Marx’s involvement with this newspaper was a nodal point in his intellectual, personal, and political development, a bridge between his past life and his future endeavors. His affiliation with the journal transformed him from a scholar into an activist—or, more precisely, from a scholar with an activist bent into an activist with a scholarly tendency. It brought him into contact with communist ideas and set the framework for his self-designation as a communist. Marx’s work with the Rhineland News, particularly the four stormy months when he served as its informal editor, from mid-October 1842 to mid-February 1843, was a period of intense and productive effort that would make him known, in impressive fashion, to three very different audiences. The first was the Young Hegelians, and, more broadly, radical intellectuals throughout central Europe. To them, Marx would cease to be just the protégé of Bruno Bauer, and become an author and polemicist in his own right. A second audience was the Prussian authorities, for whom Marx would become a subversive troublemaker and appropriate subject for persecution and oppression. Marx and the Prussian kingdom became mutual enemies, and remained so until his death. Finally, Marx would gain a strong recognition among the influential inhabitants of Cologne, the Rhenish metropolis—not just the city’s nascent communists or its radical republicans, but its moderate liberals as well, and not just its marginalized, bohemian intellectuals, but its professionals, merchants, bankers, and members of the chamber of commerce.
All this recognition, even the negative, hostile kind, was powerfully affirmative for Marx, after years of difficulties making his way in the world. He visibly enjoyed being a polemical journalist and a crusading newspaper editor. For the following two decades, both his efforts at earning a living and his plans for political engagement centered on journalistic projects. Avocation, occupation, aspiration to improve the public welfare—journalism fulfilled the preconditions for choosing a career that Marx had articulated in his Abitur essay of 1835, albeit in a more bitter and contentious way than he had described in the Kantian idealism borrowed from his father and his teachers.
THE RHINELAND NEWS CAME into existence as the result of several opportunities. First was the journalistic one, opposition to the newspaper monopoly in the Rhineland’s largest city of the Cologne News, a position it had gained in 1837 by purchasing its chief competitor. Attempts in 1840 to start a competing newspaper, the Rhineland General News, although granted a license to publish by the Prussian authorities, had gone poorly. The potential competitor was dull, limited, and, above all, underfinanced. Its editors, reaching the end of their funds, wanted a new, better-financed try, and they proposed to do so by using a new business institution, raising money for their project by the sale of stock shares.16
In mid-1841, they approached a young Cologne jurist from an affluent family, Robert Jung, with their plan. A supporter of the Young Hegelians, Jung elicited the assistance of another youthful radical intellectual, the son of an affluent Jewish merchant and sugar refiner, Moses Hess. Like Jung, Hess found this idea of a newspaper funded with shares of stock intriguing; it also fit his personal interest in a journalistic career. Hess, a critic of the anti-clerical and godless attitudes of the Young Hegelians, was a socialist or communist (contemporaries frequently used the two words interchangeably), one of the first Germans to become an adherent of the ideas of the French followers of Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, who envisaged a society in which private property had been abolished and replaced by collective ownership. It may seem odd today for a communist to be an opponent of atheism, but early communism was suffused with a religious aura—albeit generally in the form of an unconventional spirituality. This was certainly true of Hess, who had rejected the dour Orthodox Judaism of his father, and developed an appreciation for Christian doctrines without actually converting to Christianity. Communists involved with corporations may seem even odder, but in the 1840s it was not at all unusual for socialists to perceive this form of business enterprise as a step away from individual and family ownership toward collectivism.17
Jung and Hess eagerly seized on the proposal and went about the business of gathering investors. There were legal difficulties in establishing a corporation, so they settled on a related business form, a Kommanditgesellschaft, similar to a Common Law limited partnership, in which the liability of most investors was limited to their investment, while a few general partners had a broader exposure to risk. The three general partners were Jung; the Cologne banker Dagobert Oppenheim; and the newspaper’s publisher, the book dealer Engelbert Renard.18
The identity of the investors reflects the second consideration behind the founding of the newspaper: differences within Cologne’s elite. Many of the investors were affluent outsiders in Cologne, migrants to the city, entrepreneurial innovators who were shaking up the established ways of the Rhenish metropolis. These investors tended to view the Cologne News as the voice of Cologne’s insiders, a group they saw as a clique with questionable and self-interested connections to the municipal government. There was even a special word in the Cologne dialect for this group, Klüngel, a term still in use today. A number of the outsiders, such as the industrialist’s son Gustav Mevissen, or the banker and chamber of commerce president Ludolf Camphausen, were Protestants, and so outsiders in another way, in one of Germany’s most Catholic major cities. This confessional dynamic helped shape the attitudes of the Prussian government toward the emerging Rhineland News. The authorities were not at all unhappy about a potential competitor undermining the Cologne News, because it had the reputation of being sympathetic to pro-Catholic and anti-Prussian viewpoints. The Prussian district governor of Cologne was actually one of the initial investors in the new project.19
Finally, there were the politics of the proposed newspaper. The capitalists behind the Rhineland News were political liberals, who wanted an end to the legally unrestrained, authoritarian rule of the Prussian monarch and his state bureaucracy. Also in their sights were the special privileges of the nobility, a remnant of the pre-1789 society of orders. In place of these, they envisaged a constitutional monarchy, whose fundamental document would guarantee basic civil liberties, proclaim equal rights under the law, and establish a legislature elected by (male) property owners. The early 1840s were a period in which liberals throughout the Prussian kingdom—but especially in the Rhineland, one of their strongholds—intensified their campaign for a constitution. Such liberal capitalists were not at all interested in seeing the newspaper that would be a vehicle for their political views promote the abolition of private property, so they rejected Hess’s aspirations to be its editor. Hess’s personal eccentricities—he was given to having visions and was notoriously querulous to boot—did not improve his prospects. Instead, the stockholders turned to one of Germany’s most eminent economists, and a prominent liberal political figure, Friedrich List; but he was recovering from a broken leg and unable to take up the offer. Instead, the position went to an economically versed journalist, one Gustav Höfken.
