‘The intelligence of the people’: Marx’s early political thought and the young Hegelian concept of state

ABSTRACT

This paper has two purposes: to provide a contextualised account of the Young Hegelian theory of the state, and to argue that Marx began working on the manuscript known as his ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’, not in the Summer of 1843, as most commentators assume, but at least as early as the Spring of 1842. The established narrative describes the Young Hegelians as ‘liberals’, and suggests that Marx ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’ represents his rejection of their liberalism and turn towards a more radical democratic and revolutionary position. Conversely, I argue that the Young Hegelians (notably Arnold Ruge and Bruno Bauer) were never liberal (at least not by any standard definition of that term) but articulated a radical and revolutionary theory of the state from the outset – one that understood freedom, not as independence, but as political participation, and that characterised the modern state, not as the guarantor of private rights, but as the institutional framework in which all citizens could realise their public freedom. In this sense, Marx’s ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy Law’ does not represent a break with the Young Hegelians theory of state, but a contribution to it.

KEYWORDS:

• Karl Marx
• Arnold Ruge
• Bruno Bauer
• Young Hegelianism
• state theory

Introduction

This paper has both a broad and a narrow purpose. The broad purpose is to offer a contextualised account of the political thought of the Young Hegelians, and especially their concept of the state. The narrow one is to reanimate a forgotten debate over the dating of the manuscript now known as Marx’s ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’, and to suggest that it was written, not in the Summer of 1843, as most commentators assume, but at least as early as the Spring of 1842. In the first instance, I argue that the Young Hegelians (notably Arnold Ruge, Bruno Bauer, and Marx himself), developed an original and sophisticated approach to what Ruge called the ‘absolute state’ – one that cannot be easily categorised according to the discourse of political forms (liberalism, republicanism, democracy, and so on), but must be understood in relation to the specific (political theoretical and political theological) struggles and debates through which it first came into focus. In the second, I maintain that, while it is often treated as the moment when Marx rejects the liberalism that the Young Hegelians are thought to have espoused, the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’ is better understood as a contribution to the Young Hegelian concept of the state, which was anything but liberal, at least according to conventional definitions of that term. Throughout the late 1830s and early 1840s, the Young Hegelians promoted the construction of a revolutionary state in which all citizens would achieve self-determination through direct and ongoing participation in public life. This state would not exist to secure an external, negative, private freedom, or the rights of a liberal individual. Rather, it would constitute the stage on which the positive, collective, public freedom of the people could be actualised and performed. While, by 1843, the Young Hegelians had been roundly defeated (their journals suppressed, their academic posts denied or rescinded, their ranks splintered by internal debates, and many of their members either caught up in lengthy legal proceedings that would see them imprisoned or forced into exile) it would be a mistake to dismiss their project as utopian, impractical, or idealist in the pejorative sense. For, while their arguments were articulated in a densely philosophical and theological idiom, they had concrete political and institutional implications – implications that were recognised by their contemporaries, applauded by their friends, and palpably feared by their enemies.

What follows is broken down into three parts. The first begins by providing a contextualised account of the Young Hegelian theory of state. Focusing primarily on the work of Arnold Ruge and Bruno Bauer, I argue that, for the Young Hegelians, the state was not an instrument designed to protect external interests or secure private freedom, but a political stage on which citizens could practice, and in doing so realise, their public freedom, or participate in the rational self-determination of their collective existence. Theirs, then, was not a liberal but a revolutionary model, albeit one couched in a distinct political theology that can make it difficult to grasp without a wider knowledge of the period. The second part considers Marx’s journalism for the Rheinische Zeitung and the political ideas he developed there. I emphasise the theory of state presented in ‘On the Commissions of the Estates in Prussia’, the argument of which, I suggest, is comparable to the one developed by Ruge, Bauer, and other Young Hegelians. Once again, however, I maintain that the radicalism of Marx’s journalism is difficult to discern unless it is approached in relation to the texts with which it was designed to engage. The final section turns to Marx’s ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’. I explain David Riazanov’s original proposal that Marx composed the manuscript in a burst of inspiration in the Summer of 1843, and note the ongoing influence of this proposal among Marx commentators. I then recall Siegfried Landshut’s and J.P. Mayer’s effort to locate the manuscript earlier, between 1841 and 1842. I trace the somewhat submerged history of this debate, and note how, while almost all other editions accept Riazanov’s approach, those working with the second Marx-Engels Gesamtaustabge support an earlier dating. I then consider a series of articles on constitutionalism that Moses Hess and Bruno Bauer wrote for the Rheinische Zeitung in the Spring of 1842 and suggest that they represent a credible context for Marx’s ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’. I conclude by proposing that an alternative dating of this one manuscript should alter received opinions about both Marx’s political thought and the significance of Young Hegelianism in general.

Partisans of the Absolute State

For much of the twentieth century, commentators tended to approach the Young Hegelians under the shadow of Marx’s and Engels’s early polemics against them. They were thus frequently characterised the way Marx and Engels characterised them in works like The Holy Family and The German Ideology – abstract, idealistic, conceited, overly concerned with theology, possessed of an Olympian disdain for the masses, and incapable of effecting genuine political change.¹ More recent scholarship, however, has begun to break away from this interpretation, to reconstruct the radical nature of the Young Hegelian movement, and to explain why it was considered so dangerous at the time. Richly contextual accounts (operating at arms-length from Marx’s and Engels’s judgments) have now shown that, far from concerning themselves with exclusively philosophical or theological questions, the Young Hegelians were revolutionaries, and that their writings were not impotently theoretical, but powerful interventions into specific and specifically effective struggles and debates.² However, and again in a manner that the Marxist tradition would make it difficult to ascertain, for the Young Hegelians, the revolution was not directed against the state, nor was the state understood in positive terms as an instrument of class power. On the contrary, at least during the crucial years of 1838 to 1843, when their influence was at its greatest, it would be more accurate to say that, on the Young Hegelian account, the revolution was the state. For only the state could comprehend the multitude of particular identities and interests (notably sectarian religious identities and egoistic economic interests) and orient all citizens towards what was rational and universal. Only the state could constitute the ideological and institutional framework required for the development and expression of public freedom. And the theological aspects of Young Hegelian discourse were invariably political theological, or efforts to subordinate the powers of religion to the collectively determined authority of the state.

The most extensive consideration of these issues was in Arnold Ruge’s contributions to the Hallische and Deutsche Jahrbüchern. Because he had to contend with an aggressive censorship, Ruge’s arguments were frequently articulated indirectly, and can be difficult to piece together in retrospect. For the same reason, it is easy to get the impression that his position changed in response to external events, and that, as the Prussian state became more repressive, he became more radical.³ However, while there is some truth to this narrative, it is also the case that Ruge’s basic conception of the state was established early on, and that he did not exactly change his approach but become increasingly brazen about publicising it. A full appreciation of the issue would require a longer investigation. Here I offer a sketch of three themes, chosen for their capacity to illuminate Marx’s discussions of the state in the Rheinische Zeitung and the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’: (1) Ruge’s critical appropriation of Hegel’s state theory; (2) his unique conception of the ‘absolute state’ as an ‘end in itself’; and (3) his closely related political theology.

