceeds from the state,” he noted in the first of what would later become his famous philosophi- cal inversions, “and makes man into the subjectified state; democ- racy starts with man and makes the state objectified man; just as it is not religion that creates man but man who creates religion, so it is not the constitution that creates the people but the people which

creates the constitution.”⁸³ But the issue here was something other than pure philosophy: it was about establishing parties. Until 1848, Prussia did not have a constitution at all, not even a Hegelian one. At this particular time it was thus crucial to know what the world should look like after the foreseeable fall of the Ancien Régime. Liberalism wanted constitutional limitations, the containment of state power by means of constitutional law, and, in the best-case scenario, selective suffrage for the representative organs. By con- trast, the movement for radical democracy taking shape in Germany wanted unlimited sovereignty of the people and majority rule.

Marx, newly married to his secretary in the Kreuznach salon, saw the outcome of his critique of Hegel as the conception of a politi- cal system without mediation. The entire construction of Hegelian constitutional law was obsolete—but not because it rested on the antiquated construction of the representation of Estates and the presumption of a leading role for the state bureaucracy. Rather, its obsolescence lay much more in the claim that the modest plural- ism in these institutions was able to produce a balance between the interests of the state and civil society, a task that today falls to the system of parties and associations. Basically, Marx wanted a political system without any differentiation because he had come to see that mediating entities were unable to reconcile the interests of the state and civil society. This is one of the earliest examples of his mode of thought, which Georges Gurvitch once called an “inflation of antinomies.”⁸⁴ “Real extremes,” Marx wrote, “cannot be mediated precisely because they are real extremes. Nor do they require me- diation, for they are opposed in essence.” He wanted to resolve this ostensibly irreconcilable opposition between state and society into a democracy, or in any event into what he considered as such, for in a true democracy the political state was in actuality nothing more than a particular form of existence of the people.

Hegel admittedly demonstrated a certain depth by perceiving the division between civil and political society as a contradiction, but by recommending a mediating entity he had wrongly declared the ap- pearance of a resolution to be the resolution itself. With the mediat- ing entities of the three-step dialectical approach of the universal, particular, and individual, Marx declared in the spirit of a modern proponent of Enlightenment, speculative philosophy admittedly gave political body to his logic, but it did not develop—as would be appropriate—the logic of the body politic.⁸⁵ But what was the logic spe-

cific to a body politic supposed to be? An emanation, or the particu- lar form of being of a people? Presumably Marx had something similar in mind with these dark words. But then his criticism did not strike at Hegelian constitutional law alone; more forcefully, it called into question any structured constitutional law whatsoever.

Above all, however, the Hegelian demand for differentiation cannot, as Marx suggests, simply be dismissed as the voluntarism of forcing logical categories onto empirical circumstances. This de- mand was largely the result of experiences during the French Revo- lution and the dead end of the Jacobin phase of absolute freedom, whose unstructured nature Hegel regarded as having led inevitably to the Terror. Indeed, in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel devoted a chapter to the dialectic of the Enlightenment. Here he described Jacobin rule as one where “all social groups or classes which are the spiritual spheres into which the whole is articulated are abolished,” as the “corpse of the vanished independence of real being or the being of faith,” and as a mere “fury of destruction.”⁸⁶ But Marx’s generation had evidently already forgotten this chapter. The call for differentiation and mediating entities between state and soci- ety had much more to do with this historical experience than with the arbitrary application of philosophical ontology to political cir- cumstances. Even if the details of Hegel’s institutional doctrine were open to critique, it nonetheless clearly represented an attempt to conceptualize anew, in a modern and more complex world, what he saw as the world-historical impulse of the French Revolution so that this impulse could be preserved.

