viwh f V*.,throne the year before and the Young Hegelians had expected a liberalis-
ation to ensue. The new king certainly shared with the bourgeoisie a
hatred of regimented bureaucracy: his ideal was paternalistic government.
He agreed with the bourgeoisie's claim to express their opinions in Parlia-
ment and the press, and even emphasised in the censorship instruction
'the value of, and need for, frank and loyal publicity'. Since, however,
what the bourgeoisie wanted to campaign for was not a romantically
paternalist society, a collision was inevitable. In his article, entitled 'Com-
ments on the latest Prussian Censorship Instruction', Marx exposed the
inconsistencies of the new censorship regulations that were supposed to
relax the prevailing ones. Since they forbade attacks on the Christian
religion and penalised offences against 'discipline, morals and outward
loyalty', he considered that the 'censorship must reject the great moral
thinkers of the past - Kant, Fichte, Spinoza, for example - as irreligious
and violating discipline, morals and social respectability. And these moral-
ists start from a contradiction in principle between morality and religion,
for morality is based on the autonomy of the human mind whereas
religion is based on its heteronomy."^41 Further, the new regulations were
inimical to good law in so far as they were directed at 'tendencies' and
'intentions' as much as acts. For Marx, this was to create a society in
which a single state organ regarded itself as the sole possessor of reason
and morality, whereas 'an ethical state reflects the views of its members
even though they may oppose one of its organs or the government
itself.^142 He was thus beginning to draw liberal democratic conclusions
from Hegel's political philosophy.
Marx's article was a masterpiece of polemical exegesis, demonstrating
the great pamphleteering talent in the style of Boerne that he was to exhibit
throughout his life. All his articles of the Young Hegelian period - and, to a
lesser extent, many of his later writings - were written in an extremely vivid
style: his radical and uncompromising approach, his love of polarisation, his
method of dealing with opponents' views by reductio ad absurdum, all led
him to write very antithetically. Slogan, climax, anaphora, parallelism,
antithesis and chiasmus (especially the last two) were all employed by Marx
- sometimes to excess. In the event, the authorities would not pass this
particular article of his (it eventually appeared in February 1843 in Switzer-
land in Anekdota, a collection of articles suppressed by the Prussian censor-
ship and issued in book form by Ruge).
Finding 'the proximity of the Bonn professors insufferable',^14 ' Marx
moved to Cologne in April 1842 with the intention of at least writing
something that would find its way into print. While in Bonn he had made
several visits to Cologne where he found much pleasure in champagne
and discussions about Hegel. Jenny wrote to him: 'My dark little savage,