3) Absolute Criticism's Third Campaign ( by Marx)

a) Absolute Criticism’s Self-Apology. Its "Political" Past

Absolute Criticism begins its third campaign against the "Mass" with the question:

"What is now the object of criticism?"

In the same number of the Literatur-Zeitung we find the information:

"Criticism wishes nothing but to know things."

According to this, all things are the object of Criticism. It would be senseless to inquire about some particular, definite object peculiar to Criticism. The contradiction is easily resolved when one remembers that all things "merge" into Critical things and all Critical things into the Mass, as the "Object" of "Absolute Criticism".

First of all, Herr Bruno describes his infinite pity for the "Mass." He makes "the gap that separates him from the crowd" an object of "persevering study." He wants "to find out the significance of that gap for the future" (this is what above was called knowing "all" things) and at the same time "to abolish it". In truth he therefore already knows the significance of that gap. It consists in being abolished by him.

As each man's self is nearest to him, "Criticism" first sets about abolishing its own mass nature, like the Christian ascetics who begin the campaign of the spirit against the flesh with the mortification of their own flesh. The "flesh" of Absolute Criticism is its really massive literary past, amounting to 20-30 volumes. Herr Bauer must therefore free the literary biography of "Criticism" — which coincides exactly with his own literary biography — from its mass-like appearance; he must retrospectively improve and explain it and by this apologetic commentary "place its earlier works in safety".

He begins by explaining by a double cause the error of the Mass, which until the end of the Deutsche Jahrbücher and the Rheinische Zeitung™ regarded Herr Bauer as one of its supporters. Firstly the mistake was made of regarding the literary movement as not "purely literary". At the same time the opposite mistake was made, that of regarding the literary movement as "a merely" or "purely" literary movement. There is no doubt that the "Mass" was mistaken in any case, if only because it made two mutually incompatible errors at the same time.

Absolute Criticism takes this opportunity of exclaiming to those who ridiculed the "German nation" as a "blue stocking":

"Name even a single historical epoch which was not authoritatively outlined beforehand by the 'pen' and had not to allow itself to be shattered by a stroke of the pen."

In his Critical naivety Herr Bruno separates "the p°n" from the subject who writes, and the subject who writes as "abstract writer" from the living historical man who wrote. This allows him to go into ecstasy over the wonder-working power of the "pen". He might just as well have demanded to be told of a historical movement which was not outlined beforehand by "poultry" or the "goose girl".

Later we shall be told by the same Herr Bruno that so far not one historical epoch, not a single one, has become known. How could the "pen", which so far has been unable to outline "any single" historical epoch after the event, have been able to outline them all beforehand?

Nevertheless, Herr Bruno proves the correctness of his view by deeds, by himself "outlining beforehand" his own "past" with apologetic "strokes of the pen".

Criticism, which was involved on all sides not only in the general limitation of the world and of the epoch, but in quite particular and personal limitations, and which nevertheless assures us that it has been "absolute, perfect and pure" Criticism in all its works for as long as man can think, has only accommodated itself to the prejudices and power of comprehension of the Mass, as God is wont to do in his revelations to man.

"It was bound to come," Absolute Criticism informs us, "to a breach of Theory with its seeming ally,"

But because Criticism, here called Theory for a change, comes to nothing, but everything, on the contrary, comes from it; because it develops not inside but outside the world, and has predestined everything in its divine immutable consciousness, the breach with its former ally was a "new turn" only in appearance, only for others, not in itself and not for Criticism itself.

"But this turn 'properly speaking' was not even new. Theory had continually worked on criticism of itself (we know how much effort has been expended on it to force it to criticise itself); "it had never flattered the Mass" (but itself all the more); "it had always taken care not to get itself ensnared in the premises of its opponent."

"The Christian theologian must tread cautiously." (Bruno Bauer, Das entdeckte Christentum, p. 99.) How did it happen that "cautious" Criticism nevertheless did get ensnared and did not already at that time express its "proper" meaning clearly and audibly? Why did it not speak out bluntly? Why did it let the illusion of its brotherhood with the Mass persist?

"'Why hast thou done this to me?' said Pharaoh to Abraham as he restored to him Sarah his wife. 'Why didst thou say she was thy sister?'" (Das entdeckte Christentum by Bruno Bauer, p. 100.) "'Away with reason and language!' says the theologian, 'for otherwise Abraham would be a liar. It would be a mortal insult to Revelation!'" (loc. cit.)

"Away with reason and language!" says the Critic. For had Herr Bauer really and not just apparently been ensnared with the Mass, Absolute Criticism would not be absolute in its revelations, it would be mortally insulted.

"It is only," Absolute Criticism continues, "that its" (Absolute Criticism's) "efforts had not been noticed, and there was moreover a stage of Criticism when it was forced sincerely to consider its opponent's premises and to take them seriously for an instant; a stage, in short, when it was not yet fully capable of taking away from the Mass the latter's conviction that it had the same cause and the same interest as Criticism."

"Criticism's, efforts had just not been noticed; therefore the Mass was to blame. On the other hand, Criticism admits that its efforts could not be noticed because it itself was not yet "capable" of making them noticeable. Criticism therefore appears to be to blame.

God help us! Criticism was "forced"—violence was used against it—"sincerely to consider its opponent's premises and to take them seriously for an instant". A fine sincerity, a truly theological sincerity, which does not really take a thing seriously but only "takes it seriously for an instant"; which has always, therefore every instant, been careful not to get itself ensnared in its opponent's premises, and nevertheless, "for an instant" "sincerely" takes these very premises into consideration. Its "sincerity" is still greater in the closing part of the sentence. It was in the same instant when

5-762 Criticism "sincerely took into consideration the premises of the Mass" that it "was not yet fully capable" of destroying the illusion about the unity of its cause and the cause of the Mass. It was not yet capable, but it already had the will and the thought of it. It could not yet outwardly break with the Mass but the break was already complete inside it, in its mind—complete in the same instant when it sincerely sympathised with the Mass!

In its involvement with the prejudices of the Mass, Criticism was not really involved in them; on the contrary, it was, properly speaking, free from its own limitation and was only "not yet completely capable" of informing the Mass of this. Hence all the limitation of "Criticism" was pure appearance; an appearance which without the limitation of the Mass would have been superfluous and would therefore not have existed at all. It is therefore again the Mass that is to blame.

Insofar as this appearance, however, was supported by "the inability", "the impotence" of Criticism to express its thought, Criticism itself was imperfect. This it admits in its own way, which is as sincere as it is apologetic.

"In spite of having subjected liberalism itself to devastating criticism, it" (Criticism) "could still be regarded as a peculiar kind of liberalism, perhaps as its extreme form; in spite of its true and decisive arguments having gone beyond politics, it nevertheless was still bound to give an appearance of engaging in politics, and this incomplete appearance won it most of the friends mentioned above."

Criticism won its friends through its incomplete appearance of engaging in politics. Had it completely appeared to engage in politics, it would inevitably have lost its political friends. In its apologetic anxiety to wash itself free of all sin, it accuses the false appearance of having been an incomplete false appearance, not a complete false one. By substituting one appearance for the other, "Criticism" can console itself with the thought that if it had the "complete appearance" of wishing to engage in politics, it does not have, on the other hand, even the "incomplete appearance" of anywhere or at any time having dissolved politics.

Not completely satisfied with the "incomplete appearance", Absolute Criticism again asks itself:

"How did it happen that Criticism at that time became involved in 'mass-linked, political' interests',^[1] that it—even" (!)—"was obliged" (!)—"to engage in politics" (!).

Bauer the theologian takes it as a matter of course that Criticism had to indulge endlessly in speculative theology for he, "Criticism", is indeed a theologian ex professo. But to engage in politics? That must be motivated by very special, political, personal circumstances!

Why, then, had "Criticism" to engage even in politics} "It was accused—that is the answer to the question." At least the "mystery" of "Bauer's politics" is thereby disclosed; at least the appearance, which in Bruno Bauer's Die gute Sache der Freiheit und meine eigene Sache links its "own cause" to the mass-linked "cause of freedom" by means of an "and", cannot be called non-political. But if Criticism pursued not its "own cause" in the interest of politics, but politics in the interest of its own cause, it must be admitted that not Criticism was taken in by politics, but politics by Criticism.

So Bruno Bauer was to be dismissed from his chair of theology^[34]: he was accused; "Criticism" had to engage in politics, that is to say, to conduct "its", i.e., Bruno Bauer's, suit. Herr Bauer did not conduct Criticism's suit, "Criticism" conducted Herr Bauer!s suit. Why did "Criticism" have to conduct its suit?

"In order to justify itself!" It may well be; only "Criticism" is far from limiting itself to such a personal, vulgar reason. It may well be; but not solely for that reason, "but mainly in order to bring out the contradictions of its opponents", and, Criticism could add, in order to have bound together in a single book old essays against various theologians — see among other things the wordy bickering with Planck,^[3]-' that family affair between "Bauer-theology" and Strauss-theology.

Having got a load off its heart by admitting the real interest of its "politics", Absolute Criticism remembers its'"suif and again chews the old Hegelian cud (see the struggle between Enlightenment and faith^[36] in the Phänomenologie, see the whole of the

Phänomenologie) that "the old which resists the new is no longer really the old", the cud which it has already chewed over at length in Die gute Sache der Freiheit. Critical Criticism is a ruminant animal. It keeps on warming up a few crumbs dropped by Hegel, like the above-quoted proposition about the "old" and the "new", or again that about the "development of the extreme out of its opposite extreme", and the like, without ever feeling the need to deal with "speculative dialectic" in any other way than by the exhaustion of Professor Hinrichs. Hegel, on the contrary, it continually transcends "Critically" by repeating him. For example:

"Criticism, by appearing and giving the investigation a new form, i.e., giving it the form which is no longer susceptible of being transformed into an external limitation," etc.

When I transform something I make it something essentially different. Since every form is also an "external limitation", no form is "susceptible" of being transformed into an "external limitation"

any more than an apple of being "transformed" into an apple. Admittedly, the form which "Criticism" gives to the investigation is not susceptible of being transformed into any "external limitation" for quite another reason. Beyond every "external limitation" it is blurred into an ash-grey, dark-blue vapour of nonsense.

"It" (the struggle between the old and the new) "would, however, be quite impossible even then" (namely at the moment when Criticism "gives" the investigation "the new form") "if the old were to deal with the question of compatibility or incompatibility ... theoretically."

But why does not the old deal with this question theoretically? Because "this, however, is least of all possible for it in the beginning, since at the moment of surprise" (i.e., in the beginning) it "knows neither itself nor the new", i.e., it deals theoretically neither with itself nor with the new. It would be quite impossible if "impossibility", unfortunately, were not impossible!

When the "Critic" from the theological faculty further "admits that he erred intentionally, that he committed the mistake deliberately and after mature reflection" (all that Criticism has experienced, learnt, and done is transformed for it into a free, pure and intentional product of its reflection) this confession of the Critic has only an "incomplete appearance" of truth. Since the Kritik der Synoptiker" has a completely theological foundation, since it is through and through theological criticism, Herr Bauer, university lecturer in theology, could write and teach it "without mistake or error". The mistake and error were rather on the part of the theological faculties, which did not realise how strictly Herr Bauer had kept his promise, the promise he gave in Kritik der Synoptiker, Bd. I, Foreword, p. xxiii.

"If the negation may appear still too sharp and far-reaching in this first volume too, we must remember that the truly positive can be born only if the negation has been serious and general.... In the end it will be seen that only the most devastating criticism of the world can teach us the creative power of Jesus and of his principle."

Herr Bauer intentionally separates the Lord "Jesus" and his "principle" in order to free the positive meaning of his promise from all semblance of ambiguity. And Herr Bauer has really made the "creative" power of the Lord Jesus and of his principle so evident that his "infinite self-consciousness" and the "Spirit" are nothing but creations of Christianity.

If Critical Criticism's dispute with the Bonn theological faculty explained so well its "politics" at that time, why did Critical Criticism continue to engage in politics after the dispute had been settled? Listen to this:

"At this point 'Criticism' should have either come to a halt or immediately proceeded further to examine the essence of politics and depict it as its adversary; — if only it had been possible for it to be able to come to a halt in the struggle at that time and if, on the other hand, there had not been a far too strict historical law that when a principle measures itself for the first time with its opposite it must let itself be repressed by it...."

What a delightful apologetic phrase! "Criticism should have come to a halt" if only it had been possible ... "to be able to come to a halt"! Who "should" come to a halt? And who should have done what "it would not have been possible ... to be able to do"? On the other hand! Criticism should have proceeded "if only, on the other hand, there had not been a far too strict historical law," etc. Historical laws are also "far too strict" with Absolute Criticism! If only they did not stand on the opposite side to Critical Criticism, how brilliantly the latter would proceed! But à la guerre comme à la

guerrel In history, Critical Criticism must allow itself to be made a sorry "story" of!

"If Criticism" (still Herr Bauer) "had to ... it will at the same time be admitted that it always felt uncertain when it gave in to demands of this" (political) "kind, and that as a result of these demands it came into contradiction with its true elements, a contradiction that had already found its solution in those elements."

