Study of his life nd work maximilien Rubel and Margaret Manale

(1814-1881). Daughter of Prussian privy councillor Johann J Ludwig von Westphalen (1770-1842) and his (second) wifel Caroline, nee Heubel (1779-1856), Jenny was descended on her father’s side from the highest ranks of Scottish nobility, the 1 Argyle and Campbel families. Her half-brother Ferdinand von 9 Westphalen (1799-1876), of conservative Christian-monarchf^H leanings, was the well-known Prussian minister of internal affairs 3 during the period 1850-58. Jenny’s brother Edgar was a Trier 9 classmate of Marx’s and entertained a dose friendship with the j young couple during their stay in Brussels in 1846.

In October Marx enrolled at the University of Berlin to f continue his law studies. He attended lectures on Pandecta held ; by F. K. Savigny, penal law by Eduard Gans (a convertedHjew who later became a Hegelian) and anthropology. He began I writing verse and made other poetic efforts, filling with lyrics I three notebooks which he presented to his fiancee. Although | these romantic essays have been lost, a number of poems and ballads remain from the year 1837 along with a comic novel 1 Scorpion and Felix and a dramatic fantasy Oulanem, both in fragmentary form. Marx himself characterised his poetic writings j as pure idealism, as:

onslaughts on the present, broad and shapeless expressions of feeling, | unnatural, constructed out of the blue, die perfect opposite of what is actually there and what ought to be, rhetorical reflection instead | of poetic thoughts, yet perhaps a certain warmth of sentiment and | a struggle for dynamism as well... (to his father, Nov. to, 1837)49

Among the extant poems are four short and critical epigrams op Hegel. In Marx’s poetic interpretation the great philosophic L speaks as follows:

Words I teach, confused in demonic chaos So that each may thus think what pleases him And in any case none is ever constrained by bridling limits^ For, just as the poet conceives the words and thoughts J)f his beloved

Out of a roaring torrent, tumbling from a lofty cliff,

And what senses, acknowledges, conceiving in thought Jj what he feels,

So may each man sip the delightsome nectar of wisdom,,* Indeed, I am telling you everything, having told you ^{a :} Nothing (MEGA 1,2*. 42).

1835*184° 13

Marx pore's reaction to his offspring’s poetic inclinations and to his varied university activities was rather less than enthusiastic:

It is now high time that you erne yourself of this restlessness which destroys mind and body... You have assumed serious responsibilities ... You cannot imagine—with all the exaggerations and exaltations of love in a poetic spirit—that it is possible to establish die equanimity of that person to whom you have given yourself with body and soul... I have spoken with Jenny ... she is making a priceless sacrifice for you. Only sober reason can appreciate the self-denial which she shows.

May God protect you, should you ever in your life be able to forget this 1 (Dec. 28,1836) ' ^

It is not surprising that Heinrich Marx was reluctant to sanction his son's early engagement, fearing his ‘demonic and Faust-like nature' might put Karl in an unseemly position in face of his fiancee's family and damage her reputation:

I am not pretending to be an angel and I know that man does not live by bread alone, but any secondary intentions must be quelled when it is a question of fulfilling a sacred duty. And I repeat: a man has no more sacred duty than that which he assumes in the interest of the weaker sex. Thus I am asking you to be as open to me in this respect as in all others, as you would be towards a friend (Nov. 9, 1836).

In the summer semester of 1837 Marx attended lectures in philosophy and history along with jurisprudence. He became involved in a group known as the Doktorklub, students, recent graduates and aspiring writers distinguished by their pronounced Hegelian leanings. Here Marx made friends with Bruno and Edgar Bauer, Carl Friedrich Koppen, Adolf Rutenberg and others.

Marx presented to his father a hand-written volume with a selection of his literary efforts for his birthday in March 1837. Heinrich Marx came to acknowledge this aspect of his son's talents and frequently referred to his desire for a literary career, suggesting how he might realise it without abandoning his plans fra: law. He felt, however, that this gifted young man was best suited for another career:

I applauded your decision to make the teaching profession your goal, whether this be in jurisprudence or philosophy, and in the

14 Karl Marx, 1818-1843

final analysis I thought the latter would be the most fitting for you (Sept. 16, 1837).

Overshadowing these varied plans and aspirations, however, is a premonition of the difficult course which Marx’s life was to take; Heinrich Marx wrote:

I cannot and will not hide my weakness for you. From time to time my heart swells up with thoughts of you and your future. And then sometimes I cannot rid myself of sad, portentous and frightening feelings at moments when the thought strikes me like a bolt of lightening: is your heart equal to your head and your talents? ... What brings me on to this train of thought? ... Something strange occurs to me when I regard Jenny. She, entirely devoted to you with her pure, childlike heart, at times shows involuntarily against her own will, a sort of fear, fear pregnant with premonitions, a fear that does not escape me but which I know not how to explain. What can this mean? I cannot explain it, yet unfortunately my experience keeps me from being easily led astray (March 2, 1837).