For Ruge’s approach to Hegel, the key text is his review of the statesman Heinrich on Gagern’s Kritik des Völkerrechts, which he examined alongside Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in his ‘Zur Kritik des gegenwartigen Staats- und Völkerrechts’. Ruge’s explicit purpose was to supplement Gagern’s knowledge of ‘praxis’ with the ‘true theory’ found in Hegel.⁴ But at the same time, Ruge developed a powerful critique of Hegel. First, he insisted that Hegel’s concept of state was abstract, ahistorical, and incapable of accounting for change. Hegel presented his state as ‘a fixed, universally valid closure’ and ‘conclusion for all time’. But according to his own philosophy of history, it would be more appropriate to say that ‘every form of state, even the most perfect and complete, can only ever be a product of history’. ‘History’, Ruge declared, ‘is the becoming of freedom, its objectification; the law and the state, on the other hand, are its existence, its objectified form, its specificity’. And ‘since history and the state are related like development and determination, like the course and establishment of spirit, it goes without saying that the state emerges from history and further history emerges from the state’.⁵ The state, in other words, was both the product and the vehicle of history. Second, Ruge challenged Hegel’s commitment to constitutional monarchy. Hegel proposed that only an inherited sovereign ensured that the final ‘decision-making power’ would be universal rather than reducible to particular interests. Ruge saw this as arbitrary, and a betrayal of Hegel’s own theory of the rational will. Alternatively, Ruge insisted that the ‘decision-making power’ should follow ‘the historically developed state consciousness as reflected by the national representatives’ – not an inherited crown, then, but the deliberations of a national assembly.⁶ Finally, Ruge attacked Hegel’s negative assessment of ‘popular opinion’ and his assumption that, without the stabilising power of the monarchy, political order would succumb to ‘the arbitrariness of the factions and the electorate’. ‘The truth of the majority is not the absolute truth’, Ruge allowed, ‘but it is by and large the determination of the zeitgeist, the political and historical truth’.⁷

Ruge’s state theory and political theology initially took shape in 1838 through his criticisms of Pietism, and especially a series of polemics between the Hallische Jahrbücher and the conservative historian Heinrich Leo. Ruge initiated the battle with an attack on Leo’s Sendschreiben an Görres in which he accused Leo and the Pietists of rebelling ‘against the authority of reason’, ‘against the German Reformation’, and ‘against the legitimacy of recent history’ or ‘the French Revolution and the state formations that have arisen from it, namely the centralised official and administrative state’.⁸ Leo returned fire in a forward to the second edition of his Sendschreiben, an anonymous article in the arch-conservative Berliner politische Wochenblatt, and his Die Hegelingen, which was also the work that first dubbed the circle around Ruge ‘the Young Hegelians’. In essence, Ruge and his followers were renounced as Jacobins and atheists whose mission was to infiltrate the Prussian state and use it to eliminate Christianity and impose in its place a soulless, scientistic social order.⁹ Ruge responded that, on the contrary, his agenda was to modernise the Prussian state and thereby ameliorate the social conditions that, without a modern state, would inevitably result in popular unrest. As Ruge saw it, during the Reform Era, or the period following Prussia’s defeat to Napoleon, the Prussian state had initiated a process of replicating the achievements of the French Revolution. This held out the possibility of constructing a revolutionary state from within, without the need for violent confrontation. The restauration that followed the Congress of Vienna had impeded this project. But the time was now ripe for it to be resumed.

Exactly what Ruge meant by a modern state, however, went much further than anything attempted in the Reform Era, and any forthright description of it would have been suppressed. Thus, to communicate his purpose, Ruge was compelled to design sophisticated discursive strategies. A crucial example was his ‘Karl Streckfuß und die Preußenthum’. While Ruge later admitted to being the author, the article was signed ‘von einem Württemburger’. It consisted of a critical review of the senior Prussian minister Karl Streckfuß’s Ueber die Garantieen der preußischen Zuständ – a book which held that, despite persistent liberal demands, Prussia did not require a formal constitution, as its existing institutions were sufficient to ‘guarantee’ security, freedom, and public trust.¹⁰ Ruge pretended to be a citizen of one of Germany’s most liberal states observing events in Prussia from the outside with mounting concern that a conservative faction was gaining power there, threatening Prussia’s path to constitutionalism and, by extension, Germany’s liberal movement more generally.

The argument turned on the meaning of the term ‘absolute state’. On Streckfuß’s model, Ruge proposed, ‘the absolute state’ referred to ‘the wisdom of the monarch and the highest authorities’. Here only an inner circle of officials possessed ‘a living self-consciousness of the state’ while all others had to ‘honour the state as something otherworldly’.¹¹ For Ruge, this amounted to a Catholicism of the state, or a translation of the Catholic hierarchy into political terms. Contrastingly, Ruge declared ‘we are Protestants, and we want to be good and whole Protestants, which means Protestants in the state as well. That is why’, he continued:

we cannot tolerate the absolute state, because we cannot stand that this state withholds from us the absolute that it contains within itself. We must participate in it theoretically with full public self-consciousness and practically with the freest representation … One could therefore say that this absolute has the sole fault that it is not absolute enough. For how could a state be absolute which is alive in only one part, namely the government [Regierung]? Just as God is not absolute unless he permeates the world, the state is not absolute unless it fills and permeates all human life with its self-consciousness.¹²

For the state to be genuinely ‘absolute’ and ‘Protestant’, in other words, all of its ‘parts’ would have to be ‘alive’. Not only a small coterie of ministers, but all citizens would have to engage permanently with all aspects of public life. This ‘absolute state’ would not be a means for securing private freedom. Instead, it would be what Ruge called an ‘end in itself’ – a space in which citizens realised their public freedom, or their right to self-determination through political participation. ‘Just as’, in Protestantism, ‘everyone knows and wants the truth for himself, mediates himself with God and must trust or distrust only his own spirit’, Ruge explained, so too should ‘the same mediation also take place in the state’. Here ‘the state’ was ‘no longer, in good Catholic terms, a mere safeguard (guarantee) of external life and comfort’. Rather, it was ‘the realisation of the idea itself, the existence of God, the shaping, not only of life (which even a beehive [Bienenstaat] achieves), but of the spirit, which is given to the self-conscious people based on their reason and will, and which cannot be denied wherever the image of God is recognised in them’.¹³

A consideration of two final pieces will complete this overview of Ruge’s state theory: his ‘Die evangelische Landeskirche Preußens und die Wissenschaft’, in which he enthusiastically reviewed Bauer’s book of the same name; and his editorial ‘Vorwort’ to the 1841 volume of the journal. ‘Die evangelische Landeskirche’ applauded Bauer’s defence of the unification of Prussia’s Lutheran and Calvinist congregations under a unified state church, which Bauer described as ‘the actual completion of the Reformation through the definitive constitution of the invisible church’.¹⁴ For Bauer, this meant that the state subsumed religion, and a rational public authority subsumed all appeals to a mystical, secretive one. Ruge called for ‘a book that achieves in the political sphere the same thing that the present book does in the religio-political sphere’, or one that similarly eliminated all remaining mystical, secretive aspects of the state.¹⁵ Ruge’s 1841 ‘Vorwort’ declared that this would now be (indeed had always been) the mission of the Hallische Jahrbücher itself. ‘Here’, he wrote, ‘the corresponding theory of the state is not an impenetrable, veiled, secret and therefore estranged condition, but the processual existence of our self-consciousness or, clearly stated, the ordered, universal, reasonable form of the people’s self-determination’.¹⁶ The state, then, would be the realisation of the public freedom of the citizens. The constitutional form adequate to this goal was of secondary importance. Thus, Ruge began by stating the classic republican principle that ‘the state is not a res privata but a res publica’. However, he added, ‘according to our concept, strictly speaking, it is not a res at all, not a thing, at most a matter [Angelegenheit], but not just any matter, but the matter, spirit, freedom, which contains everything in itself, in its knowledge and its actions’. ‘The state’, he reiterated, ‘is an end in itself’. Indeed, Ruge continued, even the word ‘state’ was misleading. For what was at stake was ‘the public essence’ – something that went far beyond the ‘formal guarantees’ of liberal rights or the republican rule of law (even if it was the ‘true underlying content’ of such things) and referred instead to the ‘publicly and objectively realised reason of the people’.¹⁷

Ruge, of course, was by no means the only influence on Marx’s political thought, nor was he the only Young Hegelian advancing a theory of the state as the ‘publicly and objectively realised reason of the people’. While they each inflected it in unique ways, similar arguments were developed by other figures around Marx, including Ludwig Buhl, Edgar Bauer, Karl Köppen, and Karl Nauwreck.¹⁸ But the one to whom Marx was closest during this period was undoubtedly his intellectual mentor Bruno Bauer. Because so much of his work took the form of Biblical criticism, it can be even more difficult to recognise the specifically political stakes of Bauer’s work than it is for Ruge. But, as Douglas Moggach has convincingly shown, of all the Young Hegelians, Bauer was the most vehement institutional warrior – someone committed to using his academic position within the Prussian state to revolutionise that state, or transform it into a revolutionary one.¹⁹ Amidst his expansive body of work, two texts most explicitly set out his political agenda during the period under consideration here: (1) his Die evangelische Landeskirche Preußens und die Wissenschaft, Ruge’s review of which we considered above; and (2) his ‘Die christliche Staat und unsere Zeit’, which appeared in the Hallische Jahrbücher from 7 to 12 June 1841.

