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MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS
The Ideas of
Karl Marx
A Critical Introduction
Stefano Petrucciani
Translated by
Guido Parietti
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
Series Editors
Marcello Musto
York University
Toronto, ON, Canada
Terrell Carver
University of Bristol
Bristol, UK
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Stefano Petrucciani
The Ideas of Karl

Marx
A Critical Introduction
Stefano Petrucciani
Sapienza University of Rome
Rome, Italy
Translated by
Guido Parietti
James Madison College
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI, USA
ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic)

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
ISBN 978-3-030-52350-3 ISBN 978-3-030-52351-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52351-0
Original Italian edition published by Marx, Carocci Editore, Roma 2010

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Titles Published
1. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions

of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts, 2014.
2. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German Ideol-
ogy” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach
chapter,” 2014.
3. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism,
2015.
4. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production: A
Critique of Marxism, 2016.
5. Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical
History, 2016.
6. Frederick Harry Pitts, Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to
Read Marx, 2017.
7. Ranabir Samaddar, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age, 2017.
8. George Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of
Karl Marx, 2018.
9. Jean-Numa Ducange & Razmig Keucheyan (Eds.), The End of the
Democratic State: Nicos Poulantzas, a Marxism for the 21st Century,
2018.
10. Robert Ware, Marx on Emancipation and the Socialist Transition:
Retrieving Marx for the Future, 2018.
11. Xavier LaFrance & Charles Post (Eds.), Case Studies in the Origins
of Capitalism, 2018.
v
vi TITLES PUBLISHED
12. John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair
MacIntyre, 2018.
13. Vladimir Puzone & Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian
Left in the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral
Capitalism, 2019.
14. James Muldoon & Gaard Kets (Eds.), The German Revolution and
Political Theory, 2019.
15. Michael Brie, Rediscovering Lenin: Dialectics of Revolution and
Metaphysics of Domination, 2019.
16. August H. Nimtz, Marxism versus Liberalism: Comparative Real-
Time Political Analysis, 2019.
17. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello and Mauricio de Souza Saba-
dini (Eds.), Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits: A Marxist
Analysis, 2019.
18. Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto & Babak Amini (Eds), Karl Marx’s
Life, Ideas, and Influences: A Critical Examination on the Bicente-
nary, 2019.
19. Igor Shoikhedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism:
Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights, 2019.
20. Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile:
The Possibility of Social Critique, 2019.
21. Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, 2020.
22. Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories, 2020.
23. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The Bourgeois and the Savage: A Marxian
Critique of the Image of the Isolated Individual in Defoe, Turgot and
Smith, 2020.
24. Terrell Carver, Engels before Marx, 2020.
25. Jean-Numa Ducange, Jules Guesde: The Birth of Socialism and
Marxism in France, 2020.
Titles Forthcoming
Antonio Oliva, Ivan Novara & Angel Oliva (Eds.), Marx and Contempo-
rary Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Real Abstraction
Giuseppe Vacca, Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s Twentieth
Century
Terrell Carver, The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, 30th Anniversary
Edition
Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather Brown (Eds.), Raya
Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Gender, and the Dialec-
tics of Liberation
Paresh Chattopadhyay, Socialism in Marx’s Capital: Towards a De-
alienated World
Gianfranco Ragona & Monica Quirico, Frontier Socialism: Self-
organisation and Anti-capitalism
Vesa Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment
Kohei Saito (Ed.), Reexamining Engels’s Legacy in the 21st Century
Francesco Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space
Kolja Lindner, Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism
Ryuji Sasaki, A New Introduction to Karl Marx: New Materialism,
Critique of Political Economy, and the Concept of Metabolism
Jean-Numa Ducange & Elisa Marcobelli (Eds.), Selected Writings of Jean
Jaures: On Socialism, Pacifism and Marxism
Adriana Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture: Itineraries, Problems
and Debates in Post-war Argentina
vii
viii TITLES FORTHCOMING
Marco Di Maggio, The Rise and Fall of Communist Parties in France and
Italy
George C. Comninel, The Feudal Foundations of Modern Europe
James Steinhoff, Critiquing the New Autonomy of Immaterial Labour: A
Marxist Study of Work in the Artificial Intelligence Industry
Spencer A. Leonard, Marx, the India Question, and the Crisis of
Cosmopolitanism
Joe Collins, Applying Marx’s Capital to the 21st century
Levy del Aguila Marchena, Communism, Political Power and Personal
Freedom in Marx
Jeong Seongjin, Korean Capitalism in the 21st Century: Marxist Analysis
and Alternatives
Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective
from Labriola to Gramsci
Satoshi Matsui, Normative Theories of Liberalism and Socialism: Marxist
Analysis of Values
Shannon Brincat, Dialectical Dialogues in Contemporary World Politics: A
Meeting of Traditions in Global Comparative Philosophy
Stefano Petrucciani, Theodor W. Adorno. Philosophy, Society, and Aesthetics
Francesca Antonini, Reassessing Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: Dictatorship,
State, and Revolution
Thomas Kemple, Capital after Classical Sociology: The Faustian Lives of
Social Theory
Tsuyoshi Yuki, Socialism, Markets and the Critique of Money: The Theory
of “Labour Note”
V Geetha, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in
India
Xavier Vigna, A Political History of Factories in France: The Workers’
Insubordination of 1968
Atila Melegh, Anti-Migrant Populism in Eastern Europe and Hungary: A
Marxist Analysis
Marie-Cecile Bouju, A Political History of the Publishing Houses of the
French Communist Party
Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello & Henrique Pereira Braga (Eds.),
Wealth and Poverty in Contemporary Brazilian Capitalism
Peter McMylor, Graeme Kirkpatrick & Simin Fadaee (Eds.), Marxism,
Religion, and Emancipatory Politics
TITLES FORTHCOMING ix
Mauro Buccheri, Radical Humanism for the Left: The Quest for Meaning
in Late Capitalism
Rémy Herrera, Confronting Mainstream Economics to Overcome Capi-
talism
Contents
1 The Education of a Young Hegelian 1

1.1 Marx’s First Steps as a Student 1
1.2 From “Liberal” Battles to Social Questions 6
1.3 Critique of Hegel’s Theory of the State 12
2 The Critique of Liberalism 27

2.1 The Question of Critique and the Coming
of Communism 27
2.2 Limits of the Rights of Man and Citizen 30
2.3 Philosophy, Revolution, Proletariat 42
2.4 A First Appraisal 51
3 The Discovery of Economics 55

3.1 Alienated Labor 55
3.2 Reformism and Communism 65
3.3 Yet Another Engagement with Hegel 70
3.4 The Holy Family 74
4 A New Conception of History 81

4.1 The Limits of Old Materialism 81
4.2 Toward the Science of History 87
4.3 Stirner, Communism, and Individualism 103
xi
xii CONTENTS
4.4 Concluding Remarks on the Theory of Historical

Materialism 106
5 A Time for Revolution: Marx and 1848 111

5.1 The Polemics Against Proudhon and Ricardo’s Value
Theory 111
5.2 The Communists’ Manifesto 119
5.3 1848 in Germany 130
5.4 The London Exile: A Time to Take Stock 135
6 The Critique of Political Economy 145

6.1 Marx as a Journalist 145
6.2 Toward Political Economy: The Grundrisse 148
6.3 The Fundamental Concepts of Critique: Commodity
and Value, Money and Capital, Labor-Power
and Surplus Value 160
6.4 Value and Exploitation: Two Theories and Many
Problems 172
6.5 The Tendencies of Capitalist Economy 181
7 The International, the Paris Commune, Social

Democracy 191
7.1 The Founding of the International 191
7.2 The Franco-Prussian War and the Commune 193
7.3 The Birth of Social Democracy 200
Chronology of Life and Works 207
Bibliography 211
Index 219
CHAPTER 1
The Education of a Young Hegelian
1.1 Marx’s First Steps as a Student

Karl Marx’s position in the development of modern thought is not easily
defined; his intellectual stance, in fact, hardly fits within usual disciplinary
divisions. Especially at the time of his education and earliest works, Marx
is a philosopher of the Hegelian left, even if a peculiar one. Already with
The German Ideology, however, Marx is moving toward the transforma-
tion of philosophy into a theory of society and history, and with that
he qualifies as one of the founding fathers of modern social science. In
the period culminating with the European revolution of 1848 (when
Marx publishes, with Engels, the Manifesto of the Communist Party)
Marx is first and foremost a political thinker; but the greatest work
of his life, Capital (first volume published in 1867) bears the subtitle
“Critique of Political Economy,” placing Marx among the classics of
modern economics. Marx, thus, cannot be slotted into a single discipline:
through philosophy and social theory, politics and economics, his work
appears as a unique occurrence in the history of thought; this is true both
for its distinctively multi-disciplinary character and for its extraordinary
influence on culture and, most importantly, European and world history.
Marx’s unique character, which made him the most influential thinkers
of the last two centuries, may be comprehended only by understanding his
work, irreducible to any specific discipline as it is, through its own pecu-
liarity. And this peculiarity lies precisely in the fact that Marx has been the
© The Author(s) 2020 1

S. Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx,
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52351-0_1
2 S. PETRUCCIANI
first thinker in Western history to articulate a radical critique of society, at

once as a science and as a political-organizational perspective. In this way,
Marx created something previously unheard of, a radical innovation the
like of which the history of the West had never known.
Naturally, before Marx there had been attempts, more or less moral-
istic, to criticize society, property, and inequality. Likewise, instances of
radical revolutionary politics were not unknown—for example in the most
extreme factions of the French Revolution, such as Babeuf’s “conspiracy
of the equals.” Rousseau, in his Discourse on the Origin and Founda-
tions of Inequality Among Mankind, had developed a deep philosophical
critique of an inegalitarian society. But only with Marx, a century later,
the critique makes that extraordinary leap which brings together scien-
tific, historical, and economic knowledge of society while connecting the
theory to a political-practical perspective, itself grounded on social anal-
ysis and real class conflicts. What are, then, the steps through which Marx
develops his radically new critical perspective? Here we shall go through
these steps, reconstructing their essential argumentative turns.
Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in Trier, from a family of the Jewish
bourgeoisie which had converted to Lutheranism. His father—Heinrich,
an esteemed lawyer of liberal and Francophile proclivities—nudged the
son toward the study of law, and so Marx enrolled at the university of
Bonn in 1838, at the tender age of seventeen. Only a year later, though,
Marx left Bonn for the university of Berlin where, Hegel having taught
until his death in 1831, Hegelian philosophy was still very influential.
Thus, Marx’s intellectual education happens under the aegis of Hegel’s
philosophy, to which he promptly converts, abandoning earlier sympathies
for Kant and Fichte.1 A letter to his father documents this first essential
turning point in Marx’s biography. The letter is a broad reflection on
Marx’s philosophical convictions as they then stood. There Marx writes
he had read Hegel “from beginning to end,”2 and that he was eventually
swayed by a philosophy he had initially rejected (its “grotesque and rocky
melody had never been to my taste”).3 Crucially, and differently from
Kant and Fichte, Hegel did not place the ideal above the real, but rather
1 Concerning these very early moments of Marx’ thought, see: M. Duichin, Il primo
Marx. Momenti di un itinerario intellettuale, 1835–1841 (Roma: Cadmo, 1982).
2 Karl Marx, “Letter from Marx to His Father,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works,
Volume 1 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010). The quoted text is from p. 19.
3 Ibid., 18.
1 THE EDUCATION OF A YOUNG HEGELIAN 3
sought “the idea in reality itself. If previously the gods had dwelt above
the earth, now they became its centre.”4
Having thus arrived at Hegelian dialectic despite himself, Marx
resolved to abandon legal studies and turn toward philosophy. En route
to an expedite graduation Marx submitted his dissertation at the univer-
sity of Jena, where on April 15, 1841 (without being present) he was
declared doctor in philosophy, with a thesis on The Difference Between
the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature. The dissertation is
an erudite and accurate work which, for its methodology and form, fits
perfectly within the Hegelian school of philosophical historiography. As
noted by various scholars,5 though, Marx’s conclusions are almost oppo-
site to Hegel’s appraisal of the two Greek thinkers in his lecture on the
history of philosophy, because Marx emphasized the theoretical value
of Epicurus above Democritus. Marx’s reasons to inquire this moment
of the history of thought, however, were hardly academic or historical-
philosophical; what he rather wanted was to employ the reflection on
post-Aristotelian philosophies (Stoicism, Skepticism, Epicureanism) in the
context of his contemporary intellectual environment. And thus the basic
question: What is left for those who (like Marx) find themselves thinking
after the completion of a great systematic philosophy (then Aristotle, now
Hegel), that is to say after a “conclusive” theory which seems to have
expressed and exhausted in itself all potentialities of human reason?
Hegel’s philosophy is indeed conclusive in many respects. First
because, logically, it develops a concept of truth as a result of the
whole process of the history of thought (conceptually reconstructed).
The Hegelian summa does not leave anything out of itself, it recognizes
to every past philosophy the merit of having developed one category of
logic (which is to say, of reality), and it takes on itself the task of drawing
the final implications of a thought process which arrives at full and defini-
tive self-awareness in Hegelian philosophy itself. Hegel interprets history
as the progress of the consciousness of freedom; a freedom which in the
modern age is finally universalized, organizing a reality which makes itself
4 Ibid.
5 See the excellent work of Roberto Finelli, Un parricidio mancato. Hegel e il giovane
Marx (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2004), 53–63. On Marx and atomism, see: George E.
McCarthy, Marx and the Ancients: Classical Ethics, Social Justice, and Nineteenth-Century
Political Economy (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1990).
4 S. PETRUCCIANI
into reason. But if that is so, what role can an intellectual, such as Marx,
perform within the horizon of a Hegelian system understood as the “con-
clusive” and “ultimate” philosophy? Overcoming Hegel from a new point
of view is impossible, for in his philosophy all points of view are already
included, with their limits and merits properly recognized; what can one
do, then?
For the group of critical intellectuals usually labeled as young
Hegelians (Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge, Moses Hess)—some of whom
were personal friend and intellectual companions of Marx in Berlin—the
problem was understood primarily on two levels: politics and theory of
religion. The critical task appears to be that of completing the work that
Hegel could not, or would not, complete. If it is true that in moder-
nity reason made itself into a reality, affirming the universal principle of
freedom, then one needs to develop the concrete implications of this
principle into action, criticizing whatever residual irrationality persists in
empirical existence: the authoritarian institutions of the Prussian State and
the masses’ dependency on religious faith. Philosophy, Marx writes in the
Preface to his dissertation, chooses Prometheus as its hero, and with him
it stands «against all heavenly and earthly gods who do not acknowl-
edge human self-consciousness as the highest divinity».6 It appears, then,
that post-Hegelian philosophers have to translate the philosophical prin-
ciple into critical-practical activity, so as to purify the existing world from
the irrational remnants which have already been overcome in thought—
which, at once, means to criticize Hegel, not for his principles, but for his
accommodations to extant political and religious institutions.
Marx is, in a sense, part of this general context and mood, but he also
seems to find in it problems and contradictions which leave him unsatis-
fied. It is not enough, Marx wrote in a note of his dissertation, for the
disciples to criticize Hegel’s compromises with the bad that still exists in
reality; this moralistic approach must rather be abandoned in favor of a
scientific one. In other words, one needs to ask whether the “accom-
modations” might not be rooted in some intrinsic defect of Hegel’s
philosophical framework, «in an inadequacy or in an inadequate formula-
tion of his principle itself».7 But asides from Hegel himself, there are more
6 Karl Marx, “Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of

