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Abstract
Ever since the full text of The German Ideology appeared in 1932 it has been subject to persistent misreading due to the fact that the idiosyncratic nature of this work—as merely a rough, unedited, and unfinished draft as well as a fiercely polemical text—has been neglected. As a result, the majority of scholars have tended to claim that Marx and Engels in this work propose an empiricist or positivistic conception of human history and society. A critical reading that is sensitive to the peculiar nature of this text reveals that these common interpretations are wholly ungrounded and that, on the contrary, the authors develop their polemic against the Young Hegelians from an outlook that is deeply indebted to the Hegelian philosophical legacy (even though paradoxically the latter espouses an absolute idealistic viewpoint).
Acknowledgments
This essay is an updated version of Fromm (Citation2005a), reprinted in Fromm (2011). It was translated from the Spanish by Manuel S. Almeida, and revised for Rethinking Marxism by the author.
Notes
1. See Hess (Citation1845, 8).
2. See also Philip J. Kain (Citation1986, 6, 36, 43, 46–7, 62–3, 76, 98, 133n9). A decade later, this type of reading continued to prevail among North American scholars. See, for example, Daniel Brudney (Citation1998, 281, 313).
3. Although this comment occurs in a note to illustrate the critique that the author formulates in the body of the essay in the sense that “[Marx's] predilection for overemphatic, polemically sharp, but in their meaning highly ambiguous formulations” (Márkus Citation1994, 422) cannot be justified, it is still surprising that a serious scholar brushes off the issue in such a carefree fashion, particularly when he had previously published two excellent studies—notable precisely for their philological rigor and caution—on the thought of the young Marx. See Márkus (Citation1969, Citation1974).
4. The peculiar nature of the text of The German Ideology will be the subject of another essay.
5. In this critical edition the editors forsake all attempts to present the first section of the work, “On Feuerbach,” as a coherent, unitary text (as had been done, in different ways, by all previous editions) and decided to accept and remain faithful (so far as is editorially possible) to the fact that the manuscript that has come down to us consists of a set of disjointed and only loosely coordinated fragments of different length as well as different degrees of elaboration. For details of the tortuous history of the attempts to produce a critical edition of the entire work (still unfinished!), see the corresponding publications on the MEGA2 edition published by the Berlin Academy of Sciences (BBAW) and the International Marx-Engels Foundation in Amsterdam (IMES); see also my review of Marx-Engels Jahrbuch 2003 published (in English) in Fromm (Citation2007).
6. “Das Fragment ist wahrscheinlich nach Beendigung der Arbeit am zweiten Band entstanden, d.h. im Juni oder erste Hälfte Juli 1846 … [Das] Fragment … einordnet sich in die Versuche, die eigenen Voraussetzungen und das Anliegen des geplanten Abschnitts ‘I. Feuerbach’ zu bestimmen” (Marx and Engels Citation2004, 319–20). The editors base their dating of this fragment on the truly outstanding and painstaking research of the noted scholar Inge Taubert. See especially the landmark articles published in MEGA-Studien (Taubert Citation1997a, Citation1997b).
7. See on this matter the rich discussion by Ernst Bloch (Citation1962, 28–32).
8. See, for example, the critical reference to it in Marx (Citation1961, 147; cf. MEGA2 I, vol. 2, 278).
9. It is important to remember in this regard Hegel's (Citation1955, 118) critical commentary on the fundamental illusion of classical empiricism: “The fundamental illusion of scientific empiricism is always that it utilizes the metaphysical categories of matter, force, as well as those such as the one, the multiple, universality, and infinity, and proceeds to deduce conclusions through them, supposing and applying with it the forms of the syllogism (des Schließens); without recognizing in all of it that it itself contains and does a metaphysics and using those categories and their connections in a form totally uncritical and unconscious.” See also the lucid discussion on Hegel and empiricism in Ernst Bloch (Citation1962, 109–20).
10. This is an instance where the superiority of the classic Spanish translation of Wenceslao Roces is evident over the rival versions available in English. Both the older version of Roy Pascal as well as the more recent, supposedly critical version in the Collected Works distort and blur the sense of the entire passage by ignoring what Roces correctly recognizes: that is, the presence of the same technical term, that thus has to be translated properly and consistently. Indeed, translating Darstellung/darstellen as it occurs in this particular passage—haphazardly, as “description,” “depiction,” “representation,” etc.—constitutes a serious and unforgivable error.
11. “The easiest thing is to judge what has content and solidity; it is more difficult to grasp it; and the most difficult of all is to produce what unites both, its exposition.”
12. One of the few scholars to note the technical use of Darstellung in The German Ideology is Alfred Schmidt (Citation1967, 121–2; Citation1971, 56n53).
13. See Supra footnote 10.
14. See on this matter the writings of the young Marx in his reading workbooks, reproduced in MEGA2 IV. The young Marx became familiar with Ranke through the immediate disciples of Hegel, whose courses he attended during his years as a student at the University of Berlin. In addition, he knew the Hegelian Encyclopedia, whose third edition came out in 1830 and also contains (sec. 549) the same critique of “objective” German historiography.
15. Ranke (Citation1981) contains numerous examples that confirm this.
16. Here is a notable echo of the famous third “Thesis on Feuerbach,” a text that nobody—so far as I know—has ventured to classify as “empiricist” or “positivist”!
17. See the above section of this paper on “The Concept of Exposition (Darstellung).”
18. Feuerbach's programmatic pamphlets of 1842 and 1843 constitute a good example of the use of “philosophy” to make a specific reference to the Hegelian philosophy; thus, for example, in the polemical Provisional Theses for the Reform of Philosophy as well as in most of the aphorisms of which this work is composed, the word “philosophy” is used to refer to Hegel's philosophical system.
19. See also the following, no less categorical, formulation: “Dass der Geschichte und zwar wesentlich der Weltgeschichte ein Endzweck an-und-für-sich zum Grunde liege und derselbe wirklich in ihr realisirt worden sey und werde,—der Plan der Vorsehung,—dass überhaupt Vernunft in der Geschichte sey, muss für sich selbst philosophisch und damit als an-und-für sich nothwendig ausgemacht werden” (Hegel Citation1958, 427).
20. See also Marx and Engels (Citation1976, 85; Citation1972a, 71).
21. See also Marx and Engels (Citation1976, 92; Citation1972a, 37).
22. This ambivalence is also present in the “mature” texts: if it is true that the definitive rejection of teleology and the notion of universal history as a historical product of the development of capitalism persist (see in particular the 1857 Introduction), that does not hinder the reiteration also of the simplistic and mechanical model of the historical dynamic. See, for example, the 1859 preface to the Critique of Political Economy and, above all, Capital, vol. 1, chap. 24, where Marx (Citation1990, 928–9; Citation1972b, 790–1) has no reservations in presenting his model of the historical development of capitalism using the “Hegelian” language of “negation” and “negation of the negation”: “What is now to be expropriated is not the self-employed worker, but the capitalist who exploits a large numbers of workers. This expropriation is accomplished through the action of the immanent laws of capitalist production itself, through the centralization of capitals … The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. The capitalist mode of appropriation, which springs from the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of its proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation. This is the negation of the negation.”
23. A similar situation occurs with regard to the Paris Manuscripts (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844): see my essays on the matter in Fromm (Citation2004, Citation2005b), reprinted in Fromm (Citation2011).