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DELHI UNIVERSITY LIBRARY


DELHI UNIVERSITY LIBRARY



a No. 1^ >L)V| |^ uj 749

^c. No. cy S, (^> ^ate re'ease *°r *oaD

This book should be returned on or before the date last stamped elow. An overdue charge of 5 Raise will be collected for each day the 00k is kept overtime,;

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THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE

189

KARL MARX


EDITORS OF

The Home University Library of Modern Knowledge

GILBERT MURRAY, O.M., D.C.L., F.B.A. G. N. CLARK, LL.D., F.B.A.

G. R. DE BEER, D.SC., F.R.S.

United States

JOHN FULTON, M.D., PH.D. HOWARD MUMFORD JONES, LITT.D. JULIAN BOYD, LI IT. B,


KARL MARX



HIS LIFE AND ENVIRONMENT

ISAIAH BERLIN

M.A.


Fellow of New College, Oxford Sometime Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford

Second Edition





Geoffrey Cumberlege OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO




First published in 1939. Second edition 1948.

Reprinted in 1949

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN


To My Parents

PREFATORY NOTE



My thanks are due to my friends and colleagues who have been good enough to read this book in manuscript, and have contributed valuable suggestions, by which I have greatly profited; in particular to Mr. A. J. Ayer, Mr. Ian Bowen, Mr. G. E. F. Chilver, Mr. S. N. Hampshire and Mr. S. Rachmilewitch; I am further greatly indebted to Mr. Francis Graham-Harrison for compiling the index; to Mrs. H. A. L. Fisher and Mr. David Stephens for reading the proofs; to Messrs. Methuen for permission to make use of the passage quoted on page 180; and, most of all, to the Warden and Fellows of All Souls College for permitting me to devote a part of the time during which I held a Fellowship of the college to a subject outside the scope of my proper studies.

I. B.


OXFORD

May
1939

CONTENTS


>-"fSrrRODUCTiON i

II CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE ... 23



if
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SPIRIT • • • 35

\y THE YOUNG HEGELIANS . . . 61

V PARIS 8l

vf^HISTORICAL MATERIALISM . . . .12 1

vii 1848 145

VIII EXILE IN LONDON: THE FIRST PHASE . . 166

IX THE INTERNATIONAL 2o6


  1. ‘THE RED TERRORIST DOCTOR’ . . . 222

  2. LAST YEARS ...... 249

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 26g

INDEX • ■ 275



CHAPTER I



INTRODUCTION

Things and actions are what they are, and their consequences will be what they will be: why then should we seek to be deceived?

BISHOP BUTLER

No thinker in the nineteenth century has had so direct, deliberate and powerful an influence upon mankind as Karl Marx. Both during his lifetime and after it he exercised an intellectual and moral ascendancy over his. followers, the strength of which was unique even in that golden age of democratic nationalism, an age which saw the rise of great popular heroes and martyrs, romantic, almost legendary figures, whose lives and words dominated the imagination of the masses and created a new revolutionary tradition in Europe. Yet Marx could not, at any time, be called a popular figure in the ordinary sense: certainly h£_was_jn no sense a popular writer or orator. He wrote extensIvelyT but his works were not, during his lifetime, read widely; and when, in the late ’seventies, they began to reach the immense public which several among them afterwards obtained, the desire to read them was due not so much to a recognition of their intrinsic qualities as to the growth of the fame and notoriety of the movement with which he was identified.

leader or agitator, was not a publicist of genius like the Russian democrat Alexander Herzen, nor did he possess Bakunin’s marvellous eloquence; the greater part ol his working life was spent in comparative obscurity in

2


KARL MARX

London, at his writing-desk and in the reading-room of the British Museum. He was little known to. the general public,
and while t
owards the end of his life he became the recognized, and admire371eader of a powerful international movement, nothing in Tils’ life or character stirred fTie imagination or evoked the boundless devotion, the intense, almost religious, worship, with which such men as Kossuth, Mazzini, and even Lassalle in his last years, were regarded by their followers.

His public appearances were neither frequent nor notably successful. On the few occasions on which he addressed banquets or public meetings, his speeches were overloaded with matter, and delivered with a combination of monotony and brusqueness, which commanded the respect but not the enthusiasm of his audience. He was by temperament, .a theorist and an intellectual, and instinctively avoided direct contact with the massesTsto the study of whose interests his entire life’ was' devoted. To many of his followers he appeared in the role of a dogmatic and sententious German schoolmaster, prepared to repeat his theses indefinitely, with rising sharpness, until their essence became irremovably lodged in his disciples’ minds. The greater part of his economic teaching was given its first expression in lectures to working men: his exposition under these circumstances was by all accounts a model of lucidity and conciseness. But he wrote stowly and painfully, as sometimes happens with rapid and fertile thinkers, scarcely able to cope with the speed of their own ideas, impatient at once to communicate a new doctrine, and to forestall every possible objection; the published versions were generally turgid, clumsy, and obscure in detail, although the central doctrine is ncvpr