As mentioned, the explicit purpose of Die evangelische Landeskirche was to defend Prussia’s unified state church. But the argument presented a general theory of the state as well. Bauer’s strategy was to propose that, while other defenders of the union characterised it as a simple act of administrative centralisation, its conservative ‘opponents’ had in fact ‘seen more clearly’. For they had recognised it as ‘a tremendous reversal which overthrew the visible church’. ‘The union’, Bauer wrote, ‘is the fact and the law of the Enlightenment in the church, it is the revolution perfected in the church’.²⁰ It represented the end to all church autonomy, and the final absorption of religion into the institutions of the state. Moreover, for Bauer, religion meant much more than communities of faith. It configured particularism in general – everything that divided humans, focused them on their narrow, egoistic interests, and distracted them from the universal reason of the whole. The state, on the other hand, did not so much resolve all differences, as contain them, or give them political shape. Thus, in an extraordinary passage, Bauer wrote:

The state has many monsters within it, which it must tame, educate, civilise, and morally illuminate. Humanity as such in its pure vagueness is the rage that rebels against all positive statutes, the ego is the demon that gnaws through all physical barriers with its cunning dialectics … The modern state can bear within it all these demons and monsters and educate, tame, and illuminate them. But it does not do so as a mere police state and it does not set its right against them as an external power. What good are worldly weapons against demons, spiritual monsters, and the most subtle and penetrating abstractions? Rather, the state, as the all-encompassing existence of everything human, also includes the demons and abstractions.²¹

Whereas religion invariably generated antagonistic sects, each condemning the others as heretical, the state, as ‘the all-encompassing existence of everything human’, provided the platform on which differences could encounter one another, come into conflict, and be both cancelled and preserved in a higher unity.

In ‘Die christliche Staat und unsere Zeit’, Bauer took a more historical approach to the question of church and state, even as his argument was more immediately situated in a contemporary polemic. In the first instance, Bauer argued that the history of church and state involved a dialectic in which the latter progressively subsumed the former. In the Byzantian form, Bauer claimed, church and state were identical; in the Middle Ages, they became separated, and the first sought to dominate the second; with the Reformation, they were reintegrated. However, while the modern state was supposed to contain the church, because the church remained intact, it occasionally managed to usurp state power. As Bauer saw it, this was happening again under the regime of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, as was evident in the regime’s adoption and promotion of the legal theorist Friedrich Julius Stahl’s concept of ‘the Christian state’. Stahl argued that the church had a separate source of right, independent of the state. It thus possessed an autonomous power that had to be balanced with that of the state.²² For Bauer, on the other hand, the idea of a Christian state was a contradictio in adjecto, and it could only lead to the church attempting to render the state a mere instrument, or a tool for the achievement of its own, non-state purposes. Indeed, as Bauer saw it, so long as the church continued to possess any statutory existence at all, the true essence of the state would remain obscured. The state would appear, that is, not as what Bauer called ‘an infinite end in itself’, but as ‘an external means to carry out an end that went beyond it’ and ‘to protect against a hostile world’.²³ It would remain, in other words, not a space in which citizens realised their public freedom, but a police power through which society could be regulated and controlled.

The notion, then, that the state constituted an ‘end in itself’, and that its purpose was not to secure external interests but to constitute a space of freedom, was consistent across the work of the Young Hegelians, and in many ways represented the hallmark of their project. In what follows, I argue that, while Marx did not use the phrase ‘absolute state’, or engage in extensive political theological speculations, the concept of the state that he developed in his articles for the Rheinische Zeitung, and particularly in ‘On the Commissions of the Estates in Prussia’, was entirely compatible with, and was almost certainly designed to reinforce, the one developed by figures like Ruge and Bauer. For the same reason, Marx’s early journalism cannot be parcelled off with words like ‘liberal’ or ‘constitutional’. Nor should it be subordinated to, or interpreted through the lens of, a later, ostensibly more mature position. Rather, and particularly if we want to understand its relationship to Young Hegelianism, it must be approached on its own terms, and in relation to the specific contexts into which Marx was seeking to intervene.

The Politics of the Rheinische Zeitung

Press Freedom and the Rule of Law

Marx’s first publications in the Rheinische Zeitung were a series of articles called ‘Debates on the Freedom of the Press’ and a piece titled ‘The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung’. The first analysed the transcripts of a debate that had taken place in the Rhineland Provincial Estates Assembly, while the second was a satirical reply to a rival newspaper’s attack on the philosophical press. In fact, nearly everything Marx wrote for the Rheinische Zeitung was composed in response to other texts. It is thus difficult to grasp what Marx was attempting to accomplish in his journalism if we examine it in isolation, without consulting the material with which it was designed to engage. But that is how most commentators proceed. Here, and as an alternative, I will begin by using a contextualised account of Marx’s ‘Debates on the Freedom of the Press’ to establish a handful of themes that run throughout his contributions to the Rheinische Zeitung. But I will come to focus primarily on Marx’s ‘On the Commissions of the Estates in Prussia’ (the full title of which is ‘The Supplement to Nos. 335 and 336 of the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung On the Commissions of the Estates in Prussia’) which I will examine alongside the relevant article from the Allgemeine Zeitung. As we will see, ‘On the Commissions of the Estates in Prussia’ considers the legitimacy of the United Estates Commission – a national meeting of representatives chosen from the Provincial Estates Assemblies that Friedrich Wilhelm IV had convened in November 1842. It also provides the most programmatic account of the state in Marx’s early journalism and the clearest articulation of his political commitments at the time.

The Rhineland Provincial Estates Assembly met in Düsseldorf between 23 May and 25 July 1841. Among other things, it discussed censorship, press freedom, and whether to endorse ‘the unabridged and daily publication of the Assembly debates’ themselves.²⁴ An abridged version was published in November 1841 which Marx used to access speeches by representatives of each of the four estates: princely; knightly; urban; and rural.²⁵ Exemplifying what Marx called ‘the deliberate obduracy of privilege and the natural impotence of half-hearted liberalism’,²⁶ the first two argued against press freedom, while the third argued in favour of it, but on purely commercial grounds. Only the rural representative offered what Marx considered a genuine affirmation of the press. Thus, for Marx, the least powerful member of the Assembly was also the most rational, a fact that he took great satisfaction in revealing. But most of the ‘Debates on the Freedom of the Press’ involved a methodical demolition of the representative of the knightly estate.

