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interests and he will be all the more enthusiastic and delighted with the examination when he learns that another Hegelian is now getting a chair.'128 And a year later he was writing: 'In any event see that Ladenberg [Rector of the University of Berlin] smoothes the way for you. Get him to write here on your behalf and anticipate all the sorts of intrigues that there could be. See, too, if you cannot win over Eichhorn [Minister of Culture].'129
Thus encouraged, Marx duly submitted his thesis in April 1841, but not to the University of Berlin: instead, he sent it to Jena, one of the small universities which 'gready facilitated the gaining of the title of Doctor'.130 In fact, Jena held the record in the production of Doctors of Philosophy. The whole affair was managed by Wolff, Professor of Literature there, a friend of Heinrich Heine and an acquaintance of Marx, who had probably informed him of the situation inside the Faculty at Jena. Marx was immediately granted his degree in absentia on 15 April 1841.
III. J O U R N A L I S M
As soon as his thesis was accepted, Marx began a very restless year which was finally to culminate in his adopting journalism as a career in mid1842. His search for a secure means of earning his livelihood led him to commute between Trier, Bonn and Cologne, never remaining for very long in any one place. He began many projects but - true to his previous life-style - finished none of them.
After six weeks at his parents' home in Trier, Marx moved to Bonn to pursue his academic career in the company of Bruno Bauer. To obtain a lectureship, the university statutes required a dissertation in addition to a doctoral thesis, so Marx began to revise his thesis for publication and also extend it in 'a longer dissertation, in which I will present in detail the cycle of Epicurean, Stoic and Sceptical philosophy in relation to all Greek Speculation'.131 He also appended two extended notes to his thesis.
The first of the substantial notes that Marx added to his thesis at the end of 1841 was directed primarily against Schelling, who had just been summoned to Berlin by Frederick William IV in order to 'root out the dragon-seed of Hegelianism'.132 In his lectures entitled 'The Philosophy of Revelation', Schelling drew a distinction between a negative and purely rational philosophy, and a positive one whose real content was the evolution of the divine in history and as it was recorded in the various mythologies and religions of mankind. Schelling's lectures were accompanied by much publicity and at first attracted wide attention: Engels, Kierke-
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gaard and Bakunin were all present at his inaugural lecture. The reaction of the Hegelians was strong and Marx's not least: his technique here was to contrast what Schelling was then saying with his earlier writings, and point out the disparity between his dogmatic Berlin lectures and his earlier belief in the freedom of speculation. Marx went on to claim that Hegel had inverted the traditional proofs for the existence of God and thereby refuted them. For Marx, either the proofs for the existence of God were tautologies or they were 'nothing but proofs for the existence of an essentially human self-consciousness and elaborations of it'.133 Marx finished his note - with its strange mixture of post-Hegelian philosophy and the simple rationalism of the Enlightenment - by quoting two more passages from the early Schelling: 'If you presuppose the idea of an objective God, how can you speak of laws that reason independently creates, for autonomy can only be ascribed to an absolutely free being?'