Criticism was forced into political weaknesses by the all too strict laws of history, but — it entreats— it will at the same time be admitted that it was above those weaknesses, if not in reality, at least in itself. Firstly, it had overcome them, "in feeling", for "it always felt uncertain in its demands"; it felt ill at ease in politics, it could not make out what was the matter with it. More than that! It came into contradiction with its true elements. And finally the greatest thing of all! The contradiction with its true elements into which it came found its solution not in the course of Criticism's development, but "had", on the contrary, "already" found its solution in Criticism's true elements existing independently of the contradiction! These Critical elements can claim with pride: before Abraham was, we were. Before the opposite to us was produced by development, it lay yet unborn in our chaotic womb, dissolved, dead, ruined. But since Criticism's contradiction with its true elements "had already found its solution" in the true elements of Criticism, and since a solved contradiction is not a contradiction, it found itself, to be precise, in no contradiction with its true elements, in no contradiction with itself, and — the general aim of self-apology seems attained.

Absolute Criticism's self-apology has a whole apologetical dic-tionary at its disposal:

"not even properly speaking", "only not noticed", "there was besides", "not yet complete", "although — nevertheless", "not only — but mainly", "just as much, properly speaking, only", "Criticism should have if only it had been possible and if on the other hand", "if ... it will at the same time be admitted", "was it not natural, was it not inevitable", "neither ..." etc.

Not so very long ago Absolute Criticism said the following about apologetic phrases of this kind:

"'Although' and 'nevertheless', 'indeed' and 'but', a heavenly 'Nay', and an earthly 'Yea', are the main pillars of modern theology, the stilts on which it strides along, the artifice to which its whole wisdom is reduced, the phrase which recurs in all its phrases, its alpha and omega" (Das entdeckte Christentum, p. 102).

b) The Jewish Question No. 3

"Absolute Criticism" does not stop at proving by its autobiog-raphy its own singular almightiness which "properly speaking, first "creates the old, just as much as the new". It does not stop at writing in person the apology of its past. It now sets third persons, the rest of the secular world, the Absolute "Task", the "task which is much more important now", the apologia for Bauer's deeds and "works".

The Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher published a criticism of Herr Bauer's Die Judenfrage.^[3] His basic error, the confusion of "political" with "human emancipation", was revealed. True, the old Jewish question was not first brought into its "correct setting"; the "Jewish question" was rather dealt with and solved in the setting which recent developments have given to old questions of the day, and as a result of which the latter have become "questions" of the present instead of "questions" of the past.

Absolute Criticism's third campaign, it seems, is intended to reply to the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. First of all, Absolute Criticism admits:

"In Die Judenfrage the same 'oversight' was made — that of identifying the human with the political essence."

Criticism remarks:

"it would be too late to reproach criticism for the stand which it still maintained partially two years ago." "The question is rather to explain why criticism ... even had to engage in politics."

K. Marx, On the Jewish Question. See present edition, Vol. 3.—Ed.

"Two years ago?" We must reckon according to the absolute chronology, from the birth of the Critical Redeemer of the world, Bauer's Literatur-Zeitungl The Critical world redeemer was born anno 1843. In the same year the second, enlarged edition of Die Judenfrage was published. The "Critical" treatment of the "Jewish question" in Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz appeared later in the same year, 1843 old style.^[37] After the end of the Deutsche Jahrbücher and the Rheinische Zeitung, in the same momentous year 1843 old style, or anno 1 of the Critical era, appeared Herr Bauer's fantastic-political work Staat, Religion und Parthei, which exactly repeated his old errors on the "political essence". The apologist is forced to falsify chronology.

The "explanation" why Herr Bauer "even had to" engage in politics is a matter of general interest only under certain conditions. If the infallibility, purity and absoluteness of Critical Criticism are assumed as basic dogma, then, of course, the facts contradicting that dogma turn into riddles which are just as difficult, profound and mysterious as the apparently ungodly deeds of God are for theologians.

If, on the other hand, "the Critic" is considered as a finite individual, if he is not separated from the limitations of his time, one does not have to answer the question why he had to develop even within the world, because the question itself does not exist.

If, however, Absolute Criticism insists on its demand, one can offer to provide a little scholastic treatise dealing with the following "questions of the times":

"Why had the Virgin Mary's conception by the Holy Ghost to be proved by no other than Herr Bruno Bauer?" "Why had Herr Bauer to prove that the angel that appeared to Abraham was a real emanation of God, an emanation which, nevertheless, lacked the consistency necessary to digest food?" "Why had Herr Bauer to provide an apologia for the Prussian royal house and to raise the Prussian state to the rank of absolute state?" "Why had

Herr Bauer, in his Kritik der Synoptiker, to substitute 'infinite self-consciousness' for man?" "Why had Herr Bauer in his Das entdeckte Christentum to repeat the Christian theory of creation in a Hegelian form?" "Why had Herr Bauer to demand of himself and others an 'explanation' of the miracle that he was bound to be mistaken?"

While waiting for proofs of these necessities, which are just as "Critical" as they are "Absolute", let us listen once more to "Criticism's" apologetic evasions.

"The Jewish question ... had ... first to be brought into its correct setting, as a religious and theological and as a political question." "As to the treatment and solution of both these questions, Criticism is neither religious nor political."

The point is that the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher declares Bauer's treatment of the "Jewish question" to be really theological and /antostic-political.

First, "Criticism" replies to the "reproach" of theological limitation.

"The Jewish question is a religious question. The Enlightenment claimed to solve it by describing the religious contradiction as insignificant or even by denying it. Criticism, on the contrary, had to present it in its purity."

When we come to the political part of the Jewish question we shall see that in politics, too, Herr Bauer the theologian is not concerned with politics but with theology.

But when the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher attacked his treatment of the Jewish question as "purely religious", it was concerned especially with his article in Einundzwanzig Bogen, the title of which was:

"Die Fähigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen, frei zu werden" .⁽¹⁾

This article has nothing to do with the old "Enlightenment". It contains Herr Bauer's positive view on the ability of the present-day Jews to be emancipated, that is, on the possibility of their emancipation.

"Criticism" says:

"The Jewish question is a religious question."

The question is: What is a religious question? and, in particular, what is a religious question today?

The theologian will judge by appearances and see a religious question in a religious question. But "Criticism" must remember the explanation it gave Professor Hinrichs that the political interests of the present time have social significance, that it is "no longera question" of political interests}⁽²⁾

The Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher with equal right said to Criticism: Religious questions of the day have at the present time a social significance. It is no longer a question of religious interests as such. Only the theologian can believe it is a question of religion as religion. Granted, the Jahrbücher committed the error of not stopping at the word "social". It characterised the real position of the jews in civil society today. Once Jewry was stripped bare of the religious shell and its empirical, worldly, practical kernel was revealed, the practical, really social way in which this kernel is to be abolished could be indicated. Herr Bauer was content with a "religious question" being a "religious question".

It was by no means denied, as Herr Bauer makes out, that the Jewish question is also a religious question. On the contrary, it was shown that Herr Bauer grasps only the religious essence of Jewry, but not the secular, real basis of that religious essence. He combats religious consciousness as if it were something independent. Herr Bauer therefore explains the real Jews by the Jewish religion, instead of explaining the mystery of the Jewish religion by the real Jews. Herr Bauer therefore understands the Jew only insofar as he is an immediate object of theology or a theologian.

Consequently Herr Bauer has no inkling that real secular Jewry, and hence religious Jewry too, is being continually produced by the present-day civil life and finds its final development in the money system. He could not have any inkling of this because he did not know Jewry as a part of the real world but only as a part of his world, theology; because he, a pious, godly man, considers not the active everyday Jew but the hypocritical Jew of the Sabbath to be the real Jew. For Herr Bauer, as a theologian of the Christian faith, the world-historic significance of Jewry had to cease the moment Christianity was born. Hence he had to repeat the old orthodox view that it has maintained itself in spite of history; and the old theological superstition that Jewry exists only as a confirmation of the divine curse, as a tangible proof of the Christian revelation had to recur with him in the Critical-theological form that it exists and has existed only as crude religious doubt about the supernatural origin of Christianity, i.e., as a tangible proof against Christian revelation.

On the other hand, it was proved that Jewry has maintained itself and developed through history, in and with history, and that this development is to be perceived not by the eye of the theologian, but only by the eye of the man of the world, because it is to be found, not in religious theory, but only in commercial and industrial practice. It was explained why practical Jewry attains its full development only in the fully developed Christian world, why indeed it is the fully developed practice of the Christian world itself The existence of the present-day Jew was not explained by his religion — as though this religion were something apart, independently existing — but the tenacious survival of the Jewish religion was explained by practical features of civil society which are fantastically reflected in that religion. The emancipation of the Jews into human beings, or the human emancipation of Jewry, was therefore not conceived, as by Herr Bauer, as the special task of the Jews, but as a general practical task of the present-day world, which is Jewish to the core. It was proved that the task of abolishing the essence of Jewry is actually the task of abolishing the Jewish character of civil society, abolishing the inhumanity of the present-day practice of life, the most extreme expression of which is the money system.

Herr Bauer, as a genuine, although Critical, theologian or theological Critic, could not get beyond the religious contradiction. In the attitude of the Jews to the Christian world he could see only the attitude of the Jewish religion to the Christian religion. He even had to restore the religious contradiction in a Critical way—in.the antithesis between the attitudes of the Jew and the Christian to Critical religion—atheism, the last stage of theism, the negative recognition of God. Finally, in his theological fanaticism he had to restrict the ability of the "present-day Jews and Christians", i.e., of the present-day world, "to obtain freedom" to their ability to grasp "the Criticism" of theology and apply it themselves. For the orthodox theologian the whole world is dissolved in "religion and theology". (He could just as well dissolve it in politics, political economy, etc., and call theology heavenly political economy, for example, since it is the theory of the production, distribution, exchange and consumption of "spiritual wealth" and of the treasures of heaven!) Similarly, for the radical, Critical theologian, the ability of the world to achieve freedom, is dissolved in the single abstract ability to criticise "religion and theology" as "religion and theology". The only struggle he knows is the struggle against the religious limitations of self-consciousness, whose Critical "purity" and "infinity" is just as much a theological limitation.

Herr Bauer, therefore, dealt with the religious and theological question in the religious and theological way, if only because he saw in the "religious" question of the time a "purely religious" question. His "correct setting of the question" set the question "correctly" only in respect of his "own ability"—to answer!

Let us now go on to the political part of the Jewish question. The Jews (like the Christians) are fully politically emancipated in various states. Both Jews and Christians are far from being humanly emancipated. Hence there must be a difference between political and human emancipation. The essence of political emancipation, i.e., of the developed, modern state, must therefore be studied. On the other hand, states which cannot yet politically emancipate the Jews must be rated by comparison with the perfected political state and shown to be under-developed states.

That is the point of view from which the "political emancipation" of the Jews should have been dealt with and is dealt with in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.

Herr Bauer offers the following defence of "Criticism's" Die Judenfrage.

"The Jews were shown that they laboured under an illusion about the system from which they demanded freedom."

Herr Bauer did show that the illusion of the German Jews was to demand the right to partake in the political community life in a land where there was no political community and to demand political rights where only political privileges existed. On the other hand, Herr Bauer was shown that he himself, no less than the Jews, laboured under "illusions" about the "German political system". For he explained the position of the Jews in the German states as being due to the inability of "the Christian state" to emancipate the Jews politically. Flying in the face of the facts, he depicted the state of privilege, the Christian-Germanic state, as the Absolute Christian state. It was proved to him, on the contrary, that the politically perfected, modern state that knows no religious privileges is also the fully developed Christian state, and that therefore the fully developed Christian state, not only can emancipate the Jews but has emancipated them and by its very nature must emancipate them.

"The Jews are shown ... that they are under the greatest illusion about themselves when they think they are demanding freedom and the recognition of free humanity, whereas for them it is, and can be, only a question of a special privilege."

Freedom! Recognition of free humanity! Special privilege! Edifying words by which to by-pass certain questions apologetically!

Freedom? It was a question of political freedom. Herr Bauer was shown that when the Jew demands freedom and nevertheless refuses to renounce his religion, he "is engaging in politics" and sets no condition that is contrary to political freedom. Herr Bauer was shown that it is by no means contrary to political emancipation to divide man into the non-religious citizen and the religious private individual. He was shown that just as the "state emancipates itself from religion by emancipating itself from state religion and leaving religion to itself within civil society, so the individual emancipates himself politically from religion by regarding it no longer as a public matter but as a private matter. Finally, it was shown that the terroristic attitude of the French Revolution to religion, far from refuting this conception, bears it out.

Instead of studying the real attitude of the modern state to religion, Herr Bauer thought it necessary to imagine a Critical state, a state which is nothing but the Critic of theology inflated into a state in Herr Bauer's imagination. If Herr Bauer is caught up in politics he continually makes politics a prisoner of his faith, Critical faith. Insofar as he deals with the state he always makes out of it an argument against "the adversary", un-Critical religion and theology. The state acts as executor of Critical-theological cherished desires.