Despite—or perhaps because of—his affection for his son, Heinrich Marx did not let himself be blinded to Karl’s weaknesses: the father’s letters always remained candid, straightforward and strict in their criticism. Marx could not well ignore his father’s questions and reproaches and from his only extant letter we have a detailed account of his studies in Berlin, his extra-curricular activities, his personal aspirations. Here he first mentions his life-long habit of ‘scribbling down reflections’ while making resumes or excerpts of books he read. He also recounted having composed a ‘new basic system of metaphysics’;

A curtain had fallen, my most holy of holies was torn asunder and new gods had to be installed. Turning from the idealism which I had, incidentally, nourished and compared with that of Kant and Fichte, I came to seek the idea in reality itself ... I had read fragments of Hegel’s philosophy, but its grotesque and rocky melody I found displeasing (Nov. 10, 1837).

He began writing a philosophical-dialectical analysis of the concept of the GottHeit [divinity] manifested as religion, nature and history. His ambition was to construct a new system of logic uniting art and knowledge, which Marx considered were set at variance in contemporary speculation But when he completed

1835-1840 15

his system, ‘this my most cherished offspring, nurtured by moonlight, delivers me into the arms of the enemy like a treacherous siren'. This enemy was Hegel, whom Marx studied ‘from beginning to end together with most of his disciples’ during a period of prolonged illness earlier that year.

On May 10, 1838, Marx’s father died in Trier. His last letters reflect the concern and discontentment which preoccupied the ailing man as he learned of his son’s intellectual crisis and irresponsible behaviour:

Scarcely had the wild abandon in Bonn come to an end, your debts but recently paid—and these existed in numerous connections— when to further disconcertus the love sorrows began ... we have never had the consolation of a reasonable correspondence ... we have never received an answer to our writings; your letters never continued on from the previous ones nor from our answers ... The last letter contained only a few badly written lines and an excerpt from your diary entitled ‘A Visitor’, whom I would much prefer to turn out of the house than to receive as company, a mad hack-job, which simply announces how you are wasting your talents and staying up for nights on end in order to bring such monsters into the world ... (Dec. 9, 1837).

Henriette Marx, also concerned about her son’s physical and mental well-being, procured him a medical certificate which she sent with the remark:

Enclosed you will find your certificate. Use every means possible to avoid your year of military service. You have every right to do so. Don’t ignore your eye trouble, you will save yourself much annoyance and much money ... (Feb. 15-16, 1838).

His mother’s thoughtfulness and devotion to her family were traits which Marx appreciated highly at the time, as is indicated in the following letter from Heinrich Marx to his son:

You yourself have described in such beautiful terms the life of your fine mother, you felt so deeply how it has been a continual sacrifice of love and devotion and in fact your words were not exaggerated (Aug. 12-14, ¹S37).

In any event, Marx was exempted from his military service by the Trier Commission for the Recruitment of Military Personnel

16 Karl Marx, 1818-1843

because of his health. The certificate read:

1838, (Karl Marx) is admitted to voluntary military service in Berlin for one year, but at the present time is declared unfit for duty by the departmental physician in Berlin due to thoractic weakness and periodic coughing up of blood. The same for 1839 (Schiel, Die Umwelt des jungen Karl Marx, ..., p. 23).

1839-1841 Marx began research in the philosophy of Epicurus in 1839 in preparation for a doctrinal thesis. During the summer semester in Berlin he attended only one lecture course, ‘Jesaias’ given by Bruno Bauer. Marx frequently visited the Bauer home in Charlottenburg and his friend encouraged him to write his thesis quickly and finish with the ‘farce’ of an examination. Both young men felt that there was much to be done in Prussia, where the general problems were more diverse than elsewhere and complicated by political apathy. Bauer insisted that Marx prepare himself for the tasks ahead with the least possible delay.

From the outset Marx’s work on the dissertation took a most un-Hegelian turn through the simple choice of Epicurus, a moral philosopher whose practical wisdom aimed at achieving peace of mind as the highest good. The preliminary notes and remarks for this paper are contained in seven notebooks, all entitled ‘Epicurean philosophy’. Included are excerpts from Epicurus, comments from Diogenes Laertius, Sextus Empiricus, Plutarch, Gassendi and Lucretius, as well as commentaries on Plato, Aristotle and Hegel and a schema of the Hegelian philosophy of nature. The themes thus touched upon—deformation of Hegelian philosophy by his followers, relation between Platonism and Christianity, the tasks of the philosophical historian, the Stoic ideal of the wise man—far surpass the central orientation of the thesis itself. These notes reveal how Marx gained distance from Hegelian thinking. The state, for Hegel, was the incorporation of universal reason at its highest level; thanks to the state as the realisation of liberty in concrete form, human freedom becomes possible. Marx began his notes on Epicurus with passages on the Epicurean notion of the state, based in sharp contrast to that of Hegel, on contract and serving the principle of utility for its members. Neither deification of civil institutions nor attachment to any sort of alien god is to be found in Epicurus,

