t30 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHYIn a letter of explanation to Leske he wrote: 'It seemed to me very
important that a work polemicising against German philosophy and cur-
rent German socialism should precede my positive construction. This is
necessary in order to prepare the public for the point of view of my
Economics which is diametrically opposed to the previous German intellec-
tual approach.'^24 The Holy Family had not accomplished this: it was written
before Marx had developed his systematically materialist approach to
history. Further, Bauer had published a reply to the Holy Family in which
Marx and Engels were labelled as 'Feuerbachian dogmatists';^25 and in
November 1844 another Young Hegelian, Max Stirner, had published The
Ego and its Own, an anarcho-existentialist work of extraordinary power
and fascination which branded all the forces that oppressed mankind,
whether religion or liberalism or socialism, as illusions from which men
should free themselves by refusing any form of self-sacrifice and indulging
in conscious egoism.^26 And Marx and Engels had naturally been the object
of strong criticism from Stirner as communist disciples of Feuerbach. The
German Ideology was thus conceived primarily as a work to make clear the
disagreements between Marx and Engels and Feuerbach, and also to deal
finally with the latest - and last - manifestations of Young Hegelian
idealism, Bauer's 'pure criticism' and Stirner's egoism.
The book was begun at the end of September 1845 with a lengthy
criticism of Feuerbach - 'the only one who has at least made some
progress'^27 - into which critiques of Bauer and Stirner were to be inserted.
By April 1846 these critiques had grown to the size of a large book in its
own right which was prepared for publication and taken to Germany by
Weydemeyer who had been staying with the Marx family for the first few
months of 1846. The section on Feuerbach, however, remained unfinished
and, in fact, contained very little on Feuerbach himself. The second
volume dealt with current socialist trends in Germany. It reached only a
hundred or so pages and work on the manuscript was abandoned in
August 1846."
By far the most important part of The German Ideology is the unfinished
section on Feuerbach. Marx and Engels began by making fun of the
philosophical pretensions of the Young Hegelians which they described
as 'the putrescence of Absolute Spirit' and characterised as follows:
In the general chaos mighty empires have arisen only to meet with
immediate doom, heroes have emerged momentarily only to be hurled
back into obscurity by bolder and stronger rivals. It was a revolution
beside which the French Revolution was child's play, a world struggle
beside which the struggles of the Diadochi appear insignificant. Prin-
ciples ousted one another, heroes of the mind overthrew each other
with unheard-of rapidity, and in the three years 1842-4 5 more of the