7. Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law. Introduction
For Germany the criticism of religion is in the main complete, and criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.
The profane existence of error is discredited after its heavenly oratio pro aris et /octs" has been disproved. Man, who looked for a superhuman being in the fantastic reality of heaven and found nothing there but the reflection of himself, will no longer be disposed to find but the semblance of himself, only an inhuman being, where he seeks and must seek his true reality.
The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being encamped outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state, society. This state, this society, produce religion, an inverted world-consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of that world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in a popular form, its spiritualistic point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its universal source of consola-tion and justification. It is the fantastic realisation of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a fight against the world of which religion is the spiritual aroma.
Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
a Speech for the altars and hearths.—Ed.
To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of tears, the halo of which is religion.
Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." The criticism of religion disillusions man to make him think and act and shape his reality like a man who has been disillusioned and has come to reason, so that he will revolve round himself and therefore round his true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves round man as long as he does not revolve round himself.
The task of history, therefore, once the world beyond the truth has disappeared, is to establish the truth of this world. The immediate task of philosophy, which is at the service of history, once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked, is to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms. Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.
The following exposition[80]—a contribution to that task—deals immediately not with the original, but with a copy, the German philosophy of state and of law, for no other reason than that it deals with Germany.
If one wanted to proceed from the status quo itself in Germany, even in the only appropriate way, i.e., negatively, the result would still be an anachronism. Even the negation of our political present is a reality already covered with dust in the historical lumber-room of modern nations. If I negate powdered pigtails, I am still left with unpowdered pigtails. If I negate the German state of affairs in 1843, then, according to the French computation of time, I am hardly in the year 1789, and still less in the focus of the present.
Yes, German history flatters itself with a movement which no people in the firmament of history went through before it or will go through after it. For we shared the restorations of the modern nations although we had not shared their revolutions. We underwent a restoration, first because other nations dared to carry out a revolution and second because other nations suffered a counter-revolution, the first time because our rulers were afraid, and the
[3] Cf. Karl Marx, "The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law" (see this edition, Vol. 1, p. 205).—Ed.
second because our rulers were not afraid. We—and our shepherds first and foremost—never found ourselves in the company of freedom except once—on the day of its burial.
A school which legitimates the baseness of today by the baseness of yesterday, a school that declares rebellious every cry of the serf against the knout once that knout is a time-honoured, ancestral, historical one, a school to which history only shows its posterior as the God of Israel did to his servant Mosesa—the historical school of ku)[91]—would hence have invented German history had it not been an invention of German history. For every pound of flesh cut from the heart of the people the historical school of law—Shylock, but Shylock the bondsman—swears on its bond, its historical bond, its Christian-Germanic bond.
Good-natured enthusiasts, Germanomaniacs by extraction and free-thinkers by reflection, on the contrary, seek our history of freedom beyond our history in the primeval Teutonic forests. But what difference is there between the history of our freedom and the history of the boar's freedom if it can be found only in the forests? Besides, it is common knowledge that the forest echoes back what you shout into it. So let us leave the ancient Teutonic forests in peace!
War on the German conditions! By all means! They are below the level of history, beneath any criticism, but they are still an object of criticism like the criminal who is below the level of humanity but still an object for the executioner. In the struggle against those conditions criticism is no passion of the head, it is the head of passion. It is not a lancet, it is a weapon. Its object is its enemy, which it wants not to refute but to exterminate. For the spirit of those conditions is refuted. In themselves they are not objects worthy of thought, but phenomena which are as despicable as they are despised. Criticism does not need to make things clear to itself as regards this subject-matter, for it has already dealt with it. Criticism appears no longer as an end in itself, but only as a means. Its essential sentiment is indignation, its essential activity is denunci-ation.
It is a case of describing the dull reciprocal pressure of all social spheres on one another, a general,inactive ill humour, a limited-ness which recognises itself as much as it misjudges itself, within the frame of a government system which, living on the preservation of all wretchedness, is itself nothing but wretchedness in office.
What a sight! This infinitely proceeding division of society into
a The Holy Bible, Exodus 33:23.—Ed.
the most manifold races opposed to one another by petty an-tipathies, uneasy consciences and brutal mediocrity, and which, precisely because of their reciprocal ambiguous and distrustful attitude, are all, without exception although with various formalities, treated by their rulers as licensed existences. And they must recognise and acknowledge as a concession of heaven the very fact that they are mastered, ruled, possessedl On the other side are the rulers themselves, whose greatness is in inverse proportion to their number!