Nature,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 1 (London: Lawrence & Wishart,
2010), 30.
7 Ibid., 84.
problems with his disciples and the spiritual situation of the Hegelian
“left.” If philosophy was completed in Hegel, it seems all is left is to
make the world adequate to it: «philosophy, expanded to be the whole
world, turns against the world of appearance».8 This attitude is indeed
understandable and has its own good reasons:
It is a psychological law that the theoretical mind, once liberated in itself,

turns into practical energy, and, leaving the shadowy empire of Amenthes
[the dwelling place of the souls of the dead, according to Egyptians] as
will turns itself against the reality of the world existing without it.
The transformation of philosophy into action (from the perspective

proposed in 1838 by another young Hegelian, August von Cieszkowski),9
seems incongruous to Marx, who argues:
But the practice of philosophy is itself theoretical. It is the critique that

measures the individual existence by the essence, the particular reality by
the Idea. But this immediate realisation of philosophy is in its deepest
essence afflicted with contradictions, and this its essence takes form in the
appearance and imprints its seal upon it.10
Why, then, is this “critical” attitude of the Hegelian left (e.g., of Bruno
Bauer, and in part of Marx himself), also contradictory? The answer is
that: «When philosophy turns itself as will against the world of appear-
ance, then the system is lowered to an abstract totality, that is, it has
become one aspect of the world which opposes another one».11 Philos-
ophy, which in Hegel was supposed to be a totality, is reduced to a part
to which another is opposed: the not (yet) rational existing world. From a
Hegelian point of view, this position is absurd, for it replicates the division
between reason and reality which Hegel wanted to overcome (and in such
8 Karl Marx, “Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy,” in Marx and Engels Collected

Works, Volume 1 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 491.
9 August von Cieszkowski, “Prolegomena to Historiosophie,” in The Young Hegelians:
An Anthology, ed. Lawrence S. Stepelevich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983).
10 Marx, “Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature,”
85.
11 Ibid.
6 S. PETRUCCIANI
overcoming Marx saw the greatness of the Stuttgart’s philosopher). Thus,

either one assumes that reason and reality coincide—as in the Hegelian
right, from which Marx is very distant—or one risks to fall back into pre-
Hegelian positions, where reason is the enlightening moment, opposed
to an irrational and recalcitrant reality. Unsatisfied with both horns of the
dilemma, Marx seeks a third solution which still eludes him,12 a need he
expresses metaphorically in a page of the Notebooks, where he returns to
reflect on his problem, by asking whether «men can live at all after a total
philosophy», or rather they have to resign to a squalid mediocrity.
At such times half-hearted minds have opposite views to those of whole-

minded generals. They believe that they can compensate losses by cutting
the armed forces, by splitting them up, by a peace treaty with the real
needs, whereas Themistocles, when Athens was threatened with destruc-
tion, tried to persuade the Athenians to abandon the city entirely and
found a new Athens at sea, in another element.13
The new Athens adumbrated by Marx would be a new philosophy,

capable of a critical attitude toward the world, but without reinstating
that division between reason and reality so effectively criticized by Hegel.
Marx, which in this way will be a better Hegelian than the young
Hegelians, shall thus conceive of critique not as a point of view external
to reality, but as a self -critique of reality, a movement immanent to reality
itself.
1.2 From “Liberal” Battles to Social Questions

Since the path toward an academic appointment was foreclosed—the
space for critical and radical ideas in Prussian universities was shrinking by
the day—Marx turned to journalism, through which the young Hegelians
thought they could undermine the sclerotic authoritarian institutions of
Prussia. In 1838, Arnold Ruge had founded the “Annals of Halle,”
the young Hegelians’ main journal which in 1841, unable to continue
publication in Prussia, morphed into “German Annals,” published from
12 Concerning this complex phase of Marx’s reflection, see both the already cited book
by Finelli and the useful essay: Emmanuel Renault, Marx et l’idée de critique (Paris:
Presses universitaires de France, 1995).
13 Marx, “Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy,” 492.
Dresden. Marx wrote his first article in 1842: a polemical attack against
the recently promulgated dispositions regarding censorship. An article
which, of course, was not approved by the censorship (then preemptively
applied to publications) and thus could only be published in Switzer-
land in 1843, within a collection of censored articles edited by Ruge.
Already in 1842, however, Marx’s journalistic activity could be vigorously
exercised in a brand-new daily newspaper, the “Rheinische Zeitung,”
edited in Cologne. Rhineland, a border territory, had been annexed by
France between 1795 and 1814 and was the economically most devel-
oped region of Prussia. The newspaper, financed by members of the
local bourgeoisie, was the counterpart of the conservative “Kölnische
Zeitung,” and it supported modernizing and liberalizing policies (defense
of the Napoleonic Civil Code, juridical equality of all citizens) within the
perspective of German unification. Marx published his first article there in
May 1842, and in October of the same year he became chief editor of the
newspaper. Under Marx’s direction, the newspaper enjoyed a moderate
success, but a short life: on January 21, 1843, in fact, the authorities
decreed the newspaper had to cease operations, effective April 1 of the
same year. On March 17 Marx resigned.
Through the many articles he wrote in these months, Marx intensively
and polemically developed a defense of the “liberal” cause, undertaken
especially by commenting on the debates of the Rhineland Diet (a sort of
regional parliament, without much power, whose composition was based
on estates). The main themes were the defense of press freedom against
censorship, the battle for the autonomy of the State from religion, but
also questions who were inciting problems and social tensions, such as the
law against timber theft and the protests of the Mosel’s winemakers. Marx
exercised his considerable polemical strength to support freedom, even
while his “liberalism,” rooted in Hegelian and young Hegelian philos-
ophy, still conceived the State as a moment that ought to be above
the private egoistic interests so as to realize the freedom of all citizens,
including the poorest ones. Even when, later, his positions will become
more radical and he will abandon the liberal camp, Marx remained a theo-
rist of freedom, albeit with an interpretation of freedom less and less
connected to the liberal tradition. Freedom, writes Marx in one of his
8 S. PETRUCCIANI
anti-censorship articles, coincides with the essence of mankind.14 Just as

liberalism teaches us, freedom can only be guaranteed by the rule of law:
Laws are in no way repressive measures against freedom […] Laws are
rather the positive, clear, universal norms in which freedom has acquired
an impersonal, theoretical existence independent of the arbitrariness15
Freedom is instead denied by censorship, which arbitrarily judges the

tone and “tendencies” expressed by an article and which, therefore and
contrarily to every legal principle, condemns someone merely for their
intentions, not for what they explicitly do.16 Freedom of the press is
crucial for the defense of all other freedoms, because a free press:
is the ubiquitous vigilant eye of a people’s soul, the embodiment of a

people’s faith in itself, the eloquent link that connects the individual with
the state and the world, the embodied culture that transforms material
struggles into intellectual struggles and idealises their crude material form.
[…] It is the ideal world which always wells up out of the real world and
flows back into it with ever greater spiritual riches and renews its soul.17
All freedoms stand and fall together:
One form of freedom governs another just as one limb of the body does
another. Whenever a particular freedom is put in question, freedom in
general is put in question.18
And there is no freedom without the separation between Church and

State, without abandoning that idea of a “Christian State,” which sharply
contradicts the principles of modern political citizenship (here Marx’s
writings about divorce law are also relevant). A State declaring itself
Christian is intrinsically discriminatory, even when it tolerates different
denominations. Indeed, Marx reminds us, the «conversion of the concept
14 Karl Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 1 (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 2010), 155.
15 Ibid., 162.
16 Ibid., 120.
17 Ibid., 165.
18 Ibid., 180.
of the state into an independent concept» is not a recent innova-

tion, being rather intrinsic to the whole tradition of rational political
thought, from Machiavelli and Hobbes up to Rousseau, Fichte, and
Hegel. However, while the early theorists of public law meant to derive
the State from individual reason (through the fiction of a contract),
the more ideal and profound view of recent philosophy proceeds from
the idea of the whole. It looks on the state as the great organism, in
which legal, moral, and political freedom must be realised, and in which
the individual citizen in obeying the laws of the state only obeys the natural
laws of his own reason, of human reason.19
What Marx is here defending, thus, is a rational and ethical under-

standing of freedom, very different from the individualistic and atomistic
liberalism he criticizes. The State, ultimately, cannot come from the aggre-
gation of private interests; it must transcend them to reach the rational
horizon of actual universal freedom. The State, according to its own
concept, is “the realisation of rational freedom.”20
Existing State institutions, however, do not necessarily correspond to
the rational concept of the State. For example, estate representation—
like in the Rhineland Diet—is thoroughly unacceptable, because it allows
State’s actions to be conditioned by the particularized interests of the
various classes. Estate-based representation allows private interests to
assert their particular limits against the state. They are therefore a legit-
imised self-constituted body of non-state elements in the state. Hence by
their very essence they are hostile towards the state, for the particular in
its isolated activity is always the enemy of the whole […]21
With these reflections, Marx seems to get close to a critique of

representation as such:
to be represented is something passive; only what is material, spiritless,

unable to rely on itself, imperilled, requires to be represented; but no
element of the state should be material, spiritless, unable to rely on itself,
19 Ibid., 202.
20 Ibid., 200.
21 Ibid., 305.
10 S. PETRUCCIANI
imperilled. 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 […]22
A scheme of representation where the representatives’ privilege over-

takes the defense of universal rights is unacceptable. «Privileges of the
estates are in no way rights of the province. On the contrary, the rights
of the province cease when they become privileges of the estates».23
The principle of interest-based representation denies precisely that
universalism which is intrinsic to the concept of the State:
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 […]24
What should predominate within the State is not nature but spirit, «not
the unfree object, but the free human being ».25
In these articles, as it has rightly been observed,26 Marx is still faithful
to a Hegelian interpretation of the State: as the guarantor of the common
good and as the immanent realization of reason and freedom. With equal
force, though, Marx emphasizes the inadequacies of existing institutions
vis-à-vis the rational concept of the State. In drawing implications, thus,
Marx goes well beyond the Hegelian thought that he still accepts in prin-
ciple. Hegel’s inadequacy becomes all the more evident when Marx begins
to confront problems directly connected to material interests and social
inequalities—as in the debate about the law on the theft of timber. This
law would have suppressed ancient customary rights of wood harvesting;
that is to say the gathering, within privately owned woodlands, of fallen
branches for firewood. Against the supporters of the law, which guaran-
teed the exclusive right of proprietors against old customs benefiting the
22 Ibid., 306.
23 Ibid., 145–46.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Cf. Maurice Barbier, La pensée politique de Karl Marx (Paris: Harmattan, 1992), 26.
poor, Marx asserts that the State cannot degrade itself to an instrument
of private interests, because by its own concept it should aim to gener-
ality. The law against wood thieves expresses a form of proprietary egoism,
which should not condition the State. Each and every citizen ought to be
sacred for the State, independently from the property they may or may
not own: «the state will regard even an infringer of forest regulations as a
human being, a living member of the state, one in whom its heart’s blood
flows […]».27
In this text, a first contact with the social question, Marx unabashedly
takes the side of «the poor, politically and socially propertyless», advo-
cating for a customary right which they need in order to survive.28 And
to those who would object that appealing to a customary right means
abandoning the claim to universality and rationality, privileging instead
a historically determined custom, Marx responds that the objection is
invalid, because what is not rational to begin with is the fact that there is a
poor class within the State: «the existence of the poor class itself has been
a mere custom of civil society, a custom which has not found an appro-
priate place in the conscious organisation of the state».29 The theme of
poverty returns in the articles Marx writes about the condition of Mosel
regions’ winegrowers: the State’s task is to take care of general welfare,
and certainly not to accept, as if it was a natural fact, the crisis which
brings ruin to the poorest winegrowers.
Precisely because social questions are becoming pressing and dramatic,
Marx cannot avoid to encounter the theme of “communism.” When
his newspaper is accused, by the “Augsburgische Zeitung,” to harbor
communist sympathies (due to the publication of an article by the
proto-communist Weitling, concerning housing issues in Berlin), Marx
responds30 that the “Rheinische Zeitung” «does not admit that commu-
nist ideas in their present form possess even theoretical reality, and
therefore can still less desire their practical realisation, or even consider
it possible, will subject these ideas to thoroughgoing criticism». It cannot
be denied, writes Marx, that communism is an important contempo-
rary issue, and so are the ideas expressed in the book Qu’est-ce que la
27 Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 1, 236.

