Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  They decisively demonstrated this opinion five years later, during the Revolution of 1848, the political maelstrom of mid-nineteenth-century Europe. In April of that year, Ludolf Camphausen was appointed by the king as Prussia’s first—and last—liberal prime minister. He promptly offered a position on his staff to the vigorous young man he had met as editor of the Rhineland News.68 By that time, Marx had broken with the liberalism he had endorsed in his first major foray into journalism. In support of far more radical goals, he began a second, much larger journalistic venture, the New Rhineland News, whose financial backing came from those Cologne notables who had seen Marx at work in the metropolis half a decade earlier.

  The years 1842–52 were Marx’s Cologne decade. From his appointment to an editorial position on the Rhineland News at the start to the arrest, indictment, and conviction of his followers in the Cologne Communist Trial at its end, the city remained a source of support and potential base of operations for him. With the exception of about six months in 1842–43 and fifteen months during the revolutionary period in 1848–49, Marx did not live in Cologne itself, in the Rhineland, in Prussia, or even in one of the states of the German Confederation. He lived abroad, an émigré and an exile. In those years of banishment, both self-imposed and ordered by the authorities, his intellectual horizons would expand, his political, social, and economic views would be steadily radicalized, and the social milieux of his personal and political associates would be drastically transformed. But in the course of all this, Marx never lost touch with Cologne and continued to move further along the path that he first began there.

  4

  The Émigré

  THE LESSON MARX DREW from his experiences at the Rhineland News was that moderation would not work with the Prussian monarchy. Efforts to placate the authorities just led to frustration. He wrote to Arnold Ruge, “It is bad to perform a servant’s duties, even for the cause of freedom, and to fight with one hand tied behind your back. I have gotten tired of the hypocrisy, the stupidity of crude authority, and our flattering, bending, turning our backs and searching for just the right words.”1 Marx wanted to say what he thought, to express the radical, democratic, and republican ideas common among the Young Hegelians. As was always the case with him, expressions of radicalism meant study and analysis of the causes of radicalism and of its consequences—a process that would lead to still more radical formulations. This was impossible in Prussia and, more broadly, within the boundaries of the German Confederation.

  Following the example of many left-wing contemporaries, Marx resolved to be an émigré, to move where he could say what he thought without fear of the censor or the censorious reader. As his tenure at the Rhineland News was coming to an end, he began inquiring about a position in a foreign country. An initial possibility in Zurich did not work out, but in January 1843, Arnold Ruge’s German Yearbooks were prohibited by the Kingdom of Saxony, acting under pressure from the Prussian government. Ruge proposed to move his publication abroad, and to employ Marx as a co-editor. After negotiations running through the spring of 1843, Ruge, with Marx’s enthusiastic support, decided on a somewhat different enterprise, the founding of the Franco-German Yearbooks, a journal that would promote a collaboration of French- and German-speaking radicals. Marx wanted the journal to appear in Strasbourg, but Ruge insisted on Paris. The magazine would be published and distributed from Zurich by a German émigré radical, Julius Fröbel, a prominent mid-nineteenth-century figure, today best known for his uncle Friedrich, the inventor of the kindergarten. Marx would receive a respectable if not luxurious salary of 550 talers a year, plus honoraria for any articles he wrote.2

  What this meant personally for Marx is evident from another letter he sent to Ruge in March 1843, as the two were negotiating the publishing venture. “As soon as we have concluded a contract, I will travel to Kreuznach and get married. . . .” The issue that had been haunting the engagement for seven long years had finally been resolved. Marx had a position with which he could support his bride. The new job was not an unalloyed blessing: Jenny, in particular, was reluctant to leave the country, but for her as well, the chance to get married was worth all the potential difficulties.3

  In his letter to Ruge, Marx indicated that he would not be traveling to Trier for his wedding, but to the spa town of Kreuznach, at the junction of the Nahe and Rhine rivers, to the northeast of Trier, where Jenny and her mother had been living since the death of her father. A week before the nuptials, Karl and Jenny signed a notarized marriage contract, a brief one-page document containing three clauses. The first, establishing a marital community of property, reiterated the standard arrangements of the Napoleonic Code. By contrast, the second clause modified these arrangements, stating that future inheritances would become part of the marital community of property, instead of remaining the separate property of the inheriting spouse. This was a concession to Jenny, since Karl had the expectation of an inheritance from his mother, while Jenny could not look forward to any such future bequests. The final clause stated that debts contracted by either of the two future spouses before their marriage were their separate responsibility and would not become debits charged against the marital community of property. This was another concession of Karl’s, as he had been accumulating debts ever since his father died five years earlier. Jenny, while presumably head over heels in love with Karl, was clearly also thinking soberly and practically about their future life together—as she had done since the beginning of the engagement. With property relations clarified in advance, as was typically the case in bourgeois marriages, the wedding could take place: on June 19, 1843, there was first a civil ceremony, as required by the Napoleonic Code, and then a religious one, in the Protestant church in Kreuznach.4