INTRODUCTION 3



in serious doubt. He was acutely conscious of this, and once compared himself with the hero of Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece
, who tries to paint the picture which has formed itself in his mind, touches and retouches the canvas endlessly, to produce at last a shapeless mass of colours, which to his eye seems to express the vision in his imagination. He belonged to a generation which cultivated the emotions more mtensely and deliberately than its predecessors, and was brought up among men to whom ideas were often more real than facts, and personal relations meant far more than the events of the external world; by whom indeed public life was commonly understood and interpreted in terms of the rich and elaborate world of their own private experience. Marx was by nature not introspective, and took little interest in persons or states of mind or soul; the failure on the part of so many of his contemporaries to assess the importance of the revolutionary transformation of the society of their day, due to the swift advance of technology with its accompaniment of sudden increase of wealth, and, at the same time, of social and cultural dislocation and confusion, merely excited his anger and contempt.

tie was endowed with a powerful, active, unsentimental mind, an acute sense of injustice, and exception- aily1ittIe~sensiSility, and was repelled as muchby the rhetoric and" "cn’tbtionalism of the intellectuals as by the stupidity and complacency of the bourgeoisie; the first seemed to him aimless chatter, remote from reality and, whether sincere or false, equally irritating; the second at once hypocritical and self-deceived, blinded to the salient features of its time by absorption in the pursuit of wealth and social status.


4. KARL MARX



This sense of living in a hostile and vulgar world, intensified perhaps by his dislike of the fact that he was born a Jew, increased his natural harshness and aggressiveness, and produced the formidable figure of popular imagination. His greatest admir
ers would find it difficult to maintain that he was a sensitive or Jender-hearted man, or in any way concerned about the feelings of those with whom he came into contact; the majority of the men he met were, in his opinion, either fools or sycophants, and towards such he behaved with open suspicion or contempt. But if his attitude in public was overbearing and offensive, in the intimate circle composed of his family and his friends, in which he felt completely secure, he was considerate and gentle; his married life was exceptionally happy, he was warmly attached to his children, and he treated his lifelong friend and collaborator, Engels, with uniform loyalty and devotion. He was a charmless man, and his behaviour was often boorish, but even his enejnies were fascinated by the strength and vehemence of his personality, the boldness of his views, and” the hreadth and brilliance of his analyses of the contempor- ary situation.

•fTe remained all his life an oddly isolated figure among the revolutionaries of his time, equally hostile to their persons, their methods and their ends. His isolation was not, however, due merely to temperament or to the accident of time and place. However widely th? majority of European democrats differed in character, aims and historical environment, they resembled each other in one fundamental attribute, which made co-operation between them possible, at least in principle. Whether or not they believed in violent revolution, the


INTRODUCTION 5



great majority of them were, in the last analysis, liberal reformers, and appealed explicitly to moral standards common to all mankind. They criticized and condemned the existing condition of humanity in terms of some preconceived idea
l, some system, whose desirability at least needed no demonstration, being self-evident to all men with normal moral vision; their schemes differed in the degree to which they could be realized in practice, and could accordingly be classified as less or more utopian, but broad agreement existed between all schools of democratic thought ^bout the ultimate ends to be pursued. They disagreed about the effectiveness of the proposed means, about the extent to which compromise with the existing powers was morally or practically advisable, about the character and value of specific social institutions, and consequently about the policy to be adopted with regard to them. But they were essentially reformers in the sense that they believed that there was little which could not be altered by the determined will of individuals; they believed, too, that powerfully held moral ends were sufficient springs of action, themselves justified by an appeal not to facts but to some universally accepted scale of values. It followed that it was proper first to ascertain what one wished the world to be: next, one had to consider in the light of this how much of the existing social fabric should be retained, how much condemned: finally, one was obliged to look for the most effective means of accomplishing the necessary transformation.

With this attitude, common to the vast majority of revolutionaries and reformers at all times, Marx came to be wholly out of sympathy. He was convinced that human history is governed by'Taws which, like the