1839-184 x 17

who holds that ‘the sole good which man has in relation to the world is the negative moment of being free from it'. To use the words of Epicurus’s celebrated disciple Lucretius, ‘For my song is first concerned with higher things. I seek to liberate the spirit further from the bonds of religion.’ From these extracts it seems that Marx’s attention is drawn to Epicurus by his naturalness, his manifestation of intellectual and sensual freedom, a freedom from gods and from doctrines which concedes to chance an equally great, if not greater, role in human life as to necessity. Individual will is asserted; an understanding of contingency becomes central to the wisdom of life. Man free himself here from superstition and fear and becomes capable of forging his own happiness:

Further, Epicurus speaks out against simply staring at the heavenly bodies in rigid stupefaction as something limiting, generating fear: he asserts the value of absolute freedom of the mind (MEW, EB 1: 49).

Man, conscious of his own self and accepting the world as he finds it, gains control over his relations to this world and is able to attain the highest good to which human life may aspire: tranquillity of mind. Science is clearly inessential for such a life, since natural phenomena only affect us as regards their subjective perception. Take the meteor, for example:

It is all the same to [the consciousness] how the meteor is explained and it maintains that not one explanation, but that several, i.e. that any explanation suffices; thus it confesses its own action as active fiction ... for in matters of specialised natural research one must not hold to empty generalities and rules, but should accommodate himself to the demands of the appearances themselves ... so that we may live in peace and security (EB 1:53).

Marx underlines Epicurus’s naturalness in contrast with the Philistinism of Plutarch, his hero-worship and traditional moral- !sm. Plutarch ‘babbles trivialities, he reasons like a craftsman’s apprentice’, while Epicurus constructs a logical system of values and carries it to necessary, practical conclusions. ‘Plutarch’s syncretic, mindless treatment cannot hold a candle to this’, Marx commented and extended his criticism to all of philosophy:

Ordinary thought always has abstract predicates at hand which it




18 Karl Marx, 1818-1843

separates from the subject. All philosophers have made the predicat# themselves into subjects (EB 1:12.7).

This Feuerbach-inspired remark is evidently meant for Hegel as well, but Marx nevertheless tried to save the Hegelian system:: by seeing in it his own ideal of a critical orientation towards tfe existing world order:

... but just as Prometheus, having stolen fire from heaven, began to build houses and to settle on the earth, so philosophy, having expanded to a world, turns against the visible world it finds. Thus Hegelian philosophy today (EB: 215).

Marx’s constant admiration for the early philosophers, which is linked with implied criticism of contemporary speculation,, is frankly acknowledged at the dose of the sixth excerpt noteboo|K

The Greeks will always remain our teachers because of the grandiose objective naivity which permits each object, though its rays be dim, to shine forth without drapings in the pure light of its own nature! Our time particularly has brought forth sinful phenomena even in philosophy, phenomena tainted with the greatest sin, that against the mind and against truth, whereby a concealed intention is lodged behind the perception and a concealed perception behind the thing itself (EB 1:235).

When working on his thesis, Marx conceived of a plan to write against certain academic authors who envisaged frecon* l ciliation between philosophy and religion. He wanted to elaborate some of his thoughts in a farce to be entitled ‘Fischer Vapulanfc H but the project never reached fruition. Having read and excerpted? ■ from Aristotle in an edition by Adolf Trendelenburg, Marx B also planned to write a critique of Trendelenburg'S LogiscJw| I Unt&rsuchungen, but again nothing came of (his. .

In the autumn of 1839 Bruno Bauer departed from Berlin ® | take up a teaching post at Bonn University. Marx then became | dose friends with C. F. Koppen, who was ten years his semog| I Through the force of his unusual personality Marx seems to have made such a striking impression on his friends that i Koppen, for example, a man who was already established iq the I teaching profession, dedicated his pamphlet ‘Friedrich the Great and His Antagonists’ to the 22-year-old student. Koppei™

1839-1841 19

writing was an apology for the royal philosopher and a passionate assertion of faith in reason and progress. Koppen claimed that Friedrich II’s greatness as a thinker lay in his successful reconciliation of Epicureanism, Stoicism and scepticism.

Marx succeeded in publishing for the first time in 1841. Two of his highly romantic poems, entitled Wilde Lieder (Wild Songs), appeared in the magazine Athenaum which had been founded by members of the former Doktorklub. In March Marx withdrew from Berlin and received the following academic report:

Regarding his behaviour at the University there is nothing particularly unfavourable to be noted from the disciplinary point of view, and as for his financial affairs, we have only to report that he was brought to court several times for non-payment of debts. The aforementioned student has not been charged with participation in any illegal student society at this university up to the present date (MEGA i,a: 248).