But for Marx’s generation, the French Revolution was considered an unfinished event for other reasons. It appeared not to have solved the modern riddle of the world’s duplication into state and soci- ety. In Kreuznach, Marx held that an unlimited direct democracy along Rousseauian lines—where all wish individually to share in the legislature—could overcome this problem and sublate the division of state and society through the movement of a dialectical treat- ment. Namely, once everyone operated without difference as parts of the same political body, then its abstraction would be carried so far to the extreme that it would directly bring about the transcendence [Aufhebung] of the abstraction.⁸⁷ Was this dynamic perhaps supposed to comprise the “real” logic of the body politic Hegel had called for? For a young man who had just set out to devastate philosophical specu- lation, these were highly speculative thoughts. Shortly thereafter

Marx would radicalize his conception so that the riddle would only be solved when the real, individual man reabsorbed in himself the ab- stract citizen and as an individual human being became the species-be- ing in his empirical life, individual work, and individual condition.⁸⁸ When dealing with the future, Marx’s conceptions always remained vague and philosophically undefined. They sustained themselves, in Jürgen Habermas’s formulation, on the illusion that in principle all objectified, systematically autonomized social relationships could be led back to the horizon of the world of lived experience.⁸⁹ Basi- cally, these were surprisingly simple answers to extremely compli- cated questions.

But the questions had been raised, and they had something to do with the new problems and contradictions of a rising industrial society. As early as 1831, the French socialist Pierre Leroux wrote in the Revue encyclopédique: “For forty years, one state form follows the next and one after the other collapses similarly into an abyss. All the while the Sphinx of the Revolution still wears its mysteri- ous headband upon which is written the formulation of the task as- signed to us by our fathers: liberty, equality, fraternity.”⁹⁰ Basically, Eugène Delacroix’s “Freedom at the Barricades” was the first icon of this sphinx, a “strange blending of Phryne, poissarde, and goddess of liberty,” as Heinrich Heine described it.⁹¹ During the 1830s and 1840s, French socialists and communists labored on this sphinx with a variety of plans for the future; now, from the same angle, Marx ap- proached the question about the riddle of modernity. He became a communist shortly thereafter, moving with Jenny from Kreuznach to Parisian exile.

There were real communists in the French capital, and although they initially formed, in Heine’s words, a small “ecclesia pressa” (sup- pressed church), they played a significant role in the city. They were the only party in France, Heine noted in mid 1843, that deserved resolute attention⁹² in the early capitalist society of “Enrichis- sez-vous,” which otherwise was mainly characterized by the eter- nal conflict of a present addicted to enrichment and lacking any moral footing in its heroic revolutionary past—by the “anger of a madman at a ghost.”⁹³ On this ship of fools, Heine added, the com- munists were the only force driven by “dæmonic necessity.” They were the “predestined servants by whom the supreme will sets forth its vast intentions,” and Pierre Leroux, the publisher of the Revue independence, had already taken on a role as one of their “Church

Fathers.”⁹⁴ Incidentally, Marx, who came to know Heine personally in December 1843 in Paris, would soon make his—Hegelian—idea of the predestined servants his own, albeit without sharing the cul- tural pessimism that Heine associated with such prognoses.

Pierre Leroux was among the French whom Marx and Ruge wanted to win over to their yearbook project in Paris, especially since Ruge, looking at the range of authors of Leroux’s Revue, saw the Revue as a model for the new project. Heine described Leroux, who was around fifty years old at the time, as a typical “child of the people” whose external appearance itself already revealed “the indignations of the proletary.”⁹⁵ A close friend of the author George Sands, Leroux was in fact a proletarian only in the sense of romantically aspiring to be one. Disgusted with Mammon, he had quit his job as a stockbroker and become a typographer, a typesetter, and above all an influential journalist.⁹⁶ He represented the typical French engagé of his time, for whom philosophy, as Heine put it, consisted primarily of engaging in “general researches on social questions”—which greatly appealed to Marx. Leroux was certainly one of the most interesting of the socialist theorists of his time, notwithstanding Heine’s mockery of his utopian plans as pathways into a “visioned moonshine of the future” or a “yet undiscovered star in the Milky Way.”⁹⁷ As a social theorist who, even prior to Marx, had traced the class differences of the new industrial society back to economic conditions, Leroux could be taken very seriously.⁹⁸

However, because Leroux had a deeply religious—though pan- theistic—streak, he was highly suspicious of the offers made by the radically democratic atheists who had arrived from Germany. For the same reason, Marx and Ruge fared no better with the likes of Alphonse de Lamartine, Felicité de Lamennais, Louis Blanc, or Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Ultimately, the challenging project her- alded as the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (German-French year- books) did not include a single French contributor, even though in his introduction Ruge attested that the French represented a “cos- mopolitan mission” in its true sense. Any national hatred toward France was nothing but a “blind aversion to political freedom.”⁹⁹ In this period of renewed rampant German hatred of the French after the 1840 Rhine crisis, this was a respectable European program for democracy.