When Herr Bauer had first freed himself from orthodox, un-Critical theology, political authority took for him the place of religious authority. His faith in Jehovah changed into faith in the Prussian state. In Bruno Bauer's work Die evangelische Landeskirche* not only the Prussian state, but, quite consistently, the Prussian royal house too, was made into an absolute. In reality Herr Bauer had no political interest in that state; its merit, in the eyes of "Criticism", was rather that it abolished dogmas by means of the Unified Church^[38] and suppressed the dissenting sects with the help of the police.

The political movement that began in the year 1840 redeemed Herr Bauer from his conservative politics and raised him for a moment to liberal politics. But here again politics was in reality only a pretext for theology. In his work Die gute Sache der Freiheit und meine eigene Angelegenheit, the free state is the Critic of the theological faculty in Bonn and an argument against religion. In Die Judenfrage the contradiction between state and religion is the main interest, so that the criticism of political emancipation changes into a criticism of the Jewish religion. In his latest political work, Staat, Religion und Parthei, the most secret cherished desire of the Critic inflated into a state is at last expressed. Religion is sacrificed to the state or rather the state is only the means by which the opponent of "Criticism", un-Critical religion and theology, is done to death. Finally, after Criticism has been redeemed, if only apparently, from all politics by the socialist ideas, which have been spreading in Germany from 1843 onwards, in the same way as it was redeemed from its conservative politics by the political movement after 1840, it is finally able to proclaim its writings against un-Critical theology to be social and to indulge unhindered in its own Critical theology, the contrasting of Spirit and Mass, as the annunciation of the Critical Saviour and Redeemer of the world.

Let us return to our subject!

[B. Bauer,] Die evangelische Landeskirche Preussens und die Wissenschaft.— Ed.

Recognition of free humanity? "Free humanity", recognition of which the Jews did not merely think they wanted, but really did want, is. the same "free humanity" which found classic recognition in the so-called universal rights of man. Herr Bauer himself explicitly treated the Jews' efforts for recognition of their free humanity as their efforts to obtain the universal rights of man.

In the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher it was demonstrated to Herr Bauer that this "free humanity" and the "recognition" of it are nothing but the recognition of the egoistic civil individual and of the unrestrained movement of the spiritual and material elements which are the content 'of his life situation, the content of present-day civil life; that the rights of man do not, therefore, free man from religion, but give him freedom of religion; that they do not free him from property, but procure for him freedom of property; that they do not free him from the filth of gain, but rather give him freedom of gainful occupation.

It was shown that the recognition of the rights of man by the modern state has no other meaning than the recognition of slavery by the state of antiquity had. In other words, just as the ancient state had slavery as its natural basis, the modern state has as its natural basis civil society and the man of civil society, i.e., the independent man linked with other men only by the ties of private interest and unconscious natural necessity, the slave of labour for gain and of his own as well as other men's selfish need. The modern state has recognised this its natural basis as such in the universal rights of man. It did not create it. As it was the product of civil society driven beyond the old political bonds by its own development, the modern state, for its part, now recognised the womb from which it sprang and its basis by the declaration of the rights of man. Hence, the political emancipation of the Jews and the granting to them of the "rights of man" is an act the two sides of which are mutually dependent. Herr Riesser correctly expresses the meaning of the Jews' desire for recognition of their free humanity when he demands, among other things, the freedom of movement, sojourn, travel, earning one's living, etc. These manifestations of "free humanity" are explicitly recognised as such in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. The Jew has all the more right to the recognition of his "free humanity" as "free civil society" is of a thoroughly commercial and Jewish nature, and the Jew is a necessary member of it. The Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher further demonstrated why the member of civil society is called, par excellence, "Man" and why the rights of man are called "inborn rights".

The only Critical thing Criticism could say about the rights of man was that they are not inborn but arose in the course of history. That much Hegel had already told us. Finally, to its assertion that both Jews and Christians, in order to grant or receive the universal rights of man, must sacrifice the privilege of faith—the Critical theologian supposes his one fixed idea at the basis of all things — there was specially counterposed the fact contained in all un-Critical declarations of the rights of man that the right to believe what one wishes, the right to practise any religion, is explicitly recognised as a universal right of man. Besides, "Criticism" should have known that Hébert's party in particular was defeated on the pretext that it attacked the rights of man by attacking freedom of religion,^[39] and that similarly the rights of man were invoked later when freedom of worship was restored.^[40]

"As far as political essence is concerned, Criticism followed its contradictions to the point where the contradiction between theory and practice had been most thoroughly elaborated during the past fifty years — to the French representative system, in which the freedom of theory is disavowed by practice and the freedom of practical life seeks in vain its expression in theory.

"Now that the basic illusion has been done away with, the contradiction proved in the debates in the French Chamber, the contradiction between free theory and the practical validity of privileges, between the legal validity of privileges and a public system in which the egoism of the pure individual tries to dominate the exclusivity of the privileged, should be conceived as a general contradiction in this sphere."

The contradiction that Criticism proved in the debates in the French Chamber was nothing but a contradiction of constitutionalism. Had Criticism grasped it as a general contradiction it would have grasped the general contradiction of constitutionalism. Had it gone still further than in its opinion it "should have" gone, had it, to be precise, gone as far as the abolition of this general contradiction, it would have proceeded correctly from constitutional monarchy to arrive at the democratic representative state, the perfected modern statev Far from having criticised the essence of political emancipation and proved its definite relation to the essence of man, it would have arrived only at the fact of political emancipation, at the fully developed modern state, that is to say, only at the point where the existence of the modern state conforms to its essence and where, therefore, not only the relative, but the absolute imperfections, those which constitute its very essence, can be observed and described.

The above-quoted "Critical" passage is all the more valuable as it proves beyond any doubt that at the very moment when Criticism sees the "political essence" far below itself, it is, on the contrary, far below the political essence; it still needs to find in the latter the solution of its own contradictions and it still persists in not giving a thought to the modern principle of the state.

To "free theory" Criticism contrasts the "practical validity of privileges"; to the "legal validity of privileges" it contrasts the "public system".

In order not to misinterpret the opinion of Criticism, let us recall the contradiction it proved in the debates in the French Chamber, the very contradiction which "should have been conceived" as a general one. One of the questions dealt with was the fixing of a day in the week on which children would be freed from work. Sunday was suggested. One deputy moved to leave out mention of Sunday in the law as being unconstitutional. The Minister Martin (du Nord) saw in this motion an attempt to proclaim that Christianity had ceased to exist. Monsieur Crémieux declared on behalf of the French Jews that the Jews, out of respect for the religion of the great majority of Frenchmen, did not object to Sunday being mentioned. Now, according to free theory, Jews and Christians are equal, but according to this practice Christians have a privilege over Jews; for otherwise how could the Sunday of the Christians have a place in a law made for all Frenchmen? Should not the Jewish Sabbath have the same right, etc.? Or in the practical life of the French too, the Jew is not really oppressed by Christian privileges; but the law does not dare to express this practical equality. All the contradictions in the political essence expounded by Herr Bauer in Die Judenfrage are of this kind — contradictions of constitutionalism, which is, in general, the contradiction between the modern representative state and the old state of privileges.

Herr Bauer is committing a very serious oversight when he thinks he is rising from the political to the human essence by conceiving and criticising this contradiction as a "general" one. He would thus only rise from partial political emancipation to full political emancipation, from the constitutional state to the democratic representative state.

Herr Bauer thinks that by the abolition of privilege the object of privilege is also abolished. Concerning the statement of Monsieur Martin (du Nord), he says:

"There is no longer any religion when there is no longer any privileged religion. Take from religion its exclusive power and it will no longer exist."⁽³⁾

Just as industrial activity is not abolished when the privileges of the trades, guilds and corporations are abolished, but, on the contrary, real industry begins only after the abolition of these privileges; just as ownership of the land is not abolished when privileged land-ownership is abolished, but, on the contrary, begins its universal movement only with the abolition of privileges and with the free division and free sale of land; just as trade is not abolished by the abolition of trade privileges, but finds its true realisation in free trade; so religion develops in its practical universality only where there is no privileged religion (cf. the North American States).

The modern "public system'", the developed modern state, is not based, as Criticism thinks, on a society of privileges, but on a society in which privileges have been abolished and dissolved, on developed civil society in which the vital elements which were still politically bound under the privilege system have been set free. Here no "privileged exclusivity," stands opposed either to any other exclusivity or to the public system. Free industry and free trade abolish privileged exclusivity and thereby the struggle between the privileged exclusivities. They replace exclusivity with man freed from privilege — which isolates from the general totality but at the same time unites in a smaller exclusive totality — man no longer bound to other men even by the semblance of a common bond. Thus they produce the universal struggle of man against man, individual against individual. In the same way civil society as a whole is this war against one another of all individuals, who are no longer isolated from one another by anything but their individuality, and the universal unrestrained movement of the elementary forces of life freed from the fetters of privilege. The contradiction between the democratic representative state and civil society is the completion of the classic contradiction between public commonweal and slavery. In the modern world each person is at the same time a member of slave society and of the public commonweal. Precisely the slavery of civil society is in appearance the greatest freedom because it is in appearance the fully developed independence of the individual, who considers as his own freedom the uncurbed movement, no longer bound by a common bond or by man, of the estranged elements of his life, such as property, industry, religion, etc., whereas actually this is his fully developed slavery and inhumanity. Law has here taken the place of privilege.

It is therefore only here, where we find no contradiction between free theory and the practical validity of privilege, but, on the contrary, the practical abolition of privilege, free industry, free trade, etc., conform to "free theory", where the public system is not opposed by any privileged exclusivity, where the contradiction expounded by Criticism is abolished—only here is the fully developed modern state to be found.

Here also reigns the reverse of the law which Herr Bauer, on the occasion of the debates in the French Chamber, formulated in perfect agreement with Monsieur Martin (du Nord):

"Just as M. Martin (du Nord) saw the proposal to omit mention of Sunday in the law as a motion to declare that Christianity has ceased to exist, with equal reason (and this reason is very well founded) — the declaration that the law of the Sabbath is no longer binding on the Jews would be a proclamation abolishing Judaism."⁽⁴⁾

It is just the opposite in the developed modern state. The state declares that religion, like the other elements of civil life, only begins to exist in its full scope when the state declares it to be non-political and therefore leaves it to itself. To the dissolution of the political existence of these elements, as for example, the dissolution of property by the abolition of the property qualification for electors, the dissolution of religion by the abolition of the state church, to this proclamation of their civil death corresponds their most vigorous life, which henceforth obeys its own laws undis-turbed and develops to its full scope.

Anarchy is the law of civil society emancipated from divisive privileges, and the anarchy of civil society is the basis of the modern public system, just as the public system in its turn is the guarantee of that anarchy. To the same great extent that the two are opposed to each other they also determine each other.

It is clear how capable Criticism is of assimilating the "new". But if we remain within the bounds of "pure Criticism", the question arises: Why did Criticism not conceive as a universal contradiction the contradiction which it disclosed in connection with the debates in the French Chamber, although in its own opinion that is what "should have" been done?

"That step was, however, then impossible—not only because ... not only because ... but also because without that last remnant of inner involvement with its opposite Criticism was impossible and could not have come to the point from which only one step remained to be taken."

It was impossible ... because ... it was impossible! Criticism assures us, moreover, that the fateful "one step" necessary "to come to the point from which only one step remained to be taken"

was impossible. Who will dispute that? In order to be able to come to a point from which only "one step" remains to be taken, it is absolutely impossible to take that "one step" more which leads over the point beyond which still "one step" remains to be taken. All's well that ends well! At the end of the encounter with the Mass, which is hostile to Criticism's Die Judenfrage, "Criticism" admits that its conception of the "rights of man", its

"appraisal of religion in the French Revolution", the "free political essence it pointed to occasionally at the conclusion of its considerations", in short, the whole "period of the French Revolution, was for Criticism neither more nor less than a symbol — that is to say, not the period of the revolutionary efforts of the French in the exact and prosaic sense —a symbol and therefore only a fantastic expression of the shapes which it saw at the end".

We shall not deprive Criticism of the consolation that when it sinned politically it did so only at the "conclusion" and at the "end" of its works. A notorious drunkard used to console himself with the thought that he was never drunk before midnight.

In the sphere of the "Jewish question", Criticism has indisputa-bly been winning more and more ground from the Enemy. In No. 1 of the "Jewish question", the treatise of "Criticism" defended by Herr Bauer was still absolute and revealed the "true" and "general" significance of the "Jewish question". In No. 2 Criticism had neither the "will" nor the "right" to go beyond Criticism. In No. 3 it had still to take "one step", but that step was "impossible"—because it was—"impossible". It was not its "will or right" but its involvement in its "opposite" that prevented it from taking that "one step". It would very much have liked to clear the last obstacle, but unfortunately a last remnant of Mass stuck to its Critical seven-league boots.

c) Critical Battle against the French Revolution

The narrow-mindedness of the Mass forced the "Spirit", Criticism, Herr Bauer, to consider the French Revolution not as the time of the revolutionary efforts of the French in the "prosaic sense" but "only" as the "symbol and fantastic expression" of the Critical figments of his own brain. Criticism does penance for its "oversight" by submitting the Revolution to a fresh examination. At the same time it punishes the seducer of its innocence—"the Mass" — by communicating to it the results of this "fresh examination".

