As far as Germany is concerned the criticism of religion is
practically completed, and the criticism of religion is the basis of
all criticism.
The profane existence of error is threatened when its heavenly
oratio pro aris et focis[1] has been refuted.
He who has only found a reflexion of himself in the fantastic
reality of heaven where he looked for a superman, will no longer be
willing to find only the semblance of himself, only the sub-human,
where he seeks and ought to find his own reality.
The foundation of the criticism of religion is: Man makes religion,
religion does not make man. Religion indeed is man's self-consciousness
and self-estimation while he has not found his feet in the universe.
But Man is no abstract being, squatting outside the world. Man is the
world of men, the State, society. This State, this society produces
religion, which is an inverted world-consciousness, because they are an
inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its
encyclopædic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic
Point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn
complement, its general basis of consolation and justification. It is
the fantastic realization of the human being, inasmuch as the human
being possesses no true reality. The struggle against religion is
therefore indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual
aroma is religion.
Religious misery is in one mouth the expression of real misery, and
in another is a protestation against real misery. Religion is the moan
of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, as it is
the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion, as the illusory happiness of the people,
is the demand for their real happiness. The demand to abandon the
illusions about their condition is a demand to abandon a condition
which requires illusions. The criticism of religion therefore contains
potentially the criticism of the Vale of Tears whose aureole is
religion.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers which adorned the chain,
not that man should wear his fetters denuded of fanciful embellishment,
but that he should throw off the chain, and break the living flower.
The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he thinks, acts,
shapes his reality like the disillusioned man come to his senses, so
that he revolves around himself, and thus around his real sun. Religion
is but the illusory sun which revolves around man, so long as he does
not revolve around himself.
It is therefore the task of history, once the thither side of
truth has vanished, to establish the truth of the hither side.
The immediate task of philosophy, when enlisted in the service of
history, is to unmask human self-alienation in its unholy shape, now
that it has been unmasked in its holy shape. Thus the criticism of
heaven transforms itself into the criticism of earth, the criticism of
religion into the criticism of right, and the criticism of theology
into the criticism of politics.
The following essay—a contribution to this work—is in the first
place joined not to the original, but to a copy, to the German
philosophy of politics and of right, for no other reason than because
it pertains to Germany.
If one should desire to strike a point of contact with the German
status quo, albeit in the only appropriate way, which is
negatively, the result would ever remain an anachronism. Even the
denial of our political present is already a dust-covered fact in the
historical lumber room of modern nations. If I deny the powdered wig, I
still have to deal with unpowdered wigs. If I deny the German
conditions of 1843, I stand, according to French chronology, scarcely
in the year 1789, let alone in the focus of the present.
German history flatters itself that it has a movement which no
people in the historical heaven have either executed before or will
execute after it. We have in point of fact shared in the restoration
epoch of modern nations without participating in their revolutions.
We were restored, in the first place, because other nations dared to
make a revolution, and, in the second place, because other nations
suffered a counter revolution: in the first place, because our masters
were afraid, and, in the second place, because they regained their
courage.
Led by our shepherds, we suddenly found ourselves in the society of
freedom on the day of its interment.
As a school which legitimates the baseness of to-day by the baseness
of yesterday, a school which explains every cry of the serf against the
knout as rebellious, once the knout becomes a prescriptive, a
derivative, a historical knout, a school to which history only shows
itself a posteriori, like the God of Israel to his servant
Moses, the historical juridical school would have invented German
history, were it not itself an invention of German history.
On the other hand, good-humoured enthusiasts, Teutomaniacs by
upbringing and freethinkers by reflexion, seek for our history of
freedom beyond our history in the Teutonic primeval woods. But in what
respect is our freedom history distinguished from the freedom history
of the boar, if it is only to be found in the woods? Moreover, as one
shouts into the wood, so one's voice comes back in answer (“As the
question, so the answer"). Therefore peace to the Teutonic primeval
woods.
But war to German conditions, at all events! They lie below the
level of history, they are liable to all criticism, but they remain a
subject for criticism just as the criminal who is below the level of
humanity remains a subject for the executioner.