The Bureau des Annales—the editorial office of the Deutsch- Französische Jahrbücher—resided in the ground floor of Rue Vaneau

22 in the seventh arrondissement, in a house with a small front garden. The printing was done at Worms & Cie on the Boulevard Pigalle, an enterprise that was part of the Paris community of Ger- man guest workers and emigrants, which then numbered at least eighty thousand people. Through painstaking archival research, Jacques Grandjonc has remarkably identified by name seventy-four emigrant periodicals for the period between 1830 and 1848 that had to be published abroad because of censorship in Germany.¹⁰⁰ Yet the Jahrbücher attained an extraordinary status among the many emigrant organs and in fact managed to announce an acquisition in Paris—namely, Heinrich Heine. As early as fall 1842, Heine identi- fied a need to harmonize with Ruge’s Hallische Jahrbücher and Marx’s Rheinische Zeitung and “call the bad by its proper name and defend the good without regard for the world.”¹⁰¹ In the first and only edi- tion of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, he contributed a satiri- cal hymn in praise of King Ludwig of Bavaria.

A different kind of German contribution would have been al- most completely in vain, even though in the end it characterized the entire spirit of the Jahrbücher. The independent scholar and phi- losopher Ludwig Feuerbach was represented with what amounted to a single page. Basically, this was not even an article but rather only the printing of a letter Feuerbach had written to Ruge in June 1843, in which he opined that the prohibition of Ruge’s Deutsche Jahrbücher was as disastrous for Germany’s freedom as the demise of Poland.¹⁰² At the moment, however, Feuerbach himself—sitting at his desk in his castle in Bruckberg—would rather leave matters to “quiet workings.”¹⁰³ It was Marx, with his sharp pen, who saw to it that there would be more to the Jahrbücher than simply these “quiet workings.” In the course of Marx’s studies during his months in Kreuznach, Feuerbach had been a veritable revelation. As Engels wrote in retrospect, Marx absorbed Feuerbach’s criticism of Hegel quite “enthusiastically.”¹⁰⁴ As Engels noted, Feuerbach taught Marx to upend Hegel, that is, to turn philosophical speculation on its head,¹⁰⁵ which he had attempted for the first time in his Kreuznach critique of Hegelian constitutional law.

1842 witnessed the publication of Feuerbach’s Vorläufigen The- sen zur Reform der Philosophie (Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy) and summer 1843 the publication of Ruge’s Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publizistik (Anecdotes on the most recent German philosophy and journalism) in Zurich and

Winterthur. The Preliminary Theses argued that one need only “in- vert” speculative philosophy to grasp the unveiled truth. “Thought arises from being,” wrote Feuerbach, “but being does not arise from thought.”¹⁰⁶ Marx would later say that being determines conscious- ness. As novel as this might have appeared to a generation under the spell of Hegelian speculation, the situation was otherwise for those who had at one point glanced at, for instance, John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding or the writings of Locke’s students. Locke’s act of liberation in 1690 was a rebellion against Aristotelian speculation, which at the time in Oxford was treated as a codified holy ritual. After Locke, philosophy was to be based on facts.

John Locke was the actual founder of modern thought, although his claim resounded far more modestly than the euphoria celebrating Feuerbach that took hold in Kreuznach and Paris. Locke taught that thought and all social life arise from sensation—from being. This simple idea opened all doors to unbiased science in a single blow. All historical knowledge, which in his tradition was understood as empirical thought, was thus always a kind of historical materialism as well. However, Locke was aware that precisely this turn toward researching facts established certain limits with respect to knowl- edge. “Our business here,” he wrote, “is not to know all things.”¹⁰⁷

Feuerbach’s break with Hegelian speculation, by contrast, was not principally directed toward the world of facts. He wanted to reveal a secret. “The secret of theology is anthropology,” he announced in the Preliminary Theses, “but the secret of speculative philosophy is theology.”¹⁰⁸ Feuerbach’s critique of religion not only called into question God as an absolute subject but also, along with God, the absolute Idea of speculative philosophy. He saw these as illusory du- plications of the human person who had been robbed of his natural foundations and whose consciousness of species had therefore de- veloped within these ideological alienations instead of his natural reality. God and the Idea were nothing more than false mirrored re- flections of a complete “real” human person. Feuerbach’s effect was like an inspiration. The real henceforth became an almost magical phrase for Marx.

