4. Letter to the Editor of the Démocratie pacifique
4. Letter to the Editor of the Démocratie pacifique[1]
No. 28 of the Bien public contains the following lines:
"The Kölnische Zeitung publishes a letter from Leipzig in which it is stated that a journal in French and German is due to appear shortly in Paris under the editorship of Dr. Ruge, to which M. de Lamartine and M. de Lamennais are said to have promised their collaboration.
"It is not true that M. de Lamartine has undertaken to write in any journal and, in particular, in the one in question, with M. de Lamennais.
"M. de Lamartine, who is wholly absorbed in his parliamentary work, is reserving for the Histoire des Girondins the little leisure that politics leaves him."
It is true that M. de Lamartine has not undertaken to write for the journal in question with M. de Lamennais, but we affirm that he has let us hope for his collaboration in the journal that we are proposing to found.
In addressing ourselves separately to these two famous person-ages, we have been prompted by the belief that for a work such as that of an intellectual alliance between France and Germany one should seek the support of all eminent representatives of progress in France.
Furthermore, we declare that the letter from Leipzig published by the Kölnische Zeitung, which gave rise to the article in the Bien public, did not emanate from us or from any of our friends.
Arnold Ruge, former editor of the Deutsche Jahrbücher
Charles Marx, former editor of the Rheinische Zeitung Paris, December 10, 1843
Endnotes
[1] Marx mentions his intention of critically analysing Hegel's views on the state and law as far back as in the spring of 1842. In a letter to Arnold Ruge of March 5 he writes that he is preparing an article on Hegel's legal and political views in which he intends first of all to criticise Hegel's apology on behalf of the constitutional monarchy (see this edition, Vol. 1). The above-mentioned article is not extant and it is unknown whether he actually wrote it, but the subject-matter continued to attract his attention. As Marx's theoretical views developed and he gradually adopted a materialist standpoint, largely due to Feuerbach's influence, his plans of writing a critique of Hegel's philosophy became more extensive and profound and finally he conceived the idea of counterposing the materialist conception of social phenomena to their idealist interpretation. For Marx the basic problem was the interdependence of material social relations, property relations and so on — which Hegel called "civil society"—and the political system of society, the state. Marx began to work on his plan during his stay from May to October 1843 in Kreuznach (where his bride Jenny von Westphalen, whom he married in June 1843, lived with her mother). Here, apparently, he wrote the original version of the work. In the process of writing it he felt the need for greater concrete historical material, and with this aim in view he began to study problems related not only to the theory and history of the state as a whole but to the history of individual countries (England, France, Germany, the United States, Italy, Sweden) and major world-historical events, in particular the Great French Revolution, as can be seen from his five notebooks containing excerpts (the Kreuznach Notebooks). Later on, he wrote an introduction to that work which was published in February 1844 in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. But Marx did not manage to prepare the main sections of his work for publication because he turned to other studies and conceived other literary plans (economic studies, preparation of a book against the Young Hegelians, work on the history of the Convention and so on). However, his work on the manuscript dealing with the criticism of the Hegelian philosophy of law played a major role in his spiritual development and was an important stage in the formation of his materialist views. Marx himself pointed to this in 1859 in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Engels, for his part, in his article "Karl Marx" (1869) described the conclusions arrived at by his friend as a result of the critical analysis of 20* Hegel's views in the following way: "Proceeding from the Hegelian philosophy of law, Marx came to the conclusion that it was not the state which Hegel had described as the 'top of the edifice' but 'the civil society' which Hegel had regarded with disdain that was the sphere in which a key to the understanding of the process of historical development of mankind should be looked for." The extant manuscript consists of 39 big sheets numbered in Roman figures by the author (II-XL), apparently after the work had been finished. The first sheet is missing. Each sheet is folded in two to form four pages, which are numbered in Arabic figures from sheet I-XXII. The manuscript contains a critical analysis of paragraphs 261-313 of G. W. F. Hegel's Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. These paragraphs comprise the subsection "Internal State Law" in the third part of Hegel's work. The missing first sheet apparently dealt with §§257-260 as can be seen from the extant text. The manuscript bears the imprint of an unfinished work. Some problems which the author promises to deal with below have not been treated by him in the extant part. The title of the work given by the author, which is missing in the manuscript, is reproduced from the above-mentioned introduction published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. In one of the notebooks written by Marx in Bonn in 1842 there are some notes connected with this manuscript. The date of writing the notes is not established. The notes contain some subheadings, the first of which refers to the non-extant part of the manuscript and contains references to the sheets and pages of the manuscript of the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law. The content of the notes is as follows: "Duplication of the Development System. I. 3,4. Logical Mysticism. II, 8. Ill, 9 [see this volume, pp. 7, 8]. "Mystical way of presentation. "Ibid. Example, §267. IV, pp. 13, 14 [see this volume, pp. 10, 11]. "Idea as Subject. IV, pp. 15, 16 [see this volume, pp. 11-13]. (Real subjects become mere names.) P. 17, p. 18, pp. 20, 21, pp. 24, 26, 27, p. 28, p. 40, p. 57, pp. 75, 78 [see this volume, pp. 13, 14-15, 16-18, 20-21, 22-24, 33-34, 48-49, 60, 62-63]. XXVI, 2. XXVIII. XXX, 3. XXXI, 3. XXXII, 2. XXXIV, 2, 3, 4. P. XXXVII, 2 [see this volume p. 82-83, 89-90, 98-99, 101-02, 109-10, 114-15]. Opposites. XXXIX [see this volume, p. 121-24]." Marx's manuscript was first published in Moscow by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. This work was first published in English in part in the book Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, New York, 1967, and in full as a separate edition entitled Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right' by Karl Marx. Translated from the German by Annette Jolin and Joseph O'Malley, Cambridge, 1970. In translating the term "Hegeische Rechtsphilosophie", the translators and editors, being aware of the difficulty of its rendering into English, proceeded from the interpretation of this and similar concepts in the works of Marx and Engels written in English. Thus, in the English authorised edition of Engels' work Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Hegel's expression "Begriff des Rechts" is translated in one of the notes as "concept of law" (see Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 3, Moscow, 1970, p. 115). In this manuscript as in the other works published in this volume Marx frequently uses two similar German terms, "Entäusserung" and "Entfremdung", to express the notion of "alienation". In the present edition the former is generally translated as "alienation", the latter as "estrangement", because in the later economic works (Theories of Surplus-Value) Marx himself used the word "alienation" as the English equivalent of the term "Entäusserung".