Marx and Engels’s criticism here is not fully carried out. Why is it precisely a petty bourgeois intellectual who is so devoted to philosophical idealism? His position evidently limits his outlook – but why must it pave the way for idealism in particular?
The question naturally leads further to another: what is the situation in France, Great Britain, and other countries? Evidently it was a question that Marx and Engels were not quite finished with. For example: in their foreword to the entire manuscript, they wrote that people always had erroneous ideas about themselves. They were governed by products of their brains about God or about a normal person (that is, a nature common to all people). They thus believed in the rule of ideas, something that also applied to Young Hegelian philosophy. Now, Marx and Engels would reveal that these philosophers were sheep in wolves’ clothing.
In a continuation of the foreword that they later struck out, they said that the Germans’ ideology did not differ from that of other people’s. They also saw themselves ruled by ideas. We do not know why this continuation found no favour with its authors. It squares with what was said previously – all people had up until then been ruled by the products of their thoughts – but it is possible that the term ‘German ideology’ itself had all too clearly come into conflict with what was stated in the text itself. There was no doubt that the German ideology that was under the magnifying glass differed from a French and British world of ideas that was more rooted in reality. To take one striking example: when Marx and Engels determined the connection between both of the parts their work encompassed, they contrasted the real social movements in France and England, and German trends of thought. The bourgeoisie in France and Great Britain formed a dominant social and political force, whereas liberalism in Germany – which the Young Hegelians belonged to – stopped at words. ‘True socialism’ in Germany took the same attitude to actual proletarian movements in the other countries.
Here, the German ideology appeared as something for itself.45 But before we can go further, we must scrutinize the word ‘ideology’ – a newcomer in their prose – more closely.
The word ‘ideology’ had only had a brief history when Marx and Engels began using it. Its originator was a Frenchman named Antoine Destutt de Tracy, and he presented it in a speech on 21 April 1796. At the time, the French Revolution had reached a turning point. The left had been beaten back, and with it the demands for the people’s immediate participation and involvement in the affairs of the country. Another way would now be chosen, which would lead more quickly to the goal: the best society. The philosopher Destutt de Tracy wanted to do his part with his ‘ideology’. According to him, ideology was the sum of all knowledge. More precisely, it was on the one hand the principles for how to arrive at certain knowledge, and on the other a compendium of this knowledge. No longer would development be governed by the capricious variety of opinions. This was certain knowledge.
Destutt de Tracy gained a number of devoted followers who were called ideologues. But their success would be brief. In Napoleon’s seizure of power, they gained a powerful critic. The pragmatic new ruler saw Destutt’s system as the height of ridiculous rigidity of principle and intellectual fanaticism. His negative view of the term has stuck. It is still found in dictionaries and encyclopedias.46
But the word had greater success in Germany. There, it could be said that, while the French had made a revolution and the English established industries, the Germans had created another, and ultimately sharper, weapon: ideology. It was another way of saying that while the Germans could not compare with the French in military bravado, or with the English in trade and industry, for Germans the road that stood open was that of knowledge and education. Such thoughts lay behind the great reform of the educational system that had Wilhelm von Humboldt as its most important architect.
But the advocates of German ideology belonged to a somewhat later generation. Two of them might have been important for Marx and Engels: Friedrich Rohmer and Alexander Jung. Rohmer, a Swiss philosopher and politician, shows up in passing in The German Ideology.47 It is less likely that he was the one responsible for the direct inspiration. More likely, it was Jung. Jung was a literary historian and journalist, and Engels had been in a polemic with him as far back as 1842. At that time Engels wrote under the pseudonym Friedrich Oswald, and in one reckoning Jung called him ‘little Oswald’, by which he certainly did not mean his opponent’s height, but probably his age: twenty-two years. At the time, Jung was forty-three and Engels still a fervent Young Hegelian, annoyed that Jung called Hegel an intellectual inspiration for the literary trend called Das junge Deutschland (Young Germany).
In The German Ideology it is Young Hegelianism in particular that is under fire. But it is likely that it was Jung that inspired Engels – and through him Marx as well – to use the word ‘ideology’. The difference is only that, while Jung saw ideology as the German’s chief asset, in Marx’s and Engels’s eyes it was on the contrary the thing that alienated humanity from reality. From Heine, who was present throughout The German Ideology, a quote is reproduced in the same spirit: the land belonged to the French and the Russians, and the sea to the British, but to us Germans belongs ‘the airy kingdom of dreams’.48
After The German Ideology, Marx seldom used the word ‘ideology’, while it is more frequent in Engels’s works. Marx does so above all in the famous and oft-quoted foreword to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy from 1859. But the word ‘ideology’ is in focus in Marx’s and Engels’s great manuscript. According to them, ideologies are closely bound up with division of labour. A person is marked by what she does. What she is able to do determines her perspective of herself, society, and ultimately all of reality. Ideologies live off their bearers’ narrowness of outlook.