Marx still had to submit his dissertation to a competent faculty in order to get his degree. Bauer encouraged him to do so, for:

It would be nonsense for you to devote yourself to a practical career. At present theory is the most effective practice and we cannot yet predict in how wide a sense it will become practical (MEGA 1,2: 250).

So in April Marx sent his finished thesis to the philosophical faculty of the University of Jena. His reasons for choosing Jena were the ease and lower financial outlay involved in procuring a doctoral degree from a smaller, little known German university. Without a public examination, as was required in both Bonn and Berlin, Marx was granted his diploma a week after submitting the thesis (April 15, 1841), which he had dedicated to Jenny’s father, Ludwig von Westphalen.

‘Not ideology nor vain hypotheses do we need for our life, but to live without confusion.' Marx might well have made this quotation from Epicurus the motto of his dissertation, so accurately does it reflect the substance of the paper. Although the breadth of the material treated in the actual thesis is much more restricted than in the preliminary writings, it nevertheless does justice to the intentions stated in the Preface:

Hegel had, to be sure, correctly determined the general characteristics

zo Kart Marx, 1818-18431

of the systems mentioned ... yet, for one, it was still impossibfeio j delve into details; for another, this grandiose thinker was hindered I by his view of what he termed ‘speculative* par excellenodfrom I recognising the deep purpose of these systems in the history gjf I Greek philosophy and for the Greek mind in general ... I hope to I have solved one problem in the history of Greek philosophy which I has been left unexplained up till now (MEW, EB 1:26if.).

In this paper a clear contrast is made between two conceptid® j of philosophy—what it is and the ends it serves—as express^? in the writings of Epicurus and Democritus. The dissertationwas formally entitled ‘The Difference between the Philosophie&^K I Nature in Democritus and Epicurus’. Democritus conceived of philosophy as empirical knowledge: ‘Unsatisfied in philosophy, he throws himself into the arms of positive knowledge?. Marx wrote. Although there is evidently a difference between philosophy as wisdom of life and science as empirical life experienera Democritus attempted to fuse the two: philosophy becomes science. The result is that ‘The knowledge he holds to be true is meaningless for his own life, while the knowledge which gives him substance is without truth and so he rejects it’ (MEW,

EB 1:273). Epicurus, by contrast, rejects the positive sciences as worthless for the attainment of true human perfection. For Marx the efficacity of each thinker’s philosophy is evidence^ f|| his satisfaction with the life he has led:

While Democritus, finally despairing of knowledge, puts out. his eyes at last, Epicurus, as he feels the hour of death approaching!: climbs into a warm bath, desires pure wine and recommends to his friends that they be faithful to philosophy (EB 1:273^). '

The subjectivity of each thinker’s concept of philosophy is evident. In the general relationship which he established betweep the world and abstract thought, the philosopher is simply objectifying the way in which his particular consciousness relates to the real world. Necessity is in Democritus the principle of his rigid determinism. However, for Epicurus, who does not hold science to be the goal of human effort but rather man’s own perfection,

Necessity is an evil, but there is no necessity to live under the I control of necessity. Everywhere the paths to freedom are open, are I many, short and simple (EB 1:275).

1839-1841 21

Epicurus derives his knowledge ex principio intemo; he is therefor the sovereign of his life, complete within himself, an entire being and not one who leans upon something outside himself, as Democritus leans upon his teachers. In short, Marx brought out the distinctions between philosophy as wisdom of life and philosophy Up the totality of the empirical sciences according to Democritus, whereby Marx’s own bias for the former thinker is not difficult discern.

In one of the notes appended to the dissertation Marx briefly considered t^e question of. the relationship between philosophy and praxis, presenting the two as inseparable:

Philosophical praxis is itself theoretical. It is the criticism which measures the individual existence against the essence and particular reality against the idea. Yet this immediate realisation of philosophy is burdened with contradictions in its innermost essence, while this essence manifests itself in appearance, leaving its mark thereupon

(eb 1 paH

Marx, now a fresh university graduate, was full of plans and inspiration, but as yet had no actual professional occupation. In a letter to the novelist Berthold Auerbach, Moses Hess characterised his 23-year-akl friend Marx as:

... the greatest, perhaps the only real philosopher living today ... Dr Marx ... is still a very young man and is going to give the death blow to medieval religion and politics. He combines the sharpest wit with the most profound philosophic gravity; imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel united in one person— and I mean united, not thrown together—there you have Dr Marx (Sept. 2, 1841^^