  The newly married couple departed for a brief honeymoon, up the Rhine River to the far southwestern end of the German states and Switzerland. In two weeks, they ran through all their cash, a present from Jenny’s mother, that was intended to last until Karl began his new job. Supposedly they left the money out in their hotel rooms, allowing friends and acquaintances to take it and not pay it back. This story, reiterated by biographers, is based on a third-hand account told thirty years after the fact by Karl and Jenny’s oldest daughter to Karl’s friend, the gynecologist Dr. Ludwig Kugelmann, who passed it on to his daughter Franziska, who wrote it down. In the retelling, the story has become an ominous portent of future money troubles that would continuously plague the marriage as a result of the couple’s lax attitudes toward their finances. Stripping the account of the accretions it gained over the years in its continued retelling reveals something rather different: the inability of Jenny’s mother to provide her daughter with an appropriate dowry, a substantial capital that would yield a continuous income to the young couple, as would be expected of any respectable marriage at the time. Jenny did receive the household furnishings a respectable bride normally brought into her marriage—linens, furniture, table silver—but most of the silver was poor quality, outdated or simply worn out.5

  After the honeymoon, the couple returned to Kreuznach, lodging with Jenny’s mother and brother Edgar, until their departure for Paris in mid-October. The close proximity to family members did not prevent the newlyweds from conceiving their first child. Jenny was pregnant by early August 1843. The initial months of the marriage also gave Marx the leisure to do some intellectual work he had been preparing since he moved to Bonn from Berlin. One aspect of this work would become a feature of Marx’s way of absorbing information: reading texts and making elaborate excerpts. Of course, in the days before scanners, photocopiers, microfilm, much less typewriters, extensive excerpting was the only way to procure and store information; but Marx always took unusually extensive notes, generally much more than was necessary for the project at hand. The spa town of Kreuznach had a surprisingly good municipal library, created by the city fathers for the use of the many affluent and well-educated visitors who came to take the waters. Marx made good use of these facilities, takin
g notes on the histories of the major European countries and the United States, as well as going over some classics of political theory, including works by Montesquieu, Machiavelli, and Rousseau.6

  Besides reading, Marx was also writing, preparing an essay for the Franco-German Yearbooks, a critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. For well over a year, Marx had been considering writing a criticism of the master’s main work on politics.7 The manuscript, although ultimately never finished like so many of Marx’s larger intellectual efforts, was his first theoretical venture, showing the state of his thought after editing the Rhineland News but before his departure for Paris and intellectual and political encounters in continental Europe’s great metropolis. The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law consisted primarily of Hegelian reflections, particularly influenced by the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, on the political issues Marx had discussed when editing the Rhineland News.

  Feuerbach was one of the Young Hegelian philosopher-theologians, along with David Friedrich Strauss and Bruno Bauer, who had argued that human understandings of divinity involved the projection—by a process of externalization, emptying out, and alienation—of collective human characteristics onto an imaginary supreme being. Both Feuerbach and Bauer had extended this critique of religion to Hegel’s ideas themselves, understanding Hegel’s concept of an Absolute Spirit that was the motive force of nature and human history as precisely the same kind of projection of collective human characteristics onto an imaginary entity the Young Hegelians had perceived in religion. Where Feuerbach differed from Bauer and the other Young Hegelians was in his conception of what was being alienated in both religious ideas of a deity and Hegel’s concept of Absolute Spirit: not exclusively consciousness or self-consciousness, but the human race or species in its natural, material—or, as Feuerbach liked to say, “sensuous”—existence. Feuerbach, in other words, was a materialist, who propounded a distinctly biological version of materialism, since he saw human species existence as constituted above all in sexual relations.8

  Marx, even at the height of his enthusiasm for Feuerbach, was skeptical of this naturalist materialism, stating that Feuerbach “references nature too much and politics too little.”9 But he found Feuerbach’s criticism of Hegel’s ontology a promising way to criticize Hegel’s politics. Feuerbach asserted that Hegel had confused subject and predicate: Absolute Spirit as subject of history had characteristics or predicates of humanity as a species, while it was really humanity as a species that was providing the characteristics of Absolute Spirit. Marx’s critique made a parallel point: Hegel described the Absolute Idea as the subject and state and society as its predicates, while in reality the determinations were reversed.

  This line of reasoning may seem both abstruse and abstract, but Marx was using his philosophical argument to make a political point. He showed how Hegel’s derivation of the forms and functions of government from the development of the Idea exalted the powers of the monarch, enhanced the social and political position of the landed nobility, and reinforced the authority of state officials. Marx had sarcastic words for the way Hegel made “the governing power [into] the emanation of the prince,” because the prince represented the bodily existence of the “subject of the Absolute Idea,” rather than the prince being the constitutionally designated head of the executive, the governing power. He went on at some length about how Hegel derived, from the “natural principle of the family,” the nobility’s entailed estates, and their right to special parliamentary representation in a House of Lords. There was similar sarcasm for Hegel’s philosophical derivation of the privileged position of the state bureaucracy.10

  Such arguments were intellectually more elaborate versions of the polemics Marx had written while editing the Rhineland News, and demonstrated, by the choice of political targets, his republican and democratic sympathies. The absence, though, of the major topics of his future thought is certainly striking. The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law had nothing in it about political economy, the working class, or socialism.

