Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx

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Religion &Theology Religion & Theology 17 (2010) 358–401 brill.nl/rt

Friends, Radical and Estranged: Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx

Roland Boer School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Newcastle, University Drive, Callaghan, NSW 2308, Australia [email protected]

Abstract This essay offers a careful and critical commentary on the deep, complex and conflictual relation between Karl Marx and Bruno Bauer – at personal, professional and political levels. I do so with a particular interest in religion, since Bauer was one of the towering biblical scholars in the Ger- many of his time (mid-nineteenth century). Bauer was Marx’s one-time teacher, friend and men- tor who taught him a course on the book of Isaiah at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin in 1839. Not many years later, Bauer becomes a target for Marx’s polemic in The Holy Family and The German Ideology, as well as On the Jewish Question. Why the intense polemic? I argue that the problem with Bauer – for Marx – was that he developed a reasonably radical political position – his later works dealt extensively with politics – through his work as a biblical critic. Marx sought to close this path off entirely, although he does admit in a telling phrase that Bauer follows the ‘detour of theology’. Yet, despite all the polemic, Bauer and Marx kept in touch, the former visiting Marx in London many years later and the latter keeping up a lively interest in Bauer’s movements and writings.

Keywords Karl Marx, Bruno Bauer, Isaiah, On the Jewish Question, The Holy Family, The German Ideology

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.1 This essay oﬀers a careful and critical commentary on the deep, complex and conﬂictual relation between Karl Marx and Bruno Bauer. I do so with a particular interest in religion, since Bauer was one of the towering biblical scholars in the Germany of his time (mid-nineteenth century). Three motives drive

1 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 4 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975 [1845]), 102; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Die heilige Familie oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik,” in Marx Engels Werke, Vol. 2 (Berlin: Dietz, 1974 [1845]), 108–9.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/157430110X597890 R. Boer / Religion & Theology 17 (2010) 358–401 359 this commentary: first, I seek to understand the similarities and differences between two of the leading German radicals of the time; second, I wish to restore the importance of the close relationship between Marx and Bauer; third, I seek to answer a specific question: why was Bauer Marx’s favourite target, attacking him so often and so vehemently? In other words, why did Marx seek to block Bauer’s path to radical politics? The short answer is that Bauer had developed a radical position through theology and biblical criticism, a position that made him one of the most radical thinkers in Germany at the time.2 But he was a complex radical, taking on the ancien régime, liberal- ism and socialism. Marx had to negate Bauer on two counts: his anti-socialist stance and his path to radical political republicanism through biblical criticism. For Marx, neither was acceptable. The long answer will take the rest of this study. In what follows I trace the way Marx’s one-time teacher at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin became one of his main opponents, at whom he fired salvo after salvo. Marx’s connection with Bauer goes back to his university days in Berlin in 1836–9, where he took a course with the young licentiate on the biblical book of Isaiah in the summer of 1839. So I begin with that, exploring Bauer’s own ideas in the process. From there I move on to consider Marx’s ongoing and complex relationship with Bauer, whom he could still call a friend and who visited Marx in London many years later. The first deeply critical response to Bauer comes with the essay On the Jewish Question, an extended review of Bauer’s book of that name. After that we find the full-blooded critiques in both The Holy Family and The German Ideology, where Marx and Engels develop a two- pronged attack: that Bauer is for all his disavowals still both a theologian and a conventional Hegelian.

1. The Book of Isaiah (with Herr Licentiate Bauer)

There is small note from Marx’s Leaving Certiﬁcate from the Friedrich Wil- helm University in Berlin that may easily be dismissed. It reads as follows: V. In the summer term 1839 1. Isaiah with Herr Licentiate Bauer, attended.3

2 In an excellent study, Douglas Moggach, The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), has restored Bauer as an independent and radical political thinker. In particular, he counters the general position that Bauer retreated from his earlier radical theological criticism to vacuous right-wing social criticism. 3 “Leaving Certiﬁcate from Berlin University,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975 [1926]), 704.