Marx-Engels Collected Works
1 Marx mentions his intention of critically analysing Hegel’s views on the state and law as far back as in the spring of 1842. In a letter to Arnold Ruge of March 5 he writes that he is preparing an article on Hegel’s legal and political views in which he intends first of all to criticise Hegel’s apology on behalf of the constitutional monarchy (see this edition, Vol. 1). The above-mentioned article is not extant and it is unknown whether he actually wrote it, but the subject-matter continued to attract his attention. As Marx’s theoretical views developed and he gradually adopted a materialist standpoint, largely due to Feuerbach’s influence, his plans of writing a critique of Hegel’s philosophy became more extensive and profound and finally he conceived the idea of counterposing the materialist conception of social phenomena to their idealist interpretation. For Marx the basic problem was the interdependence of material social relations, property relations and so on-which Hegel called “civil society"-and the political system of society, the state.
Marx began to work on his plan during his stay from May to October 1843 in Kreuznach (where his bride Jenny von Westphalen, whom he married in June 1843, lived with her mother). Here, apparently, he wrote the original version of the work. In the process of writing it he felt the need for greater concrete historical material, and with this aim in view he began to study problems related not only to the theory and history of the state as a whole but to the history of individual countries (England, France, Germany, the United States, Italy, Sweden) and major world-historical events, in particular the Great French Revolution, as can be seen from his five notebooks containing excerpts (the Kreuznach Notebooks). Later on, he wrote an introduction to that work which was published in February 1844 in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. But Marx did not manage to prepare the main sections of his work for publication because he turned to other studies and conceived other literary plans (economic studies, preparation of a book against the Young Hegelians, work on the history of the Convention and so on). However, his work on the manuscript dealing with the criticism of the Hegelian philosophy of law played a major role in his spiritual development and was an important stage in the formation of his materialist views. Marx himself pointed to this in 1859 in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Engels, for his part, in his article “Karl Marx” (1869) described the conclusions arrived at by his friend as a result of the critical analysis of Hegel’s views in the following way: “Proceeding from the Hegelian philosophy of law, Marx came to the conclusion that it was not the state which Hegel had described as the ‘top of the edifice’ but ‘the civil society’ which Hegel had regarded with disdain that was the sphere in which a key to the understanding of the process of historical development of mankind should be looked for.”
The extant manuscript consists of 39 big sheets numbered in Roman figures by the author (II-XL), apparently after the work had been finished. The first sheet is missing. Each sheet is folded in two to form four pages, which are numbered in Arabic figures from sheet 1-XXII. The manuscript contains a critical analysis of paragraphs 261-313 of G. W. F. Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. These paragraphs comprise the subsection “Internal State Law” in the third part of Hegel’s work. The missing first sheet apparently dealt with “257-260 as can be seen from the extant text. The manuscript bears the imprint of an unfinished work. Some problems which the author promises to deal with below have not been treated by him in the extant part. The title of the work given by the author, which is missing in the manuscript, is reproduced from the above-mentioned introduction published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. In one of the notebooks written by Marx in Bonn in 1842 there are some notes connected with this manuscript. The date of writing the notes is not established. The notes contain some subheadings, the first of which refers to the non-extant part of the manuscript and contains references to the sheets and pages of the manuscript of the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. The content of the notes is as follows.. “Duplication of the Development System. I. 3,4. Logical Mysticism. II, 8. III, 9 [see this volume, pp. 7, 8].
“Mystical way of presentation.
"Ibid. Example, §267. IV, pp. 13, 14 [see this volume, pp. 10, 11].
"Idea as Subject. IV, pp. 15, 16 [see this volume, pp. 11-131. (Real subjects become mere names.) P. 17, p. 18, pp. 20, 21, pp. 24, 26, 27, p. 28, p. 40, p. 57, pp. 75, 78 [see this volume, pp. 13, 14-15, 16-18, 20-21, 22-24, 33-34, 48-49, 60, 62-631. XXVI, 2. XXVIII. XXX, 3. XXXI, 3. XXXII, 2. XXXIV, 2, 3, 4. P. XXXVII, 2 [see this volume p. 82-83, 89-90, 98-99, 101-02, 109-10, 114-15]. Opposites. XXXIX [see this volume, p. 121-24].”
Marx’s manuscript was first published in Moscow by the Institute- of Marxism-Leninism.
This work was first published in English in part in the book Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, New York, 1967, and in full as a separate edition entitled Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ by Karl Marx. Translated from the German by Annette Jolin and Joseph O'Malley, Cambridge, 1970.
In translating the term “Hegelsche Rechtsphilosophie”, the translators and editors, being aware of the difficulty of its rendering into English, proceeded from the interpretation of this and similar concepts in the works of Marx and Engels written in English. Thus, in the English authorised edition of Engels’ work Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Hegel’s expression “Begriff des Rechts” is translated in one of the notes as “concept of law” (see Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 3, Moscow, 1970, p. 115).
In this manuscript as in the other works published in this volume Marx frequently uses two similar German terms, “Entäusserung” and “Entfremdung” to express the notion of “alienation”. In the present edition the former is’ generally translated as “alienation”, the latter as “estrangement”, because in the later economic works (Theories of Surplus-Value) Marx himself used the word “alienation” as the English equivalent of the term “Entäusserung”.
2 Here and below Marx quotes Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse, according to the edition Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Werke, Bd. 8, hrsg. von Dr. Eduard Gans, Berlin, 1833. Sometimes Marx quotes with omissions which he does not always indicate with dots. Similarly, he does not always reproduce italics, frequently italicising instead other words and passages in the quotations. In the present edition emphasis in the quotations from Hegel’s work reproduced by Marx is rendered by italics, whereas passages emphasised by Marx are printed in bold italics. In individual cases where there are no indications in the manuscript, the editors give in square brackets references to the corresponding paragraphs of Hegel’s work.
3 Marx did’ not return to this question anywhere else in the extant manuscript.
4 Apparently this refers to G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopädie der Philosophische Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, Erster Theil, Die Wissenschaft der Logik.
5 This possibly refers to Saint-Simon and his followers, who considered that in the future society the state would turn from an instrument for administering people into an instrument for administering things, i.e., would lose its political character.
6 In the extant manuscript an analysis of the Addition to § 290 of Hegel’s work is missing.
7 The Prussian Common Law (Preussische Landrecht) — the laws of the provinces in the kingdom of Prussia codified in 1794. It reflected the backwardness of feudal Prussia in the sphere of law and court procedure.
8 The extant manuscript does not deal with this question.
9 This section is from the third, concluding part of Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, comprising H 182-256. It precedes the section “Der Staat”, the paragraphs of which (§§ 261-313) are analysed in this manuscript. There is no special analysis of this section in the extant part of the manuscript though Marx repeatedly touches on Hegel’s views on civil society when examining § 308 (see, in particular, pp. 111-15 of this volume).
10 This refers to la Charte bâclée (the Constitutional Charter) introduced after the July 1830 revolution in France.
11 This problem is not dealt with in the extant part of the manuscript.
12 This apparently refers to the same problem which Marx mentioned above, on page 121, as a problem to be analysed later on (see Note 11).
13 This note was written by Marx in connection with his reading and summarising of the journal Historisch-politische Zeitschrift, edited by Leopold Ranke. Hamburg, 1832, Bd. 1, Heft 1. Marx was interested, in particular, in Ranke’s article, “Über die Restauration in Frankreich”. This note is to be found in the fourth Kreuznach Notebook which contains Marx’s historical excerpts relating to July-August 1843 (see Note 1). The thoughts expressed in it on the inconsistency of the Hegelian idealist conception of the relation between the abstract idea of the state and its concrete historical forms, etc., are directly connected with Marx’s work Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (see pp. 75-80 and 82-83 of this volume).
14 This refers to the Constitutional Charter of 1814, the basic law of the Bourbons returned to power, and the Charter published on August 14, 1830, after the bourgeois revolution in France. The Constitutional Charter of 1830 was the basic law of the July monarchy. It repeated the main principles of the 1814 Charter but the preamble of the 18 14 Charter, speaking of the constitution being granted (octroyée) by the king, was omitted from the 1830 Constitution and the rights of the Upper and Lower Chambers were extended at the expense of some of the monarch’s prerogatives. Under the new constitution the monarch was regarded only as the head of the executive and was deprived of the right to repeal or suspend laws.
15 Early in the spring of 1843 Marx conceived the idea of launching a new journal as the organ of the German and French democrats. He intended to publish it in collaboration with the Young Hegelian Arnold Ruge, editor of the journal Deutsche Jahrbücher, which had been suppressed by the government (see Marx’s letter to Ruge of March 13, 1843, this edition, Vol. 1). At the end of May 1843 Marx went to Dresden to see Ruge on this question. In the course of the preliminary talks, two tendencies became apparent in respect of the line of the future journal. Ruge pursued chiefly educational goals and planned to turn the journal into a means for an exchange of ideas in the sphere of philosophy (primarily German philosophy) and social and political sciences (above all, French), whereas Marx sought to link the theoretical tasks of the journal as closely as possible with the actual revolutionary struggle against the feudal-absolutist order in Germany, to use the journal as an ideological weapon in the struggle for restructuring society. The different approaches to the journal’s programme were reflected in the materials prepared for it and in the correspondence between its prospective editors. Marx’s intention to turn the journal into a more radical and militant organ is felt also in the given draft programme of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, which Marx wrote after he had received Ruge’s programmes in German and French in August 1843. Marx used these programmes but changed some formulations, especially those of the second and partly of the third point which in Ruge’s programmes read as follows:
“2) Reviews of the newspapers, which will give a calm but just and strict appraisal of the periodicals of our day, the spirit inspiring them, their actions and tendencies and also their impact on public opinion.
"3) Critical reviews of books published on both sides of the Rhine.”
“2) Reviews of the newspapers and journals which express their attitude to the problems of the day.
"3) Reviews of old-time writings and belles-lettres in Germany as well as reviews of books published in the two countries which open or continue the new epoch.”
In elaborating the final text of the programme, Ruge was to take into account the draft written by Marx and reproduce, wholly or in part, some of his formulations. For the sake of comparison we quote below the text printed in issue No. 1-2 of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Paris, 1844:
“This journal is a critical publication, but it is not a German literary newspaper. We shall publish excerpts from French and German sources:
"1. On men and systems which are of significance and enjoy influence, on topical questions, on the constitution, legislation, political economy, morals and institutions. Instead of the divine policy of the heavenly kingdom it will reflect the true science of human affairs.
"2. Reviews of newspapers and journals which express their attitude to the problems of our day.
"3, Reviews of old-time writings and belies-lettres in Germany which of necessity will subject to criticism the old German spirit in its transcendent, now moribund existence; as well as reviews of books of the two countries which open or continue the new epoch which we are entering.”
16 The journal Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher was to contribute to rallying various representatives of progressive democratic and socialist thought in France and Germany, and to become the organ of “a Franco-German scientific alliance” as Marx wrote in a letter to Ludwig Feuerbach on October 3, 1843 (see p. 349 of this volume). Invitations to contribute to the journal were extended to Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, Heinrich Heine, Moses Hess, Karl Bernays, Julius Fröbel, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Félicité de Lamennais, Alphonse de Lamartine, Louis Blanc, Pierre Leroux, Étienne Cabet and others. This letter of the editorial board of the future journal, which was signed by Marx and Ruge, was published in the Fourierist newspaper Démocratie pacifique in reply ta an unsigned item, written by Lamartine, which appeared on December 10, 1843, in the newspaper Bien Public.
17 This refers to a letter of November 16, from Leipzig, which was published in the Kölnische Zeitung on November 20, 1843.
18 These letters written by Marx form part of his correspondence with Ruge at the time of their preparations for publishing the journal Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, they were published in the journal in the section “From the Correspondence of 1843”, where letters by Ruge, Bakunin and Feuerbach were also printed. In these letters Marx in fact formulated his revolutionary views on the programme of the journal which went further than the tasks of disseminating abstract philosophical ideas and bourgeois-democratic political views, set by its other editor, Ruge.
Marx’s letters to Ruge from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher were first published in English in the book Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, New York, 1967.
Despite considerable organisational and material difficulties (the journal was edited in Paris and printed in Zurich) the editorial board managed to put out the first double issue (No. 1-2) of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher at the end of February 1844. The main trend of the journal was determined by Marx’s letters and articles (“On the Jewish. Question”, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction”) and Engels’ articles (“Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy”, “The Condition of England. Past and Present by Thomas Carlyle”), which were published in it and were imbued with revolutionary-communist spirit. However, the publication of the journal was discontinued (for the reason see this volume, p. 188, and Note 36).