This representative developed two lines of thought: (1) he opposed the publication of the Assembly debates on the grounds that it would curtail the ‘freedom of expression’ or ‘frankness of speech’ of the representatives and expose them to ‘external’ interests ‘seeking to influence our personality through public opinion’;²⁷ and (2) he argued that the current use of censorship prior to publication was more just than a law governing the press after publication as while the former was ‘preventative’ the latter would be ‘repressive’.²⁸ In response to the first, Marx insisted that the purpose of the assembly was not to protect the ‘privileges of the estates’, as the representative’s concern with ‘external’ influence seemed to suggest, but to articulate ‘the rights of the province’.²⁹ ‘The province demands that the words of the representatives of the estates should be converted into the publicly audible voice of the country’, Marx wrote. The only important issue was ‘whether the province should be conscious of being represented or not’. The answer was obviously yes. For ‘a representation which is divorced from the consciousness of those whom it represents is no representation’ and ‘a truly political assembly flourishes only under the great protection of the public spirit, just as living things flourish only in the open air’.³⁰ In response to the representative’s second line of thought, Marx mounted a brilliant defence of the rule of law. Thus, he insisted that, whereas ‘the censorship law has only the form of law’, ‘the press law’ would be ‘real law’ or ‘the positive existence of freedom’. ‘Laws’, Marx declared, ‘are in no way repressive measures against freedom, any more than the law of gravity is a repressive measure against motion’. Rather, ‘laws … are the positive, clear, universal norms in which freedom has acquired an impersonal, theoretical existence independent of the arbitrariness of the individual. A statue book is a people’s Bible of freedom’.³¹

This conception of the rule of law returned throughout Marx’s writings in the Rheinische Zeitung, particularly in two pieces: a short essay called ‘The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law’, which took aim at the school named in its title, notably Karl Ludwig von Haller, Friedrich Julius Stahl, and Heinrich Leo; and another longer analysis of the Assembly transcripts called ‘Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood’, which defended the customary rights of the poor – the Standeslosen, or those without estate – to collect fallen wood from what had historically been common land but was now private property. The first traced the origin of the Historical School of Law back to the eighteenth-century legal positivism of Gustav Hugo, who rejected all ‘a priori’ legal categories save a fundamental ‘duty of conscience [Gewissens-Pflicht]’ which compelled all subjects ‘to submit to the law’ or ‘the juridical state of affairs [rechtlicher Zustand]’.³² Here, Marx claimed, there was ‘no rational necessity inherent in the positive institutions’. Indeed, all law was ‘contrary to reason’. Hugo was thus a ‘complete sceptic’. With him, ‘the eighteenth-century scepticism in regard to the rationality of what exists appears as scepticism in regard to the existence of rationality’.³³ His nineteenth century followers, however, were worse. For whereas Hugo merely asserted that legal institutions are ‘irrational’, ‘Haller, Stahl, [and] Leo’ treated them as ‘representations of a higher “positive” reason’. They did not merely suggest that there was no rational truth. They declared the truth of the irrational and advocated ‘the right of arbitrary power’.³⁴

The legal question at the centre of ‘Debates on the Law on the Thefts of Wood’ concerned whether the law governing the theft of living wood should be extended to cover dead wood, which the poor had traditionally been allowed to collect. Marx’s argument had two aspects. First, he proposed that, as modern law became organised around property right, those who own property should lose their customary rights, but those who own none should not. ‘The so-called customs of the privileged classes’, Marx claimed, ‘are understood to mean customs contrary to the law’. They would be better described as ‘customary wrongs’ and have therefore correctly been abolished.³⁵ However, while ‘this course of action was correct in regard to those who, besides right, also enjoyed custom’, it ‘was incorrect in regard to those who had only customs without rights’.³⁶ Put differently, where custom is translated into right, as when it becomes property, it should disappear. But where ‘custom is the anticipation of legal right’ it must remain intact. Thus, for Marx, ‘one cannot speak of the customary rights of the privileged estates’ for ‘law has already anticipated all possible consequences of their right’. For those with no property, on the other hand, the situation was the precise opposite. Thus, Marx contended, ‘a customary right by its very nature can only be a right of this lowest, propertyless and elemental mass’.³⁷ The Historical School’s arguments for the customary rights of the nobility applied exclusively to the customary rights of the poor.

The second issue that Marx took up was much larger and concerned, not only law, but the nature of the state. In short, Marx argued that the wood theft laws reduced the state to an ‘instrument’ of private interest. As Marx put it, ‘the wood thief has robbed the forest owner of wood’, but ‘the forest owner has made use of the wood thief to purloin the state itself’.³⁸ Thus, and for instance, Marx explained how the draft law would have wood thieves repay the forest owner the cost of the wood they had taken. But that cost would be determined by a forest ranger who, while nominally a public official, was paid by the forest owner. Similarly, along with the cost of the wood, the wood thief was to pay a fine. But the fine would go, not to the public coffers, but to the forest owner. Moreover, if the wood thief proved incapable of paying, they would be sentenced to work, not on a public project, but, once again, for the forest owner. Finally, by way of a legal ‘exception’ that, the Assembly decided, was necessary in the name of ‘practicality’, the draft law made it possible for forest owners to act as judges in the case of crimes committed against them, and even to begin collecting fines before a trial.³⁹ In this sense, Marx maintained, ‘the forest owner claims not only his private right, but also the state’s right to the wood thief, and so puts himself in the place of the state’.⁴⁰ And so long as external, private interest continued to form the foundation of the state (so long as the state was treated as a means rather than an end in itself), all law would result in the substitution of private right for state right, the particular for the universal.

‘The Intelligence of the People’

This brings us to Marx’s ‘On the Commissions of the Estates in Prussia’, the inspiration for which was an editorial that appeared in the Beilage zur Allgemeinen Zeitung on 1 and 2 December 1842 under the title ‘Ueber die Zusammenseßung der ständischen Ausschüsse in Preußen’. The unnamed author defended the composition of the United Estates Commission and responded to liberal demands for greater representation, especially for ‘industry’ and ‘intelligence’. The former referred to what the author called ‘mobile capital’, or wealth not located in ‘landed property’. The latter referred to civil servants, academics, lawyers, clergy, and journalists – a group of professions that, some argued, could be understood as a separate estate deserving of its own representation. While he dismissed the claims of ‘the intelligentsia’, arguing that their occupations alone constituted an adequate mode of political participation, the author acknowledged the ‘tremendous upswing in industry in recent times’. But he insisted that property ownership was the only legitimate foundation for the estates. ‘Just as the so-called zeitgeist will never succeed in destroying the difference between the elements as they exist in nature or returning them to a chaotic unity’, he wrote, ‘so too in the spiritual world will it never annihilate the difference between the estates, which is based on the divine world order itself’. No doubt ‘the people should be allowed to participate in the universal state of affairs [Staatsangelegenbeiten]’. However, ‘it is important that they not be set in motion as a crude, inorganic mass’. Only the differences between estates guarded against this possibility. Thus, it was ‘not a question of whether the estates should exist at all, but to what extent and in what proportion the existing estates should be called upon to participate in political activities’.⁴¹ The answer was contained in the Cabinet Order in which the king had called for the meeting of the Commission: it should have ‘an advisory participation in public affairs’.⁴² And since this was the same level of participation afforded to the Provincial Assemblies, it made no sense to add new forms of representation at the national level.

In what was recognised at the time as a ploy to evade the censor, Marx began his response by proposing that his purpose was to criticise the article and not the institution it described. ‘The presentation of a state institution is not the state institution itself’, he wrote. ‘Hence a polemic against this presentation is not a polemic against the state institution’. ‘Every object’, he continued, ‘that is made a matter for praise or blame in the press becomes a literary object, hence an object for literary discussion’. And in this manner, the press ‘transforms the material struggle into an ideological struggle, the struggle of flesh and blood into the struggle of minds, the struggle of need, desire, empiricism into the struggle of theory, of reason, of form’.⁴³ That said, Marx had little trouble destroying the arguments of ‘Ueber die Zusammenseßung’ or showing that they repeatedly presupposed what they should properly have been required to prove. And the only slightly buried agenda here was to use this debate as a platform for developing a larger, discrete theory of the state.