28 Ibid., 230.
29 Ibid., 234.
30 Ibid., 220.
12 S. PETRUCCIANI
propriété (1840) by Pierre Joseph Proudhon (whom Marx shall merci-

lessly demolish later on). In October 1842, then, Marx is still far from
communist ideas «in their present form» (a qualification that should
perhaps be emphasized), but already intentioned to examine them seri-
ously. We might also suppose that, as the director of a liberal newspaper
continuously subject to censorship, Marx had to exercise some caution
in his writing, and that he was chafing at these limits. In fact, after the
government decided to close his newspaper, Marx wrote, in a letter to
Arnold Ruge, that he was almost rejoicing at the government giving him
back his freedom:
It is a bad thing to have to perform menial duties even for the sake of
freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs. I have become
tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and
scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words […] I can do nothing
more in Germany. Here one makes a counterfeit of oneself.31
As we can see from these complaints, Marx is developing thoughts

too radical to be expressed in a German newspaper. Before leaving the
country, however, Marx had something else to do: marrying Jenny von
Westphalen, the noble young woman with whom he had been engaged
for seven years (they married at Kreuznach, on June 19, 1843). Marx used
the Summer of 1843, spent in Kreuznach at the house of his mother-in-
law, to dive deep into a critical study of Hegel’s theory of the State.
1.3 Critique of Hegel’s Theory of the State

To attack the proprietary egoism and backwardness of Prussia, the polemi-
cist Marx of the “Rheinische Zeitung” would just employ the Hegelian
idea of the State as a guarantor of general interest and rational freedom.
But this was not enough for Marx as a philosopher and radical social critic.
Already in March 1842, as attested by a letter to Arnold Ruge, Marx had
in his mind to write
31 Ibid., 397–98.
a criticism of Hegelian natural law, insofar as it concerns the internal

political system. The central point is the struggle against constitutional
monarchy as a hybrid which from beginning to end contradicts and
abolishes itself.32
Marx’s critique of Hegel, though, did not take the form of an

article, but was rather realized in a voluminous manuscript—written, we
can presume, during the stay at Kreuznach in the Spring–Summer of
1843—commenting on sections 261–313 of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
Certainly, this work was heavily influenced by Marx’s enthusiastic reading
of Feuerbach’s works, and especially the Provisional Theses for the Refor-
mation of Philosophy, first published in 1843 by Ruge in Switzerland
(within a collection33 that also included Marx’s first article, which could
not be published in Prussia, Comments on the Latest Prussian Censor-
ship Instruction). Feuerbach’s materialistic critique of Hegel’s speculative
idealism furnished the philosophical ground for Marx’s own work of
critical deconstruction of Hegel’s theory of the State.
In the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (published only in 1927,
edited by Rjazanov), Marx analyzes Hegel’s theory on different levels,
which we should keep distinct for clarity. Firstly, Marx’s general theoret-
ical objections are concerned with Hegel’s method to develop a theory
of the State within his philosophical framework. Secondly, Marx criticizes
Hegel’s social ontology, which is to say the way in which he conceived
the relation between the State and the other social spheres (family and
civil society). Thirdly, there is the critique of political theory properly so-
called, that is to say of the way in which Hegel articulates the State and
the institutions through which sovereignty is organized.
Concerning the general philosophical level, Marx’s critique boldly
follows Feuerbach’s reading according to which idealistic philosophy, just
like theology, inverts the real relation between subject and predicate. Like
God does not create man, but rather man creates God, so in philos-
ophy the true subject is not thought, or the Hegelian Idea, but the man
that actually exists, of whom thought is just a predicate: «thinking comes
from being but being does not come from thinking». Thus, according to
Feuerbach, «the Hegelian philosophy is the last place of refuge and the
32 Ibid., 382–83.
33 Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publicistik (Zurich-Winterthur:
Verlag des Literarischen Comptoirs, 1843).
14 S. PETRUCCIANI
last rational support of theology». «The Hegelian doctrine, that nature or

reality is posited by the idea, is merely the rational expression of the theo-
logical doctrine that nature is created by God, that the material essence
is created by an immaterial, i.e., abstract, essence».34 Speculative philos-
ophy, just like theology, first separates the predicate from the subject and
posits the former as an autonomous being (God or the Idea). Then, the
real subject is degraded as a predicated, that is to say as a creation, or
production, of the hypostatized predicate. This is indeed what happens in
Hegel’s system, according to both Feuerbach and Marx. Here, we shall
try to synthetically reconstruct this interpretation, and the consequent
critiques; but it is important to remember that this is only one interpre-
tation, and that Hegel’s philosophy may also be read in different ways,
without reducing it to a negative “idealism,”35 as Marx and Feuerbach
did.
In Hegel’s thought, according to Marx, the totality of reality is under-
stood as the process of the Idea’s self-development. The Idea is initially
within itself in logic, then outside of itself through its exteriorization in
the natural world, finally to return in itself through the world of spirit.
This world of spirit is human reality in its dimensions of subjective and
then objective spirit (in society and history), and finally of absolute spirit
(in art’s forms, religion, and philosophy, this last being the moment
where reality arrives at its own self-consciousness as self-development
of the Idea). But if this is the case, Marx says, then the concrete
political institutions, historical and contingent as they are (such as Prus-
sian monarchy, feudal rights of primogeniture), which Hegel deduces
as moments of his philosophy of right, are no longer the product of
concrete historical actions, performed by men in specific circumstances.
They are rather the fruit of the Idea’s self-development and are there-
fore justified and sanctified as such. This would be a distortion of the
real historical process, deriving from «Hegel’s wanting to write the biog-
raphy of abstract substance, of the idea, man’s activity, etc., thus having to
appear as the activity and result of something else». According to Marx,
34 Ludwig Feuerbach, “Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy,” in The

Young Hegelians: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence S. Stepelevich (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983). The quoted passages are from p. 167.
35 For example, Bodei gives a very different interpretation in his beautiful book: Remo
Bodei, Sistema ed epoca in Hegel (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1975).
«The inevitable outcome of this is that an empirical existent is uncriti-

cally accepted as the actual truth of the idea», producing a «necessary
transforming of empirical fact into speculation and of speculation into
empirical fact».36
But why does Marx, and Feuerbach before him, think that Hegel’s
philosophy unwittingly produces that conceptual monster which Feuer-
bach calls «rational empiricism»37 and which Marx defines as the inver-
sion of empirics into speculation and vice versa? The reasons for this
critique are not hard to understand. Within a materialistic and sensualistic
perspective like Feuerbach’s, only sensory experience provides access to
substantive knowledge, while the concept without experience is an empty
tautology. Therefore, those who pretend, like Hegel, to develop the entire
system of reality starting from a pure dialectic of concepts are compelled
to surreptitiously fill these empty concepts with empirical materials. But
in this way empirical elements are injected into the system, covertly and
therefore uncritically, because empirical reality is not enquired and studied
as such, but as if it was the mere product of the concepts’ self-movement.
The distortion of the correct (according to Feuerbach and Marx) rela-
tion between experience and concept (i.e., first we have experienced,
then we systematize them into concepts) produces the paradoxical result
that, on the one hand, speculation is inverted into empiricism (for there
is nothing else from which to draw contents) and, on the other hand,
empiricism becomes speculation. Concrete historical institutions, with all
their contingent irrationality, become moments in the self-development
of the concept, and as such they are, so to speak, divinized into what
Marx deems Hegel’s «logical, pantheistic mysticism».38
The specificity of Marx’s critique of idealism, or apriorism, would then
be that (as argued by Gaetano della Volpe, who most emphasized this
aspect of Marx’s thought)39 Marx does not just note, as Kant already
had, that concepts without intuitions are “empty” (i.e., concepts require
a content that cannot but come from experience), but also adds that
36 Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” in Marx

and Engels Collected Works, Volume 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 39.
37 Ludwig Feuerbach, “Towards a Critique of Hegelian Philosophy,” in The Young
Hegelians: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence S. Stepelevich (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983), 110.
38 Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” 7.
39 Cf. Gaetano Della Volpe, Opere (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1973), vol. 5, 322.
16 S. PETRUCCIANI
such concepts are surreptitiously filled. The philosopher who, like Hegel,
pretends to remain at the level of pure concepts necessarily has to make
an underhanded use of empirics, if said concepts are to have any content
whatsoever.
This Marxian critique of idealism has been lauded for its importance
and novelty, but it is not without problems, which exceedingly enthu-
siastic interpretations tend to miss. Firstly, as we observed, it is not an
entirely original critique, since the reading of Hegel in terms of spec-
ulative empiricism is merely reprising an argument from Feuerbach.40
Secondly, this critique makes sense only if we accept a materialistic and
sensualistic framework, postulating a clear primacy of experience over
concept and of being over thought. But with this we lose what had been
Kant’s great theoretical discovery: that there is no experience without
conceptual mediation. In other words, as shown by Adorno (a careful
reader of Marx, and inimical to every naiveté), even conceding the inter-
pretation of Hegel as asserting the primacy of thought over being, we are
not yet overcoming his position if we just dogmatically invert the assump-
tion, positing the primacy of being over thought. One should, instead, try
to develop the dialectic intertwinement of these two poles, which neither
Feuerbach nor the Marx of 1843 managed to do. The importance of this
Marxian text, thus, is not to be sought in its critique of idealism, which
is its methodological ground, but rather in its concrete contents, in the
way in which Marx confront Hegel’s conception of the State, society, and
their connections.
From this point of view, a fundamental aspect emerges in the first part
of Marx’s manuscript. Just as he criticizes the primacy of the Idea over
empirics, Marx also intends to invert the way in which Hegel conceives
the relations between family, civil society, and State (the three moments
that, all-together, comprise Hegel’s ethical sphere). For Hegel, which on
this point is especially Aristotelian, the State is last in the order of expo-
sition but first in reality, because it is only in the State that family and
civil society are possible. But, here too, Marx wants to restore to their
40 Roberto Finelli insisted on this point, against della Volpe’s position, both in his two
books on Marx and in the edition of the Critique he edited together with Francesco
Saverio Trincia. Cesare Luporini, in his ample and important introduction to The German
Ideology, had already observed how Marx, in his critique of Hegel’s political philosophy
was merely «applying an aspect of the critical-antispeculative method which may already
be found in Feuerbach»: Cesare Luporini, “Introduzione,” in L’ideologia tedesca (Roma:
Editori Riuniti, 1967), XXXI.
rightful configuration the subject–predicate relations: the truth is that

«there can be no political state without the natural basis of the family
and the artificial basis of civil society; they are for it a conditio sine qua
non». In Hegel, instead, «the condition is postulated as the conditioned,
the determinant as the determined, the producing factor as the product
of its product».41 In his social ontology, just as in theoretical philosophy,
Marx wants to invert Hegel’s hierarchy: society grounds and explains the
State, not vice versa. It is not by chance that in 1859, in the famous
Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx will
trace (with some self-misrepresentation) the general lines of his historical
materialism back to his first confrontation with Hegel. Marx will say that
here already he had understood how the forms of the State are explicable
starting from civil society’s relationships rather than vice versa.42 Here
too, Marx opposes a primacy to another primacy, without substantiating
this inversion with real argumentations. Whether the inversion is fecund
shall be assessed later, that is to say when Marx will develop this first
intuition into the attempt to construct a materialistic theory of history.
However, to understand the development of Marx’s thought beyond
social ontology, the most significant pages of the Kritik are those which
thematize the relation between civil society and State, reflecting on its
configuration in Hegel as well as in the reality of the time. Here Marx,
who is ferociously anti-Hegelian regarding methodology, indeed takes
Hegel very seriously as a profound interlocutor, who shed light on a deci-
sive question of modern politics. The fundamental point for both Hegel
and Marx is that in modernity there is a separation between political State
and civil society. Hegel «takes as his starting point the separation of “civil
society” and the “political state” as two fixed opposites, two really different
spheres», but this is not to be criticized. In fact, Marx continues, «This
separation does indeed really exist in the modern state».43 «Hegel is not
to be blamed for depicting the nature of the modern state as it is, but for
presenting that which is as the nature of the state».44 Hegel, thus, would
correctly understand where the political problem of modernity lies: in the