By its sharp political presentation of material the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher attracted the attention of the progressive sections of society in Germany, France and other countries but at the same time evoked indignation of the conservative press. On March 10, 1844, the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung wrote: “The criticism to which the new Paris journal resorts knows no mercy, in its polemics it disregards all aesthetic standards, and its satirical tone, though it does not stab like a dagger, punches like a huge fist.” The Prussian Government considered the political line of the journal extremely “dangerous”, banned its import to Germany and issued warrants for the arrest of Marx, Ruge, Heine and the other contributors in the event of their coming to Prussia. About two-thirds out of the total of three thousand copies fell into the hands of the police.
19 This figure of speech was used by analogy with the satirical poem of the German humanist Sebastian Brant, Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools), published in 1494. In a letter to Ruge in May 1843 Marx repeated this metaphor (see p. 139 of this volume).
20 In a letter to Marx written from Berlin in March 1843, Ruge complained about the absence of any signs of revolutionary ferment in Germany, about the spirit of servility, submission to despotism and allegiance that had been prevalent in the country for many years. This letter was published in the section “From the Correspondence of 1843” in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.
21 Marx alludes to the patronage and support which Frederick William IV, while still Crown Prince, extended to the journal Berliner politisches Wochenblatt (1831-41) which was the mouthpiece for the ideas of feudal reaction and conservative romanticism.
The coronation of Frederick William IV, which took place on June 7, 1840, in Königsberg, was surrounded with the pageantry of medieval knighthood.
22 In a letter to Marx in August 1843 (published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher) Ruge informed him of the final decision to have the journal published in Paris. Earlier there had been no unanimity on this point, besides Paris other places had been suggested, in particular Switzerland and Strasbourg.
23 Marx’s departure for Paris was delayed. He arrived there with Jenny at the end of October 1843.
24 This article was written in reply to the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer, who in his works on this subject reduced the problem of the emancipation of the Jews to their emancipation from Judaism. Being an idealist, Bauer considered the overcoming of religious prejudices as the decisive means for eliminating national contradictions. Polemics with him over this question provided Marx with an occasion for considering from the materialist point of view the broader problem of emancipating not only the Jews but the whole of mankind from economic, political and religious fetters.
When quoting from the works of Bruno Bauer and others Marx sometimes slightly departs from the text of the source; the emphasis, as a rule, is Marx’s, but in quoting from Hegel’s book Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts he reproduces also the author’s emphasis. Quotations from books and documents in French are given by Marx in the French language. In the present work these are given in French in the text, and the corresponding English texts are given in the footnotes.
The first English translation of this article was published in the book: Karl Marx, Selected Essays; London, Parsons, 1926.
25 The text of the French Constitution of 1791 (which was preceded by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen) is quoted by Marx from the
W. Wachsmuth, Geschichte Frankreichs im Revolutionszeitalter, Bd. 1, Hamburg, 1840 (documents in the book are cited in French). Excerpts from the Constitution of 1793 are quoted from the documentary publication in many volumes by P. J. B. Buchez and P. C. Roux entitled Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française, Vol. 31, Paris, 1837. Below, when quoting constitutional documents of the period of the French Revolution, Marx uses the same sources, mainly the work of Buchez and Roux.
26 The quotation from the Constitution of 1795 is taken from Vol. 36 of the Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française by P. J. B. Buchez and P. C. Roux.
27 The first quotation is taken from the book: W. Wachsmuth, Geschichte Frankreichs im Revolutionszeitalter, the second from Vol. 31 of the Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française by P. J. B. Buchez and P. C. Roux.
28 Quoted from Thomas Münzer’s pamphlet directed against Martin Luther: Hochlebende Fleisch zu Wittenberg, verursachte Schutzrede und Antwort wider das geistlose, sanft welches mit verkehrter Weise durch den Diebstahl der heiligen Schrift die erbdrmiiche Christenheit also ganz jämmerlich besudelt hat. The pamphlet was published in 1524. Marx quotes it from Leopold Ranke, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation, Berlin, 1839.
29 According to Marx’s intention, this article was to serve as an introductory section to a detailed work in which he planned to make a critical analysis of Hegel’s idealist philosophy and political views (see Note 1). While working on the “ Introduction” Marx did not confine himself to the criticism of Hegel’s philosophy; he set himself the task of defining his attitude not only to the existing ideological trends but also to the actual revolutionary processes.
The first English translation of this work was published in the book: Karl Marx, Selected Essays, London, Parsons, 1926.
30 This remark testifies to Marx’s intention to complete his criticism of the Hegelian philosophy of law which he had begun earlier, to finish and prepare for publication the rough draft of the manuscript of 1843 on this subject. However, after the publication of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher had been discontinued, Marx gradually abandoned his plan because he was busy with other work, primarily, the study of economic relations. Marx also had other reasons, which he mentioned in the Preface to the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, namely, his dissatisfaction with the chosen form of combining a criticism of Hegel’s views on different subjects with a critical analysis of these subjects as such, his growing conviction that in this form his work would give “the impression of arbitrary systematism” (see p. 231 of this volume).
Proceeding from these considerations, Marx arrived at the conclusion that it would be better to give a critical analysis of law, ethics, politics, etc., in separate booklets and to crown it all with a critical work summing up his views on the idealist, speculative philosophy. Soon, however, the need arose of first coming out against the Young Hegelians and Marx’s plans again underwent a change. He began to connect his elaboration of the principles of a new, revolutionary-materialist world outlook primarily with a criticism of the idealist world outlook of the Young Hegelians and other representatives of German bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology. This task was fulfilled by Marx and Engels in their joint works: The Holy Family and The German Ideology.
31 The historical school of law — a trend in the historical and legal science which arose (Gustav Hugo, Friedrich Karl von Savigny and others) attempted to justify the in Germany at the end of the 18th century. The representatives of this school privileges of the nobility and feudal institutions on the grounds of stability of historical traditions. For a description of this school see Marx’s article “The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law” (this edition, Vol. 1).
32 This refers to the liberal circles of Germany, representatives of the liberal op position in the Landtags, liberal publicists of various descriptions, and others, who demanded constitutional reforms.
33 This refers to the Young Hegelians. They drew radical atheistic conclusions from Hegel’s philosophy but at the same time detached philosophy from reality and turned it into a self-contained and determining force. In fact the Young Hegelians were withdrawing more and more from the practical revolutionary struggle.
34 The September laws promulgated by the French Government in September 1835 restricted the rights of the jury and introduced severe measures against the press. They provided for increased money deposits for periodical publications and introduced imprisonment and large fines for publishing statements against private property and the existing state system. The enactment of these laws in conditions of the July constitutional monarchy, which formally proclaimed freedom of the press, emphasised the anti-democratic nature and hypocrisy of the bourgeois system.
35 The Holy Roman Empire of the German nation (962-1806) comprised at different times German, Italian, Austrian, Hungarian and Czech lands, Switzerland and the Netherlands and was a loose confederation of feudal kingdoms and principalities, church domains and free cities with different political systems, laws and traditions.
36 The printing of the journal was carried out in Zurich by the publishing house Das literarische Comptoir founded by Julius Fröbel in 1842. Besides the reason mentioned in the letter, disagreements between Marx and Arnold Ruge were largely responsible for the journal ceasing to he published. These disagreements boiled down to the fact that the bourgeois radical Ruge opposed Marx’s revolutionary-communist world outlook. The final break between Marx and Ruge took place in March 1844. Ruge’s hostile attitude towards the revolutionary struggle of the masses, which became evident at the time of the Silesian uprising of June 1844, induced Marx to come out in the press against his former co-editor.
37 This article was written in reply to Ruge’s article signed “Ein Preusse”, which was published in the newspaper Vorwärts! on July 27, 1844, under the title “Der König von Preussen und die Sozialreform”. In his article Ruge represented the Silesian weavers’ uprising (June 4-6, 1844) as a futile revolt of the helpless poor people driven to despair. Unlike Ruge, Marx saw it as the first big battle of the German proletariat against the bourgeoisie, as the manifestation of the growth of class-consciousness of the German workers.
With the publication of this article, Marx began to contribute to the newspaper Vorwärts!, which prior to that, during the initial period of its publication-from early 1844 to the summer of the same year- was of a moderate liberal trend due to the influence of its publisher, the German businessman Heinrich Börnstein, and its editor Adalbert von Bornstedt. However, when a friend of Marx, Karl Bernays, a revolutionary-minded radical, became its editor in the summer of 1844, the newspaper began to assume a democratic character. Having become a contributor to the newspaper, Marx began to influence its editorial policy and in September became one of its editors. On his proposal Engels, who had published in it two articles in the series “The Condition of England”, was also included on the editorial board. Among its other contributors were Heine, Herwegh, Ewerbeck and Bakunin. Under Marx’s influence the newspaper began to express communist views. It sharply criticised Prussian absolutism and moderate German liberalism. To comply with the demand of the Prussian Government, the Guizot ministry took repressive measures against its editors and contributors in January 1845 and its publication ceased.
In the quotations from the article by Ruge the emphasis is Marx’s. Works of other authors-French and English (in their publications in French)-were quoted by Marx in German, apparently in his own translation.
This article was first published in English in the book: Karl Marx, Selected Essays, London, Parsons, 1926.
38 The editorial of the French democratic newspaper La Réforme of July 20, 1844, dealt with the Cabinet order of the Prussian King Frederick William IV to display concern for the poor. This Cabinet order was prompted by the fear caused by the Silesian weavers’ uprising. The author of the article was inclined to take the Prussian King’s demagogy for a serious intention to carry out social reforms.
39 Marx refers to the Cabinet order of the Prussian King Frederick William IV of July 18, 1843, issued in connection with the participation of government officials in a banquet arranged in Düsseldorf by the liberals to mark the seventh Rhenish Landtag; the order prohibited the government officials to take part in manifestations of this kind.
40 This refers to the Corn Laws — a series of laws in England (the first of which dated back to the 15th century) which imposed high duties on imported corn with the aim of maintaining high prices on it on the home market. In the first third of the 15th century several laws were passed (in 18 1 5, 1822 and later) changing the conditions of corn imports, and in 1828 a sliding-scale was introduced, which raised import duties on corn when prices fell on the home market and, vice versa, lowered import duties when prices rose.
In 1838 the Manchester factory owners Cobden and Bright founded the Anti-Corn Law League, which widely exploited the popular discontent at rising corn prices. While agitating for the abolition of the corn duties and demanding complete freedom of trade, the League strove to weaken the economic and political positions of the landed aristocracy and to lower workers’ wages.
The struggle between the industrial bourgeoisie and the landed aristocracy over the Corn Laws ended in their repeal in 1846.
41 Marx quotes Francis Bacon according to the French translation of McCulloch’s book A Discourse on the Rise, Progress, Peculiar Objects, and Importance, of Political Economy (J. R. MacCulloch, Discours sur 1'origine, les progris, les objets particuliers, et 1'importance de 1'économie politique, Genève-Paris, 1825, pp. 131-32).
42 This quotation from Dr. Kay’s pamphlet published anonymously in 1839 is cited by Marx in his own free translation with omissions from the two-volume edition of Eugène Buret, De la misire des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en France.... T. 1, pp. 396, 398, 401.
43 The decree of the National Convention of May 11 (22 Floréal), 1794, ordered the compilation of a Livre de la bienfaisance nationals (Book of National Charity) in which were to be entered invalids, orphans, the incapacitated and so forth, who were entitled to certain grants. It was one of the palliative measures for fighting the misery of the popular masses, introduced by the Jacobin government before its fall on July 27 (9 Thermidor), 1794.
The irruption of a crowd of hungry women into the building of the National Convention on May 20 (1 Prairial), 1795, marked the beginning of an uprising by the plebeian and proletarian masses of Paris against the Thermidor reaction; they put forward the slogan, “Bread and the Constitution of 1793!” Like the preceding uprising in Germinal (April) of the same year, the Prairial uprising was suppressed by military force.
44 Marx refers to the revolutionary song Das Blutgericht which was popular among the Silesian weavers on the eve of the revolt.
45 This refers to the revolts of the Lyons weavers in November 1831 and April 1834.
46 The Cabinet order of Frederick William IV quoted here and below was published on August 9, 1844, in the Allgemeine Preussische Zeitung. It was caused by an abortive attempt on the life of the king on July 26, 1844, in Berlin, by the former burgomaster of the town of Storkow, H. L. Tschech, acting on personal grounds.
47 This refers to the proposals submitted by the Prussian diplomat Bunsen to Frederick William IV in the spring and summer of 1844 concerning the proposed reform of the Prussian political system. According to Bunsen, his project was drawn up in “the monarchical and conservative spirit” and provided for the institution of an English-type bicameral Prussian parliament (Landtag) with an aristocratic upper chamber and a lower chamber elected on the estates principle.
