Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  Gradually, Marx managed to place his life on a new footing. Thinking of an academic career, he started to work, at first in somewhat desultory fashion, on preparing a doctoral dissertation that would apply Hegel’s methods to the study of ancient philosophy. As he immersed himself in the writings of ancient Greek philosophers, the ecstatic and awe-inspiring feelings that the system of Hegel’s thought had imbued in him began to fade against the much more difficult task of choosing a dissertation topic and applying to scattered texts Hegel’s concepts of philosophical development. Strongly influencing these efforts were the individuals who introduced him to Hegelian philosophy.

  Unlike some of his slightly older contemporaries, Marx could not experience Hegel personally, because the philosopher had died in the cholera epidemic of 1831. But in the thirteen years before his death when he taught at the University of Berlin, Hegel had founded a school and recruited a body of disciples, particularly numerous in Berlin itself, but in other parts of Germany as well. It was these disciples who initiated Marx into the mysteries of the master’s ideas.

  One important, and generally somewhat underrated, influence on Marx was a Berlin professor of legal history, Eduard Gans. With a personal background containing similarities to Heinrich Marx—he had converted from Judaism to Protestantism to be eligible for a professorship—Gans was a riveting public speaker, who filled the university lecture halls not just with students but with educated members of the general public. He reinterpreted Hegel’s views of legal and political developments a bit to the left, openly espousing constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties and parliamentary government, points about which the master himself had been studiedly vague. Unlike most central European intellectuals, Gans had good personal and intellectual connections in France, including a friendship with Alexis de Tocqueville, the celebrated liberal intellectual, best known today for his penetrating analysis of the practice of democracy in the young North American Republic. Gans was also one of the first Germans to take note of the Saint-Simonians, the early French socialists, who developed the ideas of collective instead of private ownership of industry and economic planning in place of the free market. He shared their concerns about the conditions of artisans and the nascent working class, although he rejected both their socialist ideas and Hegel’s notions about reviving the guild system, advocating instead workers’ production cooperatives.

  Marx attended Gans’s lectures, and the professor noted the industriousness with which he did so. The ideas expressed there clearly made an impression on the young Marx, and a number of passages in the Communist Manifesto would be taken, almost verbatim, from Gans’s writing. Gans was a mentor and adviser in the making; had he not died of a stroke in 1839 at the age of forty-two, Marx’s life might have taken a quite different path.34

  Instead, the major intellectual influence on Marx as well as the personal connections that would shape his post-university plans came from a loosely knit group of philosophers, theologians, and freelance intellectuals, contemporaries called the Young Hegelians.35 In part connected to the university, but also a substantial element of the broader cultural scene in Berlin, these Young Hegelians combined deeply earnest intellectual speculation with a raucous and bohemian lifestyle, in a way that proved very attractive to Marx, and one that would draw him into a radical political stance. The youth of these Young Hegelians was at least as much a political and ideological reference as a chronological one. The term “Young” came into the European political vocabulary following the French Revolution of 1830, and it referred to a generational transition, as political radicalism and the individuals who supported it went from nostalgic reminiscences of the great days of the French Revolution of 1789 to forward-looking aspirations for change. The pioneering example of this transition was the secret society “Young Italy,” founded by the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini, the most prominent leader of democratic and republican radicalism, not just on the Italian Peninsula but across the entire Continent. Closer to home in central Europe was the literary movement “Young Germany,” whose best-known member was the poet Heinrich Heine (both Heine and Mazzini would play roles in Marx’s life), and whose socially critical literature was officially prohibited in 1835 by the new German Confederation. This central European league of states was created by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, ending the wars of Napoleon, and destroyed in 1866 as a result of the wars of German unification, ultimately resulting in a Prussian-dominated German Empire.36