At the beginning of July . 1841 Marx moved to Bonn from Trier, where he had spent the intervening months since receiving his degree in April. In Bonn he continued to see much of Bruno Bauer and planned with Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach to bring out a periodical entitled Arcbiv des AtHeismus, which they were determined to make even more radically left-wing than Arnold Ruge’s Deutsche Jahrbiicher. Georg Jung, at the time involved hi preparations for founding a newspaper to be called the RHeintsche Zeitung, reported in a letter to Ruge that:

Dr Marx, Dr Bauer and L. Feuerbach are getting together to make up

22 Karl Marx, 1818-1843

a theological-philosophical journal and when so, may all the angels gather around old God the Father and may he have mercy on himself, for these three are certain to throw him out of his heaven and chase him with a legal suit to boot. Marx, for one, calls the Christian religion one of the most immoral, and he is, by the way, albeit a most despairing revolutionary, one of the cleverest heads I know (Oct. 18,

1841).

Bauer was suspended from his lecturing post in Bonn for the winter semester 1841-42 and in May 1842 his dismissal was made permanent. This was a punishment for proposing a toast in the spirit of the left-Hegelians. Marx too saw his hopes for a university career sink radically. In November 1841 Bauer published an anonymous pamphlet on which Marx was assumed to have collaborated. Entitled The Trumpet of the Last Judgment on Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist. An Utimatum, this tract presented, under the pretext of attacking Hegel’s atheism, a philosophy of universal consciousness which had little in common with Hegel's Weltgeist.

1842-1843 In January 1842 Marx again returned to Trier, to the bedside of the ailing Ludwig von Westphalen. He remained at the Westphalen home until the older man’s death on March 3, helping the family and devoting but little time to his own affairs. He wrote, nevertheless, one article which he intended to publish in Ruge’s Deutsche Jahrbiicher entitled ‘Remarks on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction’. Appropriately enough, the Saxonian censor prohibited its appearance in Ruge’s Dresden journal and thus it was not published until the following year in a volume called Anekdota. Also edited by Ruge, the latter journal was used to bring out those articles and other writings rejected by the Prussian censors. Marx's contribution, signed simply ‘by a Rhenish citizen’, closed with the following quotation from Tacitus:

Rare is the good fortune of those times in which one may think what one wishes and say what one thinks (MEW 1:25).

It is interesting to note that the last chapter of Spinoza’s Tractatus has a title derived from the above quotation. Marxs excerpt notebooks show that he had actually been reading Spinoza during the earlier part of 1841. His knowledge of

1842-1843 23

Judaism, later criticised in his essay on ‘The Jewish Question', probably stemmed from Spinoza’s Tractatus, apart from which Marx made two notebooks of extracts from Spinoza’s correspondence. Spinoza states in his Tractatus that democracy is ‘of all forms of government the most natural and the most consonant with individual liberty’. Marx’s article on Prussian censorship presents the democratic state as the ethical state, which ‘... presupposes a “sense of state” [Staatsgesinnung] in its members, even when they should oppose an organ of the state’ (MEW 1:15). But a government which presumed alone to incorporate reason and morality,

such a government invents tendentious laws, laws of revenge ... based on the lack of character and on an unethical and materialist view of the state (MEW 1:15).

Following his stay in Trier, Marx announced to Ruge his newest writing projects and promised to send as soon as possible two articles, one on Christian art, the second a critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the core of which

is the struggle against the constitutional monarchy as a hybrid thing, which is thoroughly self-contradictory and occasions its own dissolution. There is no German translation for res publica (March 5,

1842).

In a subsequent letter Marx reported that he had expanded the article on Christian art to a study entitled ‘Religion and Art with Special Emphasis on Christian Art’ and was thus delayed in delivering it. A few days later he wrote that he was nearly finished and promised Ruge four articles: 1. on religious art, 2. on the romantics, 3. a critique of the historical school of law and 4. on the ‘positive’ philosophers. Of these only the third essay ever appeared in published form. In preparing his articles Marx read and excerpted numerous passages from Christoph Meiner’s Allgemeine kritische Geschichte der Religionen (1806), Jean Barbeyrac’s Traite de la morale des Peres de I’Eglise (1728), Charles Debrosses’s Ober den Dienst der Fetischgdtter (1785), Karl August Bottinger’s Ideen zur Kunst- Mythologie (1826-36), Johann Jakob Grund’s Die Malerei der Griechen (1810), Karl Friedrich von Rumohr’s Italieniscke For- schungen (1827) and Lorenz Stein’s book Der Sozialismus und


24 Karl Marx, 1818-1843

Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs (1842).