42 Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: Part One,” in
Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 29 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010).
44 Ibid., 63.
18 S. PETRUCCIANI
fact that political State and civil society are not only separated but, most
importantly, are also in a reciprocal contradiction (in a way which will
have to be better determined). The greatest recognition Marx affords to
Hegel is in fact this: «Hegel’s profundity [is] that he feels the separation
of civil from political society as a contradiction».45
Thus, by reflecting on the modern relation between State and civil
society, Marx sees in Hegel both a fundamental merit and some serious
limitations. The merit, as we just saw, is that Hegel captured how, in
modernity, the relation between civil society and political State consti-
tutes a contradiction—we shall now see how and in what sense. The
limits, instead, are basically two: on the one hand, according to Marx,
Hegel does not reflect enough on the historical quality of this separa-
tion between State and civil society, which is a modern determination
unknown to other ages. On the other hand, while Hegel sees the contra-
diction between State and civil society, he then removes this contradiction
(reneging the deepest thread of his own thought), with the use of very
questionable theoretical expedients. It is now time, then, to consider
more closely the different aspects of Marx’s assessment of Hegel, in the
order we have just introduced them.
Concerning Hegel’s merit, how should we understand the individua-
tion of the contradiction between civil society and State? Why are civil
life and political life “opposites”46 ? The answer is quite clear: civil society
is, in Hegel’s words as cited by Marx, «the battlefield of the individual
private interests of all against all», and thus it is the realm of the «bellum
omnium contra omnes » and of the conflict between private egoisms,47
whereas the State has the general interest as its end. The latter’s principle,
then, is directly opposite to the former’s, even though in the State as
conceived by Hegel private interests are not erased, but rather preserved
and reconciled. Marx, in any case, emphasizes the truth he takes Hegel to
see only faintly: that is to say that the two spheres are in mutual contra-
diction and opposition. Marx assumes, with Hegel, that the State is, at
least according to its concept, the realm of the general interest. From
this Marx then deduces, radicalizing Hegel, that the State is necessarily in
contradiction with civil society and the realm of private interest.
45 Ibid., 75.
46 Ibid., 76.
47 Ibid., 41–42.
This contradiction, which Marx sees as characteristic of modern society,

reverberates within the individual itself, who is at once a member of civil
society and a citizen of the State. The individual, in this sense, is inhabited
by two contradictory identities: as a private person he only aims at his
egoistic interest, but as a citizen he takes the general interest as his own
end.
The separation of civil society and political state necessarily appears as a

separation of the political citizen, the citizen of the state, from civil society,
from his own, actual, empirical reality, for as an idealist of the state he is
quite another being, a different, distinct, opposed being.48
Marx’s analysis, however, does not stop there. If the individual is

divided in two contradictory figures, if he is self-separated, how can he
operate and act concretely? That is possible only insofar as one of the two
identities asserts itself at the other’s expenses. And according to Marx this
is precisely what happens, because the real life of civil society cannot but
prevail on the State’s life, which is comparatively formal, abstract, and
illusionary—ultimately reduced to a sort of idealistic appendix, hiding the
true materialistic reality, that is to say the dominance of private egoism.
We shall get back to this point when we will illustrate the positive
proposal advanced by Marx in the Kritik. First, though, we have to look
more closely at the two critiques Marx advances against Hegel, which as
we said concern the de-historicization of the separation between State and
civil society and the illusionary way in which Hegel attempts to overcome
it. As for the first aspect, in the Kritik Marx notes a point he will later
develop in the Jewish Question: that is to say how the division between
State and civil society is generated in modernity, while it was unknown
to feudal society. In the Middle Ages, the civil and political conditions
of the individual were not separated, they rather constituted a unitary,
self-consistent, reality.
One can express the spirit of the Middle Ages in this way: The estates of
civil society and the estates in the political sense were identical, because
civil society was political society – because the organic principle of civil
society was the principle of the state.49
48 Ibid., 77–78.
49 Ibid., 72.
20 S. PETRUCCIANI
The abstraction of the political State was therefore unknown to the

Middle Ages:
In the Middle Ages there were serfs, feudal estates, merchant and trade
guilds, corporations of scholars, etc.: that is to say, in the Middle Ages
property, trade, society, man are political; the material content of the state
is given by its form; every private sphere has a political character or is a
political sphere; that is, politics is a characteristic of the private spheres too.
[…] In the Middle Ages the life of the nation and the life of the state are
identical. Man is the actual principle of the state – but unfree man.50
The landowner is at once a lord in the political sense, and the serf
is at once deprived of political rights: in sum, social and political hier-
archy coincides in what Marx calls «democracy of unfreedom».51 That is
a condition of serfdom, but of univocal serfdom, not mystified by the
double status of the individual as a man and as a citizen. This unity of
social and political, instead, is precisely what passes away with the coming
of the bourgeois world:
Only the French Revolution completed the transformation of the polit-

ical into social estates, or changed the differences of estate of civil society
into mere social differences, into differences of civil life which are without
significance in political life.52
The neutralization of the political value of social differences, according

to Marx, makes it so that «just as the Christians are equal in heaven, but
unequal on earth, so the individual members of the nation are equal in
the heaven of their political world, but unequal in the earthly existence of
society».53
The contradiction between civil society and State, thus, is a character-
istic of modern times only. The other critique, as we mentioned, is that
Hegel sees the contradiction but then tries to sweep it under the rug,
with expedients such as proposing the re-introduction of bygone insti-
tutions, contradicting the logic of modern politics, such as class-based
50 Ibid., 32.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., 80.
53 Ibid., 79.
representation. This is an important and delicate point, since here both

the proximity and the distance between Marx and Hegel become evident.
Hegel claims that if political representation is understood as representing
abstract individuals, citizens atomized in their equality, then political life
is severed from civil society and placed “up in the air,” thus becoming an
abstraction, devoid of truth. Precisely for this reason Hegel believes that
political representation should be organically connected to the different
spheres or classes in which civil society is articulated. Marx shares the
idea that abstract political equality is devoid of truth, but against Hegel
he asserts that such abstraction is itself the principle of modern society
(conclusively affirmed by the French Revolution), and therefore, it cannot
be overcome by bringing back institutions from a bygone era. Hegel,
thus, contradictorily thinks politics according to two irreconcilable prin-
ciples: «Hegel wants the medieval-estates system, but in the modern sense
of the legislature, and he wants the modern legislature, but in the body
of the medieval-estates system! This is the worst kind of syncretism».54
But Hegel’s vision is not just contradictory and historically unrealistic; it
is also unacceptable in its implications, for example, when it assumes the
rationality of primogeniture rights, so as to guarantee the stability of the
landowning class as it participates to the legislative power. According to
Marx, the consequence is that, in the allegedly rational Hegelian State,
one becomes a legislator by birthright, which is to say that «political spir-
itualism» is inverted into «the crassest materialism».55 «In its supreme
functions the state acquires the reality of an animal ».56
Within the theoretical coordinates we have here introduced, Marx also
develops a series of critiques against central points of Hegel’s institu-
tional architecture, such as monarchy, the role of bureaucracy, and the
relation between constitution and legislative power. We cannot follow all
the aspects of Marx’s argument here, but what we are most interested in
is the endpoint of his line of critique.
Modern society is not the organic whole Hegel contradictorily tries to
conceive, but is rather characterized by a division between the sphere of
real life—where private interest and unchecked individualism reign—and
a political dimension where the general interest should be manifest, but
54 Ibid., 95.
55 Ibid., 105.
56 Ibid.
22 S. PETRUCCIANI
is indeed actualized only abstractly and fictitiously. The modern State, the
«constitutional state is the state in which the state interest as the actual
interest of the nation exists only formally but, at the same time, as a deter-
minate form alongside the actual state».57 It is the state in which «matters
of general concern» become a monopoly of the bureaucracy while, on the
other hand, «monopolies are the real matters of general concern».58 If
politics is a limited and separate sphere—which does not concretely touch
the daily life of citizens, nor does include them as its protagonists—then it
remains a “formality,” a “ritual.” In this void of effective sovereignty, the
power of those who dominate civil society (large proprietors and monop-
olists) is then reconfirmed. The only way for the universal to have any
reality, thus, is to overcome the abstraction of the political State; and this
can only happen in democracy, which here Marx presents as the truth
of all previous constitutions. Democracy is the truth of all constitutions
because, while the preceding ones (such as monarchy) express the life of
the people only in itself , in democracy this relation becomes for itself ,
that is to say explicit and self-aware. The constitution is always a product
of the life of the people, but in democracy it is so in a fully developed
awareness: here the people itself create its constitution. Finally, then, the
political constitution appears what it truly is: «a free product of man».59
Only democracy, thus, is coherent with the true state of things: «Just as it
is not religion which creates man but man who creates religion, so it is not
the constitution which creates the people but the people which creates
the constitution».60 Democracy, however, is not just «the solved riddle
of all constitutions»,61 but at the same time their overcoming, because
true democracy is something more and different from a mere political
constitution. It is crucial to understand the point:
In all states other than democratic ones the state, the law, the constitution
is what rules, without really ruling – i.e., without materially permeating the
content of the remaining, non-political spheres. In democracy the consti-
tution, the law, the state itself, insofar as it is a political constitution, is
57 Ibid., 65.
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid., 29.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
only the self-determination of the people, and a particular content of the

people.62
In other words, in all abstract political forms, even
in the republic as a merely particular form of state, political man has his
particular mode of being alongside unpolitical man, man as a private indi-
vidual. Property, contract, marriage, civil society all appear here […] as
particular modes of existence alongside the political state, as the content
to which the political state is related as organising form […]63
In Marx’s democracy—the concrete organization of the people—the

exact opposite is true: politics is no longer a formal universal, seemingly
floating above the concrete particulars of the people’s life, which it only
appears to dominate without dominating them in reality. On the contrary,
politics becomes a particular modality, among others, of the people’s
existence; it loses its fictitious superior universality and acquires a less
ambitious but more concrete dimension. In Marx’s own words:
In democracy the political state, which stands alongside this content and
distinguishes itself from it, is itself merely a particular content and partic-
ular form of existence of the people […] In democracy the state as particular
is merely particular; as general, it is the truly general, i.e., not some-
thing determinate in distinction from the other content. The French have
recently interpreted this as meaning that in true democracy the political
state is annihilated. This is correct insofar as the political state qua political
state, as constitution, no longer passes for the whole.64
Even in their complexity, these formulations already express an orig-

inal intuition, which will remain central throughout the development of
Marx’s political thought: that is to say the conviction that true democ-
racy, as the people’s self-determination, requires the overcoming of the
separation between politics and other social domains (family, work, prop-
erty, etc.). Marx’s thesis is that, for individuals to be self-determining,
politics has to come back from heaven to earth. Politics must merge
with the concrete articulation of life and work, rather than constitute
62 Ibid., 30–31.
63 Ibid., 30.
64 Ibid.
24 S. PETRUCCIANI
a separate and posterior dimension, operating on the ground of pre-

given contents—which actually dominate and condition politics even
while politics abstractly and illusorily pretends to condition and domi-
nate them. Thus, already in this early work, Marx formulates the thesis
of the overcoming or extinction of the political State. This thesis shall
invite many debates and diverse interpretations amongst Marxist. It is a
thesis, nonetheless, with a very clear nucleus: if politics has to be the self-
determination of society, then it has to be organized from the bottom-up,
internally to the social realm, rather than be a separate sphere pretending
to dominate the social without controlling it at all. This perspective does
not imply that properly political activities shall disappear, if by politics we
understand the making of general rules of social cooperation, or the reso-
lution of coordination problems. Politics, though, becomes an activity on
the same level as all others, geared to solve certain specific problems of
social life. For example, as Marx writes
the significance of the legislative power as a representative power