“Dear Sir,” Marx wrote on 11 September 1844 from the Rue Vaneau to Feuerbach in Bruckberg, “I am glad to have the oppor- tunity of assuring you of the great respect and—if I may use the word—love, which I feel for you.” Despite their limited scope, Marx

continued, Feuerbach’s more thesis-like articles of recent times were nonetheless more important than all of contemporary German liter- ature put together. With his writings, Feuerbach had namely finally provided a philosophical basis for socialism. And further: “The unity of man with man, which is based on the real differences between men, the concept of the human species brought down from the heaven of abstraction to the real earth, what is this but the concept of soci- ety?”¹⁰⁹ Hiding behind these sentences was an entire program hold- ing far more than the announcement of a future sociology. Marx meant that the concept of society held the key to understanding the entire riddle of history.

In a certain way, Hegel had already argued in sociological terms. Well aware of the significance of John Locke’s act of liberation, he had also always been in favor of empirical research. But he felt that the facts needed to be ordered systematically and situated in their appropriate place in the Spirit’s history of the world and being. Yet the further intrusion of empirical research into his system led to an erosion of Hegelian metaphysics. This was exemplified in the reasoning of Eduard Gans, who, on the basis of his intensive work in legal history, came to believe that from the outset, the idea of law was just as nonexistent as its realization in history; instead, the idea and its realization exhibited a “course that ran parallel with history.”¹¹⁰ This was not so much Hegelian metaphysics but rather more a secular intellectual history. Another example of secular in- tellectual history was David Friedrich Strauß. And the importance of Lorenz von Stein, whom Moses Hess characterized as a “Hege- lian of the center,” also deserves mention.¹¹¹ With Socialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreich (Socialism and communism in today’s France), published in 1842, Stein was the first to draw the German public’s attention to the new political trends in the neighboring country and also to make compelling reference to the serious social problems and irreconcilable class differences of the new capitalistic industrial society developing in Europe, problems that largely still lay ahead for Germany. Stein held that “the or- der of society dominates the constitution of the state,” and that at the core this order was a “system of production.”¹¹² According to Herbert Marcuse, Stein’s work constituted the first German sociol- ogy.¹¹³ But Hess reproached Stein for believing in the possibility of a “mediation of the contradictions in the situation of strife.” In other words, with his drastic depiction of exploitation, immiseration, and

the proletarian countermovement that could be observed in France, Stein argued for decidedly preventive state social policies instead of socialism. According to Hess, Stein was nothing more than a cold “political rationalist.”¹¹⁴

But Marx was not. For him, history had a definite goal and thus an inherent truth, namely, the practical sublation of the alienation of the person, something he regarded as the necessary result of the premises of Feuerbach’s dialectical critique of ideology. The radical change, for Marx, came from philosophical—not empirical—re- search, and when he spoke of reality, he primarily meant the earthly rather than the illusory world of human beings; seldom was this the world of facts. The fact that this moved him beyond Feuerbach toward empirical research of the earthly world had its own logic, and his extensive work is evidence of the dedication with which he undertook this task. But the question is whether empiricism ever played a substantially different role for Marx than it did for Hegel, or whether he instead founded a kind of new materialistic panthe- ism of history.

That is to say, he developed a materialistic teleology, in the light of which he now also arranged his French experiences. “You would have to attend one of the meetings of the French workers,” he in- formed Feuerbach at his country estate, “to appreciate the pure freshness, the nobility which burst forth from these toil-worn men. The English proletarian is also advancing with giant strides but he lacks the cultural background of the French. But I must not forget to emphasise the theoretical merits of the German artisans in Swit- zerland, London and Paris.” It was in any case obvious, he informed his intellectual inspirator of ideas, that what was being readied among these barbarians of our civilized society was the practical element for the emancipation of mankind,¹¹⁵ which Feuerbach called the heart of philosophy: “the source of sorrow, finitude, need, sensualism.”¹¹⁶ Feuerbach would presumably have understood the allusion to the late-antique translatio imperii, but he hardly saw matters as Marx did. As Boëthius had done at the court of Theodoric, king of the Goths, Feuerbach preferred to take precautionary refuge in the comfort of philosophy. New lineages, new spirits would arise, Feuerbach wrote to his young admirer a month later, “as once before from the coarse Germanic tribes,” but the dismal, even if unintentional, result of communism would merely consist of turning “the top to the bottom, and the bottom to the top.”¹¹⁷

