Marxism (RLE Marxism)

An Historical and Critical Study

George Lichtheim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317496991
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book, first published in 1961 and revised in 1964, is both a critical study of a body of thought and an historical account of how Marxist theory arose from the context of European history in the 19th century. It traces the development of socialist thought from the French to the Russian Revolutions and attempts to show in what manner the political and intellectual problems of Central Europe between 1848 and 1948 came to dominate the theory and practice of that Marxist movement which formed the crucial link between the two revolutions. The author takes the view that Marxism is a movement and a body of doctrine which belongs essentially to the 19th century, which came to an end with the First World War and the Russian Revolution, and that its impact as a doctrine has now been absorbed.

PART 1 The Heritage 1789–1840

1 German Idealism

DOI: 10.4324/9781315713106-2

Classical German philosophy has been described as a secularised form of Protestantism; it has also been called the theory of the French Revolution. There is no need to argue the respective merits of these interpretations. They are compatible, for the effect of the French Revolution upon the German Enlightenment was to accentuate certain traits which had their roots in the Reformation: principally the radical dissociation of the individual soul, and therewith the realm of freedom, from the wretchedness of earthly existence. German idealist philosophy, like German Protestant theology before it, transforms the aims of men into spiritual values; it thus renounces as hopeless the task of anchoring them in material reality.

In its origins the German Enlightenment of the eighteenth century proceeded from motives held in common with sceptical and deist movements elsewhere in Europe, until in the person of Kant it brought forth a thinker who combined these intellectual strands with the heritage of the Reformation and the first stirrings of the Romantic movement—the latter by way of Rousseau whose growing influence among the educated elite of Germany prepared the way for a sympathetic reception of the French Revolution in its earlier, pre-terrorist, phase. In this manner the Enlightenment came to rest upon an intellectual assent to changes occurring beyond the frontiers and involving no more than a theoretical acceptance of events which had no counterpart in Germany. This attitude (which as time went on was modified by disapproval first of the Jacobin dictatorship and later of the Napoleonic empire) entailed no corresponding change in the contemplative outlook of the elite which had made itself responsible for the guardianship of intellectual values. As before, the life of the spirit was conceived as an autonomous realm unconnected with the sordid circumstances of material existence. Indifferent to the public sphere, because impotent to shape it in accordance with their ideals, the educated strata who around 1800 sustained the flowering of the German Renaissance in the classical Weimar culture, entrenched themselves in the unconquerable regions of philosophy, literature, and art. In so doing they evolved an awareness of personal freedom and a way of life that stood in stark contrast to the realities surrounding them. At the same time they made it more difficult for themselves to break out of their isolation and find the way back to ordinary human community, society, the state.¹

¹ Marcuse, op. cit., passim; Ernst Troeltsch, ‘Der deutsche Idealismus’, in Aufsaetze zur Geistesgeschichte und Religionssoziologie, Tuebingen, 1925, pp. 532 ff.

In this process may be traced the final consummation of tendencies latent in German society since the Reformation—tendencies which signalised the subsequent failure to bring the public realm into correspondence with the aims of the liberal intellectuals, when under the impulsion of social and economic change they finally descended into the political arena. In preparing the way for their discomfiture in the abortive 1848 revolution, the liberals simultaneously laid the groundwork for the theoretical justification of their repeated failures: henceforth every new defeat would serve as additional proof that mankind was neither worth saving nor capable of being saved. Only a few chosen spirits had access to the realm of freedom, truth, and beauty, and for them alone did these supreme values possess concrete existence. For the mass of the people there remained the consolations of religion, concerning whose illusory character Goethe and Hegel entertained as little doubt as did Feuerbach, Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. Thus the German Renaissance, originally the offspring of Northern Germany’s traditional Protestant culture, issued in an idealist philosophy which from a secret doctrine of the elect evolved by stages into an openly proclaimed cult of the elite.²

² Karl Barth, Die protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert, Zurich, 1947, passim; also by the same author, ‘Mensch und Mitmensch’, in Die kirchliche Dogmatik, vol. III, 2; published separately, Zurich, 1954; cf. Karl Loewith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche, Stuttgart, 1950, pp. 33 ff.

Hegel’s philosophy represents a crucial stage in this process, for it marks both the climax of the idealist movement and the point where its inner tensions threaten to disrupt the philosophic integument. Hegel himself stood midway between the rationalist doctrine formulated by Kant and Fichte, and the reaction which arose from the failure of the French Revolution to translate the aims of the Enlightenment into reality. Opposed alike to the doctrinaire intransigence of the Jacobins, and to the conservative reaction dominant during the Restoration period after 1815, he consistently maintained an intermediate position which in the end led him back to a qualified acceptance of his native Lutheranism and its political sanction: the absolutist state. Yet the growing conservatism of the ageing Hegel was superimposed upon a rationalist system incompatible with religious orthodoxy and the ideology of the Prussian monarchy. The tension, never resolved in his life-time, exploded after his death. It then became apparent that the contradictions which ultimately tore the system apart had been held together by an act of will on Hegel’s part. When in 1831 he left the scene, his followers drifted into incompatible positions which finally coincided with the emerging political line-up on the eve of the 1848 crisis. In conformity with the underlying gravitational pull of German history throughout the nineteenth century, the majority chose the conservative side.³

³ For Hegel’s conservatism, cf. Loewith, op. cit., pp. 39–42; Marcuse, op. cit., pp. 169 ff. For the incompatibility of Hegel’s philosophy of religion with Protestant orthodoxy, cf. Barth, Die protestantische Theologie etc., pp. 343–78.