Grappling with them, criticism is no passion of the head, it is the
head of passion. It is no anatomical knife, it is a weapon. Its object
is its enemy, which it will not refute but destroy. For the spirit of
the conditions has been refuted. In and for themselves they are no
memorable objects, but existences as contemptible as they are despised.
Criticism has already settled all accounts with this subject. It no
longer figures as an end in itself, but only as a means. Its essential
pathos is indignation, its essential work is denunciation.
What we have to do is to describe a series of social spheres, all
exercising a somewhat sluggish pressure upon each other, a general
state of inactive dejection, a limitation which recognizes itself as
much as it misunderstands itself, squeezed within the framework of a
governmental system, which, living on the conservation of all
meannesses, is itself nothing less than meanness in government.
What a spectacle! On the one hand, the infinitely ramified division
of society into the most varied races, which confront each other with
small antipathies, bad consciences, and brutal mediocrity, and
precisely because of the ambiguous and suspicious positions which they
occupy towards each other, such positions being devoid of all real
distinctions although coupled with various formalities, are treated by
their lords as existences on sufferance. And even more. The fact that
they are ruled, governed, and owned they must acknowledge and confess
as a favour of heaven! On the other hand, there are those rulers
themselves whose greatness is in inverse proportion to their number.
The criticism which addresses itself to this object is criticism in
hand-to-hand fighting, and in hand-to-hand fighting, it is not a
question of whether the opponent is a noble opponent, of equal birth,
or an interesting opponent; it is a question of meeting him. It is thus
imperative that the Germans should have no opportunity for
self-deception and resignation. The real pressure must be made more
oppressive by making men conscious of the pressure, and the disgrace
more disgraceful by publishing it.
Every sphere of German society must be described as the partie
honteuse[2] of German society, these petrified conditions must be
made to dance by singing to them their own melody! The people must be
taught to be startled at their own appearance, in order to implant
courage into them.
And even for modern nations this struggle against the narrow-minded
actuality of the German status quo cannot be without interest,
for the German status quo represents the frank completion of the
ancien régime, and the ancien régime is the concealed defect
of the modern State. The struggle against the German political present
is the struggle against the past of modern nations, which are still
vexed by the recollections of this past. For them it is instructive to
see the ancien régime, which enacted its tragedy with them,
playing its comedy as the German revenant. Its history was
tragic so long as it was the pre-existing power of the world, and
freedom, on the other hand, a personal invasion, in a word, so long as
it believed and was obliged to believe in its justification. So long as
the ancien régime as the existing world order struggled with a
nascent world, historical error was on its side, but not personal
perversity. Its downfall was therefore tragic.
On the other hand, the present German régime, which is an
anachronism, a flagrant contradiction of the generally recognized axiom
of the obsolescence of the ancien régime, imagines that it
believes in itself, and extorts from the world the same homage. If it
believed in its own being, would it seek to hide it under the semblance
of an alien being and look for its salvation in hypocrisy and
sophistry? The modern ancien régime is merely the comedian of a
world order whose real heroes are dead.
History is thorough, and passes through many phases when it bears an
old figure to the grave. The last phase of a world historical figure is
its comedy. The gods of Greece, once tragically wounded to death in the
chained Prometheus of Æschylus, were fated to die a comic death in
Lucian's dialogues. Why does history take this course? In order that
mankind may break away in a jolly mood from its past.
In the light of this historical foresight, the political powers of
Germany are vindicated. As soon then as the modern politico-social
reality is itself subjected to criticism, as soon, therefore, as
criticism raises itself to the height of truly human problems, it
either finds itself outside the German status quo, or it would
delve beneath the latter to find its object.
To take an example! The relation of industry, and of the world of
wealth generally, to the political world is one of the chief problems
of modern times. Under what form is this problem beginning to engage
the attention of Germans? Under the form of protective tariffs, of the
system of prohibition, of political economy. Teutomania has passed out
of men and gone into matter, and thus one fine day we saw our cotton
knights and iron heroes transformed into patriots. Thus in Germany we
are beginning to recognize the sovereignty of monopoly at home, in
order that it may be invested with sovereignty abroad. We are now
beginning in Germany at the point where they are leaving off in France
and England.