Marx’s piece was published in three parts, on 11, 20, and 31 December 1842. The first took up the Allgemeine Zeitung author’s suggestion that, without the differences between the estates, society would devolve into a ‘crude, inorganic mass’. Marx agreed that the state had to be internally differentiated, or an internally differentiated totality. But he insisted that, rather than presupposing the difference between the estates of civil society, ‘one should proceed from the actual differences created and conditioned by the internal structure of the state’ itself. These would include ‘the districts, rural communities, governments, provincial administrations, and military departments’, all of which constituted differences that ‘owing to their very essence are dissolved at every moment into the unity of the whole’. Unlike the estates, they were not ‘raw materials imposed on the present time by blind natural necessity’ but ‘free creations of the spirit of the Prussian state’.⁴⁴ In other words, for Marx, representatives to the Commission should be chosen, not on the basis of their position in civil society, but on the basis of their position within the state, or their active participation in public institutions, including local governments, bureaucracies, and the military. This Marx referred to as ‘the real organic life of the state’ and ‘the supreme act of its internal unification’. Thus, Marx declared:

We demand only that the Prussian state should not break off its real state life at a sphere which should be the conscious flowering of this state life; we demand only the consistent and comprehensive implementation of the fundamental institutions of Prussia, we demand that the real organic life of the state should not be suddenly abandoned in order to sink back into unreal, mechanical, subordinated, non-state spheres of life. We demand that the state should not dissolve itself in carrying out the act that should be the supreme act of its internal unification.⁴⁵

The demand, then, was that the Commission should not be an instrument for securing the interests of ‘non-state spheres of life’ such as the estates, but a centralised representation of the various elements of the state itself. Here ‘the real organic life of the state’ would comprehend and subsume the ‘unreal, mechanical, subordinated, non-state spheres of life’. The state, that is, would comprehend and subsume civil society.

Marx’s second article developed this line of thought by criticising the Allgemeine Zeitung author’s characterisation of the relationship between the Provincial Estates Assemblies and the United Estates Commission. The author argued that, insofar as both were designed as representations of the estates, there was no qualitative difference between them, and thus no reason to add new forms of representation to the latter. It was sufficient for the Commission to consist of deputies elected from the Assemblies. If any ‘objections’ to the composition of the Commission were ‘well founded’, the author reasoned, ‘they would be applicable also to the provincial estates’.⁴⁶ Of course, Marx noted, that was exactly what the critics of the Commission claimed – not that the Commission should be based on a principle other than the one informing the Assemblies, but that neither the Commission nor the Assemblies should be founded on the estates. Thus, Marx asked: ‘can the author believe that he has refuted his opponents merely by himself becoming aware of and formulating their objections?’⁴⁷ On the author’s model, the delegates to the Commission were, as it were, doubly particularistic. They represented ‘particular provincial interests from the standpoint of their particular estate interests’. But, assuming that the purpose of the central Commission was to articulate the universal interests of the state, how were the former magically transformed into the latter? ‘What new element suddenly turns the representatives of the provincial interests into representatives of state interests and gives their particular activity the nature of a general activity,’ Marx wondered. On the current model, he continued, ‘it cannot be any other element than the fact of a common place of assembly’ or the fact that the delegates meet in one location. But to suggest that ‘mere space’ constituted ‘the organising soul’ of the state was to reduce the state to ‘the most materialistic mechanism’.⁴⁸ It did not transform particular interests into the universal but concealed the former behind a veneer of the latter. What was required was a Commission genuinely capable of articulating the universal.

Developing such a universal concept of the Commission, indeed of state as such, was the purpose of the third article in Marx’s response to ‘Ueber die Zusammenseßung’. Marx accomplished this task by way of a close examination of the author’s discussion of ‘intelligence’ – one that moved deftly from the established liberal demand that the intelligentsia be treated as a particular estate that elects its own delegates to the Commission to the much more radical demand that, not only the Commission, but all aspects of both state and society be founded on the universal ‘intelligence of the people’. Marx began by noting the author’s claim that, insofar as all humans possess intelligence, the representatives of the estates were simultaneously representatives of intelligence, meaning no additional representatives were required. While this position was obviously simplistic, Marx continued, it contained an element of truth. For, when liberals demanded that the intelligentsia should be recognised as an estate with separate delegates to the Commission, their rationale was that, while the traditional estates represented the particular, egoistic interests of landed property, intelligence was able to contemplate the universal. However, Marx reasoned, intelligence in this sense could not be introduced into a Commission already composed of particular estates by adding the intelligentsia as another particular estate. In fact, Marx maintained, all state institutions based on particular estates amounted to ‘a legitimised self-constituted body of non-state elements within the state’. In effect, their function was to bring the claims of non-state entities before the state, and even to assert the former against the latter. As such, they were ‘hostile towards the state’ and ‘the enemy of the whole’. Therefore, Marx concluded, if ‘the demand for representation of the intellect is to have any meaning, we must expound it as the demand for the conscious representation of the intelligence of the people’. For only ‘the intelligence of the people’ constituted ‘a representation which does not seek to assert individual needs against the state, but one whose supreme need is to assert the state itself, and indeed as its own achievement, as its own state’.⁴⁹

The conclusion of Marx’s argument was a heightened crescendo. It employed a dense philosophical vocabulary. But its practical institutional implications were nevertheless discernible. Marx wrote:

Representation must not be conceived as the representation of something that is not the people itself. It must be conceived only as the people’s self-representation, as a state action which, not being its sole, exceptionless state action, is distinguished from other expressions of its state life merely by the universality of its content. Representation must not be regarded as a concession to a defenceless weakness, to impotence, but rather as the self-reliant vitality of the supreme force. In a true state, there is no landed property, no industry, no material thing, which as a crude element of this kind could make a bargain with the state; in it there are only spiritual forces, and only in their state form of resurrection, in their political rebirth, are these natural forces entitled to a voice in the state. The state pervades the whole of nature with spiritual nerves, and at every point it must be apparent that what is dominant is not matter, but form, not nature without the state, but the nature of the state, not the unfree object, but the free human being.⁵⁰

Neither the estates, in other words, nor any other particular interest emerging out of civil society could be said to represent the people. Rather, the political representation of the people in the state could only mean the ‘self-representation’ of the people insofar as they participate in the operation of the state. In a ‘true state’, we did not find crude, natural, non-state elements like ‘landed property’ or ‘industry’ seeking representation before, making demands on, or attempting to bargain with a distinct, centralised power. Rather, ‘the state pervades the whole of nature with its spiritual nerves’, and the various interests and constituencies of civil society were only ‘entitled to a voice’ after they had undergone a ‘political rebirth’ or ‘state form of resurrection’.

Given this conception of the state, not as something that secures external, non-state interests, but as a system of institutions that comprehends civil society, it is perhaps not surprising that critics of the Rheinische Zeitung accused it of harbouring communist sympathies. As editor, Marx was the one called upon to respond to such accusations (which, if substantiated, would have ensured the journal’s immediate demise). His solution was to limit the contributions of some of the more radical writers and to suggest that challenging any practical expression of communism would require a theoretical examination of communist ideas, and that this was the function of a free press.⁵¹ Where Marx’s actual sympathies rested is impossible to know. But, along with his ‘Debates on the Law on the Thefts of Wood’, his ‘Justification of the Correspondent from the Mosel’, which addressed the plight of peasants in the Mosel region, also dealt with questions of economic inequality, and proposed that only a reorientation of the relationship between the state and civil society could address the underlying issues.⁵² In either case, however else we might characterise Marx’s position in the Rheinische Zeitung, the term ‘liberal’, while often used by commentators, seems particularly unhelpful, as does ‘utopian’. It was a theory of the institutions adequate to a modern state. And it would make a great deal of sense if, around the same time, Marx was attempting to work out its philosophical parameters as well. The next section will argue that this represents a convincing approach to Marx’s ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’.