completely disappears. The legislative power is representation here in the
sense in which every function is representative—in the sense in which, e.g.,
the shoemaker, insofar as he satisfies a social need […]65
We also have to note how, even while conceiving the legislative power
in these radically “demystified” terms, Marx still insists that the legislator
might be subordinated to a constitution but, insofar as it is «the represen-
tative of the people, of the will of the species»,66 it always has the right to
change the constitution. If legislative power represents the people, then
to the question of whether the people keeps the right to give itself a new
constitution, «the answer must be an unqualified “Yes”».67
There have been many discussions about the sources—which Marx
mentions only elliptically as «the French»—for Marx’s idea of reuniting
the social and political spheres. Many interpreters emphasized how Marx
was influenced by Saint-Simon’s socialism and Proudhon’s anarchism—
which in 1843 Marx still appreciates and takes very seriously—but we
65 Ibid., 119.
66 Ibid., 57.
67 Ibid.
must also not forget how the theoretical framework that Marx is elabo-
rating in this phase of his thought does not have much in common with
that of the aforementioned authors.68
The effective conquest of “true democracy,” in any case, is for Marx
tightly connected to the universal recognition not just of the active right
to vote, but also of the passive right to be elected, that is to say the
possibility of occupying positions of political power. Marx, as one can
see from the aforementioned references to legislation, does not doubt
that there are problems of social coordination, which the citizens have
to confront through their representatives. The problem, Marx writes, is
not to decide whether the legislative power has to be exercised directly or
indirectly, but rather that of generalizing both the right to vote and to be
elected: «This is the real point of dispute concerning political reform, in
France as in England».69
Objectively, in the mid-nineteenth century, the extension of voting
rights to the lower classes is a focal point of political and social conflicts.
Marx, however, thinks that this extension could be the opening through
which his idea of true democracy would come through:
only in elections unlimited both in respect of the franchise and the right
to be elected. But the completion of this abstraction is at the same time
the transcendence of the abstraction. In actually positing its political exis-
tence as its true existence, civil society has simultaneously posited its civil
existence, in distinction from its political existence, as inessential; and the
fall of one side of the division carries with it the fall of the other side, its
opposite. Electoral reform within the abstract political state is therefore the
demand for its dissolution, but also for the dissolution of civil society.70
The fight for the suffrage, from Marx’s point of view, is not only
relevant in itself, but also because its victory would consequently lead
to abolishing the separation between politics and civil society. The two
poles—separated by the modern age, generating a mystification which
was extraneous to the explicit domination of feudalism—would thus be
68 Regarding this issue, we can still profitably read the well-researched: Danilo Zolo, La
teoria comunista dell’estinzione dello Stato (Bari: De Donato, 1974), especially pp. 91–116
and footnote 55, pp. 92–93.
70 Ibid., 121.
26 S. PETRUCCIANI
re-composed, opening the way to overcome political alienation and to

realize that “true democracy” which Marx, here, sees as the endgame.
This is only an intermediary but still important point because, even within
a still-developing thought, Marx uncovers what remains to this day the
deepest problem of democracy: that is to say the unavoidable relation
between the regulative forms of law and the substantive contents of social
emancipation and equality.71
71 Cfr. G. Cacciatore, Il Marx “democratico,” in AA.VV., Sulle tracce di un fantasma,

a cura di M. Musto, Manifestolibri, Roma 2005, pp. 145–57; the quote is from p. 151.
CHAPTER 2
The Critique of Liberalism
2.1 The Question of Critique

and the Coming of Communism
The unpublished notes on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right became the basis
upon which, in the second half of 1843, Marx will elaborate two texts,
published in February 1844 on the only number of “Deutsch-Französische
Jahrbücher.” The journal was edited by Marx and Ruge and published in
Paris, where Marx and his wife Jenny moved in October 1843. The first
article is titled On the Jewish Question and the second one Contribution to
the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction (an introduction,
incidentally, to no book, for the announced work was never to be written).
Together with these writings from Marx, on which we shall say more
shortly, the “German-French Annals” issue includes an exchange (edited
for publication) between some of the protagonist of this theoretical-
political endeavor: Marx himself, Ruge, Bakunin, as well as a letter of
solidarity and encouragement from Feuerbach. The last letter of this brief
collection (from Marx to Ruge, Kreuznach, September 1843) contains
a sort of programmatic address, which allows us to capture how Marx
understood the status and main task of critique, at this time so crucial
for the development of his thought.1 Essentially, Marx’s point is that
1 For a provoking reflection on this point, see: Emmanuel Renault, Marx et l’idée de
critique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1995), esp. Ch. 2.
© The Author(s) 2020 27

S. Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx,
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52351-0_2
28 S. PETRUCCIANI
the duty of his generation is to develop Feuerbach’s critique of religion,

broadening its scope to include politics and the main social institutions.
The aim of a «mundane» philosophy is to advance the «ruthless criti-
cism of all that exists ».2 But how is this critique to be understood? In
perfect coherence with his basic Hegelian framework, Marx explains that
the critique cannot begin from an arbitrarily chosen principle, external to
the criticized object. To the contrary, true critique is immanent critique,
developed from principles which are already inherent to the criticized
object: «we do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to
find the new world through criticism of the old one».3 And, later, Marx
further clarifies:
Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form. The critic
can therefore start out from any form of theoretical and practical conscious-
ness and from the forms peculiar to existing reality develop the true
reality as its obligation and its final goal. As far as real life is concerned,
it is precisely the political state – in all its modern forms – which, even
where it is not yet consciously imbued with socialist demands, contains the
demands of reason. And the political state does not stop there. Everywhere
it assumes that reason has been realised. But precisely because of that it
everywhere becomes involved in the contradiction between its ideal func-
tion and its real prerequisites. From this conflict of the political state with
itself, therefore, it is possible everywhere to develop the social truth.4
The critique, thus, is historical and immanent, neither abstract nor

grounded on a-temporal principles. It develops and brings to explicit
consciousness a dynamic that is intrinsic to reality itself. This way of
conceiving the critique is one of the most characteristic peculiarities of
Marx, and it will stay steady, despite all the changes in the contents and
concrete articulations of the critique itself. We shall not, Marx insists,
propose to the world:
2 Karl Marx, “Letters from the Deutsch-Französische, Jahrbücher” in Marx and Engels
Collected Works, Volume 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 142.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., 143.
2 THE CRITIQUE OF LIBERALISM 29
a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new
principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. […] We merely
show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something
that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.5
This framework, according to Marx, is the appropriate starting point to

confront the socialist and communist doctrines that are already spreading,
especially in France but in some measure also in Germany. Coherently
with his refusal of abstract principles or ideals, Marx is theoretically far
from the authors of communist “systems,” like Cabet’s Travels in Icaria
(1840, II ed. 1842) or Weitling’s Guarantees of harmony and freedom
(1842); Marx deems the «actually existing communism» a «dogmatic
abstraction». Marx, moreover, asserts that communism is not identified
with the suppression of private property (perhaps that means that it has
a broader and richer content), and adds that communism is «a special
expression of the humanistic principle» or also «a special, one-sided real-
isation of the socialist principle» (Fourier and Proudhon are the socialists
Marx had in mind). And the socialist principle itself «is only one aspect
that concerns the reality of the true human being»6 (distinct from theo-
retical aspects, like religion or science, which deserve just as much critical
attention).
From these passages, it emerges very clearly what Marx rejects:
communist systems as pre-made social utopias. Not equally obvious is
Marx’s own position: it is unclear whether he thought of himself as a
communist, and his writing might lead us to think he did not. It is
nevertheless evident that Marx was then already strongly leaning toward
a philosophical-political communism, grounded on a certain idea of the
true human essence; and it is a fact that some contemporaries already
considered him a communist. For example, in an article from November
18, 1843, Engels talks of “Dr. Marx” as a communist,7 although the
writer here is a young Engels, enthusiastic neophyte of communism,
not yet connected to Marx, and who improperly also considers Ruge
as a communist. The reality, in any case, is that Marx’s political evolu-
tion is very fast in this period: from his 1842’s liberalism, he switches
5 Ibid., 144.
6 Ibid., 143.
7 Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 3 (London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 416.
30 S. PETRUCCIANI
to radical democracy in the critique of Hegelian philosophy of 1843.

Then, in the aforementioned epistolary exchange, Marx hints toward
communism, as we saw, and even to “revolution.” Marx will definitively
arrive at communism in the Spring–Summer of 1844, with the so-called
Paris Manuscripts, going through the steps we shall now explore: the
critique of political democracy, in the name of social emancipation, in On
the Jewish Question, and the connection between philosophy, proletariat,
and revolution in the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right.
2.2 Limits of the Rights of Man and Citizen

The essay On the Jewish Question is composed of two parts, presented
as two long reviews of the texts that Bruno Bauer had dedicated to the
problem of Jewish emancipation: the problem, that is, of the Jews’ right
to be considered as fully equal citizens. Marx, however, begins from the
discussion of this issue only to develop much broader and more general
considerations, involving the fundamental structures of the modern liberal
State. According to Bauer, the conquest of full juridical and political
equality presupposes a process of emancipation from religion, which has
to develop both on the side of the citizens (who must free themselves
from religious and Church obedience) and of the State (which must no
longer be a Christian or confessional State). But for Marx this approach
does not capture the way in which the relation between politics and reli-
gion actually works in the modern State; not, at least, if we conceptualize
the State based on its most advanced examples, such as the United States
of America. For Bauer (at least according to Marx’s reading),8 political
emancipation—the conquest of juridical and political equality between
all citizens—is somehow in contradiction with religious belonging. For
Marx, instead, political emancipation is not so demanding and, while it
obviously cannot coexist with a State-sanctioned religion (which would
negate equality between citizen), it can well coexist with strong religious
identities on the citizens’ part. This is in fact demonstrated by the United
8 For a more careful assessment of Bauer’s position, cf. the introduction to: Massimiliano
Tomba, ed. La questione ebraica (Roma: Manifestolibri, 2004). See also: Massimiliano
Tomba, Crisi e critica in Bruno Bauer. Il principio di esclusione come fondamento del
politico (Napoli: Bibliopolis, 2002).
States, where the absence of State religion corresponds to an intense

religious life for the citizens in civil society.
Thus, for Marx political emancipation is not at all human emanci-
pation, and not even the emancipation of mankind from religion. It is
instead necessary to clarify the proper logic of political emancipation,
as Marx is about to do, leaving behind the polemics with Bauer. Why,
then, political emancipation not only does not free men from religion,
but rather can well coexist with it? Answering this question means to
enquire the nature of political emancipation and its limits. The starting
point of this reflection had been already expounded by Marx in his critical
notes on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. In feudal society, rights and duties
are not equal for all individuals, but rather distributed based on their
belonging to castes and orders within society: the lord of the land is at
once economically dominant and endowed with a political role, whereas
the servant is dominated in his labor and politically dependent on his
lord. In the liberal-bourgeois State, instead, caste differences and special
juridical statuses are overcome. Individuals are freed from ascribed groups
and considered purely as individuals, all equal before the law; social and
economic differences (so that one is a landowner and another a daily
laborer) no longer entail differences in civil and political rights. This is
of course a long and contradictory process, which here Marx observes
from its endpoint, when social differences are wholly disconnected from
any legal privilege. Political emancipation can be called complete when
there is no longer any property qualification needed for voting or being
elected, that is to say when everyone is equally entitled to full political
rights—as according to Marx was already happening in «many states of
North America».9
It is not particularly relevant that Marx overestimated the North-
American States’ liberalism, overlooking, for example, the exclusion of
Blacks from all rights. What Marx is trying to accomplish in this text,
in fact, is not a historical analysis, which might shed light on how little
liberalism has been coherent with its own theoretical assumptions.10 Marx
rather wants to emphasize the logic of liberalism to show how, even
considering it in its most completed and ideal figure, the liberal State
9 Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 3
(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 153.
10 Domenico Losurdo, instead, focused on the faults of actually existing liberalism, see,
for example: Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (London: Verso, 2011).
32 S. PETRUCCIANI
does not achieve that emancipation of mankind from any form of subjec-
tion, which would instead be the proper objective of a true critique. In
the liberal-bourgeois State, to summarize, individuals are socially unequal
but politically equal: this neutralization of the juridical-political value of
social differences goes together with the atomization of individuals, who
possess rights only as individuals and no longer, as in pre-modern social
orders, due to their belonging to a caste, estate, or corporation. But why,
then, the political emancipation which swept away feudal privileges, and
which is paradigmatically expressed in the Declarations of Rights of the
French Revolution, even while constituting «a big step forward […] is
not the final form of human emancipation»?11 Why, that is to say, this
emancipation does not concretely free men from subjection? Why are the
conquests of civil and political right, and even democracy, insufficient to
ensure human emancipation?12
Marx’s answer to this question is very clear. First of all, precisely insofar
as it neutralizes the political value of social inequalities, political emanci-
pation does not consider how to overcome them; it rather leaves them
as they are: «the political annulment of private property not only fails to
abolish private property but even presupposes it». True, the State declares
that all are equally citizens and participants to popular sovereignty, despite
all differences of birth, status, wealth,
Nevertheless, the state allows private property, education, occupation, to

act in their way, i.e., as private property, as education, as occupation, and
to exert the influence of their special nature. Far from abolishing these real
distinctions, the state only exists on the presupposition of their existence
[…].13
But there is more: the modern liberal State presupposes the differ-
ences and social inequalities not just by leaving them free to exist and
develop, but above all because it grounds and guarantees them insofar as,
in its juridical architecture, poses the rights of the private individual, of
11 Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 155.