The chronological truth that an experiment of the eighteenth century like the French Revolution is still entirely an experiment of the eighteenth century, and not, for example, an experiment of the nineteenth, seems "still entirely" to be one of those truths which "are self-evident from the start". But in the terminology of Criticism,, which is very prejudiced against "crystal-clear" truths, a truth like that is called an "examination" and therefore naturally has its place in a "fresh examination of the Revolution".

"The ideas to which the French Revolution gave rise did not, however, lead beyond the order of things that it wanted to abolish by force."

Ideas can never lead beyond an old world order but only beyond the ideas of the old world order. Ideas cannot carry out anything at all. In order to carry out ideas men are needed who can exert practical force. In its literal sense the Critical sentence is therefore another truth that is self-evident, and therefore another "examination".

Undeterred by this examination, the French Revolution gave rise to ideas which led beyond the ideas of the entire old world order. The revolutionary movement which began in 1789 in the Cercle social,^[41] which in the middle of its course had as its chief representatives Leclerc and Roux, and which finally with Babeufs conspiracy was temporarily defeated, gave rise to the communist idea which Babeufs friend Buonarroti re-introduced in France after the Revolution of 1830. This idea, consistently developed, is the idea of the new world order.

"After the Revolution had therefore" (!) "abolished the feudal barriers in the life of the people, it was compelled to satisfy and even to inflame the pure egoism of the nation and, on the other hand, to curb it by its necessary complement, the recognition of a supreme being, by this higher confirmation of the general state system, which has to hold together the individual self-seeking atoms."

The egoism of the nation is the natural egoism of the general state system, as opposed to the egoism of the feudal classes. The supreme being is the higher confirmation of the general state system, and hence also of the nation. Nevertheless, the supreme being is supposed to curb the egoism of the nation, that is, of the general state system! A really Critical task, to curb egoism by means of its confirmation and even of its religious confirmation, i.e., by recognising that it is of a superhuman nature and therefore free of human restraint! The creators of the supreme being were not aware of this, their Critical intention.

Monsieur Bûchez, who bases national fanaticism on religious fanaticism, understands his hero Robespierre better.^[42] Nationalism [Nationalität] led to the downfall of Rome and Greece. Criticism therefore says nothing specific about the French Revolution when it maintains that nationalism caused its downfall, and it says just as little about the nation when it defines its egoism as pure. This pure egoism appears rather to be a very dark, spontaneous egoism, combined with flesh and blood, when compared, for example, with the pure egoism of Fichte's "ego". But if, in contrast to the egoism of the feudal classes, its purity is only relative, no "fresh examination of the revolution" was needed to see that the egoism which has a nation as its content is more general or purer than that which has as its content a particular social class or a particular corporation.

Criticism's explanations about the general state system are no less instructive. They are confined to saying that the general state system must hold together the individual self-seeking atoms.

Speaking exactly and in the prosaic sense, the members of civil society are not atoms. The specific property of the atom is that it has no properties and is therefore not connected with beings outside it by any relationship determined by its own natural necessity. The atom has no needs, it is self-sufficient; the world outside it is an absolute vacuum, i.e., is contentless, senseless, meaningless, just because the atom has all fullness in itself. The egoistic individual in civil society may in his non-sensuous imagination and lifeless abstraction inflate himself into an atom, i.e., into an unrelated, self-sufficient, wantless, absolutely full, blessed being. Unblessed sensuous reality does not bother about his imagination, each of his senses compels him to believe in the existence^[2] of the world and of individuals outside him, and even his profane stomach reminds him every day that the world outside him is not empty, but is what really fills. Every activity and property of his being, every one of his vital urges, becomes a need, a necessity, which his self-seeking transforms into seeking for other things and human beings outside him. But since the need of one individual has no self-evident meaning for another egoistic individual capable of satisfying that need, and therefore no direct connection with its satisfaction, each individual has to create this connection; it thus becomes the intermediary between the need of another and the objects of this need. Therefore, it is natural necessity, the essential human properties however estranged they may seem to be, and interest that hold the members of civil society together; civil, not political life is their real

There is evidently an error in the original: "an den Sinn" instead of "an das Sein".— Ed.

tie. It is therefore not the state that holds the atoms of civil society together, but the fact that they are atoms only in imagination, in the heaven of their fancy, but in reality beings tremendously different from atoms, in other words, not divine egoists, but egoistic human beings. Only political superstition still imagines today that civil life must be held together by the state, whereas in reality, on the contrary, the state is held together by civil life.

"Robespierre's and Saint-Just's tremendous idea of making a 'free people' which would live only according to the rules of justice and virtue—see, for example, Saint-Just's report on Danton's crimes and his other report on the general police — could be maintained for a certain time only by terror and was a contradiction against which the vulgar, self-seeking elements of the popular community reacted in the cowardly and insidious way that was only to be expected from them."

This phrase of Absolute Criticism, which describes a "free people" as a "contradiction" against which the elements of the "popular community" are bound to react, is absolutely hollow, for according to Robespierre and Saint-Just liberty, justice and virtue could, on the contrary, be only manifestations of the life of the "people" and only properties of the "popular community". Robespierre and Saint-Just spoke explicitly of "liberty, justice and virtue" of ancient times, belonging only to the "popular community". Spartans, Athenians and Romans at the time of their greatness were "free, just and virtuous peoples".

"What," asks Robespierre in his speech on the principles of public morals (sitting of the Convention on February 5, 1794), "is the fundamental principle of democratic or popular government? It is virtue, I mean public virtue, which worked such miracles in Greece and Rome and which will work still greater ones in republican France; virtue which is nothing but love of one's country and its laws.

Robespierre then explicitly calls the Athenians and Spartans "peuples libres".* He continually recalls the ancient popular community and quotes its heroes as well as its corrupters — Lycurgus, Demosthenes, Miltiades, Aristides, Brutus and Catilina, Caesar, Clodius and Piso.

In his report on Danton's arrest (referred to by Criticism) Saint-Just says explicitly:

"The world has been empty since the Romans, and only their memory fills it and still prophesies liberty."

His accusation is composed in the ancient style and directed against Danton as against Catilina.

In Saint-Just's other report, the one on the general police,*⁽¹⁾ the republican is described exactly in the ancient sense, as inflexible, modest, simple and so on. The police should be an institution of the same nature as the Roman censorship. — He does not fail to mention Codrus, Lycurgus, Caesar, Cato, Catilina, Brutus, An-tonius, and Cassius. Finally, Saint-Just describes the "liberty, justice and virtue" that he demands in a single word when he says:

"Que les hommes révolutionnaires soient des Romains."'^[1]

Robespierre, Saint-Just and their party fell because they confused the ancient, realistic-democratic commonweal based on real slavery with the modern spiritualistic-democratic representative state, which is based on emancipated slavery, bourgeois society. What a terrible illusion it is to have to recognise and sanction in the rights of man modern bourgeois society, the society of industry, of universal competition, of private interest freely pursuing its aims, of anarchy, of self-estranged natural and spiritual individuality, and at the same time to want afterwards to annul the manifestations of the life of this society in particular individuals and simultaneously to want to model the political head of that society in the manner of antiquity!

The illusion appears tragic when Saint-Just, on the day of his execution, pointed to the large table of the Rights of Man hanging in the hall of the Conciergerie and said with proud dignity: "C'est pourtant moi qui ai fait cela." b It was just this table that proclaimed the right of a man who cannot be the man of the ancient commonweal any more than his economic and industrial conditions are those of ancient times.

This is not the place to vindicate the illusion of the Terrorists historically.

"After the fall of Robespierre the political enlightenment and movement hastened to the point where they became the prey of Napoleon who, shortly after 18 Brumaire, could say: 'With my prefects, gendarmes and priests I can do what I like with France."'

Profane history, on the other hand, reports: After the fall of Robespierre, the political enlightenment, which formerly had been overreaching itself and had been extravagant, began for the first time to develop prosaically. Under the government of the Directory,^[46] bourgeois society, freed by the Revolution itself from the trammels of feudalism and officially recognised in spite of the Terror's wish to sacrifice it to an ancient form of political life, broke out in powerful streams of life. A storm and stress of commercial enterprise, a passion for enrichment, the exuberance of the new bourgeois life, whose first self-enjoyment is pert, light-hearted, frivolous and intoxicating; a real enlightenment of the land of France, the feudal structure of which had been smashed by the hammer of the Revolution and which, by the first feverish efforts of the numerous new owners, had become the object of all-round cultivation; the first moves of industry that had now become free — these were some of the signs of life of the newly emerged bourgeois society. Bourgeois society is positively represented by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, therefore, begins its rule. The rights of man cease to exist merely in theory.

It was not the revolutionary movement as a whole that became the prey of Napoleon on 18 Brumaire, as Criticism in its faith in a

Herr von Rotteck or Welcker believes^[47]; it was the liberal bourgeoisie. One only needs to read the speeches of the legislators of the time to be convinced of this. One has the impression of coming from the National Convention into a modern Chamber of Deputies.

Napoleon represented the last battle of revolutionary terror against the bourgeois society which had been proclaimed by this same Revolution, and against its policy. Napoleon, of course, already discerned the essence of the modern state; he understood that it is based on the unhampered development of bourgeois society, on the free movement of private interest, etc. He decided to recognise and protect this basis. He was no terrorist with his head in the clouds. Yet at the same time he still regarded the state as an end in itself and civil life only as a treasurer and his subordinate which must have no will of its own. He perfected the Terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution. He fed the egoism of the French nation to complete satiety but demanded also the sacrifice of bourgeois business, enjoyments, wealth, etc., whenever this was required by the political aim of conquest. If he despotically suppressed the liberalism of bourgeois society — the political idealism of its daily practice — he showed no more consideration for its essential material interests, trade and industry, whenever they conflicted with his political interests. His scorn of industrial hommes

d'affaires was the complement to his scorn of ideologists. In his home policy, too, he combated bourgeois society as the opponent of the state which in his own person he still held to be an absolute aim in itself. Thus he declared in the State Council that he would not suffer the owner of extensive estates to cultivate them or not as he pleased. Thus, too, he conceived the plan of subordinating trade to the state by appropriation of roulage.⁽²⁾ French businessmen took steps to anticipate the event that first shook Napoleon's power. Paris exchange brokers forced him by means of an artificially created famine to delay the opening of the Russian campaign by nearly two months and thus to launch it too late in the year.

Just as the liberal bourgeoisie was opposed once more by revolutionary terror in the person of Napoleon, so it was opposed once more by counter-revolution in the Restoration in the person of the Bourbons. Finally, in 1830 the bourgeoisie put into effect its wishes of the year 1789, with the only difference that its political enlightenment was now completed, that it no longer considered the constitutional representative state as a means for achieving the ideal of the state, the welfare of the world and universal human aims but, on the contrary, had acknowledged it as the official expression of its own exclusive power and the political recognition of its own special interests.

The history of the French Revolution, which dates from 1789, did not come to an end in 1830 with the victory of one of its components enriched by the consciousness of its own social importance.

d) Critical Battle against French Materialism

"Spinozism dominated the eighteenth century both in its later French variety, which made matter into substance, and in deism, which conferred on matter a more spiritual name.... Spinoza's French school and the supporters of deism were but two sects disputing over the true meaning of his system.... The simple fate of this Enlightenment was its decline in romanticism after being obliged to surrender to the reaction which began after the French movement."

That is what Criticism says. To the Critical history of French materialism we shall oppose a brief outline of its ordinary, mass-type history. We shall acknowledge with due respect the abyss between history as it really happened and history as it takes place according to the decree of "Absolute Criticism", the creator equally of the old and of the new. And finally, obeying the prescriptions of Criticism, we shall make the "Why?", "Whence?" and "Whither?" of Critical history the "object of a persevering study".

"Speaking exactly and in the prosaic sense", the French Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and in particular French materialism, was not only a struggle against the existing political institutions and the existing religion and theology; it was just as much an open, clearly expressed struggle against the metaphysics of the seventeenth century, and against all metaphysics, in particular that of Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza and Leibniz. Philosophy was counterposed to metaphysics, just as Feuerbach, in his first resolute attack on Hegel, counterposed sober philosophy to wild speculation. Seventeenth century metaphysics, driven from the field by the French Enlightenment, notably, by French materialism of the eighteenth century, experienced a victorious and substantial restoration in German philosophy, particularly in the speculative German philosophy of the nineteenth century. After Hegel linked it in a masterly fashion with all subsequent metaphysics and with German idealism and founded a metaphysical universal kingdom, the attack on theology again corresponded, as in the eighteenth century, to an attack on speculative metaphysics and metaphysics in general. It will be defeated for ever by materialism, which has now been perfected by the work of speculation itself and coincides with humanism. But just as

Feuerbach is the representative of materialism coinciding with humanism, in the theoretical domain, French and English socialism and communism represent materialism coinciding with humanism in the practical domain.