The disintegration of Hegelianism thus went parallel with the gradual formation of a movement hostile to absolutism and religious orthodoxy. This coincidence of philosophical and political stirrings is an index to the backwardness of mid-nineteenth-century Germany. In Western Europe it was no longer possible to assemble a radical party under the banner of slogans directed primarily against the ‘union of throne and altar’, whereas Germany in the 1840’s was still struggling with the heritage of absolutism, not to mention the Middle Ages. In Prussia as in Austria, the church—Lutheran in the one case, Catholic in the other—provided both the principal safeguard of authority and its ideological justification. In this respect as in others, the two leading German states were closer to Russia than to Western Europe. This contrast was already noticeable during the Napoleonic era and it became more marked after the disintegration of the Bourbon monarchy in France during the 1830 revolution: an event that coincided with the close of the classical age in German literature and philosophy.⁴

⁴ Goethe’s death in 1832 marks the end of an epoch as much as Hegel’s departure the year before. For a conservative interpretation of this turning-point, cf. Loewith, op. cit., pp. 28 ff; for the conventional Marxist-Leninist view cf. G. Lukács, Der junge Hegel, Zurich, 1948, pp. 27–45.

Hegel’s philosophy must be viewed against this background of slowly mounting dissatisfaction with the continued existence of the Old Regime, after the latter had been eliminated in France and other parts of Western Europe. The tendency of his thought is to comprehend all possible antagonisms within the unity of a system which allows for conflict only as the motor of gradual progress towards a predetermined goal. The real and the rational are identical. Ultimately this is a theological conception, and the final tendency of Hegel’s philosophy is to substitute itself for religion. On the political plane it reflects that reconciliation of (critical) thought with (unchanging) reality which is the common trait of all forms of German Idealism. Like the classical Weimar culture, of which it is the philosophical counterpart, the Hegelian system provides a transcendental resting-place for ideals not realised in actuality. It holds out to men the promise not of freedom, but of the idea of freedom; it envisages not the actual domination of reason in human affairs, but the recognition of the march of reason through history. It thus embodies both the ultimate aims of mankind—liberty and rationality—and their renunciation.

Hegel stands midway between the rationalism of the Enlightenment, which looked forward to a golden age of ordered freedom, and the radicalism of the post-1830 generation, determined to resume the advance where the French Revolution had been brought to a halt. His death in 1831 terminates the half-century of Germany’s classical period which had opened with Kant’s publication of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. The equivocal character of Hegel’s pronouncements served for a while to conceal the fact that his system embodied, albeit in an obscure and mystifying fashion, some of the aims for which the French Revolution had been fought. Yet the radicals who broke away from him after his death were on solid ground when they denounced the conservative and contemplative bent of his philosophy. The ‘reconciliation of idea and reality’ is the central motive of Hegel’s thought, as the transformation of reality is that of Marx. Hence the Hegelian dialectic in its orthodox form could not serve as an instrument of change, though a time was to come when it would be hailed as the ‘algebra of revolution’ by Herzen, invoked in support of radical revolt by Bakunin, and acclaimed as the esoteric doctrine of revolution by Engels.⁵

⁵ Cf. F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in Marx-Engels, Selected Works, Moscow, 1951, II, pp. 324 ff; cited hereafter as MESW. For Bakunin’s views, cf. M. Bakunin: ‘Reaktion in Deutschland’, in Deutsche Jahrbuecher, vol. 17, 21st Oct. 1842, especially p. 1009: ‘Let us put our trust therefore in the eternal spirit who shatters and destroys only because he is the unfathomable and eternally creative source of life. The desire to destroy is itself a creative desire.’ (Quoted in D. Chizhevski, Hegel bei den Slawen, Reichenberg, 1934, p. 203.) For a more considered statement by a Polish pupil of Hegel, cf. August von Cieszkovski, Prolegomena zu einer Historio-sophie, Berlin, 1838. There is evidence that Marx was influenced by him; cf. Auguste Cornu, Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels, Paris, 1955, vol. I. pp. 142 ff.