In April 1842 Marx moved to Bonn where he began writing for the Rheinische Zeitung. His first contributions were a series of essays on the proceedings of the 6th Rhenish Parliament, which had met in Dusseldorf from May to June of the preceding year. The first essay, ‘Debates on the Freedom of the Press and the Publication of the Parliamentary Proceedings’, appeared in six instalments in May; the second, concerning the religious dispute in Cologne, was struck out by the censor; the third, ‘Debates on the Law Punishing Wood-Theft’, appeared in five issues of the paper during October and November. Later, in 1859, Marx remarked that these articles, together with a series on the misery of the wine-growers in the Moselle valley, first gave him an opportunity to delve into economic questions. In this connection, Marx’s first direct confrontation with the ideas of Saint-Simon and other French socialists seems to have come from the RhZ articles published by Moses Hess and Gustav Mevissen and probably as well from Lorenz Stein’s book Socialism and Communism in Contemporary France, which appeared this same year and was reviewed in the columns of the RhZ. However, it was unlikely that Marx read Stein before leaving Germany in October 1843. At the outset he was distrustful of this ‘faint philosophic echo’ of French socialism echoed in the RhZ, especially when produced by the pen of the Berlin Freien, a radical group of individualists with anarchistic leanings which also published in the RhZ. In a letter to Ruge Marx detailed his objections to their writings:

L.. I held that it was unsuitable and indeed immoral to smuggle communist and socialist dogmas, i.e. a new world-view, into incidental theatre reviews, etc., and I desired quite a different and more profound discussion of communism, if it were to be discussed at all (Nov. 30, 1842).

In these early newspaper articles Marx directed his attention towards the problem of freedom; his approach is strongly philosophical :

Freedom is so essentially a part of human nature that even its opponents help to realise it in combatting its reality; they want to appropriate for themselves this precious jewel which they deny is a jewel of human nature.... The danger which threatens the life

1842-1843 25

of every being is that of losing itself; the mortal danger therefore for every human being is that of losing his freedom. (MEW 1:51,60)

The press of a nation constitutes according to Marx the ‘intellectual mirror’ in which a people observes itself, and, since ‘observation of self is the first prerequisite of wisdom’, repressive censorship laws which prevent the people from attaining wisdom must be vehemently condemned:

In order to fight against freedom of the press, one must defend the standpoint that the human race is incapable of reaching maturity ...

If man’s immaturity is the mystic reason which speaks against freedom of the press, then censorship is in any event a most highly reasonable measure to assure that men never mature. (MEW 1:48-49)

In May and June Marx was temporarily in Trier due to a death in the family. Personal problems developed and Marx wrote to Ruge:

My family has caused me difficulties which expose me for the moment to the most depressing financial circumstances despite their being well-off. It would not be right for me to burden you with the tale of these private infamies. It is truly fortunate that public infamies make it impossible for any man of character to let himself be irritated by the private ones. (July 7, 1842)

Of the four articles promised Ruge for his Zurich publication Anekdota only the one on the historical school of law appeared in print—in the RhZ, however, not in Anekdota. The article was unsigned and a chapter on marriage was cut out by the censor. Marx’s standpoint here is a rejection of the theoretical view which sees present life as the corruption of a once perfect and absolute state of nature. He maintains instead that ‘as every century has its own particular nature, so does it engender its own particular natural man’ (MEW 1:79).

On October 15 Marx, now settled in Cologne, began work as editor-in-chief of the RhZ. In the early editorial he repudiated an attack by the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung accusing the RhZ of communist tendencies. For the first time Marx mentioned the names Fourier, Leroux, Considerant and Proudhon and termed the work of the latter ‘insightful’. The RhZ, Marx announced, was going to submit socialist ideas to rigorous criticism, for


i6 Karl Marx, 1818-1843

... ideas which have won over our minds and conquered our way of thinking, ideas forged to our conscience by reason are chains we cannot break out of without breaking our hearts; they are demons which we can overcome only by acquiescing to them (MEW 1:108).

As editor of the RHZ Marx found himself caught in a dual conflict; on the one side, he faced the paper's shareholders, intent on moderating the editors’ political tendency; on the other, he was challenged by the Freien, whose superficial articles on communism and atheism Marx rejected. About November 24 he received a letter from Eduard Meyen, written in the name of the Berlin radicals, demanding that he justify his editorial policy. In the midst of this conflict Friedrich Engels paid his first visit to Marx in Cologne on the way to England, where he conducted business for his father’s spinning mills in Manchester. Since Engels stood close to the Berlin Freien at that time, it is not surprising that Marx received him rather coolly. Towards the end of November the situation finally ripened to an open break between the editor-in-chief and his Berlin contributors, while Engels, tending more and more towards a communist viewpoint, published in the RHZ his first articles on the condition of the working class in England.

In November-December the RHZ published three articles on the increasingly critical situation of the wine-growing peasants in the Moselle valley. The first president of the Rhineland province, von Schaper, issued an official denial of the alleged conditions and accused the RHZ of false reporting, of calumny and of stirring up dissatisfaction among the populace. Marx came to the defence of the correspondent’s reports in two articles published in January 1843.