"Speaking exactly and in the prosaic sense", there are two trends in French materialism; one traces its origin to Descartes, the other to Locke. The latter is mainly a French development and leads directly to socialism. The former, mechanical materialism, merges with French natural science proper. The two trends intersect in the course of development. We have no need here to go more deeply into the French materialism that derives directly from Descartes, any more than into the French school of Newton and the development of French natural science in general.

We shall therefore merely say the following:

Descartes in his physics endowed matter with self-creative power and conceived mechanical motion as the manifestation of its life. He completely separated his physics from his metaphysics. Within his physics, matter is the sole substance, the sole basis of being and of knowledge.

Mechanical French materialism adopted Descartes' physics in opposition to his metaphysics. His followers were by profession anti-metaphysicians, i.e., physicists.

This school begins with the physician Le Roy, reaches its zenith with the physician Cabanis, and the physician La Mettrie is its centre. Descartes was still living when Le Roy, like La Mettrie in the eighteenth century, transposed the Cartesian structure of the animal to the human soul and declared that the soul is a modus of the body and ideas are mechanical motions. Le Roy even thought Descartes had kept his real opinion secret. Descartes protested. At the end of the eighteenth century Cabanis perfected Cartesian materialism in his treatise: Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme.^[48]

Cartesian materialism still exists today in France. It has achieved great successes in mechanical natural science which, "speaking exactly and in the prosaic sense", will be least of all reproached with romanticism.

The metaphysics of the seventeenth century, represented in France by Descartes, had materialism as its antagonist from its very birth. The latter's opposition to Descartes was personified by

Gassendi, the restorer of Epicurean materialism. French and English materialism was always closely related to Democritus and Epicurus. Cartesian metaphysics had another opponent in the English materialist Hobbes. Gassendi and Hobbes triumphed over their opponent long after their death at the very time when metaphysics was already officially dominant in all French schools.

Voltaire pointed out that the indifference of the French of the eighteenth century to the disputes between the Jesuits and the Jansenists^[49] was due less to philosophy than to Law's financial speculations. So the downfall of seventeenth-century metaphysics can be explained by the materialistic theory of the eighteenth century only in so far as this theoretical movement itself is explained by the practical nature of French life at that time. This life was turned to the immediate present, to worldly enjoyment and worldly interests, to the earthly world. Its anti-theological, anti-metaphysical, materialistic practice demanded corresponding anti-theological, anti-metaphysical, materialistic theories. Metaphysics had in practice lost all credit. Here we have only to indicate briefly the theoretical course of events.

Jn the seventeenth century metaphysics (cf. Descartes, Leibniz, and others) still contained a positive, secular element. It made discoveries in mathematics, physics and other exact sciences which seemed to come within its scope. This semblance was done away with as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century. The positive sciences broke away from metaphysics and marked out their independent fields. The whole wealth of metaphysics now consisted only of beings of thought and heavenly things, at the very time when real beings and earthly things began to be the centre of all interest. Metaphysics had become insipid. In the very year in which Malebranche and Arnauld, the last great French metaphysicians of the seventeenth century, died, Helvétius and Condillac were born.

The man who deprived seventeenth-century metaphysics and metaphysics in general of all credit in the domain of theory was Pierre Bayle. His weapon was scepticism, which he forged out of metaphysics' own magic formulas. He himself proceeded at first from Cartesian metaphysics. Just as Feuerbach by combating speculative theology was driven further to combat speculative philosophy, precisely because he recognised in speculation the last prop of theology, because he had to force theology to retreat from pseudo-science to crude, repulsive faith, so Bayle too was driven by religious doubt to doubt about the metaphysics which was the prop of that faith. He therefore critically investigated metaphysics in its entire historical development. He became its historian in order to write the history of its death. He refuted chiefly Spinoza and Leibniz.

Pierre Bayle not only prepared the reception of materialism and of the philosophy of common sense in France by shattering metaphysics with his scepticism. He heralded the atheistic society which was soon to come into existence by proving that a society consisting only of atheists is possible, that an atheist can be a man worthy of respect, and that it is not by atheism but by superstition and idolatry that man debases himself.

To quote a French writer, Pierre Bayle was "the last metaphysician in the sense of the seventeenth century and the first philosopher in the sense of the eighteenth century".

Besides the negative refutation of seventeenth-century theology and metaphysics, a positive, anti-metaphysical system was required. A book was needed which would systematise and theoretically sub-stantiate the life practice of that time. Locke's treatise An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding came from across the Channel as if in answer to a call. It was welcomed enthusiastically like a long-awaited guest.

The question arises: Is Locke perhaps a disciple of Spinoza? "Profane" history can answer:

Materialism is the natural-born son of Great Britain.^[50] Already the British schoolman, Duns Scotus, asked, "whether it was impossible for matter to think}"

In order to effect this miracle, he took refuge in God's omnipotence, i.e., he made theology preach materialism. Moreover, he was a nominalist.^[51] Nominalism, the first form of materialism, is chiefly found among the English schoolmen.

The real progenitor of English materialism and all modern experi-mental science is Bacon. T o him natural philosophy is the only true philosophy, and physics based upon the experience of the senses is the chiefest part of natural philosophy. Anaxagoras and his homoeomeriae^[52], Democritus and his atoms, he often quotes as his authorities. According to him the senses are infallible and the source of all knowledge. All science is based on experience, and consists in subjecting the data furnished by the senses to a rational method of investigation. Induction, analysis, comparison, observation, experiment, are the principal forms of such a rational method. Among the qualities inherent in matter, motion is the first and foremost, not only in the form of mechanical and mathematical motion, but chiefly in the form of an impulse, a vital spirit, a tension—or a 'Qwa/',52a to use a term of Jakob Böhme's— of matter. The primary forms of matter are the living, individual-ising forces of being inherent in it and producing the distinctions between the species.

In Bacon, its first creator, materialism still holds back within itself in a naive way the germs of a many-sided development. On the one hand, matter, surrounded by a sensuous, poetic glamour, seems to attract man's whole entity by winning smiles. On the other, the aphoristically formulated doctrine pullulates with incon-sistencies imported from theology.

In its further evolution, materialism becomes one-sided. Hobbes is the man who systématises Baconian materialism. Knowledge based upon the senses loses its poetic blossom, it passes into the abstract experience of the geometrician. Physical motion is sacrificed to mechanical or mathematical motion; geometry is proclaimed as the queen of sciences. Materialism takes to misanthropy. If it is to overcome its opponent, misanthropic, fleshless spiritualism, and that on the latter's own ground, materialism has to chastise its own flesh and turn ascetic. Thus it passes into an intellectual entity; but thus, too, it evolves all the consistency, regardless of consequences, characteristic of the intellect.

Hobbes, as Bacon's continuator, argues thus: if all human knowledge is furnished by the senses, then our concepts, notions, and ideas are but the phantoms of the real world, more or less divested of its sensual form. Philosophy can but give names to these phantoms. One name may be applied to more than one of them. There may even be names of names. But it would imply a contradiction if, on the one hand, we maintained that all ideas had their origin in the world of sensation, and, on the other, that a word was more than a word; that besides the beings known to us by our senses, beings which are one and all individuals, there existed also beings of a general, not individual, nature. An unbodily substance is the same absurdity as an unbodily body. Body, being, substance, are but different terms for the same reality. It is impossible to separate thought from matter that thinks. This matter is the substratum of all changes going on in the world. The word infinite is meaningless, unless it states that our mind is capable of performing an endless process of addition. Only material things being perceptible, knowable to us, we cannot know anything about the existence of God. My own existence alone is certain. Every human passion is a mechanical movement which has a beginning and an end. The objects of impulse are what we call good. Man is subject to the same laws as nature. Power and freedom are identical.

Hobbes had systematised Bacon without, however, furnishing a proof for Bacon's fundamental principle, the origin of all human knowledge and ideas from the world of sensation.

It was Locke who, in his Essay on the Humane Understanding, supplied this proof.

Hobbes had shattered the theistic prejudices of Baconian materialism; Collins, Dodwell, Coward, Hartley, Priestley, similarly shattered the last theological bars that still hemmed in Locke's sensationalism. At all events, for materialists, deism is but an easy-going way of getting rid of religion.

We have already mentioned how opportune Locke's work was for the French. Locke founded the philosophy of bon sens, of common sense; i.e., he said indirectly that there cannot be any philosophy at variance with the healthy human senses and reason based on them.

Locke's immediate pupil, Condillac, who translated him into French, at once applied Locke's sensualism against seventeenth-century metaphysics. He proved that the French had rightly rejected this metaphysics as a mere botch work of fancy and theological prejudice. He published a refutation of the systems of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Malebranche.

In his Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines he expounded Locke's ideas and proved that not only the soul, but the senses too, not only the art of creating ideas, but also the art of sensuous perception., are matters of experience and habit. The whole development of man therefore depends on education and external circumstances. It was only by eclectic philosophy that Condillac was ousted from the French schools.

The difference between French and English materialism reflects the difference between the two nations. The French imparted to English materialism wit, flesh and blood, and eloquence. They gave it the temperament and grace that it lacked. They civilised it.

In Helvétius, who also based himself on Locke, materialism assumed a really French character. Helvétius conceived it immediately in its application to social life (Helvétius, De l'homme) P The sensory qualities and self-love, enjoyment and correctly understood personal interest are the basis of all morality. The natural equality of human intelligences, the unity of progress of reason and progress of industry, the natural goodness of man, and the omnipotence of education, are the main features in his system.

In La Mettrie's works we find a synthesis of Cartesian and English materialism. He makes use of Descartes' physics in detail. His L'homme machine is a treatise after the model of Descartes' animal-machine. The physical part of Holbach's Système de la nature is also a result of the combination of French and English materialism, while the moral part is based essentially on the morality of Helvétius.^[54] Robinet (De la nature), the French materialist who had the most connection with metaphysics and was therefore praised by Hegel, refers explicitly to Leibniz.

We need not dwell on Volney, Dupuis, Diderot and others, any more than on the physiocrats, after we have proved the dual origin of French materialism from Descartes' physics and English materialism, and the opposition of French materialism to seventeenth-century metaphysics, to the metaphysics of Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Leibniz. This opposition only became evident to the Germans after they themselves had come into opposition to speculative metaphysics.

Just as Cartesian materialism passes into natural science proper, the other trend of French materialism leads directly to socialism and communism.

There is no need for any great penetration to see from the teaching of materialism on the original- goodness and equal intellectual endowment of men, the omnipotence of experience, habit and education, and the influence of environment on man, the great significance of industry, the justification of enjoyment, etc., how necessarily materialism is connected with communism and socialism. If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc., from the world of the senses and the experience gained in it, then what has to be done is to arrange the empirical world in such a way that man experiences and becomes accustomed to what is truly human in it and that he becomes aware of himself as man. If correctly understood interest is the principle of all morality, man's private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity. If man is unfree in the materialistic sense, i.e., is free not through the negative power to avoid this or that, but through the positive power to assert his true individuality, crime must not be punished in the individual, but the anti-social sources of crime must be destroyed, and each man must be given social scope for the vital manifestation of his being. If man is shaped by environment, his environment must be made human. If man is social by nature, he will develop his true nature only in society, and the power of his nature must be measured not by the power of the separate individual but by the power of society.

These and similar propositions are to be found almost literally even in the oldest French materialists. This is not the place to assess them. The apologia of vices by Mandeville, one of Locke's early English followers, is typical of the socialist tendencies of materialism. He proves that in modern society vice is indispensable and useful.* This was by no means an apologia for modern society.

Fourier proceeds directly from the teaching of the French materialists. The Babouvists were crude, uncivilised materialists, but developed communism, too, derives directly from French materialism. The latter returned to its mother-country, England, in the form Helvétius gave it. Bentham based his system of correctly understood interest on Helvétius' morality, and Owen proceeded from Bentham's system to found English communism. Exiled to England, the Frenchman Cabet came under the influence of communist ideas there and on his return to France became the most popular, if the most superficial, representative of communism. Like Owen, the more scientific French Communists, Dézamy,

Gay and others, developed the teaching of materialism as the teaching of real humanism and the logical basis of communism.

Where, then, did Herr Bauer or, Criticism, manage to acquire the documents for the Critical history of French materialism?

1) Hegel's Geschichte der Philosophieb presents French materialism as the realisation of the Substance of Spinoza, which at any rate is far more comprehensible than "the French school of Spinoza".

2) Herr Bauer read Hegel's Geschichte der Philosophie as saying that French materialism was the school of Spinoza. Then, as he found in another of Hegel's works that deism and materialism are two parties representing one and the same basic principle, he concluded that Spinoza had two schools which disputed over the meaning of his system. Herr Bauer could have found the supposed explanation in Hegel's Phänomenologie, where it is said:

"Regarding that Absolute Being, Enlightenment itself falls out with itself ... and is divided between the views of two parties.... The one ... calls Absolute Being that predicateless Absolute ... the other calls it matter .... Both are entirely the same notion — the distinction lies not in the objective fact, but purely in the diversity of starting-point adopted by the two developments" (Hegel, Phänomenologie, pp. 420, 421, 422).a

3) Finally Herr Bauer could find, again in Hegel, that when Substance does not develop into a concept and self-consciousness, it degenerates into "romanticism". The journal Hallische Jahrbücher at one time developed a similar theory.