48 These comments are made by Marx in his conspectus of James Mill’s book Elements of Political Economy (Marx used the French translation published in 1823 under the title Élémens d'économie politique), which forms part of the fourth and fifth of the nine notebooks of excerpts made by Marx during his stay in Paris from the end of 1843 till January 1845. The Paris Notebooks reflect Marx’s intense work on political economy. The books summarised by Marx include works by J. B. Say, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, McCulloch, James Mill, Destutt de Tracy, Sismondi, Jeremy Bentham, Boisguillebert, Lauderdale, Schütz, List, Skarbek and Buret. At the time Marx used mainly French translations of the British authors. In a number of his conspectuses Marx added his own comments to the excerpts or to his summaries of passages from the books he was studying. However, most of these comments are of a fragmentary nature. Many ideas set forth in them are reproduced in one form or another, and frequently in a more developed form, in the extant sections of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The most detailed and systematised comments are those from his conspectus of Mill’s book, which form two lengthy digressions from the text he was summarising. In their ideas they are close to the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and it is possible that they anticipated the thoughts expounded in the missing pages of the second manuscript of this work.
The first author’s digression in the conspectus follows a considerable number of excerpts from Mill’s book, which, like the other excerpts or summaries of passages in the concluding part of the conspectus, are not given in this edition. The full text of the conspectus was published in: Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Erste Abteilung, Band 3, Berlin, 1932. However, the excerpts from Mill’ book made by Marx in between these two digressions, which by their content constitute a link between these comments, are published in full. Marx quotes excerpts from Mill’s book and from other French publications partly in French, but mainly in his own translation into German, alternating German text with French. In the present edition the texts quoted or paraphrased by Marx are given in English, exact quotations are reproduced from the original edition: James Mill, Elements of Political Economy, London, 1821. The emphasis in the quotations is Marx’s.
The first English translation of this article was published, in part, in the book: Writings of the Young Marx an Philosophy and Society, New York, 1967.
49 The text of this comment in the conspectus is immediately preceded by the following excerpts from James Mill’s book:
“...A medium of exchange ... is some one commodity, which, in order to effect an exchange between two other commodities, is first received in exchange for the one, and is then given in exchange for the other.” (P. 93.) Gold, silver, money.
“By value of money, is here to be understood the proportion in which it exchanges for other commodities, or the quantity of it which exchanges for a certain quantity of other things.”
“This proportion is determined by the total amount of money existing in a given country.” (p. 95.)
“What regulates the quantity of money?”
“Money is made under two sets of circumstances: Government either leaves the increase or diminution of it free; or it controls the quantity, making it greater or smaller as it pleases.
“When the increase or diminution of money is left free, government opens the mint to the public, making bullion into money for as many as require it. Individuals possessed of bullion will desire to convert it into money only when it is their interest to do so; that is, when their bullion, converted into money, will be more valuable than in its original form. This can only happen when money is peculiarly valuable, and when the same quantity of metal, in the state of coin, will exchange for a greater quantity of other articles than in the state of bullion. As the value of money depends upon the quantity of it, it has a greater value when it is in short supply. It is then that bullion is made into coin. But precisely because of this conversion, the old ratio is restored. Therefore, if the value of money rises above that of the metal of which it is made, the interest of individuals operates immediately, in a state of freedom, to restore the balance by augmenting the quantity of money.” (Pp. 99-101.)
“Whenever the coining of money, therefore, is free, its quantity is regulated by the value of the metal, it being, the interest of individuals to increase or diminish the quantity, in proportion as the value of the metal in coins is greater or less than its value in bullion.
“But if the quantity of money is determined by the value of the metal, it is still necessary to inquire what it is which determines the value of the metal.... Gold and silver are in reality commodities. They are commodities for the attaining of which labour and capital must be employed. It is cost of production, therefore, which determines the value of these, as of other ordinary productions.” (P. 101.)
50 The monetary system-an early type of mercantilism. Its adherents believed that wealth consisted in money, in amassing bullion reserves, hence the prohibition of gold and silver exports, the policy of securing an active trade balance.
51 This passage (which in the original reads as follows: “Durch die wechselseitige Entäusserung oder Entfremdung des Privateigentums ist das Privateigentum selbst in die Bestimmung des entdusserten Privateigentums geraten”) shows that when using the terms “Entäusserung” and “Entfremdung” to denote alienation Marx imparted to them an identical or nearly identical meaning. On the translation of these terms in this edition see Note 1.
52 This refers primarily to James Mill, who divided his system of political economy into four independent sections: Production, Distribution, Exchange and Consumption.
53 The rest of the conspectus contains further excerpts from Mill’s book. Concerning his excerpts from pages 261-66, on which Mill examines the question of the rent of land, profit on capital and wages as sources of taxation and the state revenue, Marx made the following brief comment:
“Es versteht sich, dass Mill wie Ricardo dagegen protestiert, irgend einem Gouvernement den Gedanken einflössen zu wollen, die Grundrente zur einzigen Quelle der Steuern zu machen, da sie parteiisch ungerechte Belastung ciner besonder Klasse von Individuen. Aber — und dies ist ein gewichtiges heimtiickisches Aber — aber die Steuer auf die Grundrente ist die einzige, vom nationalökonomischen Standpunkt aus nicht schädliche, also die einzig nationalökonomisch gerechte Steuer. Ja, das einzige Bedenken, was die Nationalökonomie aufsteilt, ist mehr anlockend als abschreckend, nimlich: class in einem selbst nur gewöhnlich bevölkerten und ausgedehnten Lande, die Höhe der Grundrente das Bedürfnis der Regierung übersteigen würde.” (“Needless to say, Mill, like Ricardo, denies that he wishes to impress on any government the idea that land rent should be made the sole source of taxes, since this would be a partisan measure placing an unfair burden on a particular class of individuals. But-and this is a momentous, insidious but-but the tax on land rent is the only tax that is not harmful from the standpoint of political economy, hence the only just tax from the point of view of political economy. Indeed, the one doubt raised by political economy is rather an attraction than a cause for apprehension, namely, that even in a country with an ordinary number of population and of ordinary size the amount yielded by land rent would exceed the needs of the government.”)
54 The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 is the first work in which Marx tried to systematically elaborate problems of political economy from the standpoint of his maturing dialectical-materialist and communist views and also to synthesise the results of his critical review of prevailing philosophic and economic theories. Apparently, Marx began to write it in order to clarify the problems for himself. But in the process of working on it he conceived the idea of publishing a work analysing the economic system of bourgeois society in his time and its ideological trends. Towards the end of his stay in Paris, on February 1, 1845, Marx signed a contract with Carl Leske, a Darmstadt publisher, concerning the publication of his work entitled A Critique of Politics and of Political Economy. It was to be based on his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and perhaps also on his earlier manuscript Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. This plan did not materialise in the 1840s because Marx was busy writing other works and, to some extent, because the contract with the publisher was cancelled in September 1846, the latter being afraid to have transactions with such a revolutionary-minded author. However, in the early 1850s Marx returned to the idea of writing a book on economics. Thus, the manuscripts of 1844 are connected with the conception of a plan which led many years later to the writing of Capital.
55 The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts is an unfinished work and in part a rough draft. A considerable part of the text has not been preserved. What remains comprises three manuscripts, each of which has its own pagination (in Roman figures). The first manuscript contains 27 pages, of which pages 1-XII and XVII-XXVII are divided by two vertical lines into three columns supplied with headings written in beforehand: “Wages of Labour”, “Profit of Capital” (this section has also subheadings supplied by the author) and “Rent of Land”. It is difficult to tell the order in which Marx filled these columns. All the three columns on p. VII contain the text relating to the section “Wages of Labour”. Pages XIII to XVI are divided into two columns and contain texts of the sections “Wages of Labour” (pp. XIII-XV), “Profit of Capital” (pp. XIII-XVI) and “Rent of Land” (p. XVI). On pages XVII to XXI, only the column headed “Rent of Land” is filled in. From page XXII to page XXVII, on which the first manuscript breaks off, Marx wrote across the three columns disregarding the headings. The text of these pages is published as a separate section entitled by the editors according to its content “Estranged Labour”.
Of the second manuscript only the last four pages have survived (pp. XL-XLIII).
The. third manuscript contains 41 pages (not counting blank ones) divided into two columns and numbered by Marx himself from I to XLIII (in doing so he omitted two numbers, XXII and XXV). Like the extant part of the second manuscript, the third manuscript has no author’s headings; the text has been arranged and supplied with the headings by the editors.
Sometimes Marx departed from the subject-matter and interrupted his elucidation of one question to analyse another. Pages XXXIX-XL contain the Preface to the whole work which is given in the present volume before the text of the first manuscript. The text of the section dealing with the critical analysis of Hegel’s dialectic, to which Marx referred in the Preface as the concluding chapter and which was scattered on various pages, is arranged in one section and put at the end in accordance with Marx’s indications.
In order to give the reader a better visual idea of the structure of the work, the text reproduces in vertical fines the Roman numbers of the sheets of the manuscripts, and the Arabic numbers of the columns in the first manuscript. The notes indicate where the text has been rearranged. Passages crossed out by Marx with a vertical line are enclosed in pointed brackets; separate words or phrases crossed out by the author are given in footnotes only when they supplement the text. The general title and the headings of the various parts of the manuscripts enclosed in square brackets are supplied by the editors on the basis of the author’s formulations. In some places the text has been broken up into paragraphs by the editors. Quotations from the French sources cited by Marx in French or in his own translation into German, are given in English in both cases and the French texts as quoted by Marx are given in the footnotes. Here and elsewhere Marx’s rendering of the quotations or free translation is given in small type but without quotation marks. Emphasis in quotations, belonging, as a rule, to Marx, as well as that of the quoted authors, is indicated everywhere by italics.
The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 was first published by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Moscow in the language of the original: Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Abt. 1, Bd. 3, 1932.
In English this work was first published in 1959 by the Foreign Languages Publishing House (now Progress Publishers), Moscow, translated by Martin Milligan.
This refers to Bruno Bauer’s reviews of books, articles and pamphlets on the Jewish question, including Marx’s article on the subject in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, which were published in the monthly Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (issue No. 1, December 1843, and issue No. IV, March 1844) under the title “Von den neuesten Schriften über die Judenfrage”. Most of the expressions quoted are taken from these reviews. The expressions “utopian phrase” and “compact mass” can be found in Bruno Bauer’s unsigned article, “Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand der Kritik?”, published in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, issue No. VIII, July 1844. A detailed critical appraisal of this monthly was later on given by Marx and Engels in the book Die heilige Familie, oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik (see this edition, Vol. 4, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism).
56 Marx apparently refers to Weitling’s works: Die Menschheit, wie sie ist und wie sie sein sollte, 1838, and Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit, Vivis, 1842.
Moses Hess published three articles in the collection Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz (Twenty-One Sheets from Switzerland), Erster Teil (Zürich und Winterthur, 1843), issued by Georg Herwegh. These articles, entitled “Sozialismus und Kommunismus”, “Philosophie der Tat” and “Die Eine und die ganze Freiheit”, were published anonymously. The first two of them had a note-"Written by the author of ‘Europäische Triarchie'”.
57 The term “element” in the Hegelian philosophy means a vital element of thought. It is used to stress that thought is a process, and that therefore elements in a system of thought are also phases in a movement. The term “feeling” (Empfindung) denotes relatively low forms of mental life in which no distinction is made between the subjective and objective.
58 Shortly after writing this Preface Marx fulfilled his intention in The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism, written in collaboration with Engels (see this edition, Vol. 4).
59 The expression “common humanity” (in the manuscript in French, “simple humanity”) was borrowed by Marx from the first volume (Chapter VIII) of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which he used in Garnier’s French translation (Recherches sur La nature et les causes de La richesse des nations, Paris, 1802, t. 1, p. 138). AB the subsequent references were given by Marx to this publication, the synopsis of which is contained in his Paris Notebooks with excerpts on political economy. In the present volume wherever there are references to or quotations from this work by Adam Smith the corresponding pages of the English edition are given and references to Garnier’s edition are reproduced in square brackets, e.g., Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Everyman’s Library edition, Vol. 1, pp. 58-60 [Garnier, t. 1, pp. 132-36].
60 Marx uses the German term “Nationalökonomie” to denote both the economic system in the sense of science or theory, and the economic system itself.
61 Loudon’s work was a translation into French of an English manuscript apparently never published in the original. The author did publish in English a short pamphlet-The Equilibrium of Population and Sustenance Demonstrated, Leamington, 1836.
