Karl Marx

by Shlomo Avineri

  Heinrich Marx died in October 1837. Marx’s record of studies for the following semester shows that he was already abandoning his legal studies and switching to more and more courses in philosophy.

  Despite his participation in the Doktoren-Klub, Marx was not involved in any clandestine activities. His record of studies, issued on 8th March 1841 by the rector and the Senate of Berlin University, also attests that “Mr Carl Heinrich Marx, born in Trier, son of the late Advocate Marx … has not been accused of taking part in forbidden associations among students in this university.” In good Prussian bureaucratic fashion, this academic record of studies is countersigned by Messrs. Lichtenstein and Krause, “the acting representatives of the Royal Government”—that is, police officials.

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  Transcending Hegel

  EDUARD GANS AND THE YOUNG HEGELIANS

  THE PERSON WHO INTRODUCED Marx to Hegel’s philosophy was Eduard Gans, one of his teachers at Berlin University. Gans’s own life reflects the tensions between the promises of modernity and the constraints of political reality and their impact on young emancipated Jews in post-1815 Germany.

  Born to a Jewish banking family in Berlin, Gans studied philosophy and law, first in Berlin and then with Hegel in Heidelberg. When Hegel moved to Berlin University in 1818, Gans followed him and became his assistant and close collaborator. At the same time, together with Leopold Zunz and Heinrich Heine, Gans founded the Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (Society for the Culture and Study of the Jews). Established in the wake of the Hep-Hep riots—the first anti-Jewish riots in modern German history, in 1819—the society’s aim was twofold: to promote a critical study of the history and culture of the Jews as a national entity, linked to a religious tradition but not subsumed under it, while at the same time enabling Jews to integrate into modern German society. The intrinsic tensions between these two aims were evident and led eventually after a few years to the demise of the society, but its pioneering attempt to present Judaism not as a mere religion but as a historical national entity had an enormous impact on Jewish intellectual discourse, and marked the beginnings of the modern, scholarly study of Jewish history and religion.

  Under Hegel’s tutelage, Gans’s academic career progressed step by step, but was hampered by his Jewishness; temporary appointments were possible, but not a tenured position as Ordinarius (full professor). Gans’s father, Abraham, who was the financial adviser of the reforming Prussian minister von Hardenberg, persuaded the minister to try to issue an edict exempting “unusually gifted personages” from the regulations that required university professors—as civil servants under Prussian law—to belong to a Christian denomination. But these attempts failed, and after much soul-searching—and an extended stay in Paris, where he was feted by French liberal intellectuals—Gans converted to the Lutheran Church in 1825. A year later he was appointed professor of legal philosophy at Berlin University.

  Gans’s conversion became a cause célèbre in Berlin intellectual circles, and even prompted Heinrich Heine, his erstwhile colleague at the Verein, to pen one of his most acerbic short poems, “To an Apostate”: “And you crawled towards the cross/That same cross which you detested … / Yesterday you were a hero/But today you’re just a scoundrel.” Heine himself converted later the same year, and the anger (and disgust) may have been aimed at himself as well.

  There is a wider context to Hegel’s support for Gans’s career. As early as 1818 Hegel called in his Philosophy of Right for full and equal civic and political rights for Jews, and made the point repeatedly in his university lectures. In the modern state, Hegel argued, “it is part of education [Bildung] that … man counts as a man in virtue of his humanity alone, and not because he is a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, German, Italian, etc.” At a time when all German student fraternities (Burschenschaften) excluded Jews as “foreigners,” one of Hegel’s assistants at Heidelberg, Friedrich Wilhelm Carové, was instrumental, under his teacher’s influence and quoting his writings, in convincing the members of the Heidelberg fraternity to accept Jews—the only fraternity to do so at the time. It is no wonder that when Hegel moved to Berlin, he drew to his lectures many of the Jewish students there, as his advocacy for Jewish emancipation was an exception among the faculty. Gans’s presence was just an outward symbol of Hegel’s position, which—together with his positive evaluation of Benedict Spinoza’s philosophy—drew criticism, some of it crude, of his “Judaizing” tendencies: his seminar was occasionally referred to as a “Jewish den,” with “Gans, Arrogance and Absalom” dominating it.

  When Hegel died in 1831, Gans was appointed to his chair and was instrumental in establishing his philosophical legacy, especially in developing the liberal—albeit conservative—elements of Hegel’s political thought. He initiated the first edition of Hegel’s Werke, and his edition of the Rechtsphilosophie includes as “Additions” [Zusätze] also the oral comments Hegel added in his lectures to the written text of his book. These “Additions” are especially significant in the sections dealing with political institutions, and were much more liberal than the published text of the book, which appeared after all under the restrictive censorship of the reactionary Carlsbad Decrees, adopted by the German states after the nationalist student outbursts that culminated in the assassination of the poet August von Kotzebue by a nationalist student and the book-burning associated with the Wartburg Festival commemorating the tercentenary of Luther’s Reformation.