Höfken proved to be an inept editor, but the problems he had went beyond his modest journalistic skills to the mismatch of his ideology with that of the newspaper’s backers. Cologne was a financial center and a river port, a commercial city whose economy centered on its position as a midpoint between products coming from Germany and those from the Atlantic world. In contrast to other parts of western Germany, it had relatively little industry. Free trade was considerably more popular to the city’s businessmen than were the protectionist ideas that List espoused and that his protégé Höfken wanted to make the center of editorial policy. In doing so, he put himself at odds with both the stockholders and the general partners, so that he lasted as editor just a few weeks from the start of publication in January 1842.20
The issue over which Höfken announced his resignation was his unwillingness to accept an article written by Bruno Bauer. His departure paved the way for the Young Hegelians, led by the general partner Robert Jung, to take over the paper. Höfken’s successor as editor was Adolf Ruten
berg, the Berlin Young Hegelian who was Bruno Bauer’s brother-in-law. Bauer, whom Jung described as “our most admirable co-worker,” was tremendously excited by the change in editorial policy, and hoped that the paper would be a vehicle for his atheistic ideas. Arnold Ruge, as well as other supporters of radical Hegelian views, also began to write for the newspaper, including a number of members of the Doctors’ Club who had introduced Marx to Hegelianism as a student in Berlin.21
IT WAS THESE CLOSE connections that enabled Marx to write for the Rhineland News. Two long essays of his appeared in the spring and summer of 1842, Marx’s first foray into the public sphere. They showed the influence of his classical education at the Gymnasium and the Hegelian reasoning he had learned at the university in Berlin. At least as impressive as the content of these essays was their style—angry, sarcastic, and polemical, not features of Marx’s previous writings. This change reflected the influence of the Young Hegelians in general, and Bauer in particular, as they came into increasing conflict with the Prussian monarchy. Marx gave the Young Hegelian style his own distinct personal twist, characterized by the use of nastily amusing analogies and a practical, anti-idealistic, almost cynical take on politics, two characteristics that would become a permanent feature of his political writing.
The first, and longer, of the two essays, and the one that made the greatest impression, dealt with freedom of the press. Marx blasted its enemies, linking their arguments to an archaic society of orders, to an authoritarian Prussian state trying to prop up this society, and to intellectual trends defending it. Unlike some of the Young Hegelians, particularly Bauer, who reveled in criticism and negativity, Marx’s piece was also affirmative, praising freedom of the press as part of a broader encomium of freedom, articulated in opposition to the nature of the Prussian monarchy.22 Not just Marx’s criticisms but his affirmations as well were posed in anti-Prussian terms: once again typical of the Young Hegelians, but also reflecting his upbringing in the city of Trier.
Marx began by blasting the Prussian government, portraying the arguments of the official newspaper, the Prussian State News, as representing childish intellectual capacities—counting, smelling, and believing in ghosts. (The passage about ghosts is significant because it would appear, in somewhat altered form, in the Communist Manifesto). Having disposed of the Prussian authorities, Marx turned his attention to the debates on freedom of the press in the recently concluded Rhenish Provincial Diet, the main topic of his essay. The very nature of the Diet provided additional ammunition for Marx. Powerless, provincial pseudo-legislatures created by the Prussian government in the 1820s, the Diets were elected, deliberated, and voted along the lines of the society of orders, with deputies representing the province’s higher nobility, its lower nobility, its town burghers, and its peasants. This arrangement was quite unpopular in the Rhineland, where two decades of French rule between 1794 and 1814 had eliminated legal distinctions between different social groups. Until the 1840s, the Diets deliberated in secret, which vitiated their representative character, since the voters quite literally did not know what the deputies they elected had said in debates or how they had voted on questions under discussion. The very existence of the Diets was a parody of the liberals’ aspirations to a constitutional parliament.23
Marx brought together liberal aspirations for an effective legislature, and for a constitution guaranteeing basic rights, such as freedom of the press, and liberal hostility to the society of orders, in discussing a speaker representing the lower nobility who had asserted that the question of publication of proceedings had been placed by the government in the “hands of the Diet.” According to Marx, this was taking a basic right—freedom of the press—and transforming it into a privilege of a constituted body of the society of orders, the Provincial Diet. “The citizen does not want to perceive his rights as a privilege. Can he regard it as right to add new privileged groups to old ones?” Following up on this, he added sarcastically, “According to the speaker . . . the province should regard the prerogatives of the provincial diet as its own rights; why not also the prerogatives of some class of state officials, of the nobility or the priests?”24 Here, Marx was defining freedom of the press as one of the universal human rights articulated in the French Revolution, and denouncing its opponents as lackeys of the Prussian state and advocates of an obsolete society of orders.
