110 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNIST
potent. He admitted that communism was partly a matter of the
stomach; but he insisted that it also was a matter of practical ethics
dealing with a Utopia above and outside the state, rather than
with a state which would be nothing more than a mere tool of
social revolution.^7
Still another essential difference between Marx and Weitling
must be emphasized. The former was a university man who had
enjoyed all the advantages of higher education, which culminated
in a doctor's degree from the University of Jena. Marx was a
pedantic neo-Hegelian, who even on minor questions could mobi
lize "his whole artillery of logic, dialectic, stylistic and learning."
Weitling could not find his way around in the "fog" of Hegelian-
ism, and he referred to Schelling and Schleiermacher with equal
disdain. Metaphysical abstractions did not interest him. He be
lieved that experience was far more valuable than books. He had
what Engels correctly called a "hatred of the learned" (Gelehr¬
tenhass), and like the true craftsman, he believed "science and
skill" were of equal importance. He would have agreed with
Heinzen's comment that Marx could not write half a page without
footnotes.
Though Weitling is properly labeled a Utopian, actually he
stood perhaps midway between the Utopians and the Marxists.
But however he may be classified he certainly was not "scientific"
in the Marxian sense, and he stubbornly refused to accept a theory
of economic determinism which made man only a figurehead in
the interplay of external, economic forces. For him, man was the
actor and maker of the drama of history. To be sure, progress was
the law of nature, but man, by his conscious effort and planning,
was needed to help work it out.^8 Not unlike the Marxian-Hegelian
system of dialectics, Weitling believed that all things have in them
the germ of change and revolution, but he believed also in the
(^7) See Veit Valentin, Geschichte der deutschen Revolution von 1848-49 (Ber
lin, 1930), I, 281; and Karl Heinzen, Die Helden des deutschen Kommunismus
(Bern, 8 1848), passim.
Karl Mielcke, Deutscher Frühsozialismus: Gesellschaft und Geschichte in
den Schriften von Weitling und Hess (Stuttgart, 1931), passim.