62 Unlike the quotations from a number of other French writers such as Constantin Pecqueur and Eugéne Buret, which Marx gives in French in this work, the excerpts from J. B. Say’s book are given in his German translation.
63 From this page of the manuscript quotations from Adam Smith’s book (in the French translation), which Marx cited so far sometimes in French and sometimes in German, are, as a rule, given in German. In this volume the corresponding pages of the English edition are substituted for the French by the editors and Marx’s references are given in square brackets (see Note 59).
64 The text published in small type here and below is not an exact quotation from Smith but a summary of the corresponding passages from his work. Such passages are subsequently given in small type but without quotation marks.
65 The preceding page (VII) of the first manuscript does not contain any text relating to the sections “Profit of Capital” and “Rent of Land” (see Note 54).
66 The whole paragraph, including the quotation from Ricardo’s book in the French translation by Francisco Solano Constancio: Des principes de 1'économie politique, et de 1'impôt, 2-e 6d., Paris, 1835, T. 11, pp. 194-95 (see the corresponding English edition On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation, London, 1817), and from Sismondi’s Nouveaux principes d'économie politique.... Paris, 1819, T. If, p. 331, is an excerpt from Eugéne Buret’s book De la misère des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en France.... Paris, 1840, T. 1, pp. 6-7, note.
67 The allusion is to the following passage: “In a perfectly fair lottery, those who draw the prizes ought to gain all that is lost by those who draw the blanks. In a profession where twenty fail for one that succeeds, that one ought to gain all that should have been gained by the unsuccessful twenty.” (Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, Bk. 1, p. 94.)
69 The Corn Laws — see Note 40.
70 Pages XIII to XV are divided into two columns and not three like the other pages of the first manuscript; they contain no text relating to the section “Rent of Land”. On page XVI, which also has two columns, this text is in the first column, while on the following pages it is in the second.
71 Marx, still using Hegel’s terminology and his approach to the unity of the opposites, counterposes the term “Verwirklichung” (realisation) to “Entwirklichung” (loss of realisation).
72 Re the translation of the terms “Entfremdung” and “Entäusserung” which express the concept of alienation see Note 1.
73 The term “species-being” (Gattungswesen) is derived from Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophy where it is applied to man and mankind as a whole.
74 Apparently Marx refers to Proudhon’s book Quest-ce que la propriété?, Paris, 1841.
75 This passage shows that Marx here uses the category of wages in a broad sense, as an expression of antagonistic relations between the classes of capitalists and of wage-workers. Under “the wages” he understands “the wage-labour”, the capitalist system as such. This idea was apparently elaborated in detail in that part of the manuscript which is not extant.
76 This apparently refers to the conversion of individuals into members of civil society which is considered as the sphere of property, of material relations that determine all other relations. In this case Marx refers to the material relations of society based on private property and the antagonism of different classes.
77 The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 deprived poor people considered able to work (including children) of any public relief except a place in the workhouse, where they were compelled to work.
78 In the manuscript “sein für sich selbst” which is an expression of Hegel’s term “für sich” (for itself) as opposed to “an sich” (in itself). In the Hegelian philosophy the former means roughly explicit, conscious or defined in contrast to “an sich”, a synonym for immature, implicit or unconscious.
79 This refers to Révolutions de France et de Brabant, par Camille Desmoulins. Second Trimestre, contenant mars, avril et mai, Paris, l'an lier 1790, N. 16, p. 139 sq.; N. 23, p. 425 sqq.; N. 26, p. 580 sqq.
80 This refers to Georg Ludwig Wilhelm Funke, Die aus der unbeschränkten Theilbarkeit des Grundeigenthums hervorgehenden Nachtheile, Hamburg und Gotha, 1839, p. 56, in which there is a reference to Heinrich Leo, Studien und Skizzen zu einer Naturlehre des Staates, Halle, 1833, p. 102.
81 The third manuscript is a thick notebook the last few pages of which are blank. The pages are divided into two columns by a vertical line, not for the purpose of dividing the text according to the headings but for purely technical reasons. The text of the first three sections comprises pp. 1-XI, XIV-XXI, XXXIV-XXXVIII and was written as a supplement to the missing pages of the second manuscript. Pages XI-XIII, XVII, XVIII, XXIII, XXIV, XXVI-XXXIV contain the text of the concluding chapter dealing with the criticism of Hegel’s dialectic (on some pages it is written alongside the text of other sections). In some places the manuscript contains the author’s remarks testifying to his intention to unite into a single whole various passages of this section separated from each other by the text of other sections. Pages XXIX-XL comprise the draft Preface. Finally, the text on the last pages (XLI-XLIII), is a self-contained essay on the power of money in bourgeois society.
82 The manuscript has “als für sich seiende Tätigkeit”. For the meaning of the terms “für sich” and “an sich” in Hegel’s philosophy see Note 78.
83 Marx refers to the rise of the primitive, crude equalitarian tendencies among the representatives of utopian communism at the early stages of its development. Among the medieval religious communistic communities, in particular, there was current a notion of the common possession of women as a feature of the future society depicted in the spirit of consumer communism ideals. In 1534-35 the German Anabaptists, who seized power in Münster, tried to introduce polygamy in accordance with this view. Tommaso Campanella, the author of Civito Solis (early 17th century), rejected monogamy in his ideal society. The primitive communistic communities were also characterised by asceticism and a hostile attitude to science and works of art. Some of these primitive equalitarian features, the negative attitude to the arts in particular, were inherited by the communist trends of the first half of the 19th century, for example, by the members of the French secret societies of the 1830s and 1840s (“worker-egalitarians”, “humanitarians”, and so on) comprising the followers of Babeuf (for a characterisation of these see Engels, “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent”, pp. 396-97 of this volume).
84 This note is given by Marx on page V of the manuscript where it is separated by a horizontal line from the main text, but according to its meaning it refers to this sentence.
85 This part of the manuscript shows clearly the peculiarity of the terminology used by Marx in his works. At the time he had not worked out terms adequately expressing the conceptions of scientific communism he was then evolving and was still under the influence of Feuerbach in that respect. Hence the difference in the use of words in his early and subsequent, mature writings. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 the word “socialism” is used to denote the stage of society at which it has carried out a revolutionary transformation, abolished private property, class antagonisms, alienation and so on. In the same sense Marx used the expression “communism equals humanism”. At that time he understood the term “communism as such” not as the final goal of revolutionary transformation but as the process of this transformation, development leading up to that goal, a lower stage of the process.
86 This expression apparently refers to the theory of the English geologist Sir Charles Lyell who, in his three-volume work The Principles of Geology (1830-33), proved the evolution of the earth’s crust and refuted the popular theory of cataclysms. Lyell used the term “historical geology” for his theory. The term “geognosy” was introduced by the 18th-century German scientist Abraham Werner, a specialist in mineralogy, and it was used also by Alexander Humboldt.
87 This statement is interpreted differently by researchers. Many of them maintain that Marx here meant crude equalitarian communism, such as that propounded by Babeuf and his followers. While recognising the historic role of that communism, he thought it impossible to ignore its weak points. It seems more justifiable, however, to interpret this passage proceeding from the peculiarity of terms used in the manuscript (see Note 85). Marx here used the term “communism” to mean not the higher phase of classless society (which he at the time denoted as “socialism” or “communism equalling humanism”) but movement (in various forms, including primitive forms of equalitarian communism at the early stage) directed at its achievement, a revolutionary transformation process of transition to it. Marx emphasised that this process should not be considered as an end in itself, but that it is a necessary, though a transitional, stage in attaining the future social system, which will be characterised by new features distinct from those proper to this stage.
88 Page XI (in part) and pages XII and XIII are taken up by a text relating to the concluding chapter (see Note 81).
89 The greater part of this page as well as part of the preceding page (XVII) comprises a text relating to the concluding chapter (see Note 81).
90 Apparently Marx refers to a formula of the German philosopher Fichte, an adherent of subjective idealism.
91 The preceding pages starting from p. XXI, which is partly taken up by a text relating to this section, contain the text of the concluding chapter.
92 In some of his early writings Marx already uses the term “bürgerliche Gesellschaft” to mean two things: (1) in a broader sense, the economic system of society regardless of the historical stage of its development, the sum total of material relations which determine political institutions and ideology, and (2) in the narrow sense, the material relations of bourgeois society (later on, that society as a whole), of capitalism. Hence, the term has been translated according to its concrete meaning in the context as “civil society” in the first case and “bourgeois society” in the second.
93 The two previous pages of the manuscript contain the draft Preface to the whole work, which is published on pages 231-34.
94 Ontology- in some philosophical systems a theory about being, about the nature of things.
95 Originally the section on the Hegelian dialectic was apparently conceived by Marx as a philosophical digression in the section of the third manuscript which is published under the heading “Private Property and Communism” and was written together with other sections as an addition to separate pages of the second manuscript (see pp. 293-306 of this volume). Therefore Marx marked the beginning, of this section (p. XI in the manuscript) as point 6, considering it to be the continuation of the five points of the preceding section. He marked as point 7 the beginning of the following section, headed “Human Requirements and Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property”, on page XIV of the manuscript. However, when dealing with this subject on subsequent pages of his manuscript, Marx decided to collect the whole material into a separate, concluding chapter and mentioned this in his draft Preface. The chapter, like a number of other sections of the manuscript, was not finished. While writing it, Marx made special excerpts from the last chapter (“Absolute Knowledge”) of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, which are in the same notebook as the third manuscript (these excerpts are not reproduced in this edition).
96 The reference is not quite accurate. On page 193 of the work mentioned, Bruno Bauer polemises not against the anti-Hegelian Herr Gruppe but against the Right Hegelian Marheineke.
97 Marx here refers to Feuerbach’s critical observations on Hegel in §§ 29-30 of his Grundsätze tier Philosophie der Zukunft.
This note is given at the bottom of page XIII of the third manuscript without any indication what it refers to. The asterisk after the sentence to which it seems to refer is given by the editors.
98 Here on page XVII of the third manuscript (part of which comprises a text relating to the section “Human Requirements and Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property”) Marx gave the note: “see p. XIII”, which proves that this text is the continuation of the section dealing with the critical analysis of the Hegelian dialectic begun on pp. XI-XIII.
99 At the end of page XVIII of the third manuscript there is a note by Marx: “continued on p. XXII”. However number XXII was omitted by Marx in paging (see Note 54). The text of the given chapter is continued on the page marked by the author as XXIII, which is also confirmed by his remark on it: “see P. XVIII”.
100 Marx apparently refers here not only to the identity of Hegel’s views on labour and some other categories of political economy with those of the English classical economists but also to his profound knowledge of economic writings. In lectures he delivered at Jena University in 1803-04 Hegel cited Adam Smith’s work. In his Philosophie des Rechts (§ 189) he mentions Smith, Say and Ricardo and notes the rapid development of economic thought.
101 Hegel uses the term “thinghood” (Dingheit) in his work Phänomenologie des Geistes to denote an abstract, universal, mediating link in the process of cognition; “thinghood” reveals the generality of the specific properties of individual things. The synonym for it is “pure essence” (das reine Wesen).
102 These eight points of the “surmounting of the object of consciousness”, expressed “in all its aspects”, are copied nearly word for word from §§ 1 and 3 of the last chapter (“Absolute Knowledge”) of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes.
103 Number XXV was omitted by Marx in paging the third manuscript.
104 Marx refers to § 30 of Feuerbach’s Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft, which says: “Hegel is a thinker who surpasses himself in thinking”.
105 This enumeration gives the major categories of Hegel’s Encyclopädie der Philosophische Wissenschaften in the order in which they are examined by Hegel. Similarly, the categories reproduced by Marx above (on p. 340) from civil law” to “world history”, are given in the order in which they appear in Hegel’s Philosophie des Rechts.
106 This letter was written soon after the termination of the talks which Marx had with Arnold Ruge from March to September 1843, on the question of publishing the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (see Note 15). The letter was connected with Marx’s intention to enlist advanced German and French intellectuals to contribute to the journal. At the end of October 1843 Marx went from Kreuznach to Paris, where the journal was to be published.
This letter was first published in English in abridged form in the book Karl Marx. Early Texts, translated and edited by David McLennan, Oxford, 1971.
107 As follows from Feuerbach’s reply to Marx on October 25, 1843, Feuerbach when mentioning a book against Schelling, which was soon to appear, referred not to his own work, but to that of his friend and follower Kappa: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Leipzig, 1843.
108 Marx ironically calls Schelling the 38th member of the German Confederation. The Confederation uniting 33 German states and 4 free cities was established at the 1815 Congress of Vienna with a view to ending feudal disunity in Germany.
109 According to the Prussian censorship instructions all publications of 21 signatures and more were not subject to preliminary censorship.
