Soren Kierkegaard

In his memoirs, when Martensen looked back upon the events of 1848,
he could not but agree with a remark he attributed to one of his acquain-
tances, who had spoken of the political revolt “in a somewhat crass fashion,
yet not without humor”: “This is yet another new and violent fit of vom-
iting; it is characteristic of the makeup of our society that from time to time
it becomes nauseated and must throw up.” Martensen was likewise fully
convinced that a revolution is always an “abnormality in human society,”
and he had strong words of condemnation for the “demonic powers” by
which the masses seemed to have been possessed.
Indeed, Martensen was not one to storm the barricades with mud and
blood on his hands, but he had a clear sense that “this strange revolution
was not merely political, butsocial.” This was a point of view he developed
in his 1874 work,Socialism and Christianity, which he incorporated more or
less unchanged as a series of chapters in hisSocial Ethicsin 1878. By then the
events of 1848 were thirty years in the past, but according to Martensen
himself, he had nonetheless had “a sense, even then, that if one did not
understand the social side of the matter, one really had no understanding of
the entire affair. I was compelled to recall what Franz von Baader had said
many years earlier about the proletariat, about the faulty relationship be-
tween the haves and the have-nots. I was compelled to recall his statement
that our present-day social culture is like... a pyramid, with a few privileged
people at the tiny summit, while the broad base was formed by an infinite
swarm of have-nots and people in need, left entirely to their own devices.”
In hisSocialism and Christianity, Martensen quoted Ferdinand Lasalle, the
founder of German Social Democracy, as well as Friedrich Engels and Karl
Marx, and Martensen’s sympathy for these political thinkers influenced his
choice of words in his memoirs, when he reflected upon the events of 1848:
“The social problem is the question of the rich and the poor, of labor and
capital, of social distress, and of a more equal and equitable distribution of
the earthly goods of life. This was the problem—fermenting and stirring,
unclarified—at the bottom of the February revolution.” And Martensen
continued, almost as though he was writing a banner that would wave over
the heads of the workers’ movements of the future, “Liberalism wants indi-
vidualism. Socialism wants society and solidarity.” In Martensen’s view, the
rising tide of liberalism was merely another form of egoism; it was greed
disguised as ideology: “It is becoming increasingly evident that liberalism
will dissolve society into nothing but individuals with their individual inter-
ests, which for a great many people are simply financial interests. Socialism,
when it is understood according to its true meaning, will bind society to-
gether in solidarity, will subordinate the individual to society. Even though