  Gans viewed the post-1815 reformed Prussian state as a model of a modern constitutional monarchy, and in his classes used Hegel as a yardstick by which to judge contemporary states and their road to modernity. He was also the first person in Germany to write about the Saint-Simonians, and thus helped acquaint his readers and students—Marx included—with the beginning of French socialism. His classes contributed to the ferment that eventually crystallized as the Young Hegelian school; it also led the followers of this school to the study of the criticism of religion offered by Ludwig Feuerbach and David Friedrich Strauss.

  Marx attended Gans’s classes for several semesters, and he mentions Gans and his lectures frequently in his notes and letters from this period. Whether he ever was able to approach his teacher on a personal level and perhaps discuss the circumstances of his conversion—so similar to those of his own father—is not known and probably would have been difficult, given the traditional German professorial distance between teachers and students. But the background story of Gans’s career was common knowledge and could not have escaped Marx’s attention.

  Gans died in 1839, at the early age of forty-one, and Marx’s official record of studies at the university shows that he virtually dropped out of the university for a couple of semesters following his professor’s death. He resumed attending classes only a year later, and during this caesura his mother—by this time widowed—anxiously enquired whether he was about to finish his studies and present his much planned doctoral dissertation.

  At that time Marx’s reading notes suggest an increasing interest in modern philosophy—he read the works of Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and David Hume—but for his doctoral dissertation he chose a rather esoteric subject from classical Greek philosophy: the difference between the Epicurean and Democritean philosophies of nature. Yet he did not present his dissertation to Berlin University. The absence of Gans was obviously a major reason for this, as the faculty of philosophy at Berlin was becoming much more conservative and theologically oriented, with the Hegelian element almost totally disappearing after the death of Gans.

  Instead, Marx sent his dissertation to the University of Jena, which allowed external candidates to qualify for a doctorate. In April 1841 his thesis was approved by the dean of the faculty of philosophy at Jena, and he received his doctorate.

  Marx’s doctoral dissertation bears an extraordinarily warm dedication to his mentor and future father-in-law, Ludwig von Westphalen. Marx refers to him as his “dear fatherly friend,” goes on to praise him as “a living proof
that idealism is no illusion but a truth,” and presents the thesis to him as “a small proof of my love and admiration to an older man who possesses the strength of youth.” This may all sound like conventional flattery, but given what we know about the relationship between the two, it seems to express a deeper and genuine gratitude. There is little doubt that Marx found in Westphalen the kind of spiritual and intellectual stimulus that his own father, for all of his legal training, appeared to have lacked.

  THE RHEINISCHE ZEITUNG AND THE BEGINNINGS OF SOCIAL CRITIQUE

  Following the acceptance of his dissertation, it was time for Marx to choose his future career. The option of a civil service position, which his university education qualified him for, was something he never seriously considered. He returned to Trier and then followed Bruno Bauer—who lost his temporary position in Berlin after Gans’s death—to Bonn, possibly considering a teaching position himself. Yet political developments in the Rhineland steered him in another direction. Through the circle around Bruno Bauer he met Moses Hess, who was involved in plans to set up a newspaper, Die Rheinische Zeitung, supported by liberal Rhenish industrialists and gathering around it a group of writers and intellectuals, many of them former students of Hegel and his disciples. In April 1842 Marx started contributing articles to the paper, and in October he was appointed its editor. He remained in the post until March 1843, when the paper was closed down by the Prussian authorities.

  The Rheinische Zeitung was not an outspoken opposition paper, nor did it intend to be one. It viewed itself as identified with the Prussian reforms of Stein and Hardenberg, but with the accession to the throne in 1840 of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, Prussian politics changed in a much more conservative, Christian, and medievalist Romantic direction. Marx’s articles in the paper—his first published writings—no doubt contributed to the authorities’ view of the paper as too critical if not subversive.

  On the surface, Marx’s articles did not attack government policies head on. Instead, what he did in most of them was to confront recent legislation and politics with the principles of a constitutional Rechtsstaat, or rule of law, sometimes using Hegelian philosophical arguments.

  Although Marx’s articles are occasionally couched in dense philosophical terminology and arguments, they do relate to current affairs. A series of articles follows debates about property rights in the Rhenish provincial Diet. Marx argues that the Diet, elected on the basis of limited suffrage, should according to its constitutional logic represent the ideas of the general interests of society, as expressed in Hegel’s theory of the state. Instead, he argues, looking at the debates and legislative decisions of the Diet, it becomes clear that it is not the general interests of society that are being promulgated, but the particularistic interests of the wealthier and stronger classes. In other words, the claim of the state to represent general interests is false: it is nothing else than the instrument of the dominant classes in civil society. Significantly, he signs some of the articles in this series by the pseudonym “Ein Rheinländer.”

  Another series of articles criticized the Historical School of Jurisprudence, identified with von Savigny, the conservative law professor at Berlin whose major tenet was denying the legitimacy of universal norms of jurisprudence and arguing for the dominance of historically transmitted legal traditions, whose very longevity and ancient origin grant them their power. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right was written partially as a polemic against this historicist, Burkean position.