Locating the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’

Riazanov’s Hypothesis and a Forgotten Debate

The manuscript known as Marx’s ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’ was discovered by Riazanov in the archives of the German Social Democratic Party in 1922. It consists of thirty-nine large pages each folded in half to form four smaller ones. The cover and the first large page are missing. What remains is a detailed analysis of paragraphs 261 to 313 of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, or the section of ‘Ethical Life’ on ‘The State’, and particularly ‘The Internal Constitution’. Marx transcribes and comments on each paragraph in turn. He attacks constitutional monarchy as contradictory. He ridicules Hegel’s defence of an inherited head of state, rejects his effort to ground the assemblies in the estates, refuses every notion of gradual change, and argues for democracy, which, he maintains, is not one constitutional form among many, but ‘the solved riddle of all constitutions’, and an ongoing revolutionary process through which the political order remains permanently responsive to the emerging demands of the people. ‘In all states other than democratic ones’, Marx writes, ‘the state, the law, the constitution is what rules, without really ruling – i.e. without materially penetrating the content of the remaining, non-political spheres. In democracy’, on the other hand, ‘the constitution, the law, the state itself, insofar as it is a political constitution, is only the self-determination of the people, and a particular content of the people’.⁵³ Or, as Marx puts it a little later: ‘if man is to do consciously what otherwise he is forced to do without consciousness by the nature of things,’ then ‘the movement of the constitution’ or ‘progress itself’ must become ‘the principle of the constitution’.⁵⁴

While Marx commentary is notorious for internecine disputes, there is an unusually wide consensus concerning the relationship between Marx’s contributions to the Rheinische Zeitung and his ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’. The established narrative holds that, while working as a journalist in 1842, Marx held essentially liberal views, defending press freedom and representative government. But the suppression of his journal and of the Young Hegelian movement more generally in early 1843 left him disillusioned with liberalism and pushed him towards democracy, revolution, and communism. The first expression of this new approach, the story continues, was his ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’, which he is said to have composed in a burst of inspiration while honeymooning in Kreuznach in the Summer of 1843, just before he moved to Paris, where he would rapidly convert to communism and commence his study of political economy. Thus, and to take just a handful of prominent examples, Miguel Abensour interprets the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’ as Marx’s ‘Machiavellian moment’, or the moment when he rejects the ‘young-Hegelian utopia of the rational state’ in favour of ‘true democracy’.⁵⁵ David Leopold places it at the centre of his contextual reading of ‘the young Marx’ and considers it Marx’s first serious encounter with ‘the modern state’.⁵⁶ And Stathis Kouvelakis treats it as the culmination of a profound ‘crisis’ that propels Marx ‘from the public sphere to revolutionary democracy’.⁵⁷

However, while none of these scholars dwells on this fact, it is important to note that this narrative relies entirely on Riazanov’s original dating of the manuscript, and that this dating, while deeply influential, is not uncontested. After examining the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’ (which, because it has no cover, also has no date), Riazanov came to the conclusion that Marx had produced it in the Summer of 1843. As evidence, he pointed to three things: (1) the intellectual resume with which Marx began the 1859 ‘Preface’ to his Critique of Political Economy, where Marx recalled that, after the suppression of the Rheinische Zeitung, he ‘eagerly grasped the opportunity to withdraw from the public stage to [his] study’ and that ‘the first work [he] undertook’ there ‘was a critical re-examination of the Hegelian philosophy of law’⁵⁸; (2) Marx’s employment of an idiom of subjects and predicates, which Riazanov proposed he derived from Feuerbach, and specifically Feuerbach’s ‘Preliminary Theses for the Reform of Philosophy’, which appeared in Ruge’s Anecdota in early 1843, and which Marx mentioned having read in a letter to Ruge on 13 March 1843; and (3) similarities between the ‘Contribution to Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’ and material found in a series of five notebooks known as his ‘Kreuznacher Hefte’, which Marx had inscribed with the words ‘Kreuznach Juli 1843’ and ‘Kreuznach Juli-August 1843’. The last of these three points appeared particularly compelling. For the ‘Kreuznacher Hefte’ consisted primarily of excerpts from works of political history and theory, and thus seemed to indicate an effort to understand history in materialist terms, or the initial building blocks of what Riazanov took to be Marx’s mature theory of historical materialism.⁵⁹

At the same time, and as Riazanov was aware, Marx’s correspondence offered strong evidence for an alternative dating. For it included three letters in which Marx mentioned working on a critique of Hegel’s state theory at least as early as the Spring of 1842. Thus, on 5 March 1842, Marx promised to send Ruge a ‘criticism of Hegelian natural law, insofar as it concerns the internal political system’, which was to be published in Ruge’s Anecdota. ‘The central point’, Marx continued, ‘is the struggle against constitutional monarchy as a hybrid which from beginning to end contradicts and abolishes itself’.⁶⁰ Marx mentioned the same project in a letter to Ruge on 20 March 1842, and again in a letter to Dagobert Oppenheim on 25 August 1842, where he implied that it was already slated to appear in the Anecdota.⁶¹ It was on the basis of these letters that, in an edition of Marx’s early writings that appeared shortly after Riazanov’s, Landshut and Mayer took issue with his approach, and suggested that the manuscript had been composed much earlier, probably between April 1841 and April 1842. For one thing, Landshut and Mayer noted, a critique of Hegelian natural law focusing on the internal political system and attacking constitutional monarchy as a contradictory hybrid was too precise a description of the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’ to imagine that Marx had completed none of it when writing to Ruge in 1842. For another, Riazanov’s notion that Marx had borrowed his idiom of subjects and predicates from Feuerbach’s ‘Preliminary Theses’ was easily refuted. For not only did the manuscript make no mention of Feuerbach. Feuerbach had developed the same idiom much more extensively in earlier works with which Marx was familiar, including his 1839 ‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’ and, most famously, his 1841 Essence of Christianity.⁶² Moreover, and more damagingly for Riazanov’s hypothesis, Marx himself had used the same idiom in his ‘Notebooks on Epicurus’, which he had composed in 1839 while preparing his doctoral dissertation.⁶³

While Riazanov’s approach was influentially installed in the first edition of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, a somewhat submerged debate over the dating of the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’ continued among European scholars for some time. August Cornu, for instance, speculated that Marx must have composed two separate critiques: an earlier, lost manuscript in which he merely pointed out ‘the contradictory nature of constitutional monarchy’, and the manuscript that we have, in which he sought ‘to show that the capital defect of Hegel’s doctrine was to transform the law into logic, stripping it of its real substance and making it an attribute of abstract concepts’.⁶⁴ Delio Cantimori was more receptive to Landshut’s and Mayer’s claims, and proposed a two-stage model, in which ‘Marx undertook on his own a revision of Hegel’s “politics” before his journalistic activity’ and then ‘resumed it after this journalistic-political activity had been violently interrupted by the censorship’.⁶⁵ Mario Rossi, on the other hand, sided with Riazanov, and insisted that any effort to date the manuscript earlier not only ‘ignored the testimony of its author’ but also ‘ended up diluting the intensity of this youthful crisis thereby diminishing its scope and seriousness’. For Rossi, the ‘style’ of the text alone (which Rossi took to convey a sense of breathless discovery) indicated ‘an exceptional moment and an exceptional experience’. For ‘the fundamental discoveries’ were already in place ‘in the second paragraph’ and ‘whoever wrote it immediately wrote the rest’.⁶⁶ The most compelling arguments, however, were made by those involved in editing both the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’ and the ‘Kreuznacher Hefte’ for the second edition of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, and those who worked closest with that material. And that research, while barely known outside a small circle of experts, almost certainly destroys Riazanov’s original hypothesis.