The old rotten condition, against which these countries are
theoretically in revolt, and which they only tolerate as chains are
borne, is greeted in Germany as the dawning of a splendid future, which
as yet scarcely dares to translate itself from cunning[3] theory into
the most ruthless practice. Whereas the problem in France and England
reads: Political economy or the rule of society over wealth, it reads
in Germany: national economy or the rule of private property over
nationality. Thus England and France are faced with the question of
abolishing monopoly which has been carried to its highest point; in
Germany the question is to carry monopoly to its highest point.
If, therefore, the total German development were not in advance of
the political German development, a German could at the most take part
in present-day problems only in the same way as a Russian can do so.
But if the individual is not bound by the ties of a nation, the
entire nation is even less liberated by the emancipation of an
individual. The Scythians made no advance towards Greek culture because
Greece numbered a Scythian among her philosophers. Luckily we Germans
are no Scythians.
As the old nations lived their previous history in imagination, in
mythology, so we Germans live our history to come in thought, in
philosophy. We are philosophical contemporaries of the present without
being its historical contemporaries. German philosophy is the ideal
prolongation of German history. If, therefore, we criticize the
oeuvres posthumes of our ideal history, philosophy, instead of the
oeuvres incomplètes of our real history, our criticism occupies a
position among the questions of which the present says: that is the
question.[4] That which represents the decaying elements of
practical life among the progressive nations with modern State
conditions first of all becomes critical decay in the philosophical
reflexion of these conditions in Germany, where the conditions
themselves do not yet exist.
German juridical and political philosophy is the sole element of
German history which stands al pari with the official modern
present.
The German people must therefore strike this their dream history
against their existing conditions, and subject to criticism not only
these conditions, but at the same time their abstract continuation.
Their future can neither be confined to the direct denial of their
real nor to the direct enforcement of their ideal political and
juridical conditions, for they possess the direct denial of their real
conditions in their ideal conditions, and the direct enforcement of
their ideal conditions they have almost outlived in the opinion of
neighbouring nations. Consequently the practical political party in
Germany properly demands the negation of philosophy. Its error consists
not in the demand, but in sticking to the demand, which seriously it
neither does nor can enforce. It believes it can accomplish this
negation by turning its back on philosophy, the while its averted head
utters a few irritable and banal phrases over it. Moreover, its horizon
is so limited as to exclude philosophy from the realm of German
actuality unless it imagines philosophy to be implied in German
practice and in the theories subserving it. It urges the necessity for
linking up with vital forces, but forgets that the real vital force of
the German people has hitherto only pullulated under its skull.
In a word: you cannot abolish philosophy without putting it into
practice. The same error, only with the factors reversed, is committed
by the theoretical party, the political party which founds on
philosophy.
The latter perceives in the present struggle only the critical
struggle of philosophy with the German world; it does not suspect that
all previous philosophy has itself been a part of this world, and is
its complement, if an ideal one. While critical towards its opposing
party, it behaves uncritically towards itself. It starts from the
assumptions of philosophy, but either refuses to carry further the
results yielded by philosophy, or claims as the direct outcome of
philosophy results and demands which have been culled from another
sphere.
We reserve to ourselves a more detailed examination of this party.
Its fundamental defect may be reduced to this: it believes it can
enforce philosophy without abolishing it. The criticism of German
juridical and political philosophy, which has received through Hegel
its most consistent, most ample and most recent shape, is at once both
the critical analysis of the modern State and of the actuality which is
connected therewith, and in addition the decisive repudiation of the
entire previous mode of the German political and juridical
consciousness, whose principal and most universal expression, elevated
to the level of a science, is speculative jurisprudence itself.
While, on the one hand, speculative jurisprudence, this abstract and
exuberant thought-process of the modern State, is possible only in
Germany, on the other hand, the German conception of the modern State,
making abstraction of real men, was only possible because and in so far
as the modern State itself makes abstraction of real men or only
satisfies the whole of man in an imaginary manner.
Germans have thought in politics what other peoples have done.
Germany was their theoretical conscience. The abstraction and
arrogance of her thought always kept an even pace with the
one-sidedness and stunted growth of her actuality. If, therefore, the
status quo of the German civic community expresses the completion
of the ancien régime, the completion of the pile driven into the
flesh of the modern State, the status quo of German political
science expresses the inadequacy of the modern State, the decay that is
set up in its flesh.