110 The reference is to German public opinion on the controversy over the book of the German theologian Paulus about Schelling’s philosophy of revelation. After this book was published in 1843 Schelling brought in several law-suits against the author demanding that dues should be paid to him for quotations from his lectures. The proceedings were widely commented in the press. This incident prompted Heinrich Heine to write his satirical poem Kirchenrat Prometheus.
111 Although in his letter of October 25, 1843, Feuerbach fully agreed with the appraisal of the political tendencies of Schelling’s philosophy given by Marx in his letter, he nevertheless refused to send an article on Schelling for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher on the plea that he was occupied with other plans.
112 This letter concerns the circumstances of publication of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher which was printed in the printshop of the publisher Fröbel. Apparently some of the manuscripts were forwarded directly to Fröbel.
114 This letter was first published in English in the book: Karl Marx. Early Texts, translated and edited by David McLellan, Oxford, 1971.
115 The English translation of Feuerbach’s Wesen des Chrisenthums was apparently never published. The French translation was published in the book: A. H. Ewerbeck, Quest-ce que la religion d'apris la nouvelle philosophic allemande, Paris, 1850.
116 The statements quoted here and some lines below were taken by Marx from articles published in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, issues V and VI, 1844. Marx criticised them in chapters seven and nine of The Holy Family (see this edition, Vol. 4).
117 The summary of the first volume of the Jacobin Levasseur’s Memoirs was compiled by Marx in connection with his plans to write a work on the history of the French Revolution. Marx began to be interested in the revolutionary events in France at the end of the eighteenth century as early as the summer of 1843, as can be seen from his excerpts from special works on this subject by the German historians Wachsmuth and Ludwig contained in the Kreuznach Notebooks. As evidenced by A. Ruge (Ruge’s letters to Feuerbach of May 15, 1844, to Fleischer of May 20 and July 9, 1844 — see A. Ruges Briefwechsel und Tagebuchblätter, Bd. 1, Berlin, 1886), after he had moved to Paris in the autumn of 1843, Marx planned to write a work on the history of the French Convention. He worked on it during several months of 1844, reading a lot of material, including the press of the time, memoirs of contemporaries, etc. In 1845 the radical Trier’sche Zeitung also wrote about these plans of Marx, which were never realised, in connection with Marx’s banishment from France. Excerpts from Levasseur’s Memoirs were published in the newspaper Vorwärts! in 1844, evidently on Marx’s advice.
The time when this conspectus was compiled apparently coincided with the beginning of Marx’s economic research: it is contained in the third notebook of the series with excerpts from the works of economists which Marx made since his arrival in Paris to August 1844. Besides the summary of Levasseur’s Memoirs, the notebook contains the end of the excerpts from the French translation of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations begun in the second notebook.
The pages of the notebook are divided into two columns by a vertical line. On the left-hand side Marx wrote direct quotations from the book in French (only one quotation is in German) or gave brief rendering in German of separate passages. Marx’s own text consists of laconic comments and references which are typed in long primer in this edition. On the right-hand side there is more coherent rendering of the book’s contents to which Marx gave the title: “The Struggle Between the Montagnards and the Girondists”. The whole text is in German with the exception of some French terms and expressions which are given in the original in this edition. In some cases, especially when assessing events and public figures, Marx also quotes from Levasseur’s text word for word or almost word for word in German. These passages are typed in small type (the quotation marks being the editors').
In this edition we publish first the text of the left columns under the subheading “Excerpts”, and then the text of the summary proper, written in the right columns. The italics are Marx’s.
118 On June 20, 1792, a mass manifestation took place in Paris in front of the Legislative Assembly and the royal palace of the Tuileries. The participants demanded cancellation of the royal veto on the decree of the establishment of a camp of Marseilles volunteers (fédérès) near Paris and restoration to their ministerial posts of the Girondist leaders dismissed by the king. The actual refusal to meet these demands made the atmosphere still more tense. The Mayor of Paris, the Girondist Pétion, dismissed from his post for supporting the manifestation, was recalled under the pressure of the Parisian sections in mid-July 1792. During the month of July 1792, despite the royal veto, detachments of fédérès continued to arrive in Paris from Marseilles and other towns. This strengthened the movement for the abolition of the monarchy and made for an energetic rebuff to the external enemies of the revolution.
119 On April 20, 1792, the Legislative Assembly voted the decree on the declaration of war on Austria, which marked the beginning of revolutionary France’s prolonged armed struggle against the coalition of counter-revolutionary states. This act was preceded by intense war propaganda on the part of the Jacobin Club (Appeals of February 15 and 17, 1792) conducted under the influence of Girondists. Representatives of the Left wing of the Club (Robespierre and others), on the contrary, considered it necessary to put off as long as possible the inevitable military conflict with the aim of gaining time for strengthening revolutionary order.
The Jacobin Club (“Société des amis de la constitution”) founded in October 1789, initially united the representatives of different political trends in the anti-absolutist camp. In July 1791, following the internal struggle, the moderate constitutionalists left the Club, and after the uprising of August 10, 1792, the Girondists followed suit. The influence of the revolutionary-democratic circles (Jacobins) then prevailed entirely. Having become their party centre, the Club, with its branches in the provinces, played an outstanding part in making revolutionary transformations.
120 On the page mentioned Levasseur writes about the ambiguous position of General Lafayette, one of the leaders of the moderate liberal constitutionalists, on the eve of the uprising of August 10, 1792. He enjoyed the confidence neither of the royal court nor of the revolutionary-patriotic camp.
121 August 10, 1792 — the day of the overthrow of the monarchy in France as a result of a popular uprising.
122 Interregnum — the period between the uprising of August 10, 1792, and the convocation of the Convention on September 20, 1792, lasting 42 days (the first open session was held on the 21st of September). It was marked by acute struggle between the Legislative Assembly and the revolutionary Paris Commune, which was formed instead of the former municipal council during the uprising of August 10 and directed the actions of the insurgents.
123 The Convention Committee consisted of a President to be re-elected every fortnight and six secretaries.
124 Feuillants — moderate liberal constitutionalists whose representatives (the Lameth brothers and others) left the Jacobin Club on July 16, 1791, after it adopted a petition for the dethroning of the king (see Note 1 19), and formed their own political club (they met in a house formerly occupied by the religious order bearing the name of the Feuillants, which was abolished in 1789). Having a considerable influence among the members of the Legislative Assembly, they strove in the interests of the big bourgeoisie and the liberal nobility to prevent the development of the revolution.
125 On these pages Levasseur refutes the Girondists’ accusations against the leaders of the Montagnards that they had been bribed by the émigrés and foreign agents. He characterises Danton, Robespierre and Marat (the latter with the reservation that he does not agree with his “wild” theories) as unselfish leaders devoted to the revolution.
126 On these pages Levasseur cites Marat’s speech in his self-defence in the Convention on September 25, 1792. In this speech Marat succeeded in proving the groundlessness of the Girondist accusation of incitement to revolt against the Convention and in defeating the proposal that his activity should be censured. Although Levasseur disliked Marat, he was compelled to admit the courage and composure with which he fought this campaign of slander and hatred launched by his opponents.
127 In Levasseur’s book: “It was difficult for the long-winded and garrulous eloquence of the latter to compete with the empty trumpery of Louvet.” Further Levasseur speaks about the unsubstantiated accusations that Robespierre aimed at dictatorship and instigated reprisals against royalist prisoners in September 1792. In his speech in the Convention on November 5, 1792, Robespierre fully disproved these Girondist insinuations.
128 The discussion of Buzot’s proposal which envisaged that the decree on the expatriation of the dethroned Bourbons should apply to the secondary branch of the dynasty as well — the family of the Duke of Orléans — was postponed by a majority vote. Levasseur states that many members of the Convention feared that expatriation of the former Duke of Or1éans, Philippe Égalité, would be a dangerous precedent of violating a deputy’s immunity.
129 On these pages Levasseur characterises the Girondists as a party whose activity objectively played into the hands of counter-revolutionary forces. “Though they were ardent republicans, they, unfortunately, fought on the side of the royalists, and, what is worse, concealed some of the royalists amidst themselves.”
130 On September 2-5, 1792, when the enemy armies were launching an offensive, in an atmosphere of disturbing rumours of counter-revolutionary conspiracies and preparations of reprisals against the families of patriots who fought the foreign enemies, the popular masses of Paris stormed the prisons, organised improvised courts and executed about a thousand prisoners who were supporters of the monarchy. These spontaneous terroristic actions of the people were used by the Girondists to accuse the Jacobins of organising the September massacres.
131 The question of performance of religious rites arose in the Convention in connection with the discussion of the report on the primary education on December 12 and 14, 1792. The proposal to introduce religious education in the primary schools was rejected during the debate, but at the same time prominent Montagnard leaders (Robespierre, Danton) came out against some deputies who proposed the general prohibition of religious rites.
Under the Decree on Means of Subsistence is meant the repeal of the corn trade restrictions and the decision on the armed suppression of the movement for fixed prices adopted by the Convention under pressure of the Girondists in December 1792. These measures strongly infringed the interests of the masses who were suffering from shortage of food and the soaring prices. During this period the Montagnards did not support the popular demands for fixed prices on bread and other products but at the same time they rejected the principle of unrestricted freedom of trade upheld by the Girondists. Thus, speaking on the food question on December 2, 1792, Levasseur advocated the necessity of compulsory measures against sabotage by the farmers and grain merchants.
132 On March 10, 1793, representatives of the most radical plebeian trend in the revolutionary camp, called “les enragés”, who wanted fixed prices, social measures against poverty, punishment of profiteers, etc., attempted to stir up a rebellion. Participants in the rebellion, during which two Girondist printshops were smashed up, wrote a petition in which they demanded the expulsion of the Girondists from the Convention. However, not being supported by the Jacobins, who were afraid to oppose the Girondists openly, “les enragés” did not attain their goal.
The Cordelier Club (“Société des amis droits de 1'homme et du citoyen”)-One of the most radical democratic organisations during the French Revolution, founded in 1790. The Left-wing Jacobins had a majority in the Club. Despite the fact that “les enragés” took part in its activities, it did not support their action of March 10, 1793.
133 On May 31 and June 2, 1793, a popular uprising took place in Paris resulting in the expulsion of the Girondists from the Convention. A revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the Jacobins supported by the masses was established. The success of the uprising was achieved through the unity of the revolutionary forces (Jacobins, “les enragés”) in their struggle against the political supremacy of the Girondist Party which became an exponent of the counter-revolutionary tendencies of the big bourgeoisie.
134 According to Levasseur’s statement Danton described Dumouriez as an extremely talented general, but having political convictions which were doubtful from the point of view of the republicans. Danton pointed to Dumouriez’ extreme ambition, his obvious reluctance to submit to the Convention’s control and his tendency to surround himself with flatterers and plotters.
135 The aggravation of the food crisis, the growing discontent of the masses and the agitation of “les enragés” for fixed prices compelled the Convention to discuss the food question again in the spring of 1793. Taking into consideration the sentiments of the people, the Jacobins this time spoke in favour of fixing the maximum prices on corn. Despite the Girondists’ resistance the decree on maximum corn prices was adopted on May 4, 1793.
136 The summary of Engels’ article “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy” is in the fifth notebook of excerpts from the works of economists made by Marx when he was in Paris (concerning the Paris Notebooks see Note 48). The conspectuses and excerpts in the fifth notebook were probably made in the first half of 1844.
137 Letters from London-a series of articles written by Engels and printed in May-June 1843 in the progressive journal Schweizerischer Republikaner published by German emigrants (Fröbel and others) in Zurich. They were actually the continuation of Engels’ reports on the social and political conflicts in England which he published in the Rheinische Zeitung at the end of 1842, soon after his arrival in that country (see this edition, Vol. 2). In early 1843 Engels temporarily interrupted his activity as a journalist owing, on the one hand, to his intensive study of social conditions in England, the English labour movement and English socialist literature and, on the other, to the closure of the Rheinische Zeitung in the spring of 1843. Later, especially from the autumn of 1843, Engels began to contribute to the labour and socialist newspapers in England and on the Continent.
Only the fourth article from the series Letters from London was published in English, in the collection: Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question, Moscow, 1971.
138 The Anti-Corn Law League — see Note 40.
139 The People’s Charter, containing the demands of the Chartists, was published on May 8, 1838, in the form of a bill to be submitted to Parliament. It consisted of six points: universal suffrage (for men over 21), annual parliaments, vote by ballot, equal electoral districts, abolition of the property qualifications for M.P.s, and remuneration of M.P.s.
140 The English edition of Strauss’ book Das Leben Jesu was put out by Hetherington Publishers in 1842 in weekly instalments.