Criticism dealing with this content is criticism in hand-to-hand combat, and in such a fight the point is not whether the opponent is a noble, equal, interesting opponent, the point is to strike him. The point is not to allow the Germans a minute for self-deception and resignation. The actual pressure must be made more pressing by adding to it consciousness of pressure, the shame must be made more shameful by publicising it. Every sphere of German society must be shown as the partie honteuse' of German society; these petrified relations must be forced to dance by singing their own tune to them! The people must be taught to be terrified at itself in order to give it courage. This will be fulfilling an imperative need of the German nation, and needs of the nations are in themselves the ultimate reason for their satisfaction.
This struggle against the limited content of the German status quo cannot be without interest even for the modern nations, for the German status quo is the open completion of the ancien régime, and the ancien régime is the concealed deficiency of the modern state. The struggle against the German political present is the struggle against the past of the modern nations, and they are still troubled by reminders of that past. It is instructive for them to see the ancien régime, which has been through its tragedy with them, playing its comedy as a German ghost. Tragic indeed was the history of the ancien régime so long as it was the pre-existing power of the world, and freedom, on the other hand, was a personal notion, i.e., as long as this regime believed and had to believe in its own justification. As long as the ancien régime, as an existing world order, struggled against a world that was only coming into being, there was on its side a historical error, not a personal one. That is why its downfall was tragic.
On the other hand, the present German regime, an anachro-nism, a flagrant contradiction of generally recognised axioms, the nothingness of the ancien régime exhibited to the world, only
a Shameful part.— Ed.
imagines that it believes in itself and demands that the world should imagine the same thing. If it believed in its own essence, would it try to hide that essence under the semblance of an alien essence and seek refuge in hypocrisy and sophism? The modern ancien régime is only the comedian of a world order whose true heroes are dead. History is thorough and goes through many phases when carrying an old form to the grave. The last phase of a world-historical form is its comedy. The gods of Greece, already tragically wounded to death in Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, had to re-die a comic death in Lucian's Dialogues. Why this course of history? So that humanity should part with its past cheerfully. This cheerful historical destiny is what we vindicate for the political authorities of Germany.
However, once modern politico-social reality itself is subjected to criticism, once criticism rises to truly human problems, it finds itself outside the German status quo or else it would reach out for its object below its object. An example. The relation of industry, of the world of wealth generally, to the political world is one of the major problems of modern times. In what form is this problem beginning to engage the attention of the Germans? In the form of protective duties, of the prohibitive system, of national economy. Germanomania has passed out of man into matter, and thus one morning our cotton barons and iron champions saw themselves turned into patriots. People are therefore beginning in Germany to acknowledge the sovereignty of monopoly within the country by lending it sovereignty abroad. People are thus about to begin in Germany with what people in France and England are about to end. The old corrupt condition against which these countries are rebelling in theory and which they only bear as one bears chains is greeted in Germany as the dawn of a beautiful future which still hardly dares to pass from cunning[a] theory to the most ruthless practice. Whereas the problem in France and England is: Political economy or the rule of society over wealth, in Germany it is: National economy or the mastery of private property over nationality. In France and England, then, it is a case of abolishing monopoly that has proceeded to its last consequences; in Germany it is a case of proceeding to the last consequences of monopoly. There it is a case of solution, here as yet a case of collision. This is an adequate example of the German form of modern problems, an example of how our history, like a clumsy recruit, still has to do extra drill in matters that are old and hackneyed in history.
If therefore the whole German development did not exceed the German political development, a German could at the most participate in the problems of the present to the same extent as a Russian can. But, if the separate individual is not bound by the limitations of the nation, still less is the nation as a whole liberated by the liberation of one individual. The fact that Greece had a Scythian[a] among its philosophers did not help the Scythians to make a single step towards Greek culture.
Luckily we Germans are not Scythians. As the ancient peoples went through their pre-history in imagination, ,in mythology, so we Germans have gone through our post-history in thought, in philosophy. We are philosophical contemporaries of the present without being its historical contemporaries. German philosophy is the ideal prolongation of German history. If therefore, instead of the œuvres incomplètes of our real history, we criticise the œuvres posthumes of our ideal history, philosophy, our criticism is among the questions of which the present says: That is the question^ What in advanced nations is a practical break with modern political conditions, is in Germany, where even those conditions do not yet exist, at first a critical break with the philosophical reflection of those conditions.