As a decisive counterpart of the previous mode of German political
consciousness, the criticism of speculative jurisprudence does not run
back upon itself, but assumes the shape of problems for whose solution
there is only one means: practice.
The question arises: can Germany attain to a practice à la
hauteur de principes,[5] that is, to a revolution which will not
only raise her to the level of modern nations, but to the human level
which will be the immediate future of these nations?
The weapon of criticism cannot in any case replace the criticism of
weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force, but
theory too becomes a material force as soon as it grasps weapons.
Theory is capable of grasping weapons as soon as its argument becomes
ad hommine, and its argument becomes ad hominem as soon as
it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the matter by its root.
Now the root for mankind is man himself. The evident proof of the
radicalism of German theory, and therefore of its practical energy, is
its outcome from the decisive and positive abolition of religion.
The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the
supreme being for mankind, and therefore with the categorical
imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a degraded,
servile, neglected, contemptible being, conditions which cannot be
better described than by the exclamation of a Frenchman on the occasion
of a projected dog tax: “Poor dogs; they want to treat you like men!”
Even historically, theoretical emancipation has a specifically
practical significance for Germany. Germany's revolutionary past is
particularly theoretical, it is the Reformation. Then it was the monk,
and now it is the philosopher in whose brain the revolution begins.
Luther vanquished servility based upon devotion, because he replaced
it by servility based upon conviction. He shattered faith in authority,
because he restored the authority of faith. He transformed parsons into
laymen, because he transformed laymen into parsons. He liberated men
from outward religiosity, because he made religiosity an inward affair
of the heart. He emancipated the body from chains, because he laid
chains upon the heart.
But if Protestantism is not the true solution, it was the true
formulation of the problem. The question was no longer a struggle
between the layman and the parson external to him; it was a struggle
with his own inner parson, his parsonic nature. And if the protestant
transformation of German laymen into parsons emancipated the lay popes,
the princes, together with their clergy, the privileged and the
philistines, the philosophic transformation of the parsonic Germans
into men will emancipate the people. But little as emancipation stops
short of the princes, just as little will the secularization of
property stop short of church robbery, which was chiefly set on foot by
the hypocritical Prussians. Then the Peasants' War, the most radical
fact of German history, came to grief on the reef of theology. To-day,
when theology itself has come to grief, the most servile fact of German
history, our status quo, will be shivered on the rock of
philosophy.
The day before the Reformation, official Germany was the most abject
vassal of Rome. The day before its revolution, it is the abject vassal
of less than Rome, of Prussia and Austria, of country squires and
philistines.
Meanwhile there seems to be an important obstacle to a radical
German revolution.
Revolutions in fact require a passive element, a material
foundation.
Theory becomes realized among a people only in so far as it
represents the realization of that people's needs. Will the immense
cleavage between the demands of the German intellect and the responses
of German actuality now involve a similar cleavage of middle-class
society from the State, and from itself? Will theoretical needs merge
directly into practical needs? It is not enough that the ideas press
towards realization; reality itself must stimulate to thinking.
But Germany did not pass through the middle stages of political
emancipation simultaneously with the modern nations. Even the stages
which she has overcome theoretically she has not reached practically.
How would she be able to clear with a salto mortale not only
her own obstacles, but at the same time the obstacles of modern
nations, obstacles which she must actually feel to mean a liberation to
be striven for from her real obstacles? A radical revolution can only
be the revolution of radical needs, whose preliminary conditions appear
to be wholly lacking.
Although Germany has only accompanied the development of nations
with the abstract activity of thought, without taking an active part in
the real struggles incident to this development, she has, on the other
hand, shared in the suffering incident to this development, without
sharing in its enjoyments, or their partial satisfaction. Abstract
activity on the one side corresponds to abstract suffering on the other
side.
Consequently, one fine day Germany will find herself at the level of
European decay, before she has ever stood at the level of European
emancipation. The phenomenon may be likened to a fetish-worshipper, who
succumbs to the diseases of Christianity.
