316 } Notes to Chapter 4
age. Ludwig Feuerbach’s anthropological critique of Christianity in his 1841 The Essence
of Christianity—and especially in the revised 1843 edition with its trenchant preface—was
highly influential, as was his critique of speculative abstraction in “Provisional Theses for the
Reformation of Philosophy” ( 1842 ) and Principles of the Philosophy of the Future ( 1843 ). The
need to move from merely contemplative ideas and concepts to deeds that would actively
shape future society and politics are major themes of Moses Hess’s Die Europäische Triar-
chie ( 1841 ; in Philosophische und sozialistische Schriften 1837 – 1850 ) and “The Philosophy
of the Act” ( 1843 ), among other essays. In “A Self-Critique of Liberalism” ( January, 1843 ),
Arnold Ruge held that “nothing but critique remains to us for making a beginning of praxis”
(“A Self-Critique of Liberalism,” 239 ; for the German original, see “Eine Selbstkritik des
Liberalismus,” Deutsche Jahrbücher, January 2 , 1843 ), and that “theory’s purpose is theory’s
praxis” (“Eine Selbstkritik des Liberalismus,” Deutsche Jahrbücher, January 4 , 1843 ), among
many similar sentiments. Rolland Lutz’s wry observation is worth bearing in mind, however,
that the Young Hegelian antiphilosophical philosophers “got no further than the transition
from a philosophy of contemplation to thoughts about action; ‘philosophy of action’ would
imply too much” (“The ‘New Left’ of Restoration Germany,” 242 ). The early Marx’s most
cited articulation of the need to overcome philosophy is in the last of his “Theses on Feuer-
bach,” but the quest to realize philosophy was a recurrent theme in his thought well before
that. In a July 1842 Rheinische Zeitung article in response to an editorial by Karl Hermes, edi-
tor of the conservative Kölnische Zeitung—in which Hermes had denounced the Rheinische
Zeitung as an enemy of the state for attacking Christianity and called on the government to
prohibit discussion of religion and philosophy in the press—Marx writes of the need for phi-
losophy to enter “into contact and interaction with the real world not only inwardly, through
its content, but also externally, through its appearance [Erscheinung]” (Karl Marx and Fried-
rich Engels, Werke [hereafter MEW], 1 : 98 ). On Hermes’s polemic with the Rheinische Zei-
tung, see Auguste Cornu, Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, 1 : 277. On Hermes’s writings on
the Jewish Question and how they set the stage for Bauer’s and Marx’s contributions to that
debate, see Julius Carlebach, Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Judaism, 82 – 85. For a
philosophical analyis of Marx’s and Feuerbach’s attempt to “leave philosophy,” see Daniel
Brudney, Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy.
2. Shlomo Avineri goes so far as to claim that “the various economic, social and historical
studies undertaken by Marx are but a corollary of the conclusions he drew from his im-
manent critique of Hegel’s political philosophy” (The Social and Political Thought of Karl
Marx, 5 ). Dieter Henrich makes a similar point (“Marx als Schüler Hegels,” 199 ).
3. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works (hereafter MECW), 1 : 18.
4. Warren Breckman underscores the critique of the limitations of subjective freedom,
which contends with the affirmation of free self-consciousness generally seen to be at the
heart of Marx’s dissertation. He demonstrates Feuerbach’s significant influence on Marx
even in this early work and highlights how Feuerbach’s analysis (in his 1838 “Critique of
Positive Philosophy”) of “the process of hypostatization, whereby human essence has been
given a distorted representation in the form of the atomized, single person,” shaped Marx’s
analysis of atomism (Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical So-
cial Theory: Dethroning the Self (hereafter DS), 268 ).
5. The essay was published in the famous 1843 volume edited by the radical poet Georg
Herwegh, Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz (Twenty-one sheets from Switzerland).