Marx and Engels did not mince words. With indignation, they saw that Max Stirner did not have any problems with a society in which different people were completely reduced to different kinds of activities. While communist propaganda argued that even workers should develop their natural abilities all around and thereby also their natural abilities for thinking, Stirner objected that each individual could free themselves within their own sphere, without such efforts. For Marx and Engels, it is the same as saying that the worker, like all others with narrow working tasks, should continue living a restricted life. But only when individuals can realize all their intrinsic capacities will we have reached a reasonable goal, they object.49
It is the same utopia expressed in a more drastic and memorable way in the chapter on Feuerbach, in which the authors depict a society that ‘makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow; to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic’. The word ‘critic’ places us among German philosophers, but the ideal is above all that of Charles Fourier, who most consistently and successfully cultivated the dream of the variation of labour.50
To Stirner, such ideas were deeply alien. According to him, it was on their own that people could reach the innermost extraordinary qualities. Liberation, in other words, is an individual project and not a societal one.
He pointed out the artistic or scientific genius who alone could complete their musical compositions or painter’s sketches. But he had no luck with his examples, Marx and Engels said. Mozart was one of his geniuses, but it was not Mozart himself who completed his Requiem. (The example is truly not a good one: Mozart could not complete his work because he died; had he not done so, Franz Xavier Süssmayr would have not had anything to do with the work.) Marx draws the conclusion that even artistic labour in contemporary society is subject to the law of division of labour. The greater the demand, the larger the selection of works. The interest in vaudeville and novels in Paris had driven along a growing host of vaudevillians and novelists. And within science, for example, astronomers had begun cooperating on developing their observations further.51
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br /> Stirner’s thoughts on the unique qualities of genius can be found in the other, more comprehensive section of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. It is called simply ‘Ich’ (Ego), and its parts are called ‘Die Eigenheit’ (The Ownness), ‘Der Eigner’ (The Owner), and ‘Der Einzige’ (The Unique One). Crucial for this triad, such as it is, that Stirner sticks blindly to the linguistic connection between Own and Owner. He was not the first to do so. John Locke, as we have already seen, was the pioneer in a long development that also included the author of the Manuscripts. Stirner, in contrast to Locke and Marx, was not primarily interested in economic categories. He had the state in his sights, and the state was his enemy in everything (something that made him of interest to anarchists). ‘The State always has the sole purpose: to limit, tame, subordinate, the individual,’ he said. In his eyes, the state was supreme, something that Marx and Engels did not agree with at all. The state owns factories and everything else in the country, Stirner argued; the factory owners were only borrowing and managing them.52 It was the same kind of delusion that the clownish and reactionary Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV was cultivating, said Marx and Engels. The king thought he was supreme – but economically, his kingdom was weak in comparison with England, and there was nothing he himself could do anything about it.53
Uniquely enough, Stirner called communism – the idea that property should be made common – social liberalism. It was the same struggle against egoism that was found in Christianity, he explained. He received the reply that communism did not demand that individuals sacrifice themselves. On the contrary, it safeguarded their total development. It preached no morals. It did not, for example, say that people should love each other. Communists ‘knew on the contrary that egoism, just like sacrifice, was a necessary form of self-confirmation’.
In the eyes of his critics, Stirner had the loose relationship of the idealist to the hard realities of existence. He was asking for a better means of exchange than money and did not understand how money was rooted in the society he lived in. In a bourgeois manner, he thought that each and every person bore the blame for their own financial worries.
Stirner embraced the person who did not submit to any external system, and the only social community he found commendable was the loosely composed association (der Verein). Whereas society consumes you, you yourself consume an association of this kind. The association is a true community, because in it you can be yourself. The state and society, on the other hand, are false.54 Marx and Engels suspected that hearsay from Paris had reached him about Fourier’s small societies (the phalanstères), but that he did not understand that Fourier required a total transformation of society in order to realize his ideals. Stirner’s associations, rather, were the result of the arbitrariness of a few individuals.
The patient reader of the long chapter on Stirner’s book will gradually find its meaning. It is a broad reckoning with the most significant work that was produced by the New Hegelian school that both Marx and Engels had once belonged to. In an entirely different manner than in The Holy Family, they were given opportunities in their chapter on Stirner to develop their own views on society and humanity. They clarified for themselves – and certainly for others as well – where they stood on almost all questions that were of significance for them.
First and foremost, they could develop in full scale their materialist understanding in contrast to Stirner’s idealist one. On point after point, they could bring out the messy, inflexible foundation of society and place it in contrast to Stirner’s ideas that so much could be made subject to the individual’s arbitrariness. They could develop their view on the relationship between the state and capitalist economy, and they could even touch upon how the division of labour within art and science related to the one within society in general.