Looking upon German governments, we find that, owing to contemporary
conditions, the situation of Germany, the standpoint of German culture
and finally their own lucky instincts, they are driven to combine the
civilized shortcomings of the modern State world, whose advantages we
do not possess, with the barbarous shortcomings of the ancien régime, which we enjoy in full measure, so that Germany is constantly obliged
to participate, if not intelligently, at any rate unintelligently, in
the State formations which lie beyond her status quo.
Is there for example a country in the world which shares so naïvely
in all the illusions of the constitutional community, without sharing
in its realities, as does so-called constitutional Germany? Was it
necessary to combine German governmental interference, the tortures of
the censorship, with the tortures of the French September laws which
presupposed freedom of the press? Just as one found the gods of all
nations in the Roman pantheon, so will one find the flaws of all State
forms in the Holy Roman German Empire. That this eclecticism will reach
a point hitherto unsuspected is guaranteed in particular by the
politico-æsthetic gourmanderie of a German king, who thinks he
can play all the parts of monarchy, both of the feudal and the
bureaucratic, both of the absolute and the constitutional, of the
autocratic as of the democratic, if not in the person of his people,
then in his own person, if not for the people, then for himself.
Germany as the embodiment of the defect of the political present,
constituted in her own world, will not be able to overthrow the
specifically German obstacles without overthrowing the general
obstacles of the political present.
It is not the radical revolution which is a utopian dream for
Germany, not the general human emancipation, but rather the partial,
the merely political revolution, the revolution which leaves the
pillars of the house standing. Upon what can a partial, a merely
political revolution base itself? Upon the fact that a part of
bourgeois society could emancipate itself and attain to general
rulership, upon the fact that, by virtue of its special situation, a
particular class could undertake the general emancipation of society.
This class would liberate the whole of society, but only upon the
assumption that the whole of society found itself in the situation of
this class, and consequently possessed money and education, for
instance, or could acquire them if it liked.
No class in bourgeois society can play this part without setting up
a wave of enthusiasm in itself and among the masses, a wave of feeling
wherein it would fraternize and commingle with society in general, and
would feel and be recognized as society's general representative, a
wave of enthusiasm wherein its claims and rights would be in truth the
claims and rights of society itself, wherein it would really be the
social head and the social heart. Only in the name of the general
rights of society can a particular class vindicate for itself the
general rulership.
Revolutionary energy and intellectual self-confidence are not
sufficient by themselves to enable a class to attain to this
emancipatory position, and thereby exploit politically all social
spheres in the interest of its own sphere. In order that the revolution
of a people should coincide with the emancipation of a special class of
bourgeois society, it is necessary for a class to stand out as a class
representing the whole of society. Thus further involves, as its
obverse side, the concentration of all the defects of society in
another class, and this particular class must be the embodiment of the
general social obstacles and impediments. A particular social sphere
must be identical with the notorious crime of society as a whole, in
such wise that the emancipation of this sphere would appear to be the
general self-emancipation. In order that one class should be the class
of emancipation par excellence, another class must contrariwise
be the class of manifest subjugation. The negative-general significance
of the French nobility and the French clergy was the condition of the
positive-general significance of the class of the bourgeoisie, which
was immediately encroaching upon and confronting the former.
But in Germany every class lacks not only the consistency, the
keenness, the courage, the ruthlessness, which might stamp it as the
negative representative of society. It lacks equally that breadth of
soul which would identify it, if only momentarily, with the popular
soul, that quality of genius which animates material power until it
becomes political power, that revolutionary boldness which hurls at the
opponent the defiant words: I am nothing, and I have to be everything.
But the stock-in-trade of German morality and honour, not only as
regards individuals but also as regards classes, constitutes rather
that modest species of egoism which brings into prominence its own
limitations.
The relation of the various spheres of German society is therefore
not dramatic, but epic. Each of them begins to be self-conscious and to
press its special claims upon the others not when it is itself
oppressed, but when the conditions of the time, irrespective of its
co-operation, create a sociable foundation from which it can on its
part practise oppression. Even the moral self-esteem of the German
middle class is only based on the consciousness of being the general
representative of the philistine mediocrity of all the other classes.