But at all costs the "Spirit" had to decree a "foolish destiny" for its "adversary", materialism.

Note. French materialism's connection with Descartes and Locke and the opposition of eighteenth-century philosophy to seventeenth-century metaphysics are presented in detail in most recent French histories of philosophy. In this respect, we had only to repeat against Critical Criticism what was already known. But the connection of eighteenth-century materialism with English and French communism of the nineteenth century still needs to be presented in detail. We confine ourselves here to quoting a few typical passages from Helvétius, Holbach and Bentham.

1) Helvétius. "Man is not wicked, but he is subordinate to his interests. One must not therefore complain of the wickedness of man but of the ignorance of the legislators, who have always placed the particular interest in opposition to the general interest." — "The moralists have so far had no success because we have to dig into legislation to pull out the roots which create vice. In New Orleans women have the right to repudiate their husbands as soon as they are tired of them. In countries like that women are not faithless, because they have no interest in being so." — "Morality is but a frivolous science when not combined with politics and legislation." — "The hypocritical moralists can be recognised on the one hand by the equanimity with which they consider vices which undermine the state, and on the other by the fury with which they condemn private vice." — "Human beings are born neither good nor bad but ready to become one or the other according as a common interest unites or divides them." — "If citizens could not achieve their own particular good without achieving the general good, there would be no vicious people except fools" {De l'esprit, t. I, Paris, 1822,^[55] pp. 117, 240, 241, 249, 251, 369 and 339).

As, according to Helvétius, it is education, by which he means (cf. loc. cit., p. 390) not only education in the ordinary sense but the totality of the individual's conditions of life, which forms man, if a reform is necessary to abolish the contradiction between particular interests and those of society, so, on the other hand, a transformation of consciousness is necessary to carry out such a reform:

"Great reforms can be implemented only by weakening the stupid respect of the peoples for old laws and customs" (loc. cit., p. 260)

or, as he says elsewhere, by abolishing ignorance.

2) Holbach. "Ce n'est que lui-même que l'homme peut aimer dans les objets qu'il aime: ce n'est que lui-même qu'il peut affectionner dans les êtres de son espèce." "L'homme ne peut jamais se séparer de lui-même dans aucun instant de sa vie; il ne peut se perdre de vue." "C'est toujours notre utilité, notre intérêt ... qui nous fait hair ou aimer les objets".^[3] (Système social, t. 1, Paris, 1822, pp. 80, 112), but "L'homme pour son propre intérêt doit aimer les autres hommes puisqu'ils sont nécessaires à son bien-être... La morale lui prouve, que de tous les êtres le plus nécessaire à l'homme c'est l'homme", (p. 76). "La vraie morale, ainsi que la vraie politique, est celle qui cherche à approcher les hommes, afin de les faire travailler par des efforts réunis à leur bonheur mutuel. Toute morale qui sépare nos intérêts de ceux de nos associés est fausse, insensée, contraire à la nature"⁽¹⁾ (p. 116). "Aimer les autres ... c'est confondre nos intérêts avec ceux de nos associés, afin de travailler à l'utilité commune... La vertu n'est que l'utilité des hommes réunis en société (p. 77). "Un homme sans passions ou sans désirs cesserait d'être un homme... Parfaitement détaché de lui-même, comment pourrait-on le déterminer à s'attacher à d'autres? Un homme, indifférent pour tout, privé de passions, qui se suffirait à lui-même, ne serait plus un être sociable... La vertu n'est que la communication du bien"⁽²⁾ (loc. cit., p. 118). "La morale religieuse ne servit jamais à rendre les mortels plus sociables" (loc. cit., p. 36).

"Man can only love himself in the objects he loves: he can have affection only for himself in the other beings of his kind." "Man can never separate himself from himself for a single instant in his life; he cannot lose sight of himself." 'Tt is always our convenience, our interest ... that makes us hate or love things."—Ed.

"In his own interest man must love other men, because they are necessary to his welfare.... Morality proves to him that of all beings the most necessary to man is man."—Ed.

3) Bentham. We only quote one passage from Bentham in which he opposes "intérêt general in the political sense". "L'intérêt des individus ... doit céder à l'intérêt public. Mais ... qu'est-ce que cela signifie? Chaque individu n'est-il pas partie du public autant que chaque autre? Cet intérêt public, que vous personnifiez, n'est qu'un terme abstrait: il ne représente que la masse des intérêts individuels... S'il était bon de sacrifier la fortune d'un individu pour augmenter celle des autres, il serait encore mieux d'en sacrifier un second, un troisième, sans qu'on puisse assigner aucune limite.... Les intérêts individuels sont les seuls intérêts réels"^[3]

(Bentham, Théorie des peines et des récompenses, Paris, 1826, 3 e m e éd., II, p. [229], 230).

e) Final Defeat of Socialism

"The French set up a series of systems of how the mass should be organised, but they had to resort to fantasy because they considered the mass, as it is, to be usable material."

Actually, the French and the English have proved, and proved in great detail, that the present social system organises the "mass as it is" and is therefore its organisation. Criticism, following the example of the Allgemeine Zeitung, disposes of all socialist and communist systems by means of the fundamental word "fantasy"?⁽¹⁾

Having thus shattered foreign socialism and communism, Criticism transfers its war-like operations to Germany.

"When the German Enlighteners suddenly found themselves disappointed in their hopes of 1842 and, in their embarrassment, did not know what to do, news of the recent French systems came in the nick of time. They were henceforth able to speak of raising the lower classes of the people and at that price they were able to dispense with the question whether they did not themselves belong to the mass, which is to be found not only in the lowest strata."

Criticism has obviously so exhausted its entire provision of well meaning motives in the apologia for Bauer's literary past that it can find no other explanation for the German socialist movement than the "embarrassment" of the Enlighteners in 1842. "Fortunately they received news of the recent French systems." Why not of the English} For the decisive Critical reason that Herr Bauer received no news of the recent English systems through Stein's book: Der Communismus und Socialismus des heutigen Frankreichs. This is also the decisive reason why only French systems ever exist for Criticism in all its talk about socialist systems.

The German Enlighteners, Criticism goes on to explain, committed a sin against the Holy Ghost. They busied themselves with the "lower classes of the people", already in existence in 1842, in order to get rid of the question, which did not yet exist then, as to what rank they were destined to occupy in the Critical world system that was to be instituted in anno 1843: sheep or goat, Critical Critic or impure Mass, Spirit or Matter. But above all they should have thought seriously of the Critical salvation of their own souls, for of what profit is it to me if I gain the whole world, including the lower classes of the people, and suffer the loss of my own soul?

"But a spiritual being cannot be raised to a higher level unless it is altered, and it cannot be altered before it has experienced extreme resistance."

Were Criticism better acquainted with the movement of the lower classes of the people it would know that the extreme resistance that they have experienced from practical life is changing them every day. Modern prose and poetry emanating in England and France from the lower classes of the people would show it that the lower classes of the people know how to raise themselves spiritually even without being directly overshadowed by the Holy Ghost of Critical Criticism.

"They," Absolute Criticism continues to indulge in fancy, "whose whole wealth is the word 'organisation of the mass'", etc.

A lot has been said about "organisation of labour", although even this "catchword" came not from the Socialists themselves but from the politically radical party in France, which tried to be an intermediary between politics and socialism.^[58] But nobody before Critical Criticism spoke of "organisation of the mass" as of a question yet to be solved. It was proved, on the contrary, that bourgeois society, the dissolution of the old feudal society, is this organisation of the mass.

Criticism puts its discovery in quotation marks [Gänsefüssea]. The goose that cackled to Herr Bauer the watchword for saving the Capitol ^{[5 9]} is none but his own goose, Critical Criticism. It organised the mass anew by speculatively constructing it as the Absolute Opponent of the Spirit. The antithesis between spirit and mass is the Critical "organisation of society", in which the Spirit, or Criticism, represents the organising work, the mass — the raw material, and history — the product. After Absolute Criticism's great victories over revolution, materialism and socialism in its third campaign, we may ask: What is the final result of these Herculean feats? Only that these movements perished without any result because they were still criticism adulterated by mass or spirit adulterated by matter. Even in Herr Bauer's own literary past Criticism discovered manifold adulterations of criticism by the mass. But here it writes an apologia instead of a criticism, "places in safety" instead of surrendering; instead of seeing in the adulteration of the spirit by the flesh the death of the spirit too, it reverses the case and finds in the adulteration of the flesh by the spirit the life even of Bauer's flesh. On the other hand, it is all the more ruthless and decisively terroristic as soon as imperfect criticism still adulterated by mass is no longer the work of Herr Bauer but of whole peoples and of a number of ordinary Frenchmen and Englishmen; as soon as imperfect criticism is no longer entitled Die Judenfrage, or Die gute Sache der Freiheit, or Staat, Religion und Parthei, but revolution, materialism, socialism or communism. Thus Criticism did away with the adulteration of spirit by matter and of criticism by mass by sparing its own flesh and crucifying the flesh of others.

One way or the other, the "spirit adulterated by flesh" or "Criticism adulterated by mass" has been cleared out of the way. Instead of this un-Critical adulteration, there appears absolutely Critical disintegration of spirit and flesh, criticism and mass, their pure opposition. This opposition in its world-historic form in which it constitutes the true historical interest of the present time, is the opposition of Herr Bauer and Co., or the Spirit, to the rest of the human race as Matter.

Revolution, materialism and communism therefore have fulfilled their historic mission. By their downfall they have prepared the way for the Critical Lord. Hosanna!

f) The Speculative Cycle of Absolute Criticism and the Philosophy of Self-Consciousness

Criticism, having supposedly attained perfection and purity in one domain, therefore committed only one oversight, "only" one "inconsistency", that of not being "pure" and "perfect" in all domains. The "one" Critical domain is none other than that of theology. The pure area of this domain extends from the Kritik der Synoptiker by Bruno Bauer to Das entdeckte Christenthum by Bruno Bauer, as the farthest frontier post.

Criticism's earlier admission that it had been involved in political prejudice was immediately followed by the extenuating circumstance that this involvement had been "basically so slight!" Now the admission of inconsistency is tempered by the parenthesis that it was committed only in individual, falsely expounded points. It was not

Herr Bauer who was to blame, but the false points which ran away with Criticism like recalcitrant mounts.

A few quotations will show that by overcoming Spinozism Criticism ended up in Hegelian idealism, that from "Substance" it arrived at another metaphysical monster, the "Subject", "Substance as a process", "infinite self-consciousness", and that the final result of "perfect" and "pure" Criticism is the restoration of the Christian theory of creation in a speculative, Hegelian form.

Let us first open the Kritik der Synoptiker.

"Strauss remains true to the view that Substance is the Absolute. Tradition in this form of universality, which has not yet attained the real and rational certitude of universality, that certitude which can be attained only in self-consciousness, in the oneness and infinity of self-consciousness, is nothing but Substance which has emerged from its logical simplicity and has assumed a definite form of existence as the power of the community" (Kritik der Synoptiker, Vol. I, Preface, pp. vi [-vii]).

Let us leave to their fate "the universality which attains certitude", the "oneness and infinity" (the Hegelian Notion).— Instead of saying that the view put forward in Strauss' theory on the "power of the community" and "tradition" has its abstract expression, its logical and metaphysical hieroglyphic, in the Spinozist conception of Substance, Herr Bauer makes "Substance emerge from its logical simplicity and assume a definite form of existence in the power of the community". He applies the Hegelian miracle apparatus by which the "metaphysical categories" — abstractions ex-tracted out of reality— emerge from logic, where they are dissolved in the "simplicity" of thought, and assume "a definite form" of physical or human existence; he makes them become incarnate. Help, Hinrichsl

"Mysterious," Criticism continues its argument against Strauss, "mysterious is this view because whenever it wishes to explain and make visible the process to which the gospel history owes its origin, it can only bring out the semblance of a process [...] The sentence: 'The gospel history has its source and origin in tradition', posits the same thing twice—'tradition' and the 'gospel history'; admittedly it does posit a relation between them, but it does not tell us to what internal process of Substance the development and exposition owe their origin."⁽¹⁾

According to Hegel, Substance must be conceived as an internal process. He characterises development from the viewpoint of Substance as follows:

"But if we look more closely at this expansion, we find that it has not come about by one and the same principle taking shape in diverse ways; it is only the shapeless repetition of one and the same thing ... keeping up a tedious semblance of diversity" (Phänomenologie, Preface, p. 12).

Help, Hinrichs!

"Criticism," Herr Bauer continues, "according to this, must turn against itself and look for the solution of the mysterious substantiality ... in what the development of Substance itself leads to, in the universality and certitude of the idea and its real existence, in infinite self-consciousness."