'It is a crime against humanity to conceal principles that are communicable to everyone.'134
The second note appended to the thesis takes up the themes already treated in the passage in the preliminary notes on the future of philosophy after Hegel's total system, and elaborates for the first time (though still in a very idealistic manner) the notions of the abolition of philosophy and praxis that were to be so central to his later thought.135
At the same time as extending his thesis by means of these rather theoretical discussions, Marx was engaged in more immediate and polemical projects - mostly in collaboration with Bruno Bauer whose increasing difficulties with the government authorities seemed to be jeopardising the prospective university careers of both of them. For Bauer was engaged in writing his Criticism of the Synoptic Gospels, a work which denied the historicity of Christ and portrayed the gospels as mythical inventions. Since March 1841 the two men had planned to found a review entitled Atheistic Archives, which would take as its foundation Bauer's gospel criticism.136 Certainly Marx's atheism was of an extremely militant kind. Ruge wrote to a friend: 'Bruno Bauer, Karl Marx, Christiansen and Feuerbach are forming a new "Montagne" and making atheism their slogan. God, religion, immortality are cast down from their thrones and man is proclaimed God.'137 And Georg Jung, a prosperous young Cologne lawyer and supporter of the radical movement, wrote to Ruge: 'If Marx, Bruno Bauer and Feuerbach come together to found a theological-philosophical review, God would do well to surround Himself with all His angels and indulge in self-pity, for these three will certainly drive Him out of His heaven... For Marx, at any rate, the Christian religion is one of the most immortal there is.'138
These plans came to nothing, however. Instead, Bauer published
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anonymously in November what purported to be an arch-conservative pietist attack on Hegel, entitled The Trump of the Last Judgement on Hegel the Atheist and Anti-Christ. Under the cover of attacking Hegel, this tract was designed to show that he was really an atheist revolutionary. Marx may well have collaborated with Bauer in writing The Trump..., and some indeed thought it was their joint work. At any rate they certainly intended jointly to produce a sequel, to be called Hegel's Hatred of Religious and Christian Art and his Destruction of all the Laws of the State. Marx therefore began to read a series of books on art and religion. Bauer had finished his part in December 1841, but he had to publish it without his collaborator's contribution: in December 1841 Marx was obliged to return to Trier where Baron von Westphalen had fallen seriously ill. Until his father-in-law's death on 3 March 1842, Marx stayed in the Westphalen house and helped, as Bauer put it, to 'lighten the days' of the dying man. March was a bad month for Marx: not only did he lose his closest friend and supporter in the Westphalen household, but his hopes of a university career were shattered when Bauer was deprived of his teaching post on account of his unorthodox doctrines. While in Trier Marx had already composed an article which he sent to Arnold Ruge who edited the Deutsche Jabrbucher.
Ruge, who was to be a close colleague of Marx's for the next two years, was also an exile from university teaching; being refused a chair owing to his unorthodox views, he resigned from the university and devoted himself entirely to journalism. For this he was admirably suited: he was a man of independent means, and although having no very original mind, he wrote quickly and well and had a very wide range of contacts.159 In 1838 he started the Hallische Jahrbiicher which soon became the leading periodical of the Young Hegelians. Although during the early years the contributions to the Hallische Jahrbiicher had in general addressed themselves to an enlightened Prussian state, by 1840 overtly political articles were beginning to follow on religious ones - a logic implicit in the notion of the 'Christian state'. As a result the Jahrbiicher was banned in Prussia in June 1841 and moved to Dresden, where it appeared under the title Deutsche Jahrbiicher.^ During 1840 the Berlin Young Hegelians had begun to write for it, and by the middle of 1841 Bauer had become a regular contributor.
Marx had already been introduced to Ruge by his Berlin friend KOppen, himself a frequent contributor. The article Marx sent to Ruge 111 Kebruary 1842 (together with a covering letter offering to review books and put all his energies at the service of the Deutsche Jahrbiicher) dealt with the new censorship instruction issued by Frederick William IV in December 1841. Frederick William IV had succeeded to the Prussian
throne the year before and the Young Hegelians had expected a liberalisation to ensue. The new king certainly shared with the bourgeoisie a hatred of regimented bureaucracy: his ideal was paternalistic government. He agreed with the bourgeoisie's claim to express their opinions in Parliament and the press, and even emphasised in the censorship instruction 'the value of, and need for, frank and loyal publicity'. Since, however, what the bourgeoisie wanted to campaign for was not a romantically paternalist society, a collision was inevitable. In his article, entitled 'Comments on the latest Prussian Censorship Instruction', Marx exposed the inconsistencies of the new censorship regulations that were supposed to relax the prevailing ones. Since they forbade attacks on the Christian religion and penalised offences against 'discipline, morals and outward loyalty', he considered that the 'censorship must reject the great moral thinkers of the past - Kant, Fichte, Spinoza, for example - as irreligious and violating discipline, morals and social respectability. And these moralists start from a contradiction in principle between morality and religion, for morality is based on the autonomy of the human mind whereas religion is based on its heteronomy."41 Further, the new regulations were inimical to good law in so far as they were directed at 'tendencies' and 'intentions' as much as acts. For Marx, this was to create a society in which a single state organ regarded itself as the sole possessor of reason and morality, whereas 'an ethical state reflects the views of its members even though they may oppose one of its organs or the government itself.142 He was thus beginning to draw liberal democratic conclusions from Hegel's political philosophy.