German philosophy of law and state is the only German history which is al pari with the official modern reality. The German nation must therefore take into account not only its present conditions but also its dream-history, and subject to criticism not only these existing conditions but at the same time their abstract continuation. Its future cannot be limited either to the immediate negation of its real conditions of state and law or to the immediate implementation of its ideal state and legal conditions, for it has the immediate negation of its real conditions in its ideal conditions, and it has almost outlived the immediate implementation of its ideal conditions in the contemplation of neighbouring nations. Hence it is with good reason that the practical political party .in Germany[32]
demands the negation of philosophy. It is wrong, not in its demand, but in stopping at the demand, which it neither seriously implements nor can implement. It believes that it implements that negation by turning its back on philosophy and with averted face muttering a few trite and angry phrases about it. Owing to the limitation of its outlook it does not include philosophy in the circle of German reality or it even fancies it is beneath German practice and the theories that serve it. You demand that real living germs be made the starting point but you forget that the real living germ of the German nation has grown so far only inside its cranium. In a word—you cannot supersede philosophy without making it a reality.
The same mistake, but with the factors reversed, was made by the theoretical political party originating from philosophy.[53]
In the present struggle it saw only the critical struggle of philosophy against the German world; it did not give a thought to the fact that the hitherto prevailing philosophy itself belongs to this world and is its complement, although an ideal one. Critical towards its adversary, it was uncritical towards itself when, proceeding from the premises of philosophy, it either stopped at the results given by philosophy or passed off demands and results from somewhere else as immediate demands and results of philosophy, although these, provided they are justified, can be obtained only by the negation of hitherto existing philosophy, of philosophy as such. We reserve ourselves the right to a more detailed description of this party. Its basic deficiency may be reduced to the following: It thought it could make philosophy a reality without superseding it.
The criticism of the German philosophy of state and law, which attained its most consistent, richest and final formulation through Hegel, is both a critical analysis of the modern state and of the reality connected with it, and the resolute negation of the whole German political and legal consciousness as practised hitherto, the most distinguished, most universal expression of which, raised to the level of a science, is the speculative philosophy of law itself. If the speculative philosophy of law, that abstract extravagant thinking on the modern state, the reality of which remains a thing of the beyond, if only beyond the Rhine, was possible only in Germany, inversely the German thought-image of the modern state which disregards real man was possible only because and insofar as the modern state itself disregards real man or satisfies the whole of man only in imagination. In politics the Germans thought what other nations did. Germany was their theoretical consciousness. The abstraction and conceit of its thought always kept in step with the one-sidedness and stumpiness of its reality. If therefore the status quo of German statehood expresses the perfection of the ancien régime, the perfection of the thorn in the flesh of the modern state, the status quo of German political theory expresses the imperfection of the modern state, the defectiveness of its flesh itself.
Even as the resolute opponent of the previous form of German political consciousness the criticism of speculative philosophy of law turns, not towards itself, but towards problems which can only be solved by one means—practice.
It is asked: can Germany attain a practice à la hauteur des principes, i. e., a revolution which will raise it not only to the official level of the modern nations but to the height of humanity which will be the near future of those nations?
The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But for man the root is man himself. The evident proof of the radicalism of German theory, and hence of its practical energy, is that it proceeds from a resolute positive abolition of religion. The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest being for man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being, relations which cannot be better described than by the exclamation of a Frenchman when it was planned to introduce a tax on dogs: Poor dogs! They want to treat you like human beings!
Even historically, theoretical emancipation has specific practical significance for Germany. For Germany's revolutionary past is theoretical, it is the Reformation. As the revolution then began in the brain of the monk, so now it begins in the brain of the philosopher.
Luther, we grant, overcame the bondage of piety by replacing it by the bondage of conviction. He shattered faith in authority because he restored the authority of faith. He turned priests into laymen because he turned laymen into priests. He freed man from outer religiosity because he made religiosity the inner man. He freed the body from chains because he enchained the heart.
But if Protestantism was not the true solution it was at least the true setting of the problem. It was no longer a case of the layman's struggle against the priest outside himself but of his struggle against his own priest inside himself, his priestly nature. And if the Protestant transformation of the German laymen into priests emancipated the lay popes, the princes, with the whole of their priestly clique, the privileged and philistines, the philosophical transformation of priestly Germans into men will emancipate the people. But secularisation will not stop at the pillaging of churches practised mainly by hypocritical Prussia any more than emancipation stops at princes. The Peasant War, the most radical fact of German history, came to grief because of theology. Today, when theology itself has come to grief, the most unfree fact of German history, our status quo, will be shattered against philosophy. On the eve of the Reformation official Germany was the most unconditional slave of Rome. On the eve of its revolution it is the unconditional slave of less than Rome, of Prussia and Austria, of country squires and philistines.