It is understandable, but not excusable, that so many who write books on Marx or Engels are not capable of the task of reading the section on Stirner in The German Ideology.
The reckoning with the advocates of the tendency that dubbed itself ‘true socialism’ was of another kind. Here, Marx and Engels came close to the interpretations that they themselves had quite recently advocated. Moses Hess also participated in their writing project at the beginning and many ‘true socialists’ held up Hess as their model.
Marx and Engels did not attempt to gloss over the fact that they themselves had recently been close to the interpretations they were now castigating. The ‘true socialists’ were a typically German phenomena, they said; their audience was not proletarians but petty bourgeois, and their current standpoint was a necessary transitional stage before they could go further. Perhaps they had already done so, after having written the works being criticized here.
Moreover, Marx and Engels declared that they had nothing personal against the authors being attacked. Their works were only the necessary products of a country that had fallen behind in development.55
But all the same, the polemics that followed were mercilessly sharp. The ‘true socialists’ usually held up German science in contrast to the ‘crude empiricism’ of other countries. Their own socialism was claimed to be so much more advanced than the communism of the French. Their communism was ‘raw’, one of them said – the same criticism that Marx levelled a few years earlier. Marx and Engels now make ironical remarks about the expression, and again have a quote from Heine at the ready: ‘Die Deutsche öffnet den Mund weit: / Die Liebe sei nicht zu roh, / sie schadet sonst die Gesundheit’ (‘With gaping jaws the German cries: / Too crude love must not be / or you’ll get an infirmity.’)56 In Heine, it is certainly not any German who was speaking but a churchwarden, but with that clarification the point would not have been driven home.
The sharpest and most detailed criticism is directed at Karl Grün, a person who had long been close to them and whom Marx had come across in Trier, Cologne, and Paris. He was the one who succeeded Marx as Proudhon’s teacher, and it is easy to see how they both followed somewhat parallel paths up until the mid-1840s. In his biography of Marx, Jonathan Sperber is actually of the opinion that the attack in The German Ideology is conditioned by rivalry and pure quarrelsomeness. But, once again, it shows that Sperber has not read the text that carefully. The chapter reveals, namely, that Grün’s knowledge of French socialism and communism was fragmentary. With an exactitude that would have suited an old-fashioned and merciless faculty opponent, Marx compares Grün’s quotes and other assessments with what Saint-Simon, Fourier, Cabet, and Proudhon actually said. Page by page, it is revealed that Grün leans on second-hand sources – and sometimes not even that – and still pretends to have deep first-hand knowledge. His general assessments were also shallow and ignorant.57
What does it say now, other than that Marx – and perhaps also Engels – knew more than Grün about contemporary French radicalism?
It indicates something that was, and remained, extremely central for Marx: his requirement for scholarly scientific exactitude and comprehensive reading. It was his strength, but would also become his fate. He read copiously and took careful, detailed notes on what he read. He was a one-man university, and was scornful and ruthless towards those who wanted to skate by more easily. But it also meant that he found it notoriously difficult to complete his larger works. It went better with shorter articles, as it did when – like here – he could collaborate with Engels, who found it easier to bring his writings to a close.
The approximately sixty pages that form the chapter on Feuerbach are a summary, but also a way for the authors of getting their bearings. It is the most known and the most read section of The German Ideology – often the only one read. Some of its more sloganistic formulations are often reproduced, such as ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas,’ or ‘In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here it is a matter of ascending from earth to heaven.’ But it is only the context and the whole that gives the chapter its significance.58
Feuerbach actually playe
d a relatively insignificant role in the chapter; the most that was said about him constituted repetitions of what Marx had already established in his Theses: Feuerbach had been satisfied with sensuous objects and ignored sensuous activity, and he did not realize that it was not only a matter of interpreting the world but of changing it as well.
The essential thing about the chapter, which also takes up almost the entire text, is a clarification and a summary of a view of history and society that Marx (and Engels as well) would thereafter adhere to in all essentials. But the analysis of capitalist society is still extremely rudimentary, and the view of the relationship between theory and empiricism is far less developed and sophisticated than it would be some decades later.
A crucial idea in The German Ideology is that it is production that makes a person a person. Production distinguishes humanity from the animals. The production of ideas is interlaced with material production, and can only provisionally be distinguished from it.
In Germany, an understanding of history predominated where, on the contrary, ideas were seen as the conductors of history. In England and France, the same attitude also set the tone, at least as far as political history was concerned. But there, the first steps had nonetheless been taken towards giving history a more solid foundation as regards trade and industry. Evidently, they were alluding to the economists here – the same economists who had played such a crucial role for both Engels’s and Marx’s new orientation. The difference was that the economists had not intended to – or even had enough knowledge to – provide a total picture of history.
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