6 KARL MARX



laws which govern nature, cannot be altered by the intervention of individuals actuated by this or that ideal. He believed, indeed, that the inner experience to which men appeal to justify their ends, so far from revealing a special kind of truth called moral or religious, is merely a faculty which engenders myths and illusions, both individual and collective. Being conditioned by the material circumstances in which they come to birth, the myths embody in the guise of objective truth whatever men in their misery wish to believe; under their treacherous influence men misinterpret the nature of the world in which they live, misunderstand their own position in it, and therefore miscalculate the range of their own and others’ power, and the consequences both of their own and their opponents’ acts. In opposition to the majority of the democratic theorists of his time, Marx believed t
hat values could not bc_con- templated iu isolation from facts, but_ji£Qessm fly depended upon the manner in which the facts were viewed. True insight into the nature and laws of the historical process will of itself, wfthout the aid of independently known moral standards, make clear to a rational being what step it is proper for him to adopt, that is, what course would most accord with the requirements of the order to which he belongs. Consequently Marx had no new ethical or social ideal to press upon mankind; he did not plead for a change of heart; a change of heart was necessarily But the substitution of one set of illusions for another. He differed from the other1'great ideolggjsts__o£Jhis generation bj_rnaking"his appeaTj'at'least in his own view, solely to reason, to the practical intelligence, denouncing only intellectual vice ordSlindness, insisting that all that men need, in order

INTRODUCTION 7



to know how to save themselves from the chaos in which they are involved, is to seek to understand their actual condition; believing that a correct estimate of the precise balance of forces in the society to which men belong will itself indicate the form of life which it is rational to pursue. v'Marx denounces the, existing order by appealing not to ideals but to history: he denounces it not as bad, or unfortunate, or due to human wickedness or folly, but as being caused by th
e laws of social development, which make it inevitable that at a certain stage of history one class should dispo£sess_and exploit another. The oppressors are threatened not with deliberate retribution on the part of their victims, but with the inevitable destruction which history has in store for them, as a class doomed shortly to disappear from the stage of history.

Yet, designed though it is to appeal to the intellect, his language is that of a herald and a prophet, speaking in the name not of human bentgs~b~Ut~of the universal law Ttielb seeking not to rescue nor to improve, but to warn and to condemn, to reveal the truth, and above all to refi|te falsehood. Destruam et adificabo (‘I shall destroy and I shall build’), which Proudhon placed at the head of one of his works, far more aptly describes Marx’s conception of his own appointed task. In 1845 he had completed the first stage of his programme, and acquainted himself with the nature, history and laws of the evolution of the society in which he found himself.1 He concluded that the history of society is the history- of struggles of opposed classes, one of which must emerge triumphant, although in a much altered form: progress is constituted by the succession of victories of one class over the other, and that man alone is rational




8

KARL MARX

who identifies himself with the progressive class in his society, either, if need be, by deliberately abandoning his past and allying himself with it, or if history has already placed him there, by consciously recognizing his situation and acting in the light of it.

^Accordingly Marx, having identified the rising class in the struggle of his own time with the proletariat, devoted the rest of his life to planning a victory for those at whose head he had placed himself. This victory the process of history would in any case secure, but human courage, determination and ingenuity could bring it nearer and make the transition less painful, accompanied by less friction and less waste of human substance. His position henceforth is that of a commander, actually engaged in a campaign, who therefore does not continually call upon himself and others to show reason for engaging in a war at all, or for being on one side of it rather than the other: the state of war and one’s own position in it are given; they are facts not to be questioned but accepted and examined; one’s sole "business is to defeat the enemy; all other problems are academic, based on unrealized hypothetical conditions, and so beside the point. Hence the almost |complete absence in Marx’s later works of discussions of ultimate principles, of all attempts to justify his opposition to the bourgeoisie. The merits or defects of the enemy, or what might have been, if no enemy and no war existed, is of no interest during the battle. To introduce these irrelevant issues during the period of actual fighting is to divert the attention of one’s supporters from the crucial issues with which, whether or not they recognize them, they are faced, and so to weaken their power of resistance.


INTRODUCTION g



All that is important during the actual war is accurate knowledge of one’s own resources and of those of the adversary, and knowledge of the previous history of society and the laws which govern it is indispensable to this end. Das Kapital
is an attempt to provide such an analysis. The almost complete absence from it of explicit moral argument, of appeals to conscience or to principle, and the equally striking absence of detailed prediction of what will or should happen after the victory, follow from the concentration of attention on the, practical problems of action. The conceptions of natural rights, and of conscience, as belonging to every man irrespective of his position in the class struggle, are rejected as liberal illusions: socialism does not appeal, it demands; it speaks not of rights, but of the new form of life before whose inexorable approach the old social structure has visibly begun to disintegrate. Moral, political, economic conceptions and ideals alter no less than the social conditions from which they spring: to regard any one of them as universal and immutable is tantamount to believing that the order to which they belong—in this case the bourgeois order—is eternal. This fallacy underlies the ethical and psychological doc- trincs of idealistic humanitarians_from the eighteenth century onwards. Hence the contempt and loathing poured by Marx upon the common assumption, made by liberals and utilitarians, that since the interests of all men are ultimately and have always been the same, a measure of goodwill and benevolence on the part of everyone may vet"make_ it~~possible to manufacture some sort of general compromise. If the war is real, these interests are totally incompatible. A denial of this fact can be due only to stupid or cynical disregard

B


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