A major difficulty, however, seems to stand in the way of a radical German revolution.
For revolutions require a passive element, a material basis. Theory can be realised in a people only insofar as it is the realisation of the needs of that people. But will the enormous discrepancy between the demands of German thought and the answers of German reality be matched by a corresponding discrepancy between civil society and the state and between civil society and itself? Will the theoretical needs be immediate practical needs? It is not enough for thought to strive for realisation, reality must itself strive towards thought.
But Germany did not go through the intermediary stages of political emancipation at the same time as the modern riations. It has not even reached in practice the stages which it has overtaken in theory. How can it do a somersault, not only over its own limitations, but at the same time over the limitations of the modern nations, over limitations which in reality it must feel and strive for as bringing emancipation from its real limitations? Only a revolution of radical needs can be a radical revolution and it seems that for this the preconditions and ground are lacking.
If however Germany has accompanied the development of the modern nations only with the abstract activity of thought without playing an effective role in the real struggle of that development, it has, on the other hand, shared the sufferings of that development, without sharing in its enjoyment or its partial satisfaction. To abstract activity on the one hand corresponds abstract suffering on the other. That is why Germany will one day find itself on the level of European decadence before ever having been on the level of European emancipation. It will be comparable to a fetish worshipper pining away with the diseases of Christianity.
If we now consider the German governments we find that because of the existing state of affairs, because of Germany's condition, because of the standpoint of German education and finally under the impulse of their own fortunate instinct, they are driven to combine the civilised shortcomings of the modern political world, the advantages of which we do not enjoy, with the barbaric deficiencies of the ancien régime, which we enjoy in full; hence Germany must share more and more, if not in the reasonableness, at least in the unreasonableness of those state formations which are beyond the bounds of its status quo. Is there in the world, for example, a country which shares so naively in all the illusions of the constitutional state without sharing in its realities as so-called constitutional Germany? And was it not perforce a German government's idea to combine the tortures of censorship with the tortures of the French September laws which presuppose freedom of the press?[34] As you could find the gods of all nations in the Roman Pantheon, so you will find in the Germans' Holy Roman Empire all the sins of all political forms.[35] That this eclecticism will reach a height never dreamt of before is guaranteed in particular by the political-aesthetic gourmandising of a German king* who intends to play all the roles of monarchy, whether feudal or bureaucratic, absolute or constitutional, autocratic or democratic, if not in the person of the people, at least in his own person, and if not for the people, at least for himself. Germany, as the deficiency of the political present constituted as a particular world, will not be able to throw down the specific German limitations without throwing down the general limitation of the political present.
It is not the radical revolution, not the general human emancipation which is a Utopian dream for Germany, but rather the partial, the merely political revolution, the revolution which leaves the pillars of the house standing. On what is a partial, a merely political revolution based? On the fact that part of civil society emancipates itself and attains general domination; on the fact that a definite class, proceeding from its particular situation, undertakes the general emancipation of society. This class emancipates the whole of society but only provided the whole of society is in the same situation as this class, e.g., possesses money and education or can acquire them at will.
No class of civil society can play this role without arousing a moment of enthusiasm in itself and in the masses, a moment in which it fraternises and merges with society in general, becomes confused with it and is perceived and acknowledged as its general representative; a moment in which its demands and rights are truly the rights and demands of society itself; a moment in which it is truly the social head and the social heart. Only in the name of the general rights of society can a particular class lay claim to general domination. For the storming of this emancipatory position, and hence for the political exploitation of all spheres of society in the
' Frederick William IV.— Ed.
interests of its own sphere, revolutionary energy and intellectual self-confidence alone are not sufficient. For the revolution of a nation and the emancipation of a particular class of civil society to coincide, for one estate to be acknowledged as the estate of the whole society, all the defects of society must conversely be concentrated in another class, a particular estate must be the general stumbling-block, the incorporation of the general limitation, a particular social sphere must be looked upon as the notorious crime of the whole of society, so that liberation from that sphere appears as general self-libera tion. For one estate to be par excellence the estate of liberation, another estate must conversely be the obvious estate of oppression. The negative general significance of the French nobility and the French clergy determined the positive general significance of the immediately adjacent and opposed class of the bourgeoisie.