Along with the lengthy Apparat that accompanies the volume of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe containing the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’ (in which the editors claim that it can ‘be assumed that in one form or another the earlier manuscript of 1842, which has not survived, was used in the drafting of the present one and that it served Marx as a kind of preparatory work)’,⁶⁷ the key document in this regard is an extensive review of the volume of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe containing the ‘Kreuznacher Hefte’ that the Marxist historian Hans-Peter Jaeck published in the Jahrbücher fur Geschichte shortly after that volume appeared in 1982. Jaeck began with the intuition that the material excerpted in the ‘Kreuznacher Hefte’, which included over twenty-three major works, could not possibly have been mastered by Marx over the course of a couple of months. He thus set out to compare the excerpts, not only to the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’ (as Riazanov had done), but to Marx’s journalism in the Rheinische Zeitung as well. And he was able to show that many of Marx’s earlier articles were directly or indirectly informed by the research found in the ‘Kreuznacher Hefte’. The only logical conclusion, then, was that Marx composed the notebooks over a long period of time, and inscribed them with a place and a date, not when he began, but when he finished with them. Indeed, after noticing the trace of ideas contained in the ‘Kreuznacher Hefte’ in Marx’s ‘On the Commissions of the Estates in Prussia’, Jaeck came to the conclusion that that work ‘already touches on the basic themes of the Hegel criticism, or the rejection of the estates system, the majorat, and “petrified” landed property’.⁶⁸ Thus, the best evidence Riazanov had gathered in favour of a rapid composition of the manuscript in Kreuznach in the Summer of 1843 now seemed to point in the opposite direction.

The Critique of Constitutionalism and the Rheinische Zeitung

Jaeck’s argument is very powerful and should give considerable pause to the established narrative concerning Marx’s intellectual development discussed above. But it operates primarily by comparing Marx’s notebooks to his own publications. Here I would like to deepen the argument for an earlier dating of the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’ by placing it alongside a discussion of constitutionalism that took shape in the pages of the Rheinische Zeitung in the first half of 1842, including one intriguing piece by Moses Hess and a series of pieces by Bauer. This material, I would suggest, represents a credible context for the ideas Marx develops in the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’ – more credible, in my estimation, than Riazanov’s invocation of Feuerbach’s ‘Preliminary Thesis’. Hess’s article appeared on 19 April 1842. The title alone – ‘Das Räthsel des 19. Jahrhunderts’ – resonates with the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’, where, as noted, Marx refers to democracy as ‘the solved riddle of all constitutions’. Indeed, Hess compares the constitutional orders of France and England and asks: ‘what kind of people is suitable for this hybrid thing [Zwitterding] called constitutional monarchy?’ – a statement that also resonates with Marx’s language, this time from his 5 March 1842 letter to Ruge. Hess’s basic argument is that ‘the French Revolution gave modern times a riddle to solve’, namely, how to balance ‘freedom and equality’. ‘The original, natural, crude form of freedom and equality – Sansculottism – soon died out’, Hess wrote. ‘The Empire was the sickness that arose from it; the Restauration its tomb’. The current problem, then, was how to achieve freedom and equality without ‘falling back into Sansculottism’.⁶⁹ The problem, in other words, was how to advance the cause of democracy without devolving into terrorism and violence. And one could read Marx’s examination of state institutions in the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’ as an attempt to address the same issue.

Along the same lines, although in a more detailed fashion, during the first half of 1842, Bauer published no fewer than eighteen political-historical essays in the Rheinische Zeitung many of which dealt with constitutional questions, constitutional monarchy in particular.⁷⁰ These pieces unfolded in what appears to be a deliberate fashion. Thus, Bauer began by drawing attention to the French ‘experiment’ with constitutional monarchy, which he characterised as an instantiation of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. But while he praised the vitality of French public life, and especially its political parties, he concluded that the French model was plagued by contradictions and proposed that history would direct Germany in a distinct, more democratic direction. Here I will attempt to capture the movement of Bauer’s thought through a sequential analysis of five pieces:

1. In ‘Die Parteien im jetzigen Frankreich’ (23 January 1842), Bauer took aim at German newspaper correspondents who ridiculed the French constitutional system for its proliferation of parties, and the factionalism and conflict that seemed to result. On Bauer’s account, those who made such judgments failed to realise that political truths can only be grasped through division and struggle. They were guilty of ‘an empty and pointless prudence that seems to rise above those struggles without knowing why, without setting a higher purpose against it’. Indeed, Bauer claimed, the French were not to be ridiculed but celebrated. The conflict characteristic of their public life expressed the political vibrancy of the modern world. No doubt they had ‘experimented in recent constitutional struggles’. But they had ‘experimented for all of us, for all of history’.⁷¹

2. Bauer’s ‘Die deutschen Sympathien für Frankreich’ (6 February 1842) sought to draw France and Germany closer together while avoiding any simple identity between them. ‘If the daydreams of our philosophers, especially our philosophical politicians, are to have any real meaning for Europe’, Bauer wrote, ‘they must first be translated into a more humane language’. And where should that process begin? ‘With the French’, he continued, ‘with a Montesquieu! With a Mirabeau! With a people who have recently produced a work in Tocqueville's treatise on North America with which we have nothing to compare’. Bauer then contrasted this civilised, rational French political discourse with the English alternative. The political movements of the latter, he said, even oppositional ones, had their roots in the ‘religious enthusiasm’ and ‘ecclesiastical fanaticism’ of the Civil War, which essentially pitted religious sects against the state church. In the French Revolution, on the other hand, ‘political questions were posed purely as such, in the sunlight of reason, humanity, and the thing itself’. At the same time, France was to be admired, but not imitated. ‘We do not want to repeat the same experiment’, Bauer wrote. For ‘each people has different experiments to carry out’. Instead, ‘we want to see which experiment is reserved for us when the one in France is completed’.⁷²

3. ‘Die Zersplitterung der Parteien in Frankreich’ (10 February 1842) sharpened Bauer’s analysis of constitutionalism considerably. It returned to the theme of the German correspondents’ misguided criticism of the French system. Whereas they saw in ‘the struggle of the constitutional powers’ only a chaotic ‘hustle and bustle’, Bauer insisted that ‘later history’ would ‘regard the multitude of parties as a proof of the thoroughness with which the principle that presently concerns France was treated and worked on in all directions’. However, Bauer reiterated his claim that the French model should not ‘be extended to all peoples and states’. For it was ‘not the necessary form of every state, but only a specific form of the idea of the state in general’. It was, in other words, one stage in a historical process, and its ‘splintering [Zersplitterung]’ had a specific lesson to impart – namely that, and despite what Hegel had proposed, constitutional monarchy was not an organic system of mediations in which all ‘conflict’ between ‘powers’ could ‘be avoided’, but a political order that fostered the conflict that would lead to its transcendence.⁷³

4. These arguments, and particularly the critique of Hegel, were developed again in ‘Die Kollisionen in den konstitutionellen Staaten’ (27 March 1842). Here Bauer challenged Hegel’s claim that, in constitutional monarchy, the sovereign’s function was both formal and indispensable, both an empty ceremonial gesture and a logical necessity. As we saw Ruge point out in his ‘Zur Kritik des gegenwartigen Staats- und Völkerrechts’ above, Hegel defended an inherited crown by claiming that every act of law required the assertion of a sovereign will, even if its function was purely formal, or to ratify the decisions of the assembly. For Bauer, though, the notion of a purely formal will was absurd. No one could simultaneously suspend their convictions and assert their will. Thus, and as the example of France revealed, constitutional monarchy resulted in repeated ‘collisions’ between the monarchy and the legislature. One way forward, Bauer proposed, was the presidential republicanism found in ‘North America’, where the ‘head of the executive power changes depending on the ruling system’ and therefore ‘does not need to constantly come into collision with the general will’ – where, that is to say, the highest office is not inherited but elected, and thus is not opposed to, but an expression of, the will of the people.⁷⁴

5. Finally, in ‘Louis Philippe und die Juli-Regierung’ (6 June and 23 June 1842) Bauer brought his sequence of articles on constitutionalism full circle. Whereas he had begun by praising French public life and its party system, he now argued that French constitutional monarchy had ‘suffocated’ the party system and destroyed and the possibility of progress through struggle. Instead of playing a purely formal role, Louis Philippe had become a ‘master of the art of wearing down the party leaders’ and thereby ‘made himself the absolute master over them’. He had become ‘the most perfect expression of Machiavellianism’ and ‘the art of bringing the parties to the point where they disgust themselves and everyone else, where they lose faith in themselves, abandon themselves, and perish in the general indifference that surrounds them’.⁷⁵ What constitutionalism generated, then, was not, as Hegel had promised, an organic totality in which all elements of society participated meaningfully in public life, but stagnation and decay. The available alternatives now were the restoration of the monarchy or the democratic concentration of power in the hands of the people.