Contrary to a widespread notion, the triad thesis-antithesis-synthesis is not essential to Hegel’s system, whose motor is rather to be found in the dialectic of the whole and its parts. There is no foundation for the legend that he attempted to deduce the empirical sequence of actual events from the triadic march of logical categories, though this criticism can reasonably be urged against the pseudo-Hegelian-ism of Lassalle or Lorenz von Stein—neither of whom understood Hegel, or indeed knew how to handle logical concepts.⁶

⁶ For a brief account of the traditional confusion over Hegel’s alleged dependence on the ‘triad’, cf. Gustav E. Mueller, ‘The Hegel Legend of “Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis”’, in Journal of the History of Ideas, New York, June 1958, vol. XIX, nr. 3, pp. 411–14. The author exaggerates Marx’s part in furthering the misconception and makes no mention of Schopenhauer’s frenzied polemics which are still quoted as valid criticism of Hegel: cf. K. R. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, vol. II, pp. 30 ff. The terms ‘thesis, antithesis, synthesis’ are employed by Fichte; they occur nowhere in Hegel’s writings. This is not to say that the misunderstanding did not have some effect on later writers who believed themselves to be in the Hegelian tradition. It was Marx’s criticism of such writers which unwittingly contributed to the further spread of the legend. Cf. his remarks on Stein, in a letter to Engels of January 8, 1868, in Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (hereafter cited as MEGA), Section III, vol. 4, p. 5.

The dialectical method is meant to conform to the actual structure of reality, conceived as a process in which the logical subject unfolds itself into its own predicates. Hegel’s marvellously compressed discussion of this theme in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Mind is still sufficiently lengthy and involved to defy summary exposition. For our purpose it is enough to say that he breaks away from formal logic, with its apparatus of fixed categories adapted to the empty certainties of mathematics, into a realm where the content and the method of philosophical enquiry are seen to coincide. The result of his enquiry is to demonstrate that reality is not as it appears to empirical perception, but as it is revealed by philosophical reflection. This certainty constitutes the inmost essence of German Idealism, and the source of its unbridgeable opposition to every form of empiricism. Insofar as Marxism embodies a similar conviction, with particular respect to history, it is still within the tradition of classical German philosophy.

Since for Hegel the truth of a philosophical proposition is demonstrated by what actually happens to the subject of the proposition—e.g., the truth that freedom is essential to men by the course of human history—there is for him no cleavage between the subject-matter of thought and the realm of actuality. Philosophical reflection discloses reason to be the ultimate essence of the world with which philosophy is concerned, and reason is likewise the instrument whereby in the course of time this truth is brought to the level of human awareness. This is the core of what has been called Hegel’s pan-logism, or his rediscovery of Aristotle’s ontology. It is also the starting-point of all the subsequent assaults on his system—by Feuerbach, by Marx and the other Young Hegelians, and lastly by Kierkegaard.⁷

⁷ For the parallelism between the Marxian and the Kierkegaardian revolt against Hegel, cf. Loewith, op. cit., pp. 125 ff; Marcuse, op. cit., pp. 262 ff.

The Hegelian scheme is operative because for Hegel there is in the last analysis no distinction between mind and its object. Both have a common denominator, which Hegel calls Reason and which appears under the guise of Spirit in the historical world. Spirit is both subjective and objective, and its ‘internal contradictions’ are resolved in the dialectical process, whereby the potentialities of all things unfold in a pattern of self-transcendence to a higher unity. Dialectical progress, though mirrored in thought, is the objective history of the real world, which arrives at self-consciousness in philosophy. The traditional criticism of this form of idealism is that it subordinates existence to logic. This misses the point, for in Hegel’s system philosophical cognition has itself an existential quality: it enables the individual to recover his essence, which is reason. Yet this identification of thought and reality was precisely the target against which Feuerbach and Marx—and from a different standpoint Kierkegaard—directed their shafts. These attacks proceeded independently of each other. Marx knew nothing of Kierkegaard, and would not have considered his critique of Hegel important, save insofar as it emphasised the other-worldly nature of Christianity.

All the thinkers in question, including Marx, operated within the context of a secularised Protestant culture. The significance of this fact is not limited to the accidental circumstance that Hegel’s philosophy became for a while the ideological sanction of the Prussian State. It extends to the core of the Hegelian system, and the subsequent revolt against it. Hegel had conceived the identity of the rational and the real in terms which ultimately went back to Christian theology. Behind the unfolding of Spirit in the universe lies the notion of creation. Spirit creates the world by externalising itself, and eventually returns to itself after arriving at self-consciousness. This process is mediated by toil and suffering, symbolised for Hegel by the image of the Cross, Reconciliation—the union of idea and reality—takes place only after the idea has undergone the lengthy travail of passing th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Note on Sources
• Introduction: A Note on Methodology
• 1 The Heritage 1789–1840
• 2 The Marxian Synthesis 1840–1848
• 3 The Test of Reality 1848–1871
• 4 The Theory of Bourgeois Society 1850–1895
• 5 Marxian Socialism 1871–1918
• 6 The Dissolution of the Marxian System 1918–1948
• Conclusion
• Index