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ABSTRACT
While Marx threw off his attraction to Romanticism when he was still a teenager, scholars have detected various senses in which deep structures of Romantic thought persist in his work. These structures have frequently been taken as contributing factors to Marx’s alleged millenarianism, doctrinaire rigidity, and intolerance. The mature Marx does draw on Romantic ideas at crucial moments; but rather than reinforcing an image of Marx as an intolerant ideologue, the Romantic element in his thought, properly construed, suggests theoretical openness and humility before an unmasterable reality.
Notes
1 This is a guiding theme in Gareth Stedman Jones’s Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (2016); see, in addition, the reflections of the current general editor of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, Harald Bluhm (Citation2017).
2 See Kelley Citation1978.
3 Karl Marx to Heinrich Marx, Nov 10. 1837, Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 18.
4 See the discussion in Wessell Citation1979, 70-77, and Kux Citation1967, 11.
5 I discuss this imagery in Breckman Citation1998.
6 Karl Marx to Heinrich Marx, Nov. 10, 1837, Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, vol. 1, 18.
7 Heinrich Marx to Karl Marx, Dec. 28, 1836, Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, vol. 1, 664.
8 Heinrich Marx to Karl Marx, Sept. 16, 1837, Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, vol. 1, 680.
9 Marx draws on Chamisso’s story about Peter Schlemihl in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
10 Karl Marx to Heinrich Marx, Nov. 10, 1837, Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, vol. 1, 19.
11 Ibid., 17.
12 Ibid., 11.
13 Ibid., 18.
14 In her discussion of this “lost aesthetic,” Margaret Rose (Citation1984, 63-65) argues that Marx’s Citation1842 treatise emphasized the sensuous, materialist basis of art, in contrast to fetishistic constructions of divine inspiration and the like.
15 Karl Marx to Feuerbach, Oct. 3, 1843, Ludwig Feuerbach. Briefwechsel, vol. 2. On Marx's view of Leroux, see Gregory Citation1983. On Leroux’s support of Schelling, see Breckman Citation2005 and Breckman Citation2013, 60-74. Ruge confirmed Marx's observations, claiming in a letter to Feuerbach that the French are “curiously block-headed over Schelling” (Nov. 11, 1843, Ludwig Feuerbach. Briefwechsel, vol. 2).
16 A number of distinguished authors argue that the older Schelling influenced the formation of Marx’s materialism, in part through the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach, they claim, was receptive to Schelling’s critique of Hegelian identity philosophy even in the later 1820s. See especially Frank Citation1992; Habermas Citation1963; Löwith Citation1964; and McCarthy Citation1988. It would exceed the scope of this paper to delve into these claims, but I challenge them, with respect especially to Feuerbach, in Breckman Citation1999, 102.
17 From Marx’s Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (Citation1857), in Baxandall and Morawski Citation2006, 108-9.
18 See especially Williamson Citation2004.
19 Quoted in Löwy and Sayre Citation2001, 33.
20 Abrams’s approach resembles that of Leszek Kolakowski (Citation1978), who also views Marx as the inheritor of a long process of transformation, whereby the original resources of Christian Neoplatonism migrate into modern secular thought. However, Kolakowski lays all his emphasis on the philosophical development of German Idealism, strictly defined as a series of moves by Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.
21 Karl Marx to Arnold Ruge, Nov. 30, 1842, Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, vol. 1, 393.
22 See Marx and Engels [Citation1845] Citation2017, 545-89.
23 I discuss the opposition between German and French national characters that structures Engels’s treatment in Breckman Citation1998.
24 The criteria whereby the young Engels evaluated various socialist writers were decidedly unromantic, including whether they acknowledged the need for community of property and equality of income and whether they articulated a concrete analysis of the negative workings of the capitalist economy. See Gregory Citation1983, 153-56.
25 Miquel Abensour’s La démocratie contre l’Etat. Marx et le moment machiavélien (Citation1997) appears in English as Democracy Against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Moment (2011). For Balibar, the “Machiavellian” and the “Messianic” persist as contending options both in the later Marx and in the Marxist tradition. In Abensour’s account, the “Machiavellian moment” of true democracy is succeeded not by the messianic, but by a mature phase in which the state form reasserts its primacy and socio-economic determinism overrides political indeterminacy. I discuss Abensour’s thesis in Breckman Citation2018.
26 Ibid., 130. Marx and Engels distinguished between what they considered the crude materialism of French communists such as Dézamy and the more supple materialism of the socialists.
27 Marx to Feuerbach, Oct. 3, 1843, MECW, vol. IV, 350.
28 On Leroux’s materialism, see Breckman Citation2005 and Citation2013, 60-74. Recently, the later Schelling has been revived by some thinkers on the Left, such as Slavoj Žižek and Jane Bennett, in search of a “non-reductive” materialism. I discuss this phenomenon in Breckman Citation2009.
29 This discussion follows closely my analysis of Marx in Breckman Citation2013, 74-82.