141 Graham’s Bill “For Regulating the Employment of Children and Young Persons in Factories, and for the Better Education of Children in Factory Districts” was submitted to the House of Commons on March 7, 1843 (see Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates: Third series, Vol. LXVII, Second Volume of the Session, London, 1843, p. 422 sqq.).
142 Engels quotes from an article in the Allgemeine Zeitung No. 1 10, April 20, 1843, datelined: “London, 13 April”.
143 The National Charter Association, founded in July 1840, was the first mass workers’ party in the history of the labour movement, numbering up to 50 thousand members in the years of the rise of the Chartist movement. The lack of ideological and tactical unity among its members and the petty-bourgeois ideology of the majority of the Chartist leaders affected the activities of the Association. After the defeat of Chartism in 1848, the Association declined and it ceased its activity in the 1850s.
144 The editorial board of the Schweizerische Republikaner gave the following note to this passage: “This comprises 1,767,500 Rhenish Fl., a sum which, according to our continental notions of ‘the poor’ is scarcely probable.”
145 The reference is apparently to the project to establish a special fund for buying plots of land and distributing them among workers. This plan was proposed by the Chartist leader Feargus O'Connor as early as 1838; he tried more than once to put it into effect; in 1845, with this aim in view, he founded the Chartist Land Co-operative Society, which was also a failure.
146 No article by Engels on this subject was published in the Schweizerische Republikaner. Later Engels wrote about the Chartists’ attitude towards the Anti-Corn Law League in his book The Condition of the Working-Class in England (Chapter “Labour Movements”, see this edition, Vol. .4).
147 The reference is to the following passage from Robert Owen’s work The Marriage System of the New Moral World, Leeds, 1838: “I resume the subject of marriage because it is the source of more demoralisation, crime, and misery than any other single cause, with the exception of religion and private property; and these three together form the great trinity of causes of crime and immorality among mankind.” (P. 54.)
148 An apparent reference to the following editions: J. J. Rousseau, An Inquiry into the Nature of the Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right, 184 [... ]; [Holbach,] System of Nature, London, 1817. Announcements of popular and cheap editions of the classics of French philosophy were published in Owen’s weekly The New Moral World.
149 The Act of Union with England was imposed on Ireland by the English Government after the suppression of the Irish rebellion in 1798. The Union, which came into force on January 1, 1801, abolished an autonomous Irish Parliament and made Ireland still more dependent on England. The demand for the repeal of the Union became a most popular watchword in Ireland after the 1820s. However, the Irish liberals who were at the head of the national liberation movement (O'Connell and others) considered the agitation for the repeal of the Union only as a means of obtaining concessions for the Irish bourgeoisie and landowners from the English Government. In 1835 O'Connell came to an agreement with the English Whigs and stopped agitation altogether. Under the impact of the mass movement, however, the Irish liberals were compelled in 1840 to found an Association of Repealers, which they tried to direct onto the path of compromise with the English ruling classes.
150 The principal tenant — a middleman who leased land directly from the landowner and then let it in small plots to subtenants, who in their turn often parcelled out these plots and let them too.
151 The second Chartist petition demanding the adoption of the People’s Charter was written by the Executive Committee of the National Charter Association and submitted to Parliament in May 1842. It also demanded for Ireland the right to annul the forced Act of Union of 1801. Despite this, the Irish liberals, far from supporting the Chartists’ agitation, took a hostile attitude towards the Chartists.
152 With the article “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent” Engels started contributing to the London socialist weekly The New Moral World and Gazette of the Rational Society founded by Robert Owen. The article was supplied with notes (reproduced at the end of this volume). Almost at the same time the article was published in an abridged form in the Chartist newspaper The Northern Star Nos. 313 and 315, November 11 and 25, 1843.
The article was welcomed in English proletarian and socialist circles. The editor of the weekly, Fleming, noted in 1844 that the English readers had got to know some representatives of continental socialism, in particular Wilhelm Weitling, thanks to the appearance at the end of the previous year of a series of articles ably written by a German living in England (The New Moral World, 1844, No. 14, p. 110). The editorial board of The Northern Star assessed Engels’ article as “an interesting ... exposition of ‘Continental Communism’ from the pen of one who was master of his subject, because he knew the facts with which he made the public acquainted” (The Northern Star No. 386, May 4, 1844).
Engels continued to contribute to the organ of the English Owenists after he left England in August 1944 up to May 1845.
153 The English translation of Buonarroti’s book was published in London in 1836 under the title Buonarroti’s History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy for Equality; with the Author’s Reflections on the Causes and Character of the French Revolution, and His Estimate of the Leading Men and Events of that Epoch. The translation was made by Bronterre O'Brien, one of the leaders and theoreticians of Chartism.
154 The reference is to the group of English Utopian Socialists who in 1842 founded the colony-commune Concordium in Ham Common near London; followers of the English mystic J. P. Greaves, the Ham Common Socialists preached moral self-perfection and an ascetic way of life. The colony did not 155 survive long.
155 The editors of The New Moral World supplied the following note to this passage: “A few years since we gave a complete exposition of the system in a series of articles in this journal.” The author of the note meant two large series of articles: “Socialism in France. Charles Fourier” and “Fourierism”; the first was published in The New Moral World in 1819 (Nos. 45-46, 48, 49), the second in 1839-40 (Nos. 53, 55, 57, 61-63, 71, 73-75).
156 The editors of The New Moral World gave the following note to this passage: “Now entitled Démocratie Pacifique.” Besides the daily newspaper La Démocratie Pacifique, published since August 1843, the Fourierists continued to publish La Phalange as a theoretical journal.
157 Engels refers here to a series of armed actions by the French proletariat directed against the regime of the bourgeois July monarchy and also to the workers’ active participation in the uprisings led by the republican secret societies. The major events in the 1830s were: the uprisings of Lyons workers at the end of November 1831 and in April 1834, and also republican revolts in Paris on June 5, 1832, April 13-14, 1834, and May 12, 1839, the main participants in which were workers.
158 “Travailleurs Égalitaires” — a secret society of the French Communists-Babouvists, which sprang up in 1840 and consisted mainly of workers. Humanitarians — a secret society of Communists-Babouvists, who in 1841 rallied around the newspaper L'Humanitaire. These two societies were under tile ideological influence of Théodore Dézamy and belonged to the revolutionary, and materialist trend in French utopian communism.
159 The editor of The New Moral World gave the following note to this sentence: “It is proper to reiterate that the Icarian Communists, in their organ, tile Populaire, have, in the strongest manner, disowned all participation in secret societies, and affixed the names of their leaders to public documents, expositions of their principles and objects.”
160 Harmony — the name of a communistic colony founded by the followers of Robert Owen in Hampshire in 1841; the colony survived till the beginning of 1846.
161 The public debate between J.Watts, who was at that time an active proponent of Owenism, and the Chartist speaker J.Bairstow took place in Manchester on October 11, 12 and 13, 1843. Engels apparently attended it.
162 Münzer’s communist revolutionary ideas, which are mentioned below, were expounded in a series of pamphlets issued by him on the eve and during the Peasant War in Germany (1524-25), in particular in the proclamation: “Ausgedrückte Entblössung des falschen Glaubens der ungetreuen Welt durchs Zeugnis des Evangelions Lucae, vorgetragen der elenden erbdrmlichen Christenheit zur Erinnerung ihres Irrsais”, published in the autumn of 1524 in Mülhausen. Later Engels called this pamphlet “a highly inciting paper” (see F. Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, Ch. 11; this edition, Vol. 10).
163 Engels’ statement is based on the prospectus of Wilhelm Weitling’s book Das Evangelium der armen Sünder which was published at that time. The book itself was published only in 1845 in Berne under the title Das Evangelium eines armen Sünders.
164 The Federal Diet-the supreme body of the German Confederation (1815-66) consisting of representatives of the German states; it defended the conservative monarchical regime in Germany.
165 The reference is to a letter written by the democratic poet Georg Herwegh to Frederick William IV in which he accused the king of breaking his promise to introduce the freedom of the press and, in particular, of banning the radical monthly Der deutsche Bote aus der Schweiz, which was being prepared for printing at the time. Herwegh’s letter appeared in the Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung on December 24, 1842; this led to the banning of the newspaper and Herwegh’s banishment from Paris. In England the letter was published in The Times on January 16, 1843, in The Morning Herald on January 17, 1843, and in other newspapers.
166 Engels’ article on this subject did not appear in The New Moral World.
167 Edgar Bauer was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for his book Der Streit der Kritik mit Kirche und Staat, Charlottenburg, 1843, confiscated by the Prussian Government.
168 During his stay in England Engels attended meetings organised by members of the Chartist movement and tried to establish personal contacts with its leaders. In the autumn of 1843 he visited Leeds, where the central Chartist organ, The Northern Star, was published at the time, and got acquainted with its editor George Julian Harney, a prominent figure in the revolutionary wing of the Chartist Party. Engels introduced himself, Harney recalled, as a permanent reader of The Northern Star, who was very much interested in the Chartist movement. As a result of this meeting Engels started contributing to the Chartist press, but at first only incidentally. On November 11 and 25, 1843, The Northern Star reprinted with some abridgements Engels’ article “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent” immediately after its first publication in the weekly The New Moral World. Two weeks later these notes connected with the above-mentioned article appeared in the Chartist paper. They also appeared in The New Moral World. In this volume they are published as one article. Closely connected with these is the short report “The Press and the German Despots” published in The Northern Star on February 3, 1844 (see this volume, p. 417). Later Engels proposed to the editors that he would systematically contribute to the paper reports about events on the Continent (see his letter to the editor of The Northern Star, p. 514 of this volume). From that time on Engels’ articles and reports were regularly published in the newspaper. After his departure from England in August 1844 his reports ceased to appear in the paper but were resumed in the autumn of 1845. (In the summer of that year Engels visited England once more and again met Harney.) He contributed to The Northern Star till 1850.
169 The reference is to the League of the Just, a secret revolutionary organisation founded in 1836 by German proletarianised emigrant craftsmen in Paris. Besides France, League branches existed in Germany, England and Switzerland. A great role in their organisation was played by Weitling. Various theories of utopian communism and socialism, in particular Weitlingism, formed the ideological foundation of the League. The emigrant workers of other nationalities also participated in the League’s activities. The internationalisation of the League and the evolution of its members’ views under the influence of the ideas of Marx and Engels led to its reorganisation into the Communist League in 1847.
By the time of the publication of this article the final verdict of the Weitling case was not yet pronounced. At the end of December 1843, the Supreme Court of Appeal of the Swiss Bund sentenced Weitling to 10 months of imprisonment and 5-year exile from Switzerland on the basis of the appeal of the prosecutor who protested the decision of the court of the Zurich canton.
170 The reference is to the anonymous article The Communists in Germany published in The Times on December 29, 1843, and reprinted in The New Moral World No. 28 on January 6, 1844. Engels cites from this article below.
171 The reference is to the Paris uprising of May 12, 1839, prepared by the secret republican socialist Société des Saisons headed by Louis Auguste Blanqui and Armand Barbès; the uprising was suppressed by troops and the National Guard.
173 Engels alludes to prominent members of the League of the Just: the type-setter Karl Schapper, the watchmaker Joseph Moll and others, connected with the Blanquist secret Société des Saisons which organised the Paris uprising of May 12, 1839. Schapper and Moll took part in the uprising, were prosecuted by the French authorities and compelled to leave for England, where they headed local branches of the League. Engels made their acquaintance in the spring of 1843 in London, as he wrote later in his article “On the History of the Communist League”.
174 On May 27, 1832, a political manifestation took place near the castle of Hambach in Bavarian Pfaiz, which was organised by representatives of the German liberal and radical bourgeoisie. Participants of the “Hambach festival” launched an appeal to fight for the unification of Germany, for the bourgeois freedoms and constitutional reforms.
On July 27, 1834, on the occasion of the anniversary of the July revolution in France a large meeting in defence of the idea of German unification was held in Steinhölzli near Berne (Switzerland) on the initiative of the German emigrants.
175 Rebeccaites — members of the peasant movement in South Wales in 1843-44 demanding the removal of tollgates. The leader of the movement acted under the assumed name of Rebecca, a personage from the Bible. The Rebeccaites acted at night dressed in women’s clothes.
176 Voigtland — the name given to one of the working-class districts in Berlin. Saint Giles’ — a district of London populated by poor people.
177 The double issue of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (No. 1-2) was put out at the end of February 1844.