Consequently it is not only the German kings who succeed to the
throne mal à propos, but it is every sphere of bourgeois society
which experiences its defeat before it celebrates its victory, develops
its own handicaps before it overcomes the handicaps which confront it,
asserts its own narrow-minded nature before it can assert its generous
nature, so that even the opportunity of playing a great part is always
past before it actually existed, and each class, so soon as it embarks
on a struggle with the class above it, becomes involved in a struggle
with the class below it. Consequently, the princedom finds itself
fighting the monarchy, the bureaucrat finds himself fighting the
nobility, the bourgeois finds himself fighting them all, while the
proletariat is already commencing to fight the bourgeois.
The middle class hardly dares to seize hold of the ideas of
emancipation from its own standpoint before the development of social
conditions and the progress of political theory declare this standpoint
to be antiquated, or at least very problematical. In France partial
emancipation is the basis of universal emancipation. In Germany
universal emancipation is the conditio sine quâ non of every
partial emancipation. In France it is the reality, in Germany it is the
impossibility of gradual emancipation which must bring forth entire
freedom. In France every popular class is tinged with political
idealism, and does not feel primarily as a particular class, but as the
representative of social needs generally. The rôle of emancipator,
therefore, flits from one class to another of the French people in a
dramatic movement, until it eventually reaches the class which will no
longer realize social freedom upon the basis of certain conditions
lying outside of mankind and yet created by human society, but will
rather organize all the conditions of human existence upon the basis of
social freedom. In Germany, on the other hand, where practical life is
as unintellectual as intellectual life is unpractical, no class of
bourgeois society either feels the need or possesses the capacity for
emancipation, unless driven thereto by its immediate position, by
material necessity, by its chains themselves.
Wherein, therefore, lies the positive possibility of German
emancipation?
Answer: In the formation of a class in radical chains, a class which
finds itself in bourgeois society, but which is not of it, an order
which shall break up all orders, a sphere which possesses a universal
character by virtue of its universal suffering, which lays claim to no
special right, because no particular wrong but wrong in general is
committed upon it, which can no longer invoke a historical title, but
only a human title, which stands not in a one-sided antagonism to the
consequences, but in a many-sided antagonism to the assumptions of the
German community, a sphere finally which cannot emancipate itself
without emancipating all the other spheres of society, which represents
in a word the complete loss of mankind, and can therefore only redeem
itself through the complete redemption of mankind. The dissolution of
society reduced to a special order is the proletariat.
The proletariat arises in Germany only with the beginning of the
industrial movement; for it is not poverty resulting from natural
circumstances but poverty artificially created, not the masses who are
held down by the weight of the social system, but the multitude
released by the acute break-up of society—especially of the middle
class—which gives rise to the proletariat. When the proletariat
proclaims the dissolution of the existing order of things it is merely
announcing the secret of its own existence, for it is in itself the
virtual dissolution of this order of things. When the proletariat
desires the negation of private property, it is merely elevating to a
general principle of society what it already involuntarily embodies in
itself as the negative product of society.
With respect to the nascent world the proletariat finds itself in
the same position as the German king occupies with respect to the
departed world, when he calls the people his people, just as he calls a
horse his horse. In declaring the people to be his private property,
the king acknowledges that private property is king.
Just as philosophy finds in the proletariat its material weapons, so
the proletariat finds in philosophy its intellectual weapons, and as
soon as the lightning of thought has penetrated into the flaccid
popular soil, the elevation of Germans into men will be accomplished.
Let us summarize the result at which we have arrived. The only
liberation of Germany that is practical or possible is a liberation
from the standpoint of the theory that declares man to be the supreme
being of mankind. In Germany emancipation from the Middle Ages can only
be effected by means of emancipation from the results of a partial
freedom from the Middle Ages. In Germany no brand of serfdom can be
extirpated without extirpating every kind of serfdom. Fundamental
Germany cannot be revolutionized without a revolution in its basis. The
emancipation of Germans is the emancipation of mankind. The head of
this emancipation is philosophy; its heart is the proletariat.
Philosophy cannot be realized without the abolition of the proletariat,
the proletariat cannot abolish itself without realizing philosophy.
When all the inner conditions are fulfilled, the German day of
resurrection will be announced by the crowing of the Gallic Cock.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Speech in defence of hearths and homes.
[2] Shameful part.
[3] listigen, a play on the name of the protectionist
economist F. List.
[4] In English in the original.
[5] In conformity with principles.