But no particular class in Germany has the consistency, the severity, the courage or the ruthlessness that could mark it out as the negative representative of society. No more has any estate the breadth of soul that identifies itself, even for a moment, with the soul of the nation, the genius that inspires material might to political violence, or that revolutionary audacity which flings at the adversary the defiant words:/ am nothing and I should be everything. The main stem of German morals and honesty, of the classes as well as of individuals, is rather that modest egoism which asserts its limitedness and allows it to be asserted against itself. The relation of the various sections of German society is therefore not dramatic but epic. Each of them begins to be aware of itself and to settle down beside the others with all its particular claims not as soon as it is oppressed, but as soon as the circumstances of the time, without the section's own participation, create a social substratum on which it can in turn exert pressure. Even the moral self-confidence of the German middle class rests only on the consciousness that it is the general representative of the philistine mediocrity of all the other classes. It is therefore not only the German kings who accede to the throne mal à propos; every section of civil society goes through a defeat before it has celebrated victory, develops its own limitations before it has overcome the limitations facing it and asserts its narrow-hearted essence before it has been able to assert its magnanimous essence. Thus the very opportunity of a great role has on every occasion passed away before it is to hand, thus every class, once it begins the struggle against the class above it, is involved in the struggle against the class below it. Hence the princes are struggling against the monarchy, the bureaucrats against the nobility, and the bourgeois against them all, while the proletariat is already beginning to struggle against the bourgeoisie. No sooner does the middle class dare to think of emancipation from its own standpoint than the development of the social conditions and the progress of political theory pronounce that standpoint antiquated or at least problematic.
In France it is enough for somebody to be something for him to want to be everything; in Germany one has to be nothing if one is not to forego everything. In France partial emancipation is the basis of universal emancipation; in Germany universal emancipation is the conditio sine qua non of any partial emancipation. In France it is the reality of gradual liberation, in Germany the impossibility of gradual liberation, that must give birth to complete freedom. In France every class is politically idealistic and becomes aware of itself at first not as a particular class but as the representative of social requirements generally. The role of eman-cipator therefore passes in dramatic motion to the various classes of the French nation one after the other until it finally comes to the class which implements social freedom no longer on the basis of certain conditions lying outside man and yet created by human society, but rather organises all conditions of human existence on the presupposition of social freedom. In Germany, on the contrary, where practical life is as spiritless as spiritual life is unpractical, no class in civil society has any need or capacity for general emancipation until it is forced by its immediate condition, by material necessity, by its very chains.
Where, then, is the positive possibility of a German emancipation? Answer: In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong but wrong generally is perpetrated against it; which can no longer invoke a historical but only a human title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in an all-round antithesis to the premises of the German state; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete rewinning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.
The proletariat is coming into being in Germany only as a result of the rising industrial development. For it is not the naturally arising poor but the artificially impoverished, not the human masses mechanically oppressed by the gravity of society but the masses resulting from the drastic dissolution of society, mainly of the middle estate, that form the proletariat, although it is obvious that gradually the naturally arising poor and the Christian-Germanic serfs also join its ranks.
By proclaiming the dissolution of the hitherto existing world order the proletariat merely states the secret of its own existence, for it is in fact the dissolution of that world order. By demanding the negation of private property, the proletariat merely raises to the rank of a principle of society what society has made the principle of the proletariat, what, without its own co-operation, is already incorporated in it as the negative result of society. In regard to the world which is coming into being the proletarian then finds himself possessing the same right as the German king in regard to the world which has come into being when he calls the people his people as he calls the horse his horse. By declaring the people his private property the king simply states that the property owner is king.
As philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapons in philosophy. And once the lightning of thought has squarely struck this ingenuous soil of the people the emancipation of the Germans into human beings will take place.
Let us sum up the result: The only practically possible liberation of Germany is liberation that proceeds from the standpoint of the theory which proclaims man to be the highest being for man. In Germany emancipation from the Middle Ages is possible only as emancipation from the partial victories over the Middle Ages as well. In Germany no kind of bondage can be broken without breaking every kind of bondage. The thorough Germany cannot make a revolution without making a thoroughgoing revolution. The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of the human being. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat. Philosophy cannot be made a reality without the abolition of the proletariat, the proletariat cannot be abolished without philosophy being made a reality.
When all inner requisites are fulfilled the day of German resurrection will be proclaimed by the ringing call of the Gallic cock.
Endnotes
[80] [Editorial note 80: text not recovered from the source scan.]
[3] [Editorial note 3: text not recovered from the source scan.]
[91] [Editorial note 91: text not recovered from the source scan.]
[32] [Editorial note 32: text not recovered from the source scan.]
[53] [Editorial note 53: text not recovered from the source scan.]
[34] [Editorial note 34: text not recovered from the source scan.]
[35] [Editorial note 35: text not recovered from the source scan.]