Hegels criticism of the substantiality view continues:

"The compact solidity of Substance is to be opened up and Substance raised to self-consciousness" (loc. cit., p. 7).

Bauer's self-consciousness, too, is Substance raised to self-consciousness or self-consciousness as Substance; self-consciousness is transformed from an attribute of man into a self-existing subject. This is the metaphysical-theological caricature of man in his severance from nature. The being of this self-consciousness is therefore not man, but the idea of which self-consciousness is the real existence. It is the idea become man, and therefore it is infinite. All human qualities are thus transformed in a mysterious way into qualities of imaginary "infinite self-consciousness". Hence, Herr Bauer says expressly that everything has its origin and its explanation in this "infinite self-consciousness", i.e., finds in it the basis of its existence. Help, Hinrichs !

Herr Bauer continues:

"The power of the substantiality relation lies in its impulse, which leads us to the concept, the idea and self-consciousness."

Hegel says:

"Thus the concept is the truth of the substance." "The transition of the substantiality relation takes place through its own immanent necessity and consists in this only, that the concept is the truth of the substance." "The idea is the adequate concept." "The concept ... having achieved free existence ... is nothing but the ego or pure self-consciousness" (Logik, Hegel's Werke, 2nd ed., Vol. 5, pp. 6, 9, 229, 13).

Help, Hinrichsl It seems comic in the extreme when Herr Bauer says in his Literatur-Zeitung:

It was not a complete criticism of Hegel's system that Herr Bauer himself thought he was giving in his Kritik der Synoptiker but at the most the completion of Hegeh system, at least in its application to theology.

He describes his criticism (Kritik der Synoptiker, Preface, p. xxi) as "the last act of a definite system", which is no other than Hegeh system.

The dispute between Strauss and Bauer over Substance and Self-Consciousness is a dispute within Hegelian speculation. In Hegel there are three elements, Spinoza's Substance, Fichte's Self-Consciousness and Hegel's necessarily antagonistic unity of the two, the Absolute Spirit. The first element is metaphysically disguised nature separated from man; the second is metaphysically disguised spirit separated from nature; the third is the metaphysically disguised unity of both, real man and the real human species.

Within the domain of theology, Strauss expounds Hegel from Spinoza's point of view, and Bauer does so from Fichte's point of view, both quite consistently. They both criticised Hegel insofar as with him each of the two elements was falsified by the other, whereas they carried each of these elements to its one-sided and hence consistent development.— Both of them therefore go beyond Hegel in their criticism, but both also remain within his speculation and each represents only one side of his system. Feuerbach, who completed and criticised Hegel from Hegel's point of view by resolving the metaphysical Absolute Spirit into "real man on the basis of nature", was the first to complete the criticism of religion by sketching in a grand and masterly manner the basic features of the criticism-of Hegel's speculation and hence of all metaphysics.

With Herr Bauer it is, admittedly, no longer the Holy Ghost, but nevertheless infinite self-consciousness that dictates the writings of the evangelist.

"We ought not any longer to conceal the fact that the correct conception of the gospel history also has its philosophical basis, namely, the philosophy of self-consciousness" (Bruno Bauer, Kritik der Synoptiker, Preface, p. xv).

This philosophy of Herr Bauer, the philosophy of self-consciousness, like the results he achieved by his criticism of theology, must be characterised by a few extracts from Das entdeckte Christenthum, his last work on the philosophy of religion.

Speaking of the French materialists, he says:

"When the truth of materialism, the philosophy of self-consciousness, is revealed and self-consciousness is recognised as the Universe, as the solution of the riddle of Spinoza's substance and as the true causa sui⁽²⁾ ..., what is the purpose of the Spirit?

What is the purpose of self-consciousness} As if self-consciousness, by positing the world, did not posit distinction, and did not produce itself in all it produces, since it does away again with the distinction of what it produced from itself, and since, consequently it is itself only in production and in movement — as if self-consciousness in this movement, which is itself, had not its purpose and did not possess itself!" (Das

entdeckte Christenthum, p. 113.)

"The French materialists did, indeed, conceive the movement of self-consciousness as the movement of the universal being, matter, but they could not yet see that the movement of the universe became real for itself and achieved unity with itself only as the movement of self-consciousness" (1. c, pp. [ 114-] 115).

Help, Hinrichsl In plain language the first extract means: the truth of materialism is the opposite of materialism, absolute, i.e., exclusive, unmitigated idealism. Self-consciousness, the Spirit, is the Universe. Outside of it there is nothing. "Self-consciousness", "the Spirit", is the almighty creator of the world, of heaven and earth. The world is a manifestation of the life of self-consciousness which has to alienate itself and take on the form of a slave, but the difference between the world and self-consciousness is only an apparent difference. Self-consciousness distinguishes nothing real from itself. The world is, rather, only a metaphysical distinction, a phantom of its ethereal brain and an imaginary product of the latter. Hence self-consciousness does away again with the appearance, which it conceded for a moment, that something exists outside of it, and it recognises in what it has "produced" no real object, i.e., no object which in reality is distinct from it. By this movement, however, self-consciousness first produces itself as absolute, for the absolute idealist, in order to be an absolute idealist, must necessarily constantly go through the sophistical process of first transforming the world outside himself into an appearance, a mere fancy of his brain, and afterwards declaring this fantasy to be what it really is, i.e., a mere fantasy, so as finally to be able to proclaim his sole, exclusive existence, which is no longer disturbed even by the semblance of an external world.

In plain language the second extract means: The French materialists did, of course, conceive the movements of matter as movements involving spirit, but they were not yet able to see that they are not material, but ideal movements, movements of self-consciousness, consequently pure movements of thought. They were not yet able to see that the real movement of the universe became true and real only as the ideal movement of self-consciousness free and freed from matter, that is, from reality; in other words, that a material movement distinct from ideal brain movement exists only in appearance. Help, Hinrichsl This speculative theory of creation is almost word for word in Hegel; it can be found in his first work, his Phänomenologie.

"The alienation of self-consciousness itself establishes thinghood.... In this alienation self-consciousness establishes itself as object, or sets up the object as itself. On the other hand, there is also this other moment in the process that it has just as much abolished this alienation and objedification and resumed them into itself.... This is the movement of consciousness" (Hegel, Phänomenologie, pp. 574-75).

"Self-consciousness has a content, which it distinguishes from itself.... This content in its distinction is itself the ego, for it is the movement of superseding itself.... More precisely stated, this content is nothing but the very movement just spoken of; for the content is the Spirit which traverses the whole range of its own being, and does this for itself as Spirit" (loc. cit., pp. [582-] 583).⁽³⁾

Referring to this theory of creation of Hegel's, Feuerbach observes:

"Matter is the self-alienation of the spirit. Thereby matter itself acquires spirit and reason — but at the same time it is assumed as a nothingness, an unreal being, inasmuch as being producing itself from this alienation, i.e., being divesting itself of matter, of sensuousness, is pronounced to be being in its perfection, in its true shape and form. Therefore the natural, the material, the sensuous, is what is to be negated here too, as nature poisoned by original sin is in theology" (Philosophie der Zukunft, p. 35).

Herr Bauer therefore defends materialism against un-Critical theology, at the same time as he reproaches it with "not yet" being Critical theology, theology of reason, Hegelian speculation. Hinrichs! Hinrichs!

Herr Bauer, who in all domains carries through his opposition to Substance, his philosophy of self-consciousness or of the Spirit, must therefore in all domains have only the figments of his own brain to deal with. In his hands, Criticism is the instrument to sublimate into mere appearance and pure thought all that affirms a finite material existence outside infinite self-consciousness. What he combats in Substance is not the metaphysical illusion but its mundane kernel—nature; nature both as it exists outside man and as man's nature. Not to presume Substance in any domain — he still uses this language — means therefore for him not to recognise any being distinct from thought, any natural energy distinct from the spon-taneity of the spirit, any power of human nature distinct from reason, any passivity distinct from activity, any influence of others distinct from one's own action, any feeling or willing distinct from knowing, any heart distinct from the head, any object distinct from the subject, any practice distinct from theory, any man distinct from the Critic, any real community distinct from abstract generality, any Thou distinct from I. Herr Bauer is therefore consistent when he goes on to identify himself with infinite self-consciousness, with the Spirit, i.e., to replace these creations of his by their creator. He is just as consistent in rejecting as stubborn mass and matter the rest of the world which obstinately insists on being something distinct from what he, Herr Bauer, has produced. And so he hopes:

It will not be long Before all bodies perish.⁽⁴⁾

His own ill-humour at so far being unable to master "the something of this clumsy world" he interprets equally consistently as the self-discontent of this world, and the indignation of his Criticism at the development of mankind as the mass-type indignation of mankind against his Criticism, against the Spirit, against Herr Bruno Bauer and Co.

Herr Bauer was a theologian from the very beginning, but no ordinary one; he was a Critical theologian or a theological Critic. While still the extreme representative of old Hegelian orthodoxy who put in a speculative form all religious and theological nonsense, he constantly proclaimed Criticism his private domain. At that time he called Strauss' criticism human criticism and expressly asserted the right of divine criticism in opposition to it. He later stripped the great self-reliance or self-consciousness, which was the hidden kernel of this divinity, of its religious shell, made it self-existing as an independent being, and raised it, under the trade-mark ''Infinite Self-consciousness^, to the rank of the principle of Criticism. Then he accomplished in his own movement the movement that the "philosophy of self-consciousness" describes as the absolute act of life. He abolished anew the "distinction" between "the product", infinite self-consciousness, and the producer, himself, and acknowledged that infinite self-consciousness in its movement "was only he himself, and that therefore the movement of the universe only becomes true and real in his ideal self-movement.

Divine criticism in its return into itself is restored in a rational, conscious, Critical way; being in-itself is transformed into being in-and-for-itself and only at the end does the fulfilled, realised, revealed beginning take place. Divine criticism, as distinct from human criticism, reveals itself as Criticism, pure Criticism, Critical Criticism. The apologia for the Old and the New Testament is replaced by the apologia for the old and new works of Herr Bauer, The theological antithesis of God and man, spirit and flesh, infinity and finiteness is transformed into the Critical-theological antithesis of the Spirit, Criticism, or Herr Bauer, and the matter of the mass, or the secular world. The theological antithesis of faith and reason has been resolved into the Critical-theological antithesis of common sense and pure Critical thought. The Zeitschrift für spekula-tive Theologie has been transformed into the Critical Literatur-Zeitung. The religious redeemer of the world has finally become a reality in the Critical redeemer of the world, Herr Bauer. Herr Bauer's last stage is not an anomaly in his development; it is the return of his development into itself from its alienation. Naturally, the point at which divine Criticism alienated itself and came out of itself coincided with the point at which it became partly untrue to itself and created something human. Returning to its starting-point, Absolute Criticism has ended the speculative cycle and thereby its own life's career. Its further movement is pure, lofty circling within itself, above all interest of a mass nature and therefore devoid of any further interest for the Mass.

---

Endnotes

[34] Concerning Bruno Bauer's dismissal from the chair of theology, see Note 10. Bauer replied to the Government's repressive measures by the publication 'in Zurich and Winterthur in 1842 of the pamphlet: Die gute Sache der Freiheit und meine eigene Angelegenheit.

[36] Marx has in mind the section of Hegel's book Phänomenologie des Geistes entitled "Die Kampf der Aufklärung mit dem Aberglauben".

a B. Bauer, Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker.—Ed.

[37] The article in question is Bruno Bauer's "Die Fähigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen, frei zu werden", which was published in the collection Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz, Zurich and Winterthur, 1843; along with the book Die Judenfrage (an enlarged edition of Bauer's articles on this subject first published in 1842), this article was subjected to a critical analysis by Marx in his article "Zur Judenfrage" in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. The reference is to the attempt to unite the various Lutheran trends by means of

(1) "The Ability of Present-Day Jews and Christians to Obtain Freedom." — Ed.

(2) See pp. 90-91 of this volume.—Ed.

[38] the forced Union of 1817, when the Lutherans were united with the Reformed (Calvinist) Church to form the Evangelical Church. The Old Lutherans, who opposed this union, seceded to form their own trend defending the "true" Lutheran Church.

[39] The reference is to the policy of de-christianisation pursued in France by Hebert and his supporters in the autumn of 1793. Outwardly it was expressed in the closing of churches and the renunciation of Catholic rites. The forcible methods used to implement these measures outraged believers, especially among the peasants.

[40] In their efforts to consolidate the Jacobin dictatorship, Robespierre and his supporters opposed the policy of de-christianisation. A decree of the Convention on December 6, 1793, prohibited "all violence or threats directed against the freedom of worship".

(3) This passage from B. Bauer's Die Judenfrage (p. 66) is quoted by Marx in his article "On the Jewish Question" (see present edition, Vol. 3, p. 149).— Ed.

(4) This passage from B. Bauer's Die Judenfrage (p. 71) is quoted by Marx in his article "On the Jewish Question" (see present edition, Vol. 3, p. 149).— Ed. Here and below quotations are taken from the article "Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand der Kritik?" (Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft VIII).— Ed.