Marx's article was a masterpiece of polemical exegesis, demonstrating the great pamphleteering talent in the style of Boerne that he was to exhibit throughout his life. All his articles of the Young Hegelian period - and, to a lesser extent, many of his later writings - were written in an extremely vivid style: his radical and uncompromising approach, his love of polarisation, his method of dealing with opponents' views by reductio ad absurdum, all led him to write very antithetically. Slogan, climax, anaphora, parallelism, antithesis and chiasmus (especially the last two) were all employed by Marx - sometimes to excess. In the event, the authorities would not pass this particular article of his (it eventually appeared in February 1843 in Switzerland in Anekdota, a collection of articles suppressed by the Prussian censorship and issued in book form by Ruge).
Finding 'the proximity of the Bonn professors insufferable',14' Marx moved to Cologne in April 1842 with the intention of at least writing something that would find its way into print. While in Bonn he had made several visits to Cologne where he found much pleasure in champagne and discussions about Hegel. Jenny wrote to him: 'My dark little savage,
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how glad 1 am that you are happy, that my letter exhilarated you, that you long for me, that you live in well-papered rooms, that you have drunk champagne in Cologne, that there are Hegel clubs there, that you
have dreamed and, in short, that you are my darling, my own dark little savage.'144 But the high life in Cologne turned out to be too much for
him as 'the life here is too noisy and good boisterous friends do not make for better philosophy'.145 So Marx returned to Bonn where he was able to relax with Bauer. 'Marx has come back here,' his friend wrote: 'Lately we went out into the open country to enjoy once again all the beautiful views. The trip was marvellous. We were as gay as ever. In Godesberg we hired a couple of donkeys and galloped on them like madmen around the hill and through the village. Bonn society gazed at us as amazed as ever. We halloed and the donkeys brayed.'146 But their ways soon parted for good when Bauer went to Berlin to try and get his dismissal rescinded. Marx meanwhile continued with his journalism. At the end of April he already had four articles to propose to Ruge. His visits to Cologne did not only consist in drinking champagne: he was gradually becoming involved in the city's liberal opposition movement, an involvement in practical politics that eventually led to his breaking with the Young Hegelians and taking over the editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung. In spite of Jenny's warning against getting 'mixed up' in politics (an activity she described as 'the riskiest thing there is'),147 it was an almost inevitable step for a young Rhineland intellectual of progressive views.
The political atmosphere in the Rhineland was quite different from Berlin: Rhineland-Westphalia, annexed by France from 1795 to 1814, had had the benefit of economic, administrative and political reforms. What had before been 108 small states were reorganised into four districts; feudalism was abolished, and various administrative anomalies - as regards the political, juridical and financial systems - were eliminated. The corporations and customs barriers were done away with, much could be exported to France and producers were protected against competition from England. Expansion, led by the textile industry, was so rapid that by 1810 the Prefect of the Ruhr plausibly claimed that it was the most industrial region in Europe. The majority of progressive figures in Germany of that time came from the Rhineland: the leaders of the liberal opposition, and many future activists in the 1848 revolutions, and poets such as Heine and Boerne.
One of the focal points of this political activity was the 'Cologne
Circle' |
the Rhineland's more down-to-earth equivalent of the Doctors' |
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which Marx joined as soon as he established himself in Bonn. In |
many ways the central figure of the Cologne Circle was Georg Jung who hud also been a member of the Berlin Doctors' Club. He quickly became