Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 65.
Marx, KMEW, 187 ; Marx and Engels, MEW, 1 : 323.
On Marx’s Feuerbachian privileging of the agency of consciousness during the pe-
riod of the Kreuznach Kritik, see Breckman, DS, 285. This privileging of consciousness also
underpins Marx’s championing of the universal franchise as the way to overcome the split
between society and state and realize “true democracy” (see KMEW, 190 – 91 ; Marx and En-
gels, MEW, 1 : 326 – 27 ). Hunt’s point that Marx may have had in mind a very active form of
political involvement when he envisioned universal suffrage as the cure for the split between
society and state is well taken (The Political Ideas, 78 – 84 ). However, even though Marx obvi-
ously means something radically different when he calls for “universal suffrage” than the sort
of political participation characteristic of modern liberal democracies such as the United
States (in the Kritik, Marx sees no essential difference between the latter, “the republic,” and
Prussian monarchy [KWEW, 88 – 90 ; Marx and Engels, MEW, 1 : 231 – 33 ]), this cure none-
theless privileges the deliberative act of voting as the transformative, revolutionary act par
excellence.
Marx, KMEW 87 ; Marx and Engels, MEW, 1 : 231.
Andrew Chitty, “The Basis of the State in the Marx of 1842 ,” 233.
Ibid.
Chitty locates the beginnings of Marx’s substantive turn away from Hegel’s “expres-
sivist” conception of the state in the “vitalist” moments in his journalism of late 1842 , when
Marx invokes “life forces” as a productive agent. Provocatively, Chitty sees a structural anal-
ogy between Marx’s adherence to an expressivist model of the state (that is, the constitution
as the articulated expression of the free, rational essence of the state), and Marx’s post- 1845
theory of social labor and “social relations of production” (quoted in ibid., 237 ). Thus Chitty
sees Marx’s late- 1842 “vitalist” conception as both the beginning of his materialist turn and
as a vantage point from which to discern a lingering Hegelianism in the post- 1845 theory.
Possibly due to constraints of space, Chitty moves from Marx’s use of “life forces” in late
1842 to his theory of social labor in 1845 without commenting on Marx’s attempts to concep-
tualize production in the two years between (“The Basis of the State,” 234 – 39 ).
Marx’s analysis of Prussian society as fractured into different interest groups (chiefly
the estates) also makes plain the ideality of his conception of the Volk, whose universality he
opposes to these narrow entities. See, among other articles, Marx, “Verhandlungen des 6.
rheinischen Landtags: Debatten über das Holzdiebstahlsgesetz,” October–November, 1842
(Marx and Engels, MEW, 1 : 109 – 47 ); “On the Commissions of the Estates in Prussia,” De-
cember 1842 (Marx and Engels, MECW, 1 : 292 – 306 ); and “Rechtfertigung des Korrespon-
denten von Mosel,” January 1843 (Marx and Engels, MEW, 1 : 172 – 99 ).
Ruge ended “A Self-Critique of Liberalism” ( 1843 ) with a call to replace liberalism
with democratism by raising the people’s consciousness. In his 1843 correspondence with
Ruge, published in the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher, Marx concurs with him about the
primacy of consciousness-raising. In “Zur Judenfrage,” and more emphatically in “Einlei-
tung” and his August 1844 polemic against Ruge, “Critical Marginal Notes on the Article
‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian,’” Marx had begun to reverse his
strategy of improving human misery through consciousness-raising and had begun to ide-