12 An interesting discussion of Marx’s critique of human rights is developed by: Allen
E. Buchanan, Marx and Justice: The Radical Critique of Liberalism (London: Methuen,
1982).
the property-owner, and of the subject of exchange on the same level (if
not a superior one) as the political rights of the citizen, who would be
the subject of popular sovereignty.
To demonstrate this thesis, Marx moves to examine the different
versions of the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, elaborated
through the shifting and contradictory phases of the French Revolution.
It is enough to read the most well-known, the Declaration of 1789, to
see how the rights of man (i.e., to say the private individual, the member
of civil society) are distinct from those of the citizen, who is the subject
of popular sovereignty (as a member of the Nation) and the author of
the laws, and how the latter are subordinated to the former. In fact, as
underscored by Marx, the Declaration explicitly stated that «the aim of all
political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible
rights of man»,14 and that implies precisely that the rights of citizen are
subordinated to those of man, and instrumental to their safeguard. This
is equivalent to saying that the citizens’ political sovereignty is meant to
guarantee their condition as members of civil society and, thus, private
property-owners: «political life declares itself to be a mere means, whose
purpose is the life of civil society».15
To clarify this point, Marx emphasizes the way in which the Decla-
rations define the «natural and imprescriptible rights of man». The text
of 1789 lists among them «liberty, property, security, and resistance to
oppression»; and even for the most radical constitution—that of 1793,
during the Jacobin period—these rights are «equality, liberty, security,
property». After having shown that the Declarations subordinate polit-
ical rights to the rights of man, that is to say to the guarantees of private
liberties, Marx analyzes more closely this latter class of rights. The aim
here is to showcase the conception of man presupposed by these private
rights, as well as the reason why said conception is unacceptable, from
Marx’s point of view.
The first and fundamental point concerns the conception of freedom16 :
the right of liberty is defined as the right to «do everything which injures
14 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 1789.

16 Concerning freedom in Marx, a necessary read is: George G. Brenkers, Marx’s Ethics
of Freedom (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983). See also the important essay: Aldo
Zanardo, “La teoria della libertà nel pensiero giovanile di Marx,” Studi Storici VII, no.
1 (1966).
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no related content on Scribd:
CHAPTER VII
MOSCOW AFTER THE RISING
Moscow, January 1, 1906.
If it is difficult—and it seems to be difficult to the verge of

impossibility—for the historian of the present day to write
impartially about political movements which happened in the days of
Queen Elizabeth and of Mary Queen of Scots, how infinitely more
difficult must it be to arrive at an impartial view of events when one
is oneself in the centre of them and living among the actors who are
contributing to what is afterwards called history! The historian solves
the question by frankly affiliating himself to one side (like Froude or
Macaulay or Taine), and he is probably right in doing this; I notice,
also, that our most eminent correspondents do the same. Therefore I
confess at once that I am in no way free from prejudices, and I make
no pretence of invincible impartiality; only I have seen and heard
enough of both sides to learn one thing—that the two parties who are
now engaged in strife in Russia are both right or both wrong. I will
try to the best of my ability to stifle my own feelings, and, like a piece
of blotting-paper which absorbs red or black ink indiscriminately, try
to reproduce as best I can fragments of what I absorb.
The strike is over, although I believe some revolutionaries are still
holding out in a factory near the Zoological Gardens. The shops are
open, the electric light is shining on the hard, snowy, ice-cold streets,
and life is going on, in the Russian expression, in its old rut. I
suppose the first question which will present itself to people abroad
anxious for information is: What did it all amount to? The second
question: What is the result of it? The third is possibly: What do the
people in Moscow, the inhabitant, the man in the street, think of it?
Practically, it did not amount to very much; a general strike was
proclaimed which was to take place all over Russia with the object of
obtaining universal suffrage. The strike was not universal. It was
closely followed by an armed rising of the revolutionary party in
Moscow with the object of arresting the Governor-General and
establishing a temporary Government. It resulted in complete and
utter failure; and this seems to point to one of two things: either that
the revolutionary party is less well organised than we supposed it to
be, or that it wrongly gauged popular feeling and no longer found
such strong support in public opinion as it did before. If it be judged
by its recent action it cannot be said to have given proof of any good
organisation, since it was obviously a mistake to foment a movement
among the military—using economic needs and demands as a
weapon—a week before the strike began. The economic demands
were made by the soldiers, and satisfied immediately, and their
mutiny ceased. It is nonsense to pretend that the soldiers have any
revolutionary tendencies, and the revolutionaries made a great
mistake in trying to undermine their belief in the Emperor. The same
thing holds good as regards the peasants; and only yesterday a
person with ultra-Radical convictions said to me: “The peasant, if he
is hungry, can easily be made to loot and burn; but if he is replete he
will send anybody who talks politics to him to the devil, and if any
one attacks the Emperor before him he will tear him to pieces;
possibly in twenty or thirty years things will be different and he will
be an enlightened man; at present he is not, and there is no use in
not facing the fact. The revolutionaries have made a cardinal error in
attacking the peasants’ and the soldiers’ only ideal—call it ideal, idol,
or what you like.” Therefore I say that in this case the behaviour of
the revolutionaries showed neither insight nor statesmanship nor
good organisation. It is possible, of course, that the strike may have
been brought about, as I wrote before, by the workmen forcing the
leaders’ hands, being unwilling to starve for a month but ready to
rise in arms and fight for several days.
Now, as to what actually happened. With regard to the loss of life
most people seem to be agreed in thinking that neither the
revolutionaries nor the soldiers suffered very great losses, but that
nine-tenths of the people killed were the onlookers among the public.
Sometimes, of course, it was their own fault; sometimes it was not.
When firing was going on it was as a rule difficult to get anywhere
near it because the police warned you “off the course.” But then one
must take into account that the streets in which the firing happened
were inhabited, and that sometimes the unfortunate inhabitants
were shot through no fault of their own. I think it is quite evident
that there was a great deal of entirely unnecessary and absolutely
futile bombarding of private houses. No doubt the revolutionaries
fired from such houses; but they fired and went away, and then the
house was battered and the revolutionaries were not caught. It must
not be thought that Moscow is a heap of cinders as in 1812. For the
most part the actual traces of bombardment are slight. The damage
done to Fielder’s School, for instance, which is in my street, amounts
to this: that the windows are broken and there is one hole in the wall.
On the other hand, several houses have been entirely destroyed, and
the printing offices of the Russkoe Slovo and some factories burnt—it
is difficult to ascertain by which side, but possibly by both. This
afternoon I went to a hospital to see some wounded soldiers, and in
one of the wards the windows had been shattered by a bullet which
had lodged in the cornice. Nothing will prevent me from believing
that it must be possible to ascertain whether you are firing at a
hospital, which is in one of the big streets of the town, or not. The
complaints of the inhabitants are universal. Some blame the soldiers
and some blame the revolutionaries, and one hears bitter stories
from both parties about the conduct of their adversaries. Those on
the Government side say: “What can you do against guerilla bands
who dart round corners, shoot policemen, and run away?” The others
say: “What can you think of people who shoot down the Red Cross
doctors and bombard private houses?” Again, the supporters of the
Government say the revolutionaries use and exploit the Red Cross
and, under the guise of Red Cross men, do murder. The others say
again “The Government hires a Militia drawn from the Black
Hundred to shoot indiscriminately from the tops of church steeples.”
Again you hear a story like this (I do not vouch for its truth): A
student was surrounded by a mob, and on the point of being lynched,
when he was rescued by a policeman, and on the way to the police
station he shot the policeman. Or you hear that a number of
peaceable citizens were walking up a street when the soldiery
suddenly appeared and fired up the street indiscriminately. It must
be borne in mind that the people of Moscow had been fully warned to
stay at home as much as possible, that after six o’clock it was
dangerous to go out, and that groups of three or more people would
be fired on at sight, since the revolutionaries, who wear no uniform
and are indistinguishable from the ordinary passer-by, took shelter
among such groups. A man in a fur coat may, for all you know, have
his pockets full of bombs. I know three cases of people being
accidentally killed: a little boy ran out of his house, not into the
street, but into the yard of his house to make a slide. As he did so he
was shot by a stray bullet. The proprietor of the Ermitage Restaurant
was also shot on his doorstep by a stray bullet. Thirdly, Metrofan, a
kind of porter who was a friend of mine, and about whom I wrote in
my last letter, has disappeared, and is not to be found in any of the
hospitals. He was the man—an ex-soldier—who said that it was
impossible to walk about safely (I laughed at him as he said it), and if
he has been killed—which I trust is not true—he seems to have had
the clearest presentiment of his fate. He was sent with a letter to a
place where firing was going on. It is just this sort of people who
suffered most: door-keepers and commissionaires who had to go
about their ordinary business and take the risk of being in dangerous
places. One extraordinarily typical incident was told me by an eye-
witness. A man was walking up the Neglinii Proiesd, a big street, in
which the Ermitage Restaurant is situated; he was deaf and could not
hear the noise of the firing; after a time he was wounded in the leg.
He saw the blood trickling on the snow, and he made the sign of the
cross and lay down and folded his arms together, resigning himself
to fate. After a time a poodle came along the street and began sniffing
at his head; this was more than he could bear, and he jumped up
again and, not noticing anything particular going on, pursued his
way quietly home. I think the police behaved exceedingly well and
the soldiers as well as could be expected. They were not, of course,
responsible for indiscriminate bombardments, which were entirely
due to the military in authority, and not, as is loosely stated, to the
Governor-General, Admiral Dubassov. In some cases the authorities
showed almost inspired ineptness. For instance, there is a large
weaving factory in Moscow, the workmen of which had not struck.
The police, with Cossacks, made a raid on it at night to search for
arms. They found none; they ransacked the barracks of the men, and
the men among whose chattels they found leaflets or any papers they
beat. On the next day two-thirds of these men went on strike. This
happened yesterday. Another case of the sort of thing which happens
is worth mentioning. There is a house in which a Jew, a Liberal
family, and a rich pork butcher dwell. The Liberal family have a boy
of twelve, who had been talking about the revolution with
pardonable boyish excess of zeal. The pork butcher said that the
whole place was going to be blown up. On the following day soldiers
arrived and began to shoot at the house. The owner, on inquiring the
reason, received the reply: “You have got a Jew in the house, and we
shall go on firing till you give us a nachai (a pourboire).” They did
this every day. What the trouble really amounted to was this: an
organised street fight, which lasted a week (nothing at all
approaching either 1832 or 1848 or 1871 in Paris), and which caused
a vast deal of damage to the inhabitants, and inflicted on them a
considerable loss of life, besides pecuniary losses resulting from the
stoppage of trade, &c. In the Paris Commune it should be
remembered that a great many people were shot in cold blood after it
was over, as a punishment, quite apart from the losses which
occurred during the fighting.
I am perfectly convinced, perhaps wrongly, that the Government is
in reality responsible for the troubles, owing to its dilatoriness in
making laws. I know the answer to this. It is said: “How can you
carry out reforms when the people won’t let you do so—when the
moment they are undertaken a series of strikes and disturbances
begin, and public servants behave in a manner which would not for a
moment be tolerated in the most progressive of Western nations?”
On the other hand it is obvious that all the strikes and disturbances
which occurred during last year arose from the fact of the delay in
the granting of reforms. And now when the people see this delay still
existing, and, rightly or wrongly, argue that nothing has been given
them till they extorted it, it is perhaps natural that their frame of
mind should be one of excited exasperation. The Government
expects them to behave reasonably, act reasonably, and think
reasonably. They are in a frame of mind when reasonable action or
thought is difficult of attainment, and the cause of their demented
attitude is the action of the Government in the past. I do not defend
them, but I understand them. My heart is with them; my head is
against them. Their situation seems to me to resemble that of a man
who for years has been kept on the verge of starvation, and is
suddenly given champagne (liberty of the Press), and is promised a
fixed and daily system of meals, consisting of wholesome food
(Parliament). Then the same people who starved him begin to be
dilatory in starting his new régime. Is it not easy to understand that
the conduct of such a man would not be likely to be reasonable? I
hope that one of the results of the events in Moscow will be to make
the Government realise the pressing necessity of taking some steps to
win the confidence of all that is “Moderate” in Russia. I hope also
that it will impress on all the “Moderates” the necessity of
combination and co-operation; because the revolutionaries declare
that they will strike again in March if they do not get what they wish,
and that the events of Moscow will be repeated in St. Petersburg. If
they decide on this, no amount of arrests and repression will prevent
them, and if the private houses of St. Petersburg are to be subjected
to indiscriminate bombardment the outlook is indeed serious. Other
results are these. The soldiers have been proved to be loyal, but a
Government cannot subsist on bayonets alone. Again, there will be a
large number of workmen out of work; these men when they go back
to their villages will be met with some such remarks as these: “No
money. You struck? What for? Get out.”
These two last mentioned facts should make strikes in the future
more difficult. Some people say that nothing will pacify the
revolutionaries; possibly, but the important question is, how far will
the revolutionaries be supported by public opinion? That depends
entirely on the action of the Government. It is certainly untrue to say
that public opinion in Moscow was against the revolutionaries, if it is
an exaggeration to say that it supported them. This leads us to
another question: What do the people here think of it all? In answer I
can only repeat what I said in my last letter: there exists violent and
bitter partisanship on both sides; there exists also a large class of
onlookers which is half-indifferent, half-resigned, and half-sceptical
—in the main indifferent. But if one is to go by facts one can point to
the small crowd—a selected and, in some parts, I believe, a paid
crowd of men—who attended the manifestation for the Emperor’s
birthday, the vast crowd which attended Bauman’s funeral, and the
great numbers of working men and others who have been fighting
against the Government these last few days. When I was talking to
the wounded soldiers to-day in the hospital they told me that they
had heard from men returning from the Far East that the reports of a
large mutiny in the Army there were untrue, that there had been
discontent about not coming home and a small rising, but nothing
like what was reported. One man said to me: “We may ask for more
soup and meat, but is it likely we are going to mutiny for that? They
will give us more if we ask for it; soldiers can’t strike, it is as if the
whole population were to strike.” I refrained from pointing out that
this is what exactly had occurred in October. I answered by my simile
of the starving man who is suddenly given champagne.
To-day I tried the Sortes Virgilianæ with regard to the present
situation and the chief actors of the drama of Russia. The result was
as follows:
1. (For Count Witte)
“dextra discedens impulit altam
Haud ignara modi puppim.”—Æ. x. 245.
2. (The general situation)