It would be a mistake, of course, to conflate Marx with either Hess or Bauer, as it would be with Ruge. But it is undeniable that numerous Young Hegelians were developing closely related criticisms of constitutional monarchy – both Hegel’s theory of it in the Philosophy of Right and its practical expression in France and England – well before 1843, and that it was a particularly pressing issue in the pages of the Rheinische Zeitung in the Spring of 1842. The ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’ also suggests that the system of mediations Hegel imagines would lead inevitably to ‘collisions’, although Marx’s version is more involved than anything Bauer describes in the Rheinische Zeitung. Indeed, for Marx, there is a sense in which the irrational elements of Hegel’s theory of state are merely ciphers for the irrational elements of his philosophical logic more generally. But all the Young Hegelians were working both inside and outside of the Hegelian system at once. That was what characterised their project all the way back to its inception with the founding of the Hallische Jahrbücher in 1838. No doubt Marx had to disentangle himself from any number of early influences in order to produce his later work. But the figure of the break is too neat to describe what was a much messier process. And, in making it possible to dismiss very serious thinkers and arguments as ‘liberal’ or ‘utopian’, it unjustifiably leaves behind as much if not more than it accumulates.

Conclusion

Perhaps for obvious reasons, twentieth century Marx commentators had a considerable amount invested in the notion that the Young Hegelians were idealist, abstract, and of interest only insofar as Marx rejected them. But that narrative cannot withstand any serious historical scrutiny. If we want to know who the Young Hegelians were, we could do worse than to sample the rhetoric of their enemies. Here, by way of conclusion, I will refer to two: the conservative theologian Ernst Hengstenberg; and the liberal philosopher and politician Karl Biedermann. On 16 July 1842, Hengstenberg’s Evangelischen Kirchenzeitung (an influential journal that frequently contained broadsides against the Young Hegelians) included an editorial titled ‘Die Vollbrachte Revolution’. Nominally a review of Bauer’s Hegel’s Lehre von der Religion und Kunst, it quickly degenerated into a diatribe. Thus, Hengstenberg noted in horror how the Young Hegelians ‘proclaim that the destructive revolutionary French philosophy of the last century was only the beginning’ and that it is ‘their duty and task to bring its practical results into the life of the people and to transfer them through a philosophy of the act into the realm of actual reality’. ‘This’, Hengstenberg fumed:

is the self-imposed goal of these modern Jacobins who seek to outdo the old-fashioned ones of the French Revolution (who were merely its forerunners) and who, if they had their way, would immediately abolish all worship, demolish all churches, melt the bells into canons, and bring a far more gruesome devastation to Germany than was ever brought to France.⁷⁶

From a very different perspective, but with similar outrage, Biedermann’s 1842 Die deutsche Philosophie contained the following judgement of those gathered around Ruge:

They want to abolish individual freedom by subordinating it to their concept of freedom. They want to destroy the self-consciousness and self-determination of the individual by forcing upon him their consciousness, their view of human destiny. That is the terrorism of freedom, both political and religious, that the Jahrbücher preach – the terrorism of one who accepts no other freedom and no other worldview than his own, and who, in the name of freedom, which he believes to be the only salvation, suppresses the freedom of all those who follow a different path.⁷⁷

These were exaggerated attacks, no doubt. But they show that, whatever else twentieth century commentators might have thought, the contemporaries of the Young Hegelians did not see them as liberal or utopian. They were revolutionaries. And working out what that meant for them sheds light, not only on their projects, but on Marx’s as well.

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Notes

1 MECW 4: 5–211; MECW 5; Hook, Hegel to Marx; Löwith, Hegel to Nietzsche; Marcuse, Reason; McLellan, Young Hegelians.

2 Breckman, Marx; Moggach, New Hegelians; Moggach, Politics; Lambrecht, Umstürzende; Quante and Mohseni, Hegelianer.

3 Breckman, ‘Arnold Ruge’.

4 Ruge, ‘Kritik’, 1209.

5 Ibid., 1210.

6 Ibid., 1229.

7 Ibid., 1236.

8 Ruge, ‘Sendschreiben’, 1183.

9 Leo, Senschreiben; Ruge, ‘Die denunciation’; Leo, Hegelingen.

10 Streckfuß, Garantieen.

11 Ruge, ‘Streckfuß’, 2092.

12 Ibid., 2100.

13 Ibid., 2106.

14 Ruge, ‘Landeskirche’, 1827.

15 Ibid., 1832.

16 Ruge, ‘Vorwort’, 2.

17 Ibid., 3.

18 Buhl, Verfassungsfrage; Edgar Bauer, Bruno Bauer; Köppen, Friedrich, 115–19; Nauwerck, Staatsverfassung.

19 Moggach, Bauer.

20 Bauer, Landeskirche, 36.

21 Ibid., 107.

22 Stahl, Kirchenverfassung; Berdahl, Nobility, 354–70.

23 Bauer, ‘Staat’, 541

24 MECW 1: 145.

25 Verhandlungen.

26 MECW 1, 180.

27 MECW 1, 147, 149.

28 MECW 1: 160.

29 MECW 1: 145.

30 MECW 1: 148, 151.

31 MECW 1: 161, 162.

32 Hugo, Lehrbuch der juristischen Encyclopädie, 19; see also: Hugo, Lehrbuch des Naturrechts, 49, 52.

33 MECW 1: 204, 205.

34 MECW 1: 209.

35 MECW 1: 230, 231.

36 MECW 1: 232.

37 MECW 1: 230.

38 MECW 1: 245, 253.

39 MECW 1: 260.

40 MECW 1: 255.

41 Anonymous, ‘Zusammenseßung’, 2673.

42 Ibid., 2674.

43 MECW 1: 292.

44 MECW 1: 296.

45 MECW 1: 297.

46 Anonymous, ‘Zusammenseßung’, 2673.

47 MECW 1: 298–9.

48 MECW 1: 299, 300.

49 MECW 1: 305, 306.

50 MECW 1: 306.

51 MECW 1: 215–21; 270–2.

52 MECW 1: 332–58.

53 MECW 3: 30–1.

54 MECW 3: 57.

55 Abensour, Democracy, 31, 38–46.

56 Leopold, Young Marx, 11–12, 19–20, 33.

57 Kouvelakis, Philosophy, 288–94.

58 MECW 29: 262.

59 Riazanov, ‘Einleitung’, lxxii–lxxv.

60 MECW 1: 382.

61 MECW 1: 385–6, 393.

62 Landshut and Meyer, ‘Einleitung’, xix–xxi.

63 MECW 1: 458.

64 Cornu, Karl Marx, 249–50. A similar approach is taken in: Lafrance, ‘La Critique’.

65 Cantimori, Studi, 167.

66 Rossi, Hegel a Marx, 277.

67 MEGA I, 3 (Apparat): 577.

68 Jaeck, ‘Kreuznacher’, 77. See also: Jaeck, ‘Gesamtausgabe’, 424.

69 Moses Hess, ‘‘Räthsel’, Beiblatt.

70 Moggach, Bruno Bauer, 126–8.

71 Bauer, ‘Parteien’, Beiblatt.

72 Bauer, ‘Sympathien’, Beiblatt.

73 Bauer, ‘Zersplitterung’, Beiblatt.

74 Bauer, ‘Kollisionen’, Beiblatt.

75 Bauer, ‘Louis Philippe’, Beiblatt.

76 Hengstenberg, ‘Vollbrachte’, 449–50.

77 Biedermann, Philosophie, 514.