  Another article criticized recent Prussian censorship regulations, which brought about the closure of some newspapers (and eventually were used to ban the Rheinische Zeitung itself). Here the argument also follows Hegel’s justification of a free press as the expression of the variety of interests and points of views that is crucial for the eventual emergence of policies aimed at the common good. Another series of articles deals with the recent retrograde Prussian divorce laws, which Marx criticized for putting property rights above individual personal rights. He also published an article on the poverty of the peasants in the Moselle Valley, where Trier is situated.

  Although the articles were mild in tone, despite Marx’s criticism of government policies, the one theme running through them is a censure of the state as not really representing the general interests—a theme he was to come back to in the more theoretical essays published some time later.

  A few months after the closure of the RZ, despite his lack of gainful employment, Marx married his fiancée, Jenny von Westphalen. This was the conclusion of a lengthy and intensive courtship, which was accompanied by numerous passionate letters, poems, and dedications. This was all in the spirit of the then prevailing romantic notions of love and affection, yet the steadfastness of their relationship did survive the hardships that later befell the family in its peregrinations caused by Marx’s political activities and attests to the depth of the feelings underlying the relationship despite everything.

  Later family reminiscences reveal that some members of the Westphalen family were not enthusiastic about the match: the age difference, Marx’s unclear career prospects, the burden of his political associations with the Young Hegelians and the banned RZ, probably also his Jewish origins. But Jenny’s father, true to his liberal principles and years’-long fatherly approach to Marx (especially after Heinrich Marx’s death), prevailed. Ludwig von Westphalen himself died in March 1842, having approved the match and accepted Marx as his future son-in-law, and the young couple married in the neighboring resort town of Kreuznach on 19th June 1843. They spent several weeks at the resort, where Jenny’s mother had been living since her husband’s death. A few months later, not before some rather tense and ugly disagreements between Marx and his mother about his part in his father’s inheritance, documented both in Marx’s letters to his colleagues as well as in court papers, the couple left for Paris. Other than a short interval during the 1848–49 revolution, they never returned permanently to live in Germany.

  It was during the summer months of 1843 spent at Bad Kreuznach—in fact an extended honeymoon—that Marx launched his first intensive critique of Hegel’s political philosophy. Writing in March of that year to his colleague Arnold Ruge, Marx mentioned his intention to follow Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel, but commenting that while Feuerbach focused too much on nature, the point is to move on to the critique of politics, as “it is politics which happens to be the only link through which contemporary philosophy can become actual.”

  This is what Marx sets out to do in thirty-nine sheets of his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (paragraphs 261–313) that are the core of his political philosophy. These comments, later known as the Kreuznach Notebooks and published for the first time only in 1927, provide a rare insight into Marx’s intellectual development. Their structure is unique and attests to their function in Marx’s own internal critique of Hegel: he first reproduces the relevant paragraph from Hegel’s book, and then sets down his criticism of it. It looks like and is a student’s critical comment on his master’s philosophy.

  It is a deeply dialectical approach to Hegel: in each case Marx starts with accepting both Hegel’s concepts as well as his system as a whole—and then subjects them to a critical confrontation with historical and contemporary reality. This is especially powerful in the way Marx confronts Hegel’s concepts of property and civil society with existing reality.

  A HEGELIAN RETROSPECTIVE

  That the origins of Marx’s socialism are in an internal radical critique of Hegel’s philosophy is dramatically illustrated in an early contemporaneous article by Friedrich Engels, published in the New Moral World, an Owenite newspaper published in England, on 18th November 1843. Engels, a scion of a Rhenish Protestant industrialist family, became acquainted with the members of the Berlin Doktoren-Klub and met Marx for the first time in November 1842 at the editorial offices of the RZ in Cologne. His family had a business branch in Manchester and sent the young Engels there, where he established contacts with Robert Owen’s socialist circles. Under
the title “Progress of the Social Reform on the Continent,” Engels reported to his English readers about the development of the various radical groups in France and Germany.

  Writing about the beginnings of the socialist movement in Germany, Engels reported that there were two distinct German socialist groups or “parties”—one made up of working-class people and artisans, and the other “philosophical.” First he described the working-class group and its most prominent leader, the tailor Wilhelm Weitling, and his work. Then he moved on to the “philosophical party,” among whose members he named the poet Georg Herwegh and “Dr Ruge, Dr Marx, Dr Hess” (though Hess had never completed his academic education), recounting Marx’s editorship at the Rheinische Zeitung. He claimed that the origins of this group lay in the development of German philosophy from Kant, Friedrich Schelling, and Fichte, culminating in Hegel’s comprehensive system, “the like of which has never been seen before.” He then elaborated:

  This system appeared quite unassailable from the without, and so it was; it has been overthrown from within only, by those who were Hegelians themselves. … Our party has to prove that either all the philosophical efforts of the German nation, from Kant to Hegel, have been useless—worse than useless; or that they must end in Communism; that the Germans must either reject their great philosophers, whose names they hold up to the glory of their nation, or that they must adopt Communism. And this will be proved …