Marx also devoted a three part article to a critique of the Prussian constitution, which was based on the existence of fixed classes or ‘estates’ [Stande]. In this article, published in December, Marx attacked the particularism of parliamentary representation according to such a constitution:

The Landtage are, because of their unique composition, nothing more than a society of special interests privileged with the opportunity of making valid their particular limits to state encroachment, in other words, they are justified self-constituted anti-state elements within the state. They are therefore by nature inimical to the state since in its isolated activity any special element is always an enemy to the

1842-1843 17

whole. It is precisely this whole which conveys to the particular a feeling of its nothingness by giving it an awareness of its limits (EB i:4!9)-

Staff and shareholders were informed at the beginning of 1843 that a government edict had been issued, forbidding further publication of the RHZ after April 1. This measure was taken on the demand of the Russian Czar Nicolas I after an outspoken article against Russian absolutism appeared in the paper on January 4, 1843. Marx was relieved that he would soon be free of the shackling censorship regulations. He wrote to Ruge:

I cannot begin anything anew in Germany; here one is forced to corrupt oneself ... To me the suppression of the Rlieinische Zeitung represents progress in political consciousness ... It is a bad state of affairs when one has to perform menial tasks even for freedom and to fight with pins instead of clubs. I tired of this hypocrisy, stupidity, brute authority and of our having to give in, to conform, to turn our backs to things and to split hairs. (Jan. 25, 1843)

Disappointed in the shareholders for their timidity in defending the paper’s staff, Marx resigned his position before the actual end of publication (March 17, 1843). His final comments on the government edict are incorporated in a protest address directed to the Prussian government by the shareholders. Marx declared (Feb. 12, 1843) that the policies of the RhZ had always been aimed at serving the true interests of the state. The government officials thought otherwise, however. In a remark noted on the margin of a letter from the censor Wilhelm Saint-Paul, a certain Councillor Bitter pointed out that Marx’s ultra-democratic inclinations were the antithesis of the principles upon which the Prussian state was founded.

In a letter to Ruge some weeks before his displacement Marx had already broached the topic of founding a new journal. He suggested that they should publish this new ‘people’s periodical’, as he envisaged the future radical organ, in Zurich with the co-operation of the poet Georg Herwegh. Once the contract was concluded, Marx was determined to go to Kreuznach, where Jenny, his fiancee of seven years, was awaiting him. He confessed to Ruge:

Without any romanticism whatsoever I can assure you that I am

28 Karl Marx, 1818-1843

head over heels in love and my love is as serious as can be. I have been engaged for over seven years now and my bride-to-be has fought the hardest of battles for me, very nearly ruining her health in the doing (March 13, 1843).

Whatever their fate should be, Marx was set on marrying before leaving Germany, although his financial situation was not very promising. Having broken with his family Marx was unable to touch his paternal inheritance as long as his mother was alive. Towards the end of March Marx made a trip to Holland, presumably to discuss the matter of his inheritance with his mother’s Dutch relatives.

While still in Cologne Marx read Feuerbach’s Preliminary Thesis on the Reformation of Philosophy (1842) which he commented on to Ruge:

I take exception to Feuerbach’s aphorisms only in one connection; he refers to nature too often and neglects politics. Yet the only way to transform contemporary philosophy into reality is through an alliance with politics (March 13, 1843).

Marx was on the move again in May: this time to Dresden where he conferred with Ruge on the subject of their joint literary enterprise. Their intention was now to publish Deutsch- Franzdsische Jahrhucher (Franco-German Annals) either in Paris or in Strasbourg. Finally at the end of the month Marx moved to Kreuznach, where Jenny and her mother were living. The marriage ceremonies, civil and religious, took place on June 19 in Kreuznach. Shortly thereafter Marx received an offer, which he immediately rejected, to enter the Prussian civil service as editor- in-chief of the Preussische Staatszeitung. During his sojourn in Kreuznach he devoted himself to a study of the revolutions in France, England and America. A number of his readings helped him arrive at a view of communism as the inevitable outcome of democracy. He also undertook a ‘critical revision’ of Hegel’s political philosophy. This critique, the bulk of which was most probably written in Kreuznach, marks his open and definitive break with Hegel’s idea of the state and acknowledges democracy as the ‘solution to the enigma of all constitutions’:

Man does not exist for the benefit of the law, the law exists for die benefit of man; law is human existence, whereas in all other political

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      1843 V)
      

forms man has only juridical existence. This is the main distinction of democracy (MEW 1:2i3).

Marx s conception of democracy goes as far as to question the existence of the state as a political body in democracy, and he suggests that in some way the state is to be overcome:

Recent French thinkers have understood this as meaning that the political state disappears in a true democracy. This is correct in so far as the state qua political state, qua political constitution is no longer valid for the whole (MEW 1:232).

