The Illusion of History illusion of history: time and the radical political imagination

6. Marx’s Early Years

117 6 Marx’s Early Years The Young Hegelians and Futurity My discussion of Rousseau began with the works of his later life in order to strip back a philosophy that attempts to push society into a regained childhood. Contrarily, Marx’s youthful life can give us the direction to discuss his mission of dragging the human species into adulthood. Where for Rousseau society had lost the enthusiasm and simplicity of its youth, for Marx society had been kept in an enforced state of immaturity, unable to grow up from its alienated supervision. This is not a flippant analogy when one considers that Rousseau found his philosophical feet late in life, where Marx discovered them early. Philosophy found these men in different periods of their life and hence had differing ramifications. The philosophical making of Marx in his early life gave him the peculiar, yet recognizable taste for future that guided his other youthful intellectual peers, the young or left Hegelians . Karl Lowith classifies these “young” Hegelians (somewhat unconventionally, but essentially justly) when he connects their endeavors with the social aspects of youth. The elders, unlike the youths, do not live in a relationship of unsatisfied tension to a world which they find inappropriate, with “antipathy toward reality.” ... In contrast, the young adhere to the particular and are attracted to the future, seek to alter the world.... To the young, the 118  Karl Marx realisation of the universal seems apostasy to duty ... the Young Hegelians represented the party of youth, not because they were themselves real youths, but in order to overcome the consciousness of being epigones. Recognising the fugacity of all that exists, they turned from the “universal” and the past in order to anticipate the future, to promote the “particular” and “individual,” and negate that which exists.1 Having moved to Berlin to study philosophy after abandoning his legal studies, Marx defended this seemingly unconsidered move in a letter to his father. In this letter Marx remarked that the overriding problem that plagued his mind was the antagonism between the “is” and the “ought,” a problem he recognized as constitutive of German Idealism.2 In the study of philosophy, especially the Hegelian philosophy, Marx believed he had found the key to the realization of freedom within natural necessity, of idealism in reality. And yet along with the Young Hegelians, Marx saw the Hegelian philosophy not so much as a grand monolithic synthesis for the contemplation of this freedom/nature fusion, but as a project in need of completion, as a methodology for radical change. The call for the realization of philosophy became the mutated cry that the realization of freedom had once been for the radical generation after Kant.3 This displaced demand would have lasting and confused consequences on the nature/freedom dichotomy, as the Young Hegelians combined Hegel’s determinant historical metaphysics with Kant’s selfmotivated ahistorical judgments. The region of time where these contradictory powers were to be played out was the future. It is important to situate and acknowledge the radical temperaments of these young thinkers properly into any textual analyses of their work. Marx was born and raised in the pools of Napoleonic influence left over after the wave of the French Revolution had subsided. Marx was hence a member of the youthful, precocious, and cosmopolitan descendants of the French Revolution. The French Revolution created men as well as 1. Karl Lowith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, translated by David E. Green (London: Constable , 1965), 66. 2. Schlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 8. 3. For a discussion on the similarities between the radical generations after both Kant and Hegel and the difficulties that this spawned, see Bernard Yack’s chapter “Left Kantian Echoes in Left Hegelian Social Criticism,” from his The Longing for Total Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 238. Early Years  119 political conditions, and most of all it created a generation buoyed by visions of new freedom and possibility. The French Revolution’s destruction of tradition historicized the generations that came after it, giving its progeny previously unseen perspectives on the role of time. The present became baptized with the future, the course of history turning from the anchored appreciation of the past into an awareness of its imminent destiny . Is it any wonder that Marx would be attracted to the Young Hegelians and the heady mood of Sturm...