  The radicalism of the Young Hegelians emerged from Hegel’s program of applying the methods and conclusions of his philosophy to every Wissenschaft, when they did so for a Wissenschaft central to German academic life: Protestant theology. Hegel had begun this enterprise, but with ambivalent results. Hegelian theology could be seen as a version of religious orthodoxy. The stage of development in which spirit perceived the object as its other could be related to the Old Testament God separate and distinct from humanity, while spirit perceiving its object as a form of self-consciousness and itself as part of Absolute Spirit would correspond to the Christian idea of the Trinity. There were other aspects of Hegel’s thought that were rather more heterodox. His assertion that humanity’s consciousness of God was God’s self-consciousness, or his contention that God was nothing without His creation, sounded suspiciously pantheistic, going against the understanding, particularly important to Germany’s born-again Protestants, of a personal God. Hegel’s integration of theology into philosophy also raised Pietists’ suspicions, when Hegel stated that philosophy asserted the conceptually grasped truth of what in religion was belief and representation. For Christians, to whom a personally felt belief was central to their faith, and certainly more important than human reason, this was another potentially subversive idea.

  The Young Hegelians actualized the subversive potential of Hegelian theology by synthesizing rationalist ideas that had been developing among German Protestants since the eighteenth century, particularly the scholarly investigations today called the Higher Criticism of the Bible: the investigation of the Old and New Testaments as historical documents, and the attempt to ascertain in them which is an empirically correct representation of events and lives in ancient Palestine, and which is a later accretion or mythological account. The first Young Hegelian to make theological waves was David Friedrich Strauss, from the University of Tübingen, a onetime Protestant pastor, who had gone to Berlin to further his theological studies by taking classes from Hegel and his students. Strauss’s Life of Jesus Theologically Examined (1835) asserted that the Gospel stories of Jesus’s life and death were not empirical accounts but mythical projections of the hopes, beliefs, and expectations of Jews in Roman Palestine, an externalization and alienation of their group self-consciousness. This academic tome went off like the proverbial bombshell in the life of the educated public, provoking angry denunciations from the orthodox, and fervent accolades from its enthusiasts.37

  Strauss’s initial insights were, in eminently Hegelian fashion, developed further and also contradicted by a University of Berlin lecturer in theology, Bruno Bauer. In his Critique of the Gospel of St. John (1840) and his Critique of the Synoptic Gospels (1841), Bauer asserted that Strauss’s description of Christian scriptures as the externalization, in mythical form, of group consciousness overlooked the importance of religious self-consciousness. The authors of the Gospel accounts took up and transformed myth into an expression of human self-consciousness. The final Young Hegelian salvo came from the Bavarian philosopher and theologian Ludwig Feuerbach, whose Essence of Christianity (1841) generalized Strauss’s and Bauer’s insights. For Feuerbach, all religions, and Christianity in particular, were expressions of the alienated human self-consciousness of itself as a species. The characteristics of a transcendent Divinity, His infinite love, justice, and mercy, for instance, were, according to Feuerbach, the best elements of humanity as a species, attributed—in Hegelian terms externalized and alienated—to a mythical supreme being.

  In the space of le
ss than a decade, from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s, the Young Hegelians were swept along by a wave of intellectual speculation, theological controversy, and political contention that turned them from insiders to outsiders, moderates to radicals, believers to atheists. Marx was just one of many of the Young Hegelian intellectuals caught up in this wave, and it shaped his thought, his actions, and his personal life.

  As they began their studies of religion, the Young Hegelians, like the theologians who first developed Higher Criticism, were trying to reinforce and purify their belief, in good Protestant fashion sorting out the originally and authentically Christian text in the biblical message from later additions. The unintended result of their scholarship and its literary expression was to undermine faith altogether, so that by the early 1840s many of the Young Hegelians had become outright and explicit atheists. Yet their atheism usually had a religious edge, since it involved transferring the sense of the transcendent from God to humanity. Ludwig Feuerbach’s description of his ideals as “anthropotheism,” or his statement that “My religion is no religion,” exemplify the piety of the Young Hegelians’ godlessness.38