Marx’s essays in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher were wholly permeated with the enthusiastic spirit of his new idea, inspired by Feuerbach. They announced a downright Copernican turning point in the historical and political view of the world. “Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve round himself,” he wrote: “The task of history, therefore, once the world beyond the truth has disappeared, is to establish the truth of this world. The immediate task of philosophy, which is at the service of history, once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked, is to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms. Thus, the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.”¹¹⁸ In the year 1844, this was the ambitious program of his own, individual version of historical materialism. Through the method of the immanent critique of the world, Marx wanted to develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles¹¹⁹ and to force these petrified relations … to dance by singing their own tune to them.¹²⁰

A year later the new doctrine was complete. Let us allow Marx himself to speak in a few longer passages. “The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination,” states a manuscript on German ideology written with Friedrich Engels in 1845/46: “They are the real individuals, their activity and the mate- rial conditions of their life, both those which they find already exist- ing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.” And again:
The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production. The social structure and the State are continually evolving out of the life- process of definite individuals, however, of these individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people’s imagination, but as they actually are; i.e. as they act, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and condi- tions independent of their will.
Continuing on:

Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., that is, real active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness [das Bewusstsein] can never be anything else than conscious being [das bewusste Sein], and the being of men is their actual life-process.

So far, so matter-of-fact. So British, one could almost say, if one takes Marx’s language about the new empirical science seriously.

But as already mentioned, his problem was something different. He wanted to demonstrate that the previous history was upside- down, that people were dominated by the products of their own ac- tivities, and that this contradiction was driving toward resolution in the present era. A few pages later, he continues:

This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we our- selves produce into a material power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calcu- lations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now and out of this very contradiction between the interest of the individual and that of the community the latter takes an indepen- dent form as the State, divorced from the real interests of individual and community, and at the same time as an illusory communal life, always based, however, on the real ties existing in every family and tribal conglomeration—such as flesh and blood, language, division of labour on a larger scale, and other interests—and especially, as we shall enlarge upon later, on the classes, already determined by the division of labour, which in every such mass of men separate out, and of which one dominates all the others. It follows from this that all struggles within the State, the struggle between democracy, aris- tocracy, and monarchy, the struggle for the franchise, etc., etc., are merely the illusory forms in which the real struggles of the different classes are fought out among one another.¹²¹
There was a significant addendum in 1859. “Mankind thus inevi- tably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve,” Marx wrote in the preface to his Critique of Political Economy,
since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic de-

velopment of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production.

With that, Marx continued, the prehistory of human society would reach its conclusion¹²² and social evolutions cease to be political revolu- tions.¹²³ Thus history not only assigned people tasks, but in a myste- rious way it also provided them with solutions—namely, replacing the domination of circumstances and of chance over individuals by the domi- nation of individuals over chance and circumstances.¹²⁴ Then all the re- versals and alienations would be resolved, and along with them the doubling of the world into state and society. As a radical democracy led back to the species-life of the social human individual, commu- nism would produce an association in which there could be no more political power properly so-called.¹²⁵ By this Marx meant the complete recovery and appropriation by human individuals of what had now become a transparent world, which would render the state superflu- ous as an illusory and domineering doubling of society.

These were the most important hypotheses in Marx’s historical materialism, which at its core was purely a philosophy of history and a secular narrative of an impending redemption. Incidentally, that narrative, with its so-called progressive epochs, leaned heavily on Hegel’s developmental stages of reason on its way from Asia to Cen- tral Europe, only Hegel’s “progress in the consciousness of freedom” was now regarded materialistically as the purposeful extrication of the human individual from nature. The fact that this develop- mental path of humanity was paved with torpidity and alienation could already be read in Hegel. The theory of alienation was in itself definitely an important discovery, insofar as it aided understanding of the structures of power and rule inherent in all systematic au- tonomizations. To be sure, these did not necessarily need to end in eschatology. Yet Marx believed that with his conceptualization he had simultaneously both understood and intellectually overcome the fascinating and frightening riddle of industrial modernity, into which the Europe of these years had tumbled headlong, as if into a magical time machine.