Marx then placed the ideas of opposition to the press in an intellectual context, presenting these ideas as examples of political thought influenced by artistic Romanticism, and its nostalgia for the Middle Ages:
When our speaker from the order of the knights with almost comic seriousness, with almost melancholy dignity and nearly religious pathos, developed the postulate of the high wisdom of the Provincial Diet and of its medieval freedom and independence, the uninitiated will be surprised to see him take a different position on the question of freedom of the press. There, he sinks from the high wisdom of the Diet to the thorough lack of wisdom of the human race, from the independence and freedom of the privileged orders he recommends above to the principled unfreedom and dependence of human nature. We are not surprised to encounter one of the many forms apparent today of the Christian knightly, modern feudal, in short, of the Romantic principle.25
Continuing in a Hegelian vein, he denounced Romantic thinkers for their perception of freedom as a particular privilege of individual social orders, rather than being “tied to the essence of humanity, to reason, thus common to all individuals.” This was a version of the universal human rights of the French Revolution inflected by Hegel’s philosophy.
Marx also used this assertion of freedom of the press as a universal human right to criticize the supporters of press freedom in the Rhenish Diet, in particular its chief proponent, the Cologne banker Heinrich Merkens. Merkens had defended freedom of the press by describing it as a byproduct of freedom of occupation—the freedom to start a newspaper being like the freedom to open a tailor’s workshop, in spite of guild restrictions. Marx praised the practical nature of Merkens’s ideas, contrasting them favorably with the impractical projects of many German intellectuals that produced changes in the realm of ideas but none in social and political reality. This self-consciously hardheaded stance would be central to Marx’s future writing; but his invidious comparisons between the practical banker and the impractical intellectuals was no endorsement of Merkens’s assertions.
Quite the opposite. Marx had a sarcastic retort to them, perhaps an observation left over from his unfinished work on Christian art: “Rembrandt painted the Mother of God as a Dutch peasant, why shouldn’t our speaker paint freedom in a form that is known and familiar to him?”26 Freedom of occupation and freedom of the press, Marx went on, were all examples of a broader generic freedom; but “is it not totally erroneous, in this unity to forget diversity and even to make a species into a norm, into the sphere of the other species? It is intolerance on the part of one species of freedom, which is only willing to tolerate others, when they fall away from themselves and declare themselves that species’ vassals.”27 More generally, Marx concluded, the defenders of freedom of the press at the Provincial Diet, in this respect like the opponents of freedom of the press, did not understand that freedom of the press was one example of broader universal human rights, and could only see it in a limited, narrow context.
Having strongly criticized limitations on freedom of the press, Marx accentuated the positive, combining Hegelian argumentation, colorful analogies, and ironic asides to offer an encomium of a free press:
The free press is the everywhere-open eye of the people’s spirit, the embodied confidence of a people in itself, the speaking ribbon that connects the individual with the state and the world, culture made corporeal, which transforms material struggles into spiritual ones and idealizes their crude material form. It is the uninhibited confession of a people to itself and, as is well known, the strength of confession leads to redemption. It is the spiritual mirror in which a people contemplates itself, and sel
f-contemplation is the first precondition of knowledge. It is the spirit of the state that can be sold by peddlers in every cottage, more cheaply than material gas. It is all-sided, omnipresent, omniscient. It is the ideal world that is constantly spilling out of the actual one, and, as an ever-richer spirit, newly animating, flowing back into it.28
The argument described, in Hegelian fashion, a free press as the objectification of the people’s spirit—and not an objectification alienated from its spirit, but one that knew itself as such. The radicalized version of Hegel’s ideas was also deployed in Marx’s ironic yet serious description of a free press as all-sided, omnipresent and omniscient, attributes of divinity, or of Hegel’s philosophical version of divinity, Absolute Spirit. And since the free press was the objectified spirit of the people, Marx was placing the people in the same transcendent position Hegel reserved for Absolute Spirit: Marx’s encomium of the press became a praise of democracy, the rule of the people, and an even stronger attack on a very authoritarian Prussian state.29
It is no surprise that the article was well received by fellow Young Hegelians such as Jung and Ruge, but it attracted a wider following. Ludolf Camphausen received a letter from his brother, Otto, then at the beginning of a distinguished career in the Prussian state service, inquiring, “Who is the author of the admirable article on the proceedings [concerning freedom of the press] of the Rhenish Provincial Diet? What do the deputies from Cologne say about it?” The Prussian minister of the interior was also impressed, albeit in a negative way, condemning the piece as a subversive attack on the state.30
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