  There was only the faintest hint of Marx’s future views in a lengthy passage in which he discussed the nature of democracy. Such a regime of popular sovereignty would exist as a republic, but a republic, as opposed to a monarchy, was just “the abstract form of the state.” Rather, Marx stated, democracy was a form of government whose “existence, whose reality, in its genuine basis, can always be traced back to the authentic man to the authentic people and is posited as the product of that people.” Establishing a democratic government would not just be a matter of the proper constitution but also of the relationship of state and society. In both the monarchy and the republic, he observed, there was a contrast between individuals as private parties, concerned with their own interests—“property, contract, marriage, civil society”—and the state. The latter was the “organizing form” of these private lives, propagating universally valid laws regulating them, but lacking the same content these private lives had, and establishing a contrast between the particular, private interests of individuals’ lives and the abstract, universal law-giving of the state. A genuine democracy would be the “true unity of the universal and particular,” where the state would be a “particular form of the people’s existence.” Recent French writers had suggested that in such a regime, the state—as a form standing for the universal, common interest against private particular interests—would “perish.” This perishing was not a literal disappearance, in the mode of anarchism, but the creation of circumstances in which the state “no longer count[s] as the totality,” that is, was no longer opposed to the private interests of civil society.

  Marx was unclear as to what social changes would be needed to produce such a democratic state, although there was a hint in one comment he made: “Property, etc., in short the entire content of law and the state is, with few modifications, the same in North America as in Prussia.”11 Bringing this comparison into conjunction with Marx’s remark that a republic was the abstract form of the state and lacked the necessary content of democracy, it appears that his vision of democracy required some modification—albeit as yet quite unspecified—of existing property arrangements.

  There were at least three rather different intellectual impulses behind this very particular invocation of democracy. One was clearly Hegelian; the unification of the universal and the particular was integral to the concept of Absolute Spirit. But it was a version of Hegel as modified by the Young Hegelians’ critique of religion. Just as, Marx argued, politicizing Feuerbach, that divinity was the externalized and alienated representation of the essence of humanity, so government was the alienated and externalized form of humanity. Feuerbach’s atheist religion called for re-inscribing humanity with its characteristics previously ascribed to a deity. Similarly, in Marx’s version of democracy, public interest, the universal common good, would no longer be the exclusive property of a state standing against and opposed to society. Instead, there would be a regime in which the particular, private concerns of civil society would simultaneously articulate the universal common good, since both would be manifestations of the people, the basis of democracy.

  Marx attributed this regime, in which the state would “perish,” to “recent Frenchmen,” possibly making an oblique reference to the French socialists he had been studying in Cologne.12 There was probably another French source of Marx’s ideas, the eighteenth-century thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Thick black lines in the margin of Marx’s excerpts from Rousseau’s Social Contract emphasized the latter’s description of the union of private interests in the general will.13 Marx’s idea of the unity of the particular with the universal, of the private interests of civil society with the general interests of the state in a democratic regime, were not dissimilar to Rousseau’s concepts, if expressed in Hegelian form.

  Most of the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law consisted of a reiteration, in more intellectual language and philosophical form, of themes Marx had already expressed in his articles for the Rhineland New
s. Those few passages in the manuscript that went further, toward a new arrangement of state and society for which Marx had as yet no new designation and simply called “democracy,” drew on an eclectic group of intellectual sources. The combination of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ludwig Feuerbach, and perhaps the 1840s French socialist Victor Considérant certainly deserves to be called eclectic, and it remained vague and imprecise, lacking content, detail, or any idea of how the new social and political order would come into existence. All of this would only emerge during the year and a half that Marx would spend in Paris.

  Arnold Ruge, accompanied by Moses Hess, went on to Paris in August 1843, two months ahead of Marx, to take the initial steps in organizing their periodical. Ruge’s later description of the hopes he placed in his move elucidates the magnetic attraction of the French capital for émigré German radicals: “At the end of our journey, we find the great valley of Paris, the cradle of the new Europe, the broad magic kettle in which world history is steaming, and out of which it ever and again bubbles forth anew.” Marx might not have used such exalted language, but he too would have felt the attraction and challenge of the Continent’s great metropolis.

  The city was enormous. Ruge recalled standing at its highest point, at the top of Montmartre, and seeing before him an infinite urban panorama: “We could not encompass it in one view, the extent of the city ran around us, it made a semi-circle, whose end, on both sides was beyond our view. . . . What we have before us, as far as the eye can see is all Paris. . . .”14 Its population surging toward the million mark, Paris was a couple of orders of magnitude larger than provincial German cities such as Trier or Cologne, and well above the 300,000 inhabitants Berlin had counted during Marx’s student days.