  The Young Hegelians’ political path paralleled their religious one. Not only did they originally see their ideas as reinforcing Protestant piety, but also, at least for the Prussians among them, as supporting the monarchy, and articulating its best traditions and ideals. Arnold Ruge, a University of Halle lecturer in education, who was the organizational mastermind of the Young Hegelians and editor of their journal, the Halle Yearbooks, stated that “Prussia is the Protestant state and its principle is light and scholarship.”39

  This connection between Prussia, Protestantism, religious rationalism, and the Enlightenment is reminiscent of the intellectual nexus surrounding Heinrich Marx’s conversion to Protestantism, and the spirit in which the young Karl Marx was raised. Like Heinrich, the Young Hegelians had good reasons for affirming the connection. While assertions that Hegelianism was the official philosophy of the Prussian state are rather exaggerated, it is true that Prussia’s longtime minister of religious and educational affairs, Karl von Altenstein, was impressed with Hegelian ideas and a bureaucratic patron of those who asserted them. In many ways a hangover from the era of liberal reforms in Prussia at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Altenstein’s influence had been waning in the 1830s, and any protection he could offer the Young Hegelians ceased with his death in 1840. That was also the year that the new monarch, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, a strong supporter of the Awakening, came to the throne. As a result, the Prussian government’s educational and cultural policies turned steadily against the ideas of Hegel and their proponents. The Young Hegelians responded by moving to the left, collaborating with the liberal opposition in Prussia, and increasingly advocating democratic and republican ideas.40

  Both political and religious developments converged in changing, much for the worse, the prospects of the Young Hegelians. They aspired to professorships at German universities, and a number of them—including Ruge, Bauer, and Feuerbach—had taken the first step on the academic ladder, obtaining positions as lecturers. The concurrent radicalization of their thinking and the increasing conservatism of government policy doomed their aspirations: there was no place in mid-nineteenth-century German universities for atheists or democrats. Not a single Young Hegelian would obtain a university position; they would be forced into careers as freelance writers, journalists, and other financially uncertain occupations. Some found their way into artistic and bohemian circles; others became left-wing political activists, and, following the failure of the 1848 Revolution, spent the rest of their lives in exile. The Young Hegelians, and Marx in his own unique way among them, became a lost generation of German intellectual life.41

  The Young Hegelian usually seen as the most important influence on Karl Marx is Ludwig Feuerbach. Even people with only the vaguest knowledge of Marx’s life and ideas have heard of his “Theses on Feuerbach,” especially the celebrated eleventh and final thesis: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.” These theses were part of the enormous mass of notes and comments that Marx made on his many different readings. During his lifetime, he never attempted to publish the theses, or make them known to a wider public. They only appeared in print after his death, when Friedrich Engels, acting as Marx’s literary executor, found them among his very extensive papers. Although Marx certainly had read and appreciated the writings of Feuerbach, the two men never met personally or collaborated on any intellectual or political projects. Indeed, Feuerbach explicitly rejected Marx’s efforts to initiate a collaboration.42

  A more important but often neglected influence on Marx was another of the Young Hegelians, Bruno Bauer. This is not completely surprising because, in contrast to the saintly Feuerbach, Bauer was an unsavory character. Contemporaries saw him as an intellectual opportunist. He began his intellectual and scholarly career as a conservative Hegelian, a vehement critic of David Friedrich Strauss and the author of a book on the Old Testament asserting the reconciliation of Hegelian philosophy and religious orthodoxy. Within a few years, Bauer had swung far to the left, turning into the most radical of the Young Hegelians, an open atheist and advocate of republicanism. Bauer also had the reputation of being a nasty individual—Strauss never forgave his initial, very hostile polemics, even after Bauer had come around to his point of view—and arrogant and self-centered to boot. His intellectual and political development after the end of the Hegelian era has done little to enhance his reputation: in the 1850s and 1860s, he became a conservative and an increasingly vehement anti-Semite, one of the founders of racial anti-Semitism in central Europe.43