"The French Revolution was an experiment which still belonged entirely to the eighteenth century."

[41] Cercle social— an organisation established by democratic intellectuals in Paris in the first years of the French Revolution. Its chief spokesman, Claude Fauchet, demanded an equalitarian division of the land, restrictions on large fortunes and employment for all able-bodied citizens. The criticism to which Fauchet and his supporters subjected the formal equality proclaimed in the documents of the French Revolution prepared the ground for bolder action in defence of the destitute by Jacques Roux, Théophile Leclerc and other members of the radical-plebeian "Enragés".

[42] Marx has in mind the Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française, t. 1-40, Paris, 1834-38, published by the French historian and publicist Ph. J. Bûchez jointly with P. C. Roux-Lavergne. It consisted of numerous documents. The introductory articles by Bûchez, a former Republican and pupil of Saint-Simon, who adopted the views of Christian Socialism in the 1830s, praised the Jacobins' activity and their revolutionary traditions but censured the steps taken by them against the Catholic clergy.

[2] The reference is to the review made by the bookbinder C.Reichardt of A. T Woeniger's Publicistische Abhandlungen, Berlin, 1843. The review was published in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft I, December 1843 and Heft II, January 1844, under the general title "Schriften über den Pauperismus" and mentioned the author's profession. The short excerpts and individual expressions quoted by Engels below and at the end of Chapter I are taken from this review.

(1) Free peoples.— Ed.

[46] The Directory— the regime established in France as a result of the overthrow of the Jacobin government on July 27 (9 Thermidor), 1794, and the introduction on November 4, 1795, by the Thermidor Convention, of a new anti-democratic constitution. Supreme executive power was concentrated in the hands of five Directors. The Directory, whose rule was marked by the flowering of enterprise and speculation, remained in existence until the coup d'état of November 9 (18 Brumaire), 1799, which completed the bourgeois counter-revolution and led to the personal rule of General Napoleon Bonaparte.

"Let revolutionary men be Romans."—Ed. "Yet it was I who made that."—Ed.

[47] The reference is apparently to the relevant articles in the Staats-Lexikon, oder Encyklopädie der Staatswissenschaften, Bd. 1-15, 1834-48, published by the German liberal historian C. Rotteck and the German liberal jwrist C. Welcker. Rotteck was also the author of the four-volume Allgemeine Weltgeschichte für alle Stände, von den frühesten Zeiten bis zum Jahre 1831, Stuttgart, 1833.

(2) Road haulage.— Ed.

[48] The first complete edition of the work of P.J.G. Cabanis appeared in Paris in 1802. But a considerable part had been published in 1798 and 1799 in the Transactions of the French Academy, under the title: Traité du physique et du moral de l'homme.

[49] The Jansenists—named after the Dutch theologian Cornelius Jansen — were an opposition trend among French Catholics in the 17th and early 18th centuries. Their views were vigorously resisted by official Catholicism.

[50] A large excerpt from this subsection of The Holy Family, beginning with this sentence and ending with the words: "... deism is but an easy-going way of getting rid of religion"'(see p. 129 of this volume), was subsequently included with a few changes by Engels in his Introduction to the 1892 English edition of his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Accordingly the passage is here given in Engels' translation except for the changes which he made.

[51] The Nominalists were adherents of a trend in medieval scholasticism, generally considered heretical and dangerous, which maintained that only individual things exist and that generality belongs only to words. They criticised the traditional "realist" doctrine, derived from Plato, that universals or "ideas" have real existence above and independent of individual things, and likewise the "concep-tualist" view that while universals do not exist outside the mind they do exist in the mind as general conceptions. The doctrine of Nominalism was later forcefully taken up and developed by the English materialist philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Homoeomeriae, according to the teaching of the ancient Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, are tiny qualitatively determined material particles which are infinite in number and variety and form the primary basis of all that exists; their combinations constitute all the variety of things.

[52] In his Introduction to the 1892 English edition of his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels gives the following explanation of this term: "'Qual' is a philosophical • play upon words. Qual literally means torture, a pain which drives to action of some kind; at the same time the mystic Böhme puts into the German word something of the meaning of the Latin qualitas; his 'qual' was the activating principle arising from, and promoting in its turn, the spontaneous development of the thing, relation, or person subject to it, in contradistinction to a pain inflicted from without."

[54] Many of the works by the philosophers mentioned were vigorously denounced by the Church and the Government authorities. La Mettrie's book, L'homme machine, published anonymously in Leyden in 1748, was burned and its author was banished from Holland, where he had emigrated from France in 1745. When the first edition of Holbach's Système de la Nature, ou des Loix du Monde physique et du Monde moral was put out in 1770, the name of the author was given as J. B. Mirabeau, secretary of the French Academy who had died in 1760.

a Bernard de. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits.— Ed. h G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie.—Ed.

[55] The first edition of Helvétius' book De l'esprit was published anonymously in Pans in 1758 and was burned by the public executioner in 1759.

English text taken from the translation by J. B. Bailie, published by Allen and Unwin, 1931, pp. 591, 592, 593.— Ed.

(1) "True morality, and true politics as well, is that which seeks to bring men nearer to one another to make them work by united efforts for their common happiness. Any morality which separates our interests from those of our associates, is false, senseless, unnatural." — Ed. "To love others ... is to merge our interests with those of our associates, to work for the common benefit.... Virtue is but the usefulness of men united in society." — Ed.

(2) "A man without desires or passions would cease to be a man.... Perfectly detached from himself, how could one make him decide to attach himself to others? A man indifferent to everything and having no passions, sufficient to himself, would cease to be a social being.... Virtue is but the communication of good."—Ed. "Religious morality never served to make mortals more sociable." — Ed. 6-762

(1) "The interest of individuals ... must give way to the public interest. But ... what does that mean? Is not each individual part of the public as much as any other? This public interest that you personify is but an abstract term: it represents but the mass of individual interests.... If it were good to sacrifice the fortune of one individual to increase that of others, it would be better to sacrifice that of a second, a third, and so on ad infinitum.... Individual interests, are the only real inter-ests."—Ed.

[58] The reference is to members of a political grouping which formed in France around the newspaper La Réforme (see Note 16). One of the leaders of this grouping, the petty-bourgeois Socialist Louis Blanc, put out in 1839-40 a pamphlet entitled L'organisation du travail, which became widely known.

[59] This is an ironic allusion to the ancient Roman tradition about the geese whose cackling saved Rome in 390 B.C. by waking the guards at the approach of the Gauls who had laid siege to the Capitol.

J Gänsefüsse ( = goose-feet) is a German word for quotation marks.— Ed.

"Modern Criticism," we are told, "had finally dealt with Spinozism; it was therefore inconsistent of it naively to presuppose Substance in one domain, even if only in individual, falsely expounded points."

(1) This is also a quotation from B. Bauer's book Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker.— Ed.

"Strauss came to grief because he was unable to complete the criticism of HegeFs system, although he proved by his half-way criticism the necessity for its comple-tion", etc.60

(2) Cause of itself.— Ed.

(3) See the English edition of Hegel's Works, pp. 789, 790.— Ed. Ludwig Feuerbach, Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft.— Ed.

(4) J. W. Goethe, Faust, Part I, Scene 3 ("Faust's Study").—Ed.

[1] The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Co. is the first joint work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. At the end of August 1844, Engels, on his way back from Manchester to Barmen, stopped over in Paris, where he had his second meeting with Marx, a meeting which marked the beginning of their collaboration as authors. During the ten days which Engels spent in Paris, he and Marx agreed to publish a criticism of the representatives of the Young Hegelian trend. They drew up the plan of a book which they at first called A Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Co., divided the sections between themselves and wrote the Foreword. Engels wrote his sections before leaving Paris. Marx, whose share comprised the bigger part of the book, continued to work on it till the end of November 1844, considerably increasing the size of the book and drawing on his "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts", on which he had been working during the spring and summer of 1844, as well as on his studies of the history of the French Revolution and his notes and summaries. During the printing of the book, Marx, on the advice of the publisher Löwenthal, added to the title the words "The Holy Family". The book was published in February 1845 in Frankfurt am Main by the Literarische Anstalt (J. Rütten) publishers. The table of contents (see contents of this volume, pp. v-xi) showed which sections had been written by Marx and which by Engels. The fact that the book, though of small format, exceeded twenty printed sheets in volume, exempted it from preliminary censorship in accordance with the regulations operating at the time in a number of German states. "The Holy Family" is a sarcastic nickname for the Bauer brothers and their followers who supported the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung published in Charlottenburg from the end of 1843 to October 1844. While attacking the Bauers and other Young Hegelians, Marx and Engels at the same time critically analysed the idealist philosophy of Hegel himself. Marx had shown his disagreement with the Young Hegelians already in the autumn of 1842 when, as an editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, he opposed the publication of superficial and pretentious articles submitted by the outwardly ultra-radical Berlin circle of "The Free" (Edgar Bauer, Max Stirner, Eduard Meyen and others). During the two years which had elapsed since Marx's clash with "The Free", Marx's and Engels' disagreement with the Young Hegelians on questions of theory and politics had deepened still more. This was accounted for not only by the transition of Marx and Engels to materialism and communism, but also by the evolution which had taken place during that time in the ideas of the Bauer brothers and their fellow-thinkers. In the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung Bauer and his group renounced the "radicalism of 1842" and, besides professing subjective idealist views, and counterposing chosen personalities, the bearers of „pure Criticism", to the allegedly sluggish and inert masses, they began spreading the ideas of moderate liberal philanthropy. Marx's draft of the Preface of his "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts" shows that already in the summer of 1844 he saw in the evolution of the Young Hegelians' views a degeneration of that initially progressive trend, a deepening of the features of mysticism and transcendentalism peculiar to Hegel's idealism, the disintegration of the Hegelian school (see present edition, Vol. 3, p. 233). It was to exposure of the Young Hegelians' views in the form which they had acquired in 1844 and to defence of their own new materialistic and communistic outlook that Marx and Engels decided to devote their first joint work. The appearance of The Holy Family evoked a lively response in the German press. It was pointed out that this work was the most profound and the most forceful of all that Marx and Engels had recently written {Mannheimer Abend-Zeitung, March 25, 1845), that it expressed socialist views, since it criticised the "inadequacy of any half-measures directed at eliminating the social ailments of our time" {Kölnische Zeitung, March 21, 1845). Reactionary circles immediately discerned the book's revolutionary trend. As early as December 1844, when the work was still printing, it was denounced in reports by Metternich's agents. The conservative Allgemeine Zeitung, polemising against the assessment of The Holy Family given by the Kölnische Zeitung, wrote with irritation on April 8, 1845, that in this book "every line preaches revolt... against the state, the church, the family, legality, religion and property", that in it "prominence is given to the most radical and the most open communism, and this is all the more dangerous as Mr. Marx cannot be denied either extremely broad knowledge or the ability to make use of the polemical arsenal of Hegel's logic, what is customarily called 'iron logic'". A month and a half later, on May 23, 1845, the Allgemeine Zeitung again censured the Kölnische Zeitung for publishing a favourable opinion of The Holy Family. Bruno Bauer's attempt to refute the criticism publicly (in the article "Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs", published in Wigand's Vierteljahrsschrift, Leipzig, 1845, Bd. Ill) boiled down essentially to asserting that he had not been correctly understood. Marx replied to this "anti-criticism" of Bauer's with an article published in the journal Gesellschaftsspiegel, Elberfeld, January 1846 (see present edition, Vol. 5), which partly coincided in content with the section "Der Heilige Bruno gegen die Autoren der 'Heiligen Familie'" in Chapter 2 ("Der Heilige Bruno") of the first volume of The German Ideology (see present edition, Vol. 5). During the lifetimes of Marx and Engels The Holy Family was not published in English. Only part of subsection d), "Critical Battle Against French Materialism", of Chapter VI, was reproduced by Engels in the Introduction to the 1892 English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (the German version of this introduction was published in Die Neue Zeit in 1895 under the title "Über den französischen Materialismus des XVIII. Jahrhunderts"). In the English language The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism, was published for the first time in 1956 by the Foreign Languages Publishing House, now Progress Publishers, Moscow, in the translation by Richard Dixon. The literary features of the work include the broad use of citations from French authors (Eugène Sue, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, and others) in the language of the original, alongside citations translated into German, as well as the use of individual expressions in foreign languages, especially French. This feature is preserved in the present edition, the translations of the citations being given in footnotes. Emphasis in the citations (printed in clear-face italics or bold-face italics in cases of special emphasis) mostly belongs to Marx and Engels, who often translated the citations with abridgments. Title-page

[3] Here and elsewhere Engels quotes Reichardt's reviews of C. Briiggemann's book, Preussens Beruf in der deutschen Staats-Entwickelung, und die nächsten Bedingungen zu seiner Erfüllung, Berlin, 1843 and A. Benda's Katechismus für wahlberechtigte Bürger in Preussen, Berlin, 1843. Both reviews were published in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft VI, May 1844.