178 The Final Protocol of the 1834 Vienna Conference of the ministers of the states of the German Confederation envisaged measures for suppressing the liberal and democratic movement in Germany, stricter censorship and mutual support of the states in the struggle against the liberal and radical opposition. This Protocol as well as the decisions of the Federal Diet (the supreme body of the German Confederation) issued in June-July 1832 on the prohibition of popular societies and meetings and also on rendering military aid to those German states which were in danger of an uprising of their subjects was the answer of the ruling circles of Germany to the unrest in the country caused by the July revolution of 1830 in France. The chief inspirer of these police measures was the Austrian Chancellor Metternich.
The Protocol of the Vienna Conference and the reactionary decision of the 1819 Karlsbad Conference of the representatives of the German states, which had been kept secret, were published by the German liberal publicist and historian K. G. Wekker in his book Wichtige Urkunden für den Rechtszustand der deutschen Nation, Mannheim, 1844. Even before the book was put out the contents of the Protocol had been known to democratic circles and published in the German emigrant press, in particular in the Paris Vorwärts! in January 1844. The text was also reprinted in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher at the end of February 1844.
179 The reference is to the trial of O'Connell and eight other leaders of the Repeal movement which started in January 1844. Taking advantage of the waverings among the Irish liberal leaders fearing the scope of the movement, the Tory government wanted to deal a smashing blow at the movement by staging this trial. In February 1844 O'Connell and his followers were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment up to twelve months. However, under the impact of mass protest the House of Lords soon quashed the sentence.
180 The Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy is the first economic work written by Engels. It was one of the principal works published i n the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, and together with the programme articles written by Marx it determined the journal’s communist trend. Marx was very much interested in this work of Engels and wrote a summary of it (see pp. 375-76 of this volume). Later on he mentioned this work more than once in his writings. In the Preface to the first edition of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) Marx called it a “brilliant essay on the critique of economic categories”. Despite the fact that the work contained some traits of immaturity which are inevitable at the earlier stage of the formation of ideas: the influence of Feuerbach’s abstract humanism which had not yet been completely overcome, a one-sided appraisal of the labour theory of value, etc.-shortcomings about which Engels wrote in a general way in his letter to Wilhelm Liebknecht on April 13, 1876-the work contained profound anticipation of some propositions in the new, materialist economic teaching.
The work also produced a strong impression on other representatives of progressive circles. For example, the Berlin physician Julius Waldeck, stressing in his letter to Johann Jacoby the maturity and boldness of the ideas expounded in this work, exclaimed: “Engels has worked a real miracle!” (G. Mayer, Friedrich Engels. Eine Biographie, Bd. 1, S. 171.)
In English the Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy was first published as an appendix to the book: Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1959.
181 The Anti-Corn Law League — see Note 40.
182 The reference is to the New York fire of December 16, 1835.
183 Several pamphlets signed “Marcus” appeared in England, in particular: On the Possibility of Limiting Populousness, printed by John Hill, Black Horse Court, Fleet Street, 1838, and The Theory of Painless Extinction, the publication of which was announced in The New Moral World on August 29, 1840. They expounded the Malthusian misanthropic theory of population. The principal ideas of “Marcus” were also summed up in the anonymous pamphlet: An Essay on Populousness, printed for private circulation; printed for the author, 1838.
184 The reference is to the Poor Law Amendment act of 1834, under which the poor were placed in workhouses named by the people “Poor Law Bastilles”. The repeal of this law was one of the main demands of the Chartists.
A characterisation of this law is given in Marx’s work “Critical Marginal Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian” (see pp. 194-95 of this volume).
185 It is difficult to judge by the available material to which literary plan this statement refers. Possibly Engels had in mind a work on English social history which he intended to write and which he mentions at the end of this work (see p. 443 of this volume). In his series of articles, The Condition of England, which is a brief preliminary outline of this work, Engels characterises the economic teaching of Adam Smith and the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill as a theoretical expression of the domination of private property, egoism, alienation of man, which represent the consummation of the principles following from the Christian world outlook and world order (see pp. 485-87 of this volume). It is probable, however, that he had in mind a plan of some special work on economics. A year later, in particular, Engels worked on a pamphlet about the German economist List (see his letter to Marx of November 19, 1844).
186 Engels has in mind a work on English social history which he planned to write and for which he collected material during his stay in England (November 1842-August 1844). He intended to devote a whole chapter of this work to the condition of the working class in England. Later he changed his plans and decided to write a special work on the English proletariat, which he did upon his return to Germany. His book The Condition of the Working-Class in England was published in Leipzig in 1845 (see this edition, Vol. 4).
187 Engels intended to write The Condition of England as a series of articles for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. The critical analysis of Carlyle’s book Past and Present was, the beginning of it, a sort of introduction, which was to be followed, according to the. author’s plans, by the main sections under the same general title ‘(see p. 468 of this volume). However, two other articles written by Engels on the same subject for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher were never printed in the journal as its publication ceased. These articles were published in two parts in the Paris Vorwärts! some months later, after Engels met Marx in Paris at the end of August 1844 and with the help of his friend became an editor of and a contributor to the newspaper.
The part of the work published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher aroused considerable interest, as Engels himself stated, among the readers in Germany (see Engels’ letter to Marx of early October 1844).
Engels cites from Thomas Carlyle’s book in his own translation into German. In so doing he often abridged the text and does not always mark the omissions by leaders. In some cases he merely renders the contents of some passage or another; the italics in quotations as a rule belong to Engels. Engels gives no references to page numbers; for the readers’ convenience page numbers are given in footnotes in this edition.
188 The reference is to the repeal in 1828 of the Test Act of 1673 and some other acts under which only members of the Church of England could occupy governmental or elective posts, and also to the subsequent abolition of some religious restrictions and of the privileges of the top aristocracy (the Act of Emancipation of 1829, which granted Catholics the right to be elected to Parliament; the Reform Act of 1832). Engels wrote about this in greater detail in the last of the series of his articles The Condition of England (see pp. 490-91 of this volume).
189 Concerning the English translation of David Strauss’ book see Note 140.
190 The Reform Act passed by the British Parliament in June 1832 was directed against the political monopoly of the landed and financial aristocracy and made membership of Parliament open to representatives of the industrial bourgeoisie. The proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie, which formed the main force in the struggle for the reform, did not get any electoral rights.
191 In August 1842 Manchester was the centre of Chartist agitation and of a powerful strike movement.
192 The People’s Charter-see Note 139.
193 The Corn Laws — see Note 40.
194 Laissez-faire, laissez-aller — the formula of the economists who advocated free trade and non-intervention by the state in the sphere of economic relations.
195 By the “great week” is meant the bourgeois July revolution of 1830 in France. The major events took place between July 27 and August 2.
196 Morison’s pills — pills invented by the English quack James Morison and widely advertised by him in the mid-twenties of the nineteenth century as a remedy for all ailments. They were prepared from the juice of certain tropical plants.
197 Engels has in mind the last period of SchelIing’s life and activity when, having renounced many of his progressive ideas, he started preaching a mystical philosophy of open irrationalism. At that time Schelling was Invited to Berlin University to oppose the influence of the Hegelian school (end of 1841-42). For more detail see Engels’ Schelling and Revelation (this edition, Vol. 2).
198 Home-colonies-the name Robert Owen gave to his communist societies.
199 Engels expressed the same hope for subsequent evolution of Carlyle’s views in the radical direction in his note to the concluding chapter of his book: The Condition of the Working-Class in England (1845) (see this edition, Vol. 4). However, his hopes were not justified and he decided to make the following addition to this note in the second German edition (1892): “But the February Revolution made him [Carlyle] an out-and-out reactionary. His righteous wrath against the Philistines turned into sullen Philistine grumbling at the tide of history that cast him ashore.”
200 This and the following article are the continuation of The Condition of England published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (see Note 187). Both articles were evidently written not later than February-March 1844, as can be judged by their contents and, in particular, the references to some facts (rejection of the motion to publish parliamentary minutes, O'Connell’s trial) as events that had taken place several weeks before (see pp. 500 and 506 of this volume). It is possible that Engels ceased writing this series because of the closure of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. From the last lines of the preceding article we see that the central theme of this series was to he the condition of the working class in England.
In English the article was first published in the book: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Articles on Britain, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971.
201 The reference is to the coalition wars of European states against revolutionary and Napoleonic France lasting from 1792 till 1815. England was an active member of these coalitions.
202 According to later historical investigations, in the 15th-17th centuries copyholders (a category of peasants holding land by copy, life and hereditary tenants who paid feudal rent) comprised the majority of the English peasants who had freed themselves from serf bondage. Modern science uses the terms villeins, bordars and cottars to denote the various categories of serf peasants in medieval England.
203 The People’s Charter — see Note 139.
204 In the Introduction to the second German edit 1 ion (1892) of his book The Condition of the Working-Class in England (see this edition, Vol. 4), Engels made .the following addition to the analogous note: “The historical outline of the industrial revolution given above is not exact in certain details; but in 1843-44 no better sources were available.” The more precise information gained from later investigations includes, in particular, the fact that Arkwright was not the inventor of the spinning-jenny but used a number of inventions made by others. judging by the corresponding passages in The Condition of the Working-Class in England, Engels here made use of other books besides Porter’s work: E. Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture of Great Britain, London. 1835; A. Ure, The Cotton Manufacture of Great Britain, Systematically Investigated and Illustrated, Vols. 1-2, London, 1836.
205 The reference is to the democratic correspondence societies organised in various English towns in the 90s of the eighteenth century under the influence of the French revolution. The first — the London Correspondence Society — was founded in 1792. In the autumn of 1793 an attempt was made to unite these organisations by convening a congress in Edinburgh which assumed the name of the Convention. The government answered with reprisals; some members of the Convention were condemned to penal servitude. In 1794 the leaders, of the London Correspondence Society (Thomas Hardy, Horne Tooke and others) were arrested. By the end of the 90s the activity of the correspondence societies ceased; however, their ideas and traditions had a great influence on the further development of the radical movement in England, especially in the period of intensive agitation for the democratic reorganisation of its political system in 1816-23.
206 In English this article was published in the book: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Articles on Britain, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971.
207 The Test Act of 1673 demanded recognition of the dogmas of the Church of England by persons occupying governmental posts. At first directed against attempts to re-establish Catholicism, this Act was subsequently applied against various religious sects and trends which deviated from the dogmas of the Established Church.
The Habeas Corpus Act was passed by the English Parliament in 1679. Concerning this Act see p. 506 of this volume.
The Bill of Rights, passed by the English Parliament in 1689, restricted the rights of the King in Parliament and confirmed the compromise between the landed aristocracy and the top financial and commercial bourgeoisie which had been achieved as a result of the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688.
208 The Magna Carta Libertatum — a document signed by the English King John Lackland on June 15, 1215, under pressure from the rebellious barons. It restricted the rights of the King, mainly in the interests of the big feudal lords, and contained some concessions to the knights and to the towns.
The Reform Act — see Note 190.
209 The reference is to the mass campaign for the electoral reform, the peak year being 1831. The Reform Act was passed as a result of this campaign. (Concerning the Reform Act see Note 190.)
210 The reference is to Thomas Duncombe’s speech in the House of Commons on August 9, 1832 (see Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates 1832, Vol. XIV, pp. 1159-1161).
211 The Act of Emancipation — see Note 188.
212 The reference is to the rejection by the House of Commons on February 12, 1844, of the motion by the’ radical M.P.s, Christie, Duncombe and others, concerning publication of minutes of the parliamentary debates (see Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 1844, Vol. LXXII, pp. 580-600).
213 The Thirty-Nine Articles — the symbol of faith of the Church of England passed by the English Parliament in 1571.
214 The Corporation Act, passed in 1661, demanded recognition of the dogmas of the Church of England by persons holding elective posts (mostly in municipal administration). It was repealed in 1828.
Concerning the repeal of the Test Act see Note 188.
216 The reference is to Thomas Gibson’s speech in the House of Commons on February 14, 1844 (see Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 1844, Vol. LXXII, p. 798).
218 The reference is to the banning by the English authorities of the mass meeting in Clontarf fixed by the Irish Repealers for October 5, 1843. The government concentrated troops in the region to prevent the protest demonstration. In these circumstances O'Connell and his followers decided to cancel the meeting; this encouraged the English authorities. who regarded it as a sign of weakness, and they decided to bring the Irish leaders to trial. The trial took place in January-February 1844 (concerning the trial see Note 179).
219 The reference is to the National Charter Association, concerning which see Note 143.
220 Re Anti-Corn Law League — see Note 40.
221 The reference is to the trials of the leaders of the National Charter Association and the participants in the strike movement of August 1842, ordered by the authorities in various towns of England after the suppression of the movement. There were mass reprisals. Out of more than 1,500 persons (mostly workers) arrested more than a half were put on trial. Sentences as a rule were very severe. Thus in Stafford (October 1842) fifty accused were sentenced to transportation (many of them for life) and 180 to various terms of imprisonment. A large group of Chartist leaders headed by Feargus O'Connor were also sentenced, their trial being held in March 1843 in Lancaster (later the sentence was quashed owing to mass pressure). Besides the towns mentioned by Engels trials were held in Chester, Liverpool and some other places in the autumn of 1842.