  There is a lot of dispute about the exact extent of Bauer’s intellectual influence on Marx, but the close personal relations between the two, and Bauer’s role in bringing Marx into the social network of the Young Hegelians, is beyond doubt. Marx first encountered the Young Hegelians during the summer of 1837, when he became a member of the Doctors’ Club, a group of Berlin Hegelians whose leading member was, as Marx informed his father, the “lecturer Dr. Bauer.” Marx’s partner in his proposed yearbook of theatrical criticism was Bauer’s brother-in-law, Adolf Rutenberg. At social events of the group, Marx and Bauer were often seen off to one side, discussing philosophical questions. Marx was a frequent visitor at the home of Bauer and his brother Edgar, another member of the group of Berlin Young Hegelians; and one of only two classes Marx took at the University of Berlin after he gave up his legal studies was a course Bauer offered on the Hebrew prophet Isaiah.

  One of the last official acts in favor of the Young Hegelians by the friendly minister of religious and educational affairs von Altenstein was to offer Bauer in 1839 a position as lecturer in Protestant theology at the University of Bonn, an institution where Bauer’s prospects for a professorship seemed better than in Berlin. After Bauer left for Bonn, he and Marx engaged in an extended correspondence. (Unfortunately, Marx’s side of the correspondence has not survived.) Bauer began making plans for Marx to come and join him in Bonn, encouraging him to finish his dissertation, informing him of the Bonn University regulations concerning eligibility for a lectureship, even suggesting some classes that Marx could teach. Contemporaries saw Marx as Bauer’s protégé, which he was.44

  But before Marx could join Bauer in Bonn, he would have to conclude work on his doctoral dissertation. The thesis he wrote—placed in today’s academic cubbyholes, it would belong to the history of philosophy—was a comparison of the theories of nature found in the writings of the Greek philosophers Democritus and Epicurus.45 Without going into a lengthy exposition of the dissertation, we can see in it the state of Marx’s personal and intellectual development at the end of his university studies.

  One aspect of the thesis was decidedly academic. Marx’s dissertation was revisionist; in it, he attempted to develop a new and different interpretation, and to overturn long-established scholarly opinions, certainly the attitude expected from an i
conoclastic Young Hegelian. Scholarly opinion had argued that the post-Aristotelian Greek philosophers were epigones, disciples with little of significance to say, and that the atomistic theories of Epicurus were just an inferior restatement of the original ideas of the earlier philosopher Democritus. Marx set out to prove the opposite, to show that Epicurus’ atomism was original, and more significant and profound than the initial work of Democritus.

  His procedure was eminently Hegelian. Arguing that the ideas of Epicurus represented an advance in the process of human intellectual development and human self-consciousness, Marx concluded:

  For Epicurus, atomism is thus, with all its contradictions, the natural science of a self-consciousness that, in the form of abstract individuality, is absolute principle. This science is implemented and perfected to its highest consequence, which is its dissolution and conscious contrast to the universal. For Democritus, by contrast, the atom is only the universal objective expression of empirical research into nature. The atom remains for him thus a pure and abstract category, a hypothesis that is the result of experience and not an energetic principle, and so thus both remains without realization and does not further determine the course of empirical natural research.46

  The Hegelian point Marx was making (the unclear and awkward language, apparent in the original German, is Hegelian too) involved perceiving the philosophical form of the dialectical development of human self-consciousness in past intellectual trends. Epicurus’ ideas, for Marx, were a higher stage of thought, since they were closer to the Hegelian understanding of a dialectical movement of self-consciousness, leading to its own contradiction, against Democritus’ undialectical conceptions, in which the concepts of the thinking and perceiving subject were used to categorize the object of its perception but had no intrinsic connection to it. This contrast between the two ancient Greek thinkers was not unlike Hegel’s critique of Kant, Marx showing himself to be a dutiful pupil of the Hegelian master. More precisely, Marx showed himself to be a true Young Hegelian, a pupil of Hegel as reinterpreted by Marx’s teacher and mentor Bruno Bauer, since what evolved in Marx’s conclusion was not spirit, as Hegel would have asserted, but human self-consciousness, as Bruno Bauer suggested. It was Bauer, as well, who had described the Greek philosophers of the Hellenistic era as a high point in the dialectical progress of self-consciousness.47