“Extemplo turbati animi, concussaque vulgi
Pectora, et arrectæ stimulis haud mollibus iræ.
Arma manu trepidi poscunt; fremit arma juventus,
Flent mæsti mussantque patres. Hic undique clamor
Dissensu vario magnus se tollit in auras.”
Æ. xi. 451.
January 2nd.
I went this afternoon, for the second time to-day, to the Soldiers’
Hospital. One of them asked me whether Paris was in Turkey. He
said the Turks were nice. Another asked me whether there wasn’t a
place where it was all water. I described Venice as best I could. On
my way to the hospital I went to the Hôtel Dresden. Metrofan has
been killed. His sister and his wife arrived in tears and in a terrible
state. He was shot by a shell.
January 3rd.
In the hospital a soldier told me two fairy tales; one was about a
wizard, and the other was in octosyllabic verse. It took twenty-five
minutes to tell. When he alluded to the “cloak of darkness” he called
it a “waterproof” cloak.
January 4th.
A cabman who drove me home last night drove me again to-day.
He said it was lucky I had taken him yesterday, because he had not
had another fare; and that he had told his comrades all about it, and
had said he would have been lost had not the Lord sent him a Barine,
and such a Barine too! (I had heavily overpaid him.) I said, “I
suppose you said, ‘God sent you a fool.’” “Oh! Barine, don’t offend
God,” he answered. The cabmen are a constant source of amusement
to me here. The other day, when I was driving, the cabman stopped
and made another one stop to admire his horse. After we drove on
again, we kept on meeting again, and every time we met we slowed
down, and the conversation about the horse and how much it had
cost was continued.
January 5th.
I taught a soldier at the hospital the Latin alphabet. He said he

would write me a letter soon in Latin letters; only he did not
understand the use of the letters W and X; but he added, I will
somehow or other find letters which will serve as equivalents to these
in the Russian alphabet.
From having had much conversation with people who defend the
revolutionaries with what seems to me nonsensical exaggeration, I
feel a wave of reaction coming over me. I can never resist this subtle
spirit of contradiction when I am with people who belong to a party,
and hear them express party feeling in unmeasured and exaggerated
terms. If I am with violent Conservatives a subtle spirit of Liberalism
rises within me, and vice versâ. Besides this, I hate political parties.
CHAPTER VIII
THE “INTELLIGENZIA”
January 6th.
I arrived at St. Petersburg this morning. I have been trying to

formulate my reactionary feelings. I will put them on paper; although
I know I shall only have to spend a very short time with real
reactionaries to be driven straight back into the opposite camp. But
lately at Moscow I have had a heavy dose of anti-governmental
unfairness. Too heavy for the present, although perhaps I shall one
day in the future think that it was not unfair at all.
I asked a man the other day, who is employed in the “Zemstva,”
what party he belonged to. “I belong to the party of common sense,”
he answered; “unfortunately it does not exist.” This exactly sums up,
I think, the impression that any impartial observer must necessarily
derive from the present situation in Russia. Common sense has gone.
Hysteria and undisciplined rant have taken its place.
First, the revolutionaries. There are two kinds of revolutionaries:
the active, who throw bombs at policemen and soldiers, who are
ready to dare anything and sacrifice themselves; and the passive
revolutionaries who sit at home and sympathise and talk a great deal.
What is their point of view?
1. They consider that all classes who are not definitely enrolled
under their flag are violent reactionaries and are fit to be classed with
the “Black Hundred.” The Duma that is to be, they say, will be a
“Black Hundred” Duma; the present Government is purely and
simply a reactionary Government composed of bureaucrats, and no
good can come to Russia until the ulcer is pierced to the core, and all
bureaucrats, together with the Emperor and all his family, and all his
Court, are removed. The objection that the present Government is
merely temporary until the Duma assembles, they meet with the
counterargument that the Government, with the franchise law as it
is, is capable of influencing the elections to any extent, and that the
result will be a reactionary Duma.
2. The second question is—What do they want? They say they want
a Constituent Assembly and universal suffrage, and no doubt they do
want this. But whether they would be satisfied with this if they were
given it is another question. Personally, my experience has so far led
me to believe that they would in no wise be satisfied with this; I
would lay odds to this effect. I may, no doubt, be mistaken. I believe
what they really want is for Russia to become a federation of
autonomous States represented by a Republic. Some of the more
moderate are either opposed to this or refrain from stating any
opinion in favour of it, owing to the fact that they know that the
Army and ninety million peasants are ready to kill any one within
reach if the “Gasudar” is to be tampered with.
They fear that if the question of a Republic is brought forward
there will be a general massacre of the educated bourgeoisie, the so-
called “Intelligenzia.” Nothing is more probable. Some people say
that nothing will really change the attitude of these people: no more
than any amount of measures which one of Lord Salisbury’s Cabinets
might have adopted would have changed the opinion of the
supporters of Mr. Gladstone or Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, or
vice versâ. That it is utterly futile to expect common sense or
common fairness from them. That they have their party feeling, to
which they are ready to sacrifice everything, and that it is infinitely
stronger and more bitter, and necessarily stronger and more bitter,
than anything of which we have had experience in England during
the last century.
Some people object that they understand the militant
revolutionaries being in this frame of mind, but they do not
understand the more intelligent passive and detached supporters of
the advanced party sharing such childish views. The more intelligent
and detached supporters are even more violent in their talk than the
militant fighters. At present the kind of argument one hears used is
like the following, which I have heard with my own ears. I have heard
intelligent cultivated people say: “How wicked and cowardly of the
Government to fire upon the revolutionaries, since they have guns
and the revolutionaries haven’t got any.” The English mind, which,
be it Liberal or Conservative, tends to common sense, revolts against
such reasoning. It is rare to find in Russia an Englishman who
sympathises with the revolutionaries. English common sense revolts
at the hysterical impatience which demands the immediate
fulfilment of measures more radical and socialist than exist in any
European state, and the common British sense of fairness is violated
at hearing of the wanton murder of policemen, who earn a poor
living and are in no way responsible for the misdeeds of the
Government, exalted as a patriotic execution worthy of Harmodius
and Aristogiton.
On the other hand I think we fail—I am alluding to Englishmen
who visit Russia, and not to those who live here permanently—to
realise that the Russians have been up to now destitute of certain
guarantees which Englishmen regard as a matter of course, and that
they do not consider they have obtained these guarantees yet; and
here it is difficult to contradict them.
Lately an incident happened which has proved a kind of focussing
glass concentrating the opinions of both parties. The revolutionaries
walked into the house of the head of the detective police service,
dragged him from his family circle and shot him. Somewhat later a
police officer named Ermolov walked into the house of a doctor and
shot him before his wife’s eyes. The officer gave himself up to the
authorities and said his act was due to momentary aberration.
Around these incidents both parties wage a war of tongues. The
sympathisers with the revolutionaries talk of the martyrdom of the
doctor; whereas their opponents say that the fuss they are making is
unjustifiable since they did the very same thing.
Personally I think that the weak side of the Government case is
this: that the revolutionaries are sure of punishment if caught;
whereas the official who does wrong is not punished, and his wrong-
doing is surely more heinous because he is the representative of the
law. On the other hand I think the wanton murder of policemen has
nothing of the heroic in it, and when I hear it spoken of in terms of
admiration I am disgusted.
As to the opponents of the revolutionaries, they also attack the
Government, and especially Count Witte. They say that the only
supporters of Count Witte are foreigners. The Slovo newspaper said,
for instance, that foreigners only supported Count Witte because
they desired the enfeeblement of Russia. But reactionaries say that
the Russian revolution is entirely fostered and supported by a foreign
Government. Now it cannot be to the French Government’s interest
for Russia’s credit to collapse, nor can it be to the German
Government’s interest for Russia to become a federation of
autonomous States; therefore it must be the English Government,
and, when pressed, they admit this. But if the English Press is trying
to ruin Russia by supporting Count Witte, it is obvious that it cannot
be at the same time trying to ruin Russia by supporting the
revolutionaries. One of these two statements must be untrue; quite
apart from the question as to whether the collapse of Russia’s credit
would prove a material advantage to England. The fact is that the
reactionaries who talk in this strain are politically limited in their
ideas; they know practically nothing either of England or of any
other country, they merely repeat old catchwords and musty
traditions which have been proved to be absurd.
Now apart from these reactionary Jingoes, who are really of no
importance whatsoever now, there is a large class of people who six
months ago would have been called red revolutionaries, and who
now call themselves “Moderates,” and are called by the
revolutionaries members of the “Black Gang.”
These people wish for the most speedy fulfilment of the Manifesto
of the 17th of October; they blame the Government for its delay in
making laws, and they blame Count Witte. But they look upon the
Duma as being competent to settle the various aspirations of the
various parties. They should be a strong party; the trouble is that up
to the present time they have never seen their way either to support
the Government or to form a homogeneous party among themselves.
It is possible that the recent events at Moscow may have the effect of
causing them to coalesce. It is to be hoped that this will happen; for
in them lies the safe via media between the two extremes of reaction
and anarchy.
It will be noticed that all these various parties are united with
regard to one detail, that is in their blame of Count Witte. It is also
worth mentioning that in all the innumerable attacks made on Count
Witte nobody has so far had the ingenuity or the perspicacity to
name his possible successor. Would the revolutionaries really like
him to go? I doubt it. They would have, in the first place, nobody to
attack; in the second place, they would risk having a more
reactionary successor. For that reason I have never up to now
believed in any of the countless reports regarding Count Witte’s
immediate resignation.
At present the Government is feeling extremely confident owing to
the way in which recent events have turned out; the revolutionaries
also profess to be in no wise disheartened; they say that the Moscow
rising is nothing in comparison with what they will do in March, and
that seeing that they have exhausted the efficacy of strikes and armed
risings they will adopt the method of terrorism and blow up
Government buildings with dynamite (in March). I have heard
intelligent sympathisers with the revolutionaries talking of such a
policy with enthusiasm, saying that this is the only way to deal with
the Government, and that the Duma, such as it will be, is not only of
no account but will never come into existence.
These people are members of the Russian “Intelligenzia,” or
middle professional class. They have many admirable qualities, and I
live among them and like them; but I think that sometimes some of
their members talk most wildly and ought to know better. Up to now,
of course, they have been carefully prevented by the Government
from taking any part in politics whatsoever, and they feel now that
vast possibilities have been opened to them; that it is they who made
the revolution, and that it is they who are going to rule the country.
Only at present they have not succeeded in producing a great man.
They arrogate to themselves the position of sole spokesmen and
representatives of the Russian people, and at this also common sense
revolts. For apart from the fact of the peasants distrusting them, and
the Army hating them, what have they done for Russia? Possibly it
was not they who brought about the Constitution. They class the
whole gentry and aristocracy with the Bureaucrats under one
sweeping ban of blame and abuse; but the gentry laid the
foundations of reform and revolution long before they existed as a
class at all (vide the Decembrists, 1825). Moreover, the gentry gave
to Russia Poushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Tolstoi, Turgeniev,
Tchaikovski, and Dostoievski; in fact, her literature, her art, her
music, her poetry; all her great men and men of genius. In the sphere
of the arts they have made Russia hideous by importing a debased
art nouveau from Munich; and in the sphere of literature they have
produced some excellent writers of short stories. In verse (the verse
of such writers as “Skitaletzt” is weaker than the prose of Andreev
and Co.) the English equivalent would be the political poetry of Mr.
Alfred Austin; the political tendencies of the Russian writers, of
course, differ widely from that of the English Laureate, whose work,
although it has met with public recognition, would, perhaps, have
made England less famous as a literary nation were it the sole
representative of our poetical literature.
Now that I have disburdened myself on the subject of the
unfairness of the “Intelligenzia,” I feel better. According to the
oriental fashion I should at once add counter-arguments giving all
that there is to be said in their favour. This I will do another day.
Moscow, January 13th.
I came back to Moscow on the 10th. I saw the old year out (it is the
Russian New Year’s Eve) with the kind family who live on the floor
above mine, and with whom I always have my meals. They played
Vindt all night. When the New Year came “A happy New Year” was
drunk in champagne.
CHAPTER IX
THE BEGINNING OF THE REACTION
Moscow, January 14th.
To-day is the Russian New Year’s Day. To-day is also Sunday, so it