222 Carolina — the criminal code of the Emperor Charles V (Constitutio criminalis Carolina) passed by the Reichstag in Regensburg in 1532; it was marked by the extreme severity of the penalties which it prescribed.
223 This passage proves that Engels intended to continue the series The Condition of England (see Note 200). He evidently planned to describe the condition of the English working class and examine the social, including labour, legislation that existed in England.
224 This letter written by Engels to the editor of The Northern Star is incomplete: only the part of it which was published in the newspaper’s editorial article on May 4, 1844, “The ‘Movement’, at Home and Abroad”, has survived. Without mentioning the author’s name, the editor of The Northern Star introduced him to the readers as the author of an essay on “Continental Communism” (they had in mind Engels’ article: “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent” which had been reprinted in the newspaper). Engels’ offer to contribute to the newspaper met the intentions of its editor Harney, who wanted to impart an international character to the newspaper by extending information on foreign affairs, as the editorial article mentioned above stated. From that moment Engels worked as an official reporter of the Chartist newspaper. The same issue carried Engels’ note on the situation in Prussia marked: “From our own Correspondent”, which (sometimes with slight alterations) was used in respect of all the material he sent to The Northern Star. Articles written by Engels were printed in the section: “Movements Abroad” under the editorial headings denoting the country the information referred to (“Germany”, “Prussia”, “Bavaria”, “Poland”, “Russia”, “Switzerland”, “France”, etc.). Sometimes several articles by Engels were printed in the same issue under different headings (e. g., on May 18 and 25, 1844). it is possible that in such cases the editors themselves divided the material of a single report into several parts.
225 In the course of his further study of the position in Germany Engels came to the conclusion that in the historical conditions obtaining the establishment of a centralised and not of a federal republic would meet the aims of the consistent struggle against political disunion and the remnants of medieval particularism in all spheres of social life. During the revolution of 1848-49 Marx and Engels, Germany into a in contraposition to the petty-bourgeois republicans, who adhered to the principle of federalism, upheld the demand of transforming single democratic republic.
226 The work under this title was not published by David Strauss.
227 The reference is apparently to the following pamphlets by Adam Gurowski: La vérité sur la Russie, 1834 and La civilisation et la Russie, 1840.
228 One of the public buildings of Ludwig of Bavaria, built in 1841 near abode of the German mythological heroes. The palace contained a collection of Regensburg, was named by him “Walhalla” after the legendary posthumous sculptures of famous men in Germany. The King himself wrote a guide book for it: Walhalla’s Genossen, gesehildert durch König Ludwig den Ersten von Bayern, dem Gründer Walhall’s, München, 1842. Poems written by Ludwig of Bavaria provide a sample of meaningless and pretentious poetry; they were published in 1842.
229 The reference is to the wars waged by the tsarist government against the peoples of the North Caucasus (Adyghei, Chechens, Avars, Lezghins, etc.) fighting for their independence. In the 1820s the liberation struggle of these peoples against the tsarist colonisers and the arbitrary rule of the local feudal lords was headed by Shamil, who was proclaimed Imam of Daghestan in 1834. The movement reached its peak in the 40s of the nineteenth century and was suppressed in 1859.
230 The canton of Vaud (German: Waadt) was known for its democratic traditions.
231 Prior to 1798 Switzerland was a union of small autonomous cantons in which political sway was exercised by the mountain patriarchal cantons headed by an aristocratic oligarchy. In 1798 a Helvetic Republic dependent on France was set up in Switzerland which was at the time occupied by the troops of the French Directory. Political privileges of the old cantons were abolished. However, the Treaty of Alliance of 1814 was approved by the Congress of Vienna, 1814-15, which restored the former sovereignty of the cantons; in the majority of them the clerical aristocratic elements again came to the fore.
232 In 1830 the movement for democratic reforms in Switzerland became more widespread under the influence of the July revolution in France. In the twelve north-western cantons, which were more advanced, the power went to the bourgeoisie, but its aspirations for the unification of the country encountered resistance from the backward mountain cantons.
233 This provision of Engels came true in three years. In November 1847 a civil war broke out in Switzerland between the aristocratic cantons united into a separate confederation known as the Sonderbund (the treaty was concluded at the end of 1845) and the north-western bourgeois cantons, in the course of which the Sonderbund was defeated. Bourgeois reforms were carried out in the Swiss cantons. Under the Constitution of 1848 Switzerland became a confederation.
In 1844, under the influence of the ruling clerical aristocratic circles the canton of Valais entered the Sonderbund. Radicals in Valais again came to power after the Sonderbund broke up.
Engels’ article “The Civil War in Switzerland” was a response to the events of 1847 (see this edition, Vol. 6).
234 During the July revolution of 1830, which led to the downfall of the Bourbon dynasty, Jacques Laffitte, a representative of moderate liberal circles of the financial bourgeoisie and a member of the Chamber, which assumed power in Paris, helped to secure the accession to the throne of Louis Philippe, the Duke of Or1éans.
235 The liberation struggle of the Algerians led by Emir Abd-el-Kader against the French colonisers lasted with interruptions from 1832 to 1847. Taking advantage of their military superiority, the French conquered Abd-el-Kader’s state in Western Algeria in the period between 1839 and 1844. However, Abd-el-Kader continued the struggle, resorting to guerrilla warfare and relying on the help of the Sultan of Morocco. When the latter was defeated in the Franco-Moroccan war in 1844, Abd-el-Kader hid in the oases of the Sahara. An uprising in Western Algeria in 1845-47, which was suppressed by the French colonisers, was the last stage of this struggle.
236 Caliphs-local rulers in Abd-el-Kader’s state, subject to the central government.
237 The reference is to the Divorce Bill drafted in 1842 by Friedrich Savigny, one of the founders of the reactionary historical school of law, who from 1842 to 238 1848 was High Chancellor of Prussia.
238 Although the Divorce Bill was kept secret, the Rheinische Zeitung edited by Marx published the Bill on October 20, 1842, thus initiating a broad discussion on the subject. on December 19, Marx’s article “The Divorce Bill” (see this edition, Vol. 1), in which he criticised the Bill, was published. The publication of the Bill in the Rheinische Zeitung was one of the reasons for the persecution of the paper, which finally led to its banning in March 1843.
239 Landtags- provincial and local assemblies of estates established in Prussia in 1823; they consisted in the main of representatives of the nobility; urban and village communities had very small representation. Landtags were convened by the King and their functions were restricted to discuss-ion of bills and to questions of local economy and administration.
240 This report had the following paragraph added to it by the editors: “In addition to the above, we give the following paragraph from the Sun: We learn from Breslau on the 9th inst. that the weavers have returned to their work after having obtained an increase of wages. They burst in, during their excursions, the doors of several wood-rangers’ houses, and carried off the fowling-pieces and ammunition, but without touching anything else."'
241 On the song of Silesian weavers, sung by the participants of the uprising of June 4-6, 1844, see Note 44.
242 This draft of the young Engels’ verse drama Cola di Rienzi only became known after Volume 2, containing his early works, letters and literary experiments, had already gone to press. This draft is therefore being published in the present volume as a supplement, although chronologically it belongs to Volume 2.
The draft manuscript was discovered among the posthumous papers of the German poet Adolf Schults, a native of Elberfeld, by Michael Knieriem, director of Frederick Engels House in Wuppertal. Schults belonged to a group of Wuppertal writers and art-lovers which included many of Engels’ fellow pupils from the Elberfeld high school who kept in touch with him during his residence (from July 1838 to March 1841) ;n Bremen, where he was gaining practical experience with a commercial firm and was also engaged in literary activities. Knieriem arranged the first publication of this drama in co-operation with Hans Pelger, director of Karl Marx House in Trier (see Michael Knieriem, Friedrich Engels: Cola di Rienzi. Ein unbehannter dramatischer Entwurf. Herausgegeben vom Friedrich-Engels-Haus, Wuppertal, und Karl-Marx-Haus, Trier, Trier, 1974). The draft was evidently intended for an opera libretto, as may be gathered from a letter of September 30, 1840, sent by Engels’ schoolfriend Carl de Haas to Schults and other Elberfeld writers in which there is a reference to Engels’ intention of writing the text of an opera at the request of one of his Elberfeld friends. This is also borne out by the style of the work, parts of which are specially adapted for performance (ducts, trios, and settings for chorus), and in which provision is made for the insertion of musical episodes. The draft was in all probability written between the end of 1840 and the beginning of 1841, since one page of the manuscript bears a short passage in Hebrew from the Old Testament which was also quoted in a letter of February 22, 184 1, from Engels to Friedrich Graeber (see present edition, Vol. 2, p. 526).
Engels took the plot for his drama from events in Rome in the middle of the 14th century — the struggle which developed between the feudal aristocracy on the one hand and the merchant and artisan population on the other. In May 1347, as a result of a popular uprising, a republic was proclaimed in Rome with “people’s tribune” Cola di Rienzi at its head. With Rienzi, firm measures against the nobility and a desire to affirm the principle of popular sovereignty and achieve the unification of Italy were combined with fantastic notions about the restoration of ancient Rome’s grandeur and world domination. Banished from Rome at the end of 1347 as a result of intrigues by the feudal magnates, Rienzi was reinstated in August 1354 with the aid of mercenary troops commanded by foreign condottieri. The people rose against Rienzi, however, resenting his despotic behaviour, his ambitiousness, and the increased tax burden, a measure which was forced on him by the costs of paying the mercenaries and conducting the war with the aristocrats. On October 8, 1354, an insurrection flared up against him and he was killed. The action in Engels’ drama deals with the second period of Rienzi’s rule.
The manuscript is a rough draft. In several places, there are author’s corrections, erasures and additions in the margin. On one page, the initials “F. E.” and Engels’ signature are to be seen in the margin. Some drawings made by the author on several pages refer to the plot of the drama, while others are unconnected with it (there are also some cartoons). The last pages contain a variant of the beginning of Act One, Scene One (in the present edition, this has been printed after the corresponding first version and has been separated from it, as from the continuation, by a horizontal line).
243 In mid-June 1844 Jenny Marx with her baby girl Jenny born on May 1 left Paris, where she had lived with her husband since October 1843, for Trier to visit her mother Caroline von Westphalen. Jenny with her daughter and a wet-nurse returned to Paris in September 1844.
244 At the end of 1843 Caroline von Westphalen left Kreuznach, where she had lived after the death of her husband, Ludwig von Westphalen, for Trier. Apparently, she lived in Trier for a time in the house of the tax-collector Wettendorf.
245 An allusion to the reverberations of the Silesian uprising of weavers of June 4-6, 1844. In Breslau, the capital of Silesia (Polish: Wroclaw), new popular disturbances took place on June 6 and 7.
246 Jenny had in mind the strained relations between Marx and his mother caused by Marx’s refusal to enter the civil service and his choice, after graduating from the University, of a type of activity which from his mother’s point of view could bring neither material welfare nor a stable social position. The fame brought to Marx by the publication of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher and a certain improvement in his material condition made Henriette Marx slightly change her attitude towards Marx and his family.
247 An apparent reference to the work Marx was planning to write on Bruno Bauer and other Young Hegelians (see Note 30). This plan was realised later, when together with Engels he wrote The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism (see this edition, Vol. 4).
248 Only that part of this letter has survived which Marx decided to publish in the Paris newspaper Vorwärts!, without mentioning the author’s name, under the title “From the Letter of a German Lady”. In his letter to Ludwig Feuerbach of August 11, 1844, he wrote that the excerpt had been taken from his wife’s letter (see this volume, p. 357). The publication of this letter was prompted by an attempt made on Ying Frederick William IV on July 26, 1844, by H. L. Tschech (see Note 46).
249 Marx’s letters to his wife mentioned here have not been found.
250 The reference is to the traditional religious rites connected with the cult of the so-called Holy Coat of Trier (supposedly stripped off Christ before his crucifixion) kept in Trier Catholic Cathedral. This cult attracted many pilgrims from other German towns.
251 The German radical publicist Georg Jung and other friends of Marx in Cologne took upon themselves to sell a certain number of copies of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher which Marx had received instead of author’s emoluments and instead of wages for his work as an editor. Some of the copies sent from Switzerland by boat were confiscated by the Baden authorities. On July 31, 1844, Jung wrote to Marx that he had posted Marx 800 francs in compensation of the confiscated copies.