Marx renounced altogether the idea of the state as a rational institution and with it Hegel’s system which culminated in the state as the highest embodiment of reason. While pretending to a spiritualism of the highest order, Hegel’s justification of the existing monarch is, according to Marx, nothing better than the crassest materialism. Reading Hegel one discovers that:

At all the highest points in the political state it is the contingency of birth which makes certain individuals into the embodiments of the highest political tasks. The highest activities in the state are attributed to individuals according to birth, just as the situation of an animal,

I its nature, way of life, etc., is given immediately at its birth. The I state in its highest functions is endowed with an animal-like reality (MEW 1:310).

Within this structure the bureaucracy develops; what is actually the form of the state constitutes and perpetuates itself as its content. The bureaucratic mind is engendered, ‘a Jesuitical, theological mind through and through’:

The aims of the state transform themselves into the aims of bureaux or the aims of bureaux into those of the state. The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge (MEW 1:249).

Control over this knowledge in the Hegelian state means that the subjects are deprived of participation in political life. They are virtually forced to live outside the state and their sole access to it is by examination, which admits them to the echelons of the bureaucracy:

• •. the examination is nothing other than the bureaucratic baptism




30 Karl Marx, 1818-1843

of knowledge, the official recognition of the trans-substantiation of profane knowledge into sacred (it goes without saying that for every examination the examinator knows all). We do not hear about Greek or Roman statesmen ever taking examinations. But what then is a Roman statesman in comparison with a member of the Prussian government! (MEW 1:253).

Hegel’s superstitious deification of the state, Marx explained, originated in his particular mode of thought which reversed subject and object. Whereas in reality man experiences his existence as both political and social, Hegel in his fantastic abstractions separates the political aspect of man, an attribute, from man and examines it as an abstract entity embodied in the state:

He made into a product, a predicate of the idea, what is actually its subject. He does not develop his thought from the object, but rather he develops the object according to thought which is complete in itself and in the abstract sphere of logic. It is not a task of developing the particular idea of the political constitution, but of relating the political constitution to the abstract idea, of giving it a place in the life-story of the idea, what evidently amounts to mystification (MEW 1:231).

The studies pursued during this period contributed fundamentally to Marx’s subsequent formulation of a ‘materialist’ view of history. He excerpted fifty pages of notes from the German translation of a book entitled Men and Manners in America (1833) by Thomas Hamilton. The Scotsman Hamilton had observed in the United States certain inequalities in class relations which he held to be incompatible with true democracy. In Hamilton Marx found what de Tocqueville had failed to notice: the revolutionary implications of American democracy. Hamilton derived the historical necessity of a rupture in American society from the social discrepancies, the class barriers founded on and reinforced by an unequal educational system ‘incompatible with the true democratic principle of absolute equality’. From this he concluded that:

I.. if the question be conceded that democracy necessarily leads to anarchy and spoliation, it does not seem that the mere length of road to be travelled is a point of much importance. In the United States, with the great advantages they possess, it may continue a

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      1843 3¹
      

generation or two longer, but the termination is the same. The doubt regards time, not destination (Hamilton, op. cit., p. 166).

Other works read by Marx at this time included Rousseau’s du Contrat social (1762), Montesquieu's L’Esprit des lois (1748), Machiavelli’s II Principe in German translation, de Tocqueville's de la Democratic en Amerique (1835-40) and Gustav Auguste Beaumont de La Bonniniere's Marie ou de I'esclavage aux Etats- Unis (1835). Still planning to collaborate on the Deutsch- Franzdsische Jahrbucher, now intended for publication in Paris, Marx corresponded with Ruge, and defined his concept of the new journal’s policy: it must be unwavering in its criticism of the existing order in the name of humanity; it should support the political fight for a democratic system which should encompass more than the machinery of a political state; it would strive to reform the individual’s consciousness not by means of communist or socialist dogmas, but through analysis of confusion, be it of religious or political nature, in the human consciousness (Sept. 1843). Among the writings completed during the Kreuznach period was the essay On the Jewish Question, composed at a time when Marx was severing his last ties with the idealist Hegelian notion of the state and bureaucracy and at a time when the conflict with his Jewish relations in money matters was particularly acute. This essay has overtones which recall a ‘prophetic’ diatribe against money and the state. Published in 1844 in the Deutsch-Franzdsische Jahrbucher, this essay and the Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right (probably written in Paris at the end of 1843) constitute the first draft of a communist manifesto which was to be given its final form in the text of 1848.

Marx and his wife left Germany for Paris on October 11. There they lodged in an apartment in rue Vaneau, situated in the area of Faubourg St Germain, where their neighbours were other German immigrants including Herwegh and Ruge. Heinrich Heine became a regular visitor to the Marx’s beginning in December and the two men saw much of one another during the coming months.