The Genesis of Historical Materialism

CHAPTER 2 The Genesis of Historical Materialism There is no doubt that, for a time, Marx fully shared the tremendous enthusi- asm felt during the 1840s by the whole school of Left Hegelians for Feuerbach’s materialist message.1 The influence exerted upon his theory by this experience may, perhaps, be best compared with that of Hume on Kant as summed up by the latter in the formula that ‘Hume aroused me from the dogmatic slum- ber’. Yet there is an important difference in the degree to which Marx on the one hand, and the other Hegelians including Engels, were impressed by the particular form of materialism represented by Feuerbach. It is no wonder that Friedrich Engels, who had suffered much in his childhood under the pietistic cant of the Wupper valley and had received his first lesson in philosophical materialism from the gospel-criticism of the Hegelian David Friedrich Strauss, and then passed from the disciple to the master discovering behind Hegel’s idealistic formulae the germs of an altogether different atheist and materialist creed, was later decisively influenced by the outspoken materialism, the germs of which were developed by Feuerbach.2 It was certainly different with Marx. He was brought up in a freethinking family and reached his ultimate materialist standpoint by a much longer road, through a study of Democritus and Epicurus, of the materialists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and finally through a detailed critical revision of the whole idealist philosophy of Hegel. His progress toward materialism was indeed, from the beginning and through all its phases, a progress to revolutionary materialist politics.3 Although he was still using the language of Hegel’s idealism, he was already a revolutionary materialist in this political sense when he raved against the ‘reprobate materialism’ of the Prussian State Gazette which ‘in considering a Statute on the stealing of wood thought only of wood and did not solve that single and material task politically, i.e., not in connection with the reason and 1 See Engels’s later testimony in Engels 1888. 2 See the detailed references in Mayer 1933. See further the recent study by Reinhart Seeger (Seeger 1935). 3 See Marx’s thesis on The Difference between the Democritean and the Epicurean Philosophy of Nature (Marx 1841, and the detailed report on the progress of his philosophical studies given by the young Marx to his father in a letter of 10 November 1837 (Marx 1927–30i, pp. 1–144, and Marx 1927–30j, pp. 213–21). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi ��.��63/9789004�7��00_0�� 126 part 3: history ethics of the State as a whole’.4 He was already a materialist critic of all existing realisations of the state-idea when he reproached Hegel for ‘proceeding from the state to make man a subjective form of the state’ instead of, ‘in the sense of modern democracy’, proceeding from man to make the state an objective form of man. He described as early as this ‘democracy’ as being ‘the general form of the State in which the formal principle is at the same time the material principle’, and added the far-reaching remark that ‘the modern French have under- stood this to mean that in true democracy the political state must disappear’.5 For all these reasons, the materialist rupture with all theological and philosophical idealism which was affected by Feuerbach in his 1841 book The Essence of Christianity, 1841, and, even more powerfully, in his 1842 Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy, did not have that sweeping effect upon Marx that it had upon Engels and, even more persistently, upon David Strauss, Bruno Bauer, etc., who, all through their lives, did not emerge from the phase of religious criticism. Thus becomes evident the real meaning of the sentence by which Marx in 1843 described the criticism of religion as ‘the premise of all criticism’.6 At the time when it was formulated by Marx under the conditions prevailing in Prussia after the change of government, this oft-quoted phrase had, besides its general theoretical significance, a definite political one too. Marx proclaimed the attack of the bourgeois freethinkers against the reaction- ary religious policy of the new régime to be the first phase of that ‘political movement’ which, beginning in 1840, was to lead up to the 1848 revolution. For the same reason, a criticism restricted to religion lost the positive significance it had borne for a time as soon as that first phase was brought to a close by the ‘socialist ideas circulating in Germany since 1843’. While in the first phase the ‘critique of religion’ had served as a veil concealing the political aims of the speedily growing revolutionary movement of the early 1840s, that movement had now reached a point at which, according to Marx, even a political struggle had become a mere transparent veil concealing the social struggle beneath.7 Marx had already declared before and, in fact, in the very sentence in which he spoke of the criticism of religion as being ‘the premise of all criticism’, that ‘the criticism of religion, for all practical purposes, has been concluded in Germany’.8 It is true that both he and Engels, one year later, reaffirmed their 4 See Marx’s article On the Debates of the 6th Rhineland Diet (Marx 1927–30k, p. 304). 5 See 1927–30i, p. 435. 6 See Marx 1927–30i, p. 607. 7 See Marx and Engels 1931–2c, p. 287. 8 Marx 1927–30i, p. 607..

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