would seem a fitting occasion to preach a long sermon on Russia. I
have been amusing myself by finding suitable texts for such a
sermon. They are all from the works of Renan, a man who gave a
good deal of thought to the various political movements and phases
of the world’s history, and expressed himself with that nice lucidity
and divine ease which we call a perfect style.
The first is this: “La Révolution française fut la gageure d’un petit
nombre d’énergumènes qui réussirent à faire croire qu’ils avaient
entraîné la nation.”
No. 2: “Éternelle puérilité des répressions pénales, appliquées aux
choses de l’âme.”
No. 3: “Dans ses accès de vertu, l’homme croit pouvoir se passer
entièrement de l’égoisme et de l’intérêt propre; l’égoisme prend sa
revanche, en prouvant que l’absolu désintéressement engendre des
maux plus graves que ceux qu’on avait cru éviter par la suppression
de la propriété.”
These are my texts, and, as is usually the case when the text is
good, the sermon is superfluous.
New Year’s Day is, we are so often told, a good occasion to look
forward and behind. What, then, is the outlook at present? Life is
going on at St. Petersburg and Moscow exactly as usual, and here,
save in the smouldering ruins of the factory of the Presnaya and
various broken windows and damaged cornices, there is nothing to
tell one that anything unusual has occurred. The Government is said
to be confident. Foreign loans are in the air. The revolutionaries, it is
said, have been crushed and dispersed. Electioneering work is
beginning; in fact, all is going as well as can be expected. That is one
view—an optimistic view which I do not altogether share. In the first
place, when people say that the Revolutionary Party or its leaders are
a minority I would reply by quoting text No. 1. “Laws, in a country
which is following an idea, are always made by the minority,” says
Renan, immediately before the sentence I have quoted.
Secondly, the Moscow episode does not seem to me to have
affected the revolutionary movement in the slightest degree. The
numbers of the killed among the insurgents were trifling; all the
important and real leaders of the Revolution had left Moscow before
this affair, which was, in fact, conducted by boys and girls; and if a
number of boys and girls can, at the head of a mass of workmen,
bring the garrison to distraction, take guns from the troops, and
force the authorities to bombard the houses of the inhabitants
without raising universal indignation, things must be fairly serious.
To say that they have alienated public sympathy is certainly
untrue; for although they started the fighting, as soon as the
authorities answered with artillery the common ordinary man in the
street began in many cases to say that it was the fault of the
Government and the authorities. Sympathy in Russia is always
certain to be with the people who are shot, be they right or wrong.
“Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim-gun and they have not.”
That is, they argue, the motto of the authorities, and that is exactly
the sentiment which arouses the indignation of the citizen. A cabman
asked some one the other day when they were going to punish “him.”
Who is “him”? he was asked. “Admiral Dubassov,” was the answer.
“Surely the Emperor will punish him for shooting at the houses.” The
energetic manner in which the rising was suppressed has, I am told,
produced a good effect in Europe; doubtless energetic measures were
not only necessary but imperative in the first instance; whether the
continuation of them now is a mistake or not only the future can
show. One fact, however, is certain, and that is that these measures
are being conducted with the same arbitrariness which has
characterised the action of the Russian police in the past, and are
causing intense exasperation. There is a word in Russian, “Proisvol,”
which means acting, like Wordsworth’s river, according to your “own
sweet will,” unheedful of, and often in defiance of, the law. It is
precisely this manner of acting which has brought about the
revolution in Russia. It is against the “Proisvol” that all the educated
classes and half the official class rebelled. And it is this very
“Proisvol” against which the whole country rose on strike, which the
Government promised should henceforth disappear, and which is at
the present moment triumphantly installed once more as the ruling
system.
Of course it may be objected that anarchy and lawless revolution
can only be met by severe repression; but the question is: Must it be
met by arbitrary and lawless repression? Hang the insurgents if you
like, but why shoot a doctor who has got nothing to do with it before
you know anything about him? To stop a newspaper like the Russkie
Viedomosti, for instance, is an act of sheer “Proisvol,” the reason
given being that it had subscription lists for workmen’s unions,
which it denies, saying that the money was for the wounded. Here I
point to my second text. All this repression seems to me utterly futile.
The future, however, can show whether this is indeed so.
In the meantime election programmes are appearing. That of the
Constitutional Democrats has come out, and is moderate in tone,
although its clauses are extensive. It insists, among other things, on
universal suffrage and an eight-hours’ day for the workmen. Here I
would point to text 3. Everybody whom I have seen in Russia in any
way connected with the working man is agreed in saying that an
eight-hours’ day is an absolute impossibility. That a Russian
workman’s eight hours means in reality about six hours. That no
factory in Russia could exist on these terms. The Constitutional
Democrats seem in this case to have omitted the factor of human
egoism and interest.
One of the gravest factors of the general situation is that Eastern
Siberia seems to be entirely in the hands of the revolutionaries, who
are apparently managing the railway and everything else with perfect
order, while the troops, anxious only to get home, are taking any
engines they can lay hands on and racing back, one train literally
racing another!
Altogether it cannot be said that the outlook is particularly
cheerful. There is one bright point so far, and that is that all parties
seem anxious to convoke the Duma. The Liberals want it, the
Conservatives want it, the Extreme Radicals sanction the elections.
The Radicals say it will be packed by the Government; but I do not
see how this is possible. They say they will let it meet, and that if it
proves “a Black Hundred Duma” they will destroy it. They call
everything which is not Radical “Black Hundred.” But, as I have said
before, and as I cannot tire of saying, it is useless to blame these
extreme parties for talking nonsense. They have been driven to this
nonsense by the still greater want of sense on the part of the
Government of Russia during the last twenty years, and in wanting to
wipe out this system altogether they are, after all, in the right. Unfair
they may be, hysterical, and absurd. So were the Jacobins; but the
absurdity, extravagance, and violence of the Jacobins were only the
logical result of the “Ancien Régime.” So it is here, although it is
misleading to compare the present movement in Russia with the
French Revolution.
And behind all the rumours and conflicts of various parties looms
the agrarian question; the ninety million peasants who till the land in
the same manner in which they tilled it four hundred years ago;
whose land from generation to generation dwindles by partition,
while the population increases. How and when is this question going
to be solved? It can only be solved by the education of the peasants
themselves; but the question is what can be done to gain time and to
make this education possible. My outlook is, perhaps, too
pessimistic. I do not know. I only feel that the whole revolutionary
movement is beyond all forces of control, and that no measures in
the world can put it back now; whether it could by wisdom be led
into safe channels is another question. Such a thing has seldom been
seen in the history of the world, and it is, after all, only out of the
past that we make the future.
To get rid of these gloomy ideas I went to the hospital, where New
Year’s Day was celebrated with great gusto; there was a Christmas-
tree, dancing and song, and it was delightful to see a little tiny boy
and a huge soldier dancing opposite each other. The Russian
peasants dance to each other, and separately, of course, like
Highlanders when they dance a reel or a schottische. It was gay and
yet rather melancholy; there were so many cripples, and it reminded
me a little of the Christmas feast described in Dostoievski’s “Letters
from a Dead House.”
January 18th.
To-day I heard a characteristic story. A student told it to me. A

peasant was looking at a rich man’s house in one of the streets of
Moscow. An agitator went up to him and said: “Think of the rich man
living in that great house, and think of your miserable position.”
“Yes,” said the peasant cheerfully, “it’s a big house; he’s a proper
Barine.”
“But,” said the agitator, much irritated, “it’s most unjust that he
should live in such a big house and that you should live in a small
house. You should turn him out of it.”
“How could that be?” answered the peasant. “He is used to being
rich. All his life he has lived in plenty. What would he do in poverty?
We are used to poverty, and we must have pity on those who are not
used to it.”
The agitator then gave the peasant up and went away in disgust.
January 20th.
I arrived in St. Petersburg this morning. Yesterday a Russian

friend of mine discussed with me my ideas on the “Intelligenzia” and
their revolutionary sympathies which I had embodied in a letter to
the Morning Post. My friend said that I had committed a gross
injustice to the Russian “Intelligenzia,” and that my letter, by
reflecting the opinion of Englishmen who had spent but a short time
in Russia, and judged everything from the point of view of a country
where political liberty had long since been an established fact, gave a
wrong impression. There is some truth in this, no doubt. It is difficult
here to keep a cool head and not to be swayed by circumambient
influence. The danger does not lie in being influenced by those who
immediately surround one, but rather in being influenced inversely
by their opinions. I mean one has only to talk to a revolutionary or to
a conservative long enough, at the present moment, to be convinced
that his adversary is right. I still hold, however, to what I wrote about
the unfairness and exaggerations of the sympathisers with the
revolution among the “Intelligenzia.” I think they are incapable of
looking at the matter impartially, and no wonder. Moreover, the
Government past and present is responsible for their frame of mind.
Again, I still hold to what I said, that the “Intelligenzia” have not
produced a great man; but instead of retracting what I said, I will, as
I said I would do, after the oriental fashion, having stated all that
there was to be said against them, try and set forth all that is to be
said in favour of the “Intelligenzia.”
In the first place, what is the “Intelligenzia”? Properly speaking, it
is composed of every one who can read or write. But the term is
generally used to designate those members of the middle class who
belong to the professional classes—doctors, professors, teachers,
journalists, and literary men. In its largest sense it is the whole
middle class, from which nine-tenths of the officials are drawn. But
when Russians speak of it they generally mean the middle class,
excluding officials. Such as it is, it contains, as well as the most hot-
headed revolutionaries and violent youths, all that is best and most
intelligent and cultivated in Russia, all men of science who have done
remarkable work in various branches, all doctors, whose life in the
country is a life of difficulty and self-sacrifice which it would be
difficult to exaggerate, all the professors and the teachers, the actors,
the singers, the musicians, the artists, the writers. These people have
for years been the absolute prey of the irresponsibility and
blundering stupidity of the higher bureaucrats. They have with
difficulty been able to obtain foreign books (Matthew Arnold’s
“Essays on Criticism” was one of the books on the index two years
ago); in teaching, half the facts of history have been forbidden them;
and at the slightest suspicion of not being “well-intentioned” they
have been placed under police surveillance and often been subjected
to gross indignities. Is it to be wondered at that they are bitter now?
The average man and woman of the Russian middle class is
incomparably better educated than the average English man or
woman of the same class. They are saturated with the foreign
classics. They often speak two languages besides Russian; and they
are conversant with modern thought in the various European
countries as far as it is allowed to reach them. When one sees the
average Englishman abroad one is aghast at his ignorance and his
want of education in comparison with these people. I have

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The Ideas of Karl Marx: A Critical

Introduction 1st Edition Stefano

More information about this series at

The Ideas of Karl

ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic)

Original Italian edition published by Marx, Carocci Editore, Roma 2010

Cover credit: Nick Hewetson/Getty Image

1. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions

1 The Education of a Young Hegelian 1

2 The Critique of Liberalism 27

3 The Discovery of Economics 55

4 A New Conception of History 81

4.4 Concluding Remarks on the Theory of Historical

5 A Time for Revolution: Marx and 1848 111

6 The Critique of Political Economy 145

7 The International, the Paris Commune, Social

Chronology of Life and Works 207

The Education of a Young Hegelian

1.1 Marx’s First Steps as a Student

© The Author(s) 2020 1

first thinker in Western history to articulate a radical critique of society, at

6 Karl Marx, “Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of

It is a psychological law that the theoretical mind, once liberated in itself,

The transformation of philosophy into action (from the perspective

But the practice of philosophy is itself theoretical. It is the critique that

8 Karl Marx, “Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy,” in Marx and Engels Collected

overcoming Marx saw the greatness of the Stuttgart’s philosopher). Thus,

At such times half-hearted minds have opposite views to those of whole-

The new Athens adumbrated by Marx would be a new philosophy,

1.2 From “Liberal” Battles to Social Questions

anti-censorship articles, coincides with the essence of mankind.14 Just as

Freedom is instead denied by censorship, which arbitrarily judges the

is the ubiquitous vigilant eye of a people’s soul, the embodiment of a

All freedoms stand and fall together:

And there is no freedom without the separation between Church and

of the state into an independent concept» is not a recent innova-

What Marx is here defending, thus, is a rational and ethical under-

With these reflections, Marx seems to get close to a critique of

to be represented is something passive; only what is material, spiritless,

imperilled. Representation must not be conceived as the representation of

A scheme of representation where the representatives’ privilege over-

In a true state there is no landed property, no industry, no material thing,

27 Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 1, 236.

propriété (1840) by Pierre Joseph Proudhon (whom Marx shall merci-

As we can see from these complaints, Marx is developing thoughts

1.3 Critique of Hegel’s Theory of the State

a criticism of Hegelian natural law, insofar as it concerns the internal

Marx’s critique of Hegel, though, did not take the form of an

last rational support of theology». «The Hegelian doctrine, that nature or

34 Ludwig Feuerbach, “Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy,” in The

«The inevitable outcome of this is that an empirical existent is uncriti-

36 Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” in Marx

rightful configuration the subject–predicate relations: the truth is that

41 Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” 9.

This contradiction, which Marx sees as characteristic of modern society,

The separation of civil society and political state necessarily appears as a

Marx’s analysis, however, does not stop there. If the individual is

The abstraction of the political State was therefore unknown to the

Only the French Revolution completed the transformation of the polit-

The neutralization of the political value of social differences, according

representation. This is an important and delicate point, since here both

only the self-determination of the people, and a particular content of the

In other words, in all abstract political forms, even