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  For Hegel, the state was the means by which the individual will was reconciled with the grander imperatives of universal Reason, through obedience to the law: ‘in duty the individual finds his liberation… from mere natural impulse… In duty the individual acquires his substantive freedom.’10 Such freedom came when man's subjective sensibilities were aligned with the progressive development of Spirit, as it manifests itself through the medium of the state. As Hegel put it in his Philosophy of Right (1820):

  The state is the actuality of concrete freedom. But concrete freedom consists in this, that personal individuality and its particular interests not only achieve their complete development and gain explicit recognition for their right (as they do in the sphere of the family and civil society), but, for one thing, they also pass over of their own accord into the interest of the universal; they even recognize it as their own substantive mind; they take it as their end and aim and are active in its pursuit.11

  In the Hegelian template, the modern state, in contrast to ancient states based around slavery, represented ‘the realization of freedom, an end in itself, “the divine idea as it exists on earth” and the reality which alone gives value to the individual life’.12 In theory, the modern state embodied progress, reason and the Idea of freedom.

  And there seemed to be a brief moment, in the aftermath of the 1806 Jena defeat, when the Prussian state might in practice signify that Hegelian ideal of rational freedom as set out in The Philosophy of Right. For this was the era of liberal reform, which had been forced upon Frederick William III by his military humiliation in 1806 and then implemented by his progressive-minded ministers, Baron Karl von Stein and Prince Karl August von Hardenberg. Serfdom was reformed, hereditary service abolished, Jews emancipated, economic controls freed up and gentle moves made in the direction of democratic representation. As part of this liberalization project, Hegel was brought from the University of Heidelberg to the newly founded Berlin University (where he held the chair of philosophy until his death in 1831 from cholera) to give the movement his intellectual imprimatur. ‘Hegel in turn hailed the reformed Prussian state as an example of a state that had attained world-historical stature by making the political actualization of Reason its inner purpose and essence,’ according to Hegel's intellectual biographer John Edward Toews.13 And there is no doubt that Hegel's philosophical elevation of the state granted a rich, spiritual dignity to the bureaucratic apparatus of Frederick William III.

  His advocacy of the state as a living entity, possessing in its laws and political structures a defined purpose based upon Reason and freedom to which individuals had to submit themselves (so that their own will self-consciously became a part of the common will), dramatically elevated its purpose. The state was not just a necessary evil to protect private property, defend the realm and manage the rule of law. Instead, it now had a far loftier purpose encompassing no less than the realization of absolute reason. And while the finer phenomenology of Hegelian philosophy might have been lost on some of the Berlin court, they quickly realized the political opportunities this reverence for authority presented. ‘His writings provided an exalted legitimation for the Prussian bureaucracy, whose expanding power within the executive during the reform era demanded justification,’ according to the historian of Prussia, Christopher Clark. ‘The state was no longer just the site of sovereignty and power, it was the engine that makes history, or even the embodiment of history itself.’14 Yet, by the 1820s, the era of Stein, Hardenburg and liberal reform had fallen prey to a court counter-attack by the reactionary old guard. In the face of a growing tide of Romanticism and nationalism, Frederick William III retreated towards monarchical conservatism. But even as the Prussian state rolled out the oppressive 1819 Karlsbad Decrees and curtailed press and legal safeguards – all a long way from Hegel's vision of a free, liberal, rational state – the same, now anachronistic Hegelian justifications were deployed.

  Hegel's radical protégés, meanwhile, offered a more progressive interpretation of their master's work. Facing the actual, revanchist philistinism of the Prussian state – with its growing authoritarianism, religious restrictions and diminishing possibility of constitutional reform – many of Hegel's disciples could not accept that their mentor (who had once planted a Liberty Tree in honour of the French Revolution) really believed this state of affairs to be the pinnacle of reason. Indeed, history seemed to be moving in a decidedly unprogressive direction when, as Engels put it, in 1840 ‘orthodox sanctimony and absolutist feudal reaction ascended the throne’ with the succession of Frederick William IV.15 If not quite a subscriber to the divine right of kings, Frederick William IV certainly held an exalted idea of Christian monarchy, with the sovereign linked to the people by a mystical, sacred bond which no parliament or constitution could sully. Frederick William IV's watch was to be no epoch of progress – instead, a sturdy commitment to tradition, continuity and hierarchy. And it was increasingly apparent that the alternative, more radical Hegelianism being preached on the Prussian campuses was at odds with such conservative dogma.

  When it came to Hegel, the danger was in the dialectic. ‘Whoever placed the emphasis on the Hegelian system could be fairly conservative in both spheres; whoever regarded the dialectical method as the main thing could belong to the most extreme opposition, both in religion and politics,’ was how Engels later described the difference. This ‘dialectical progression’ was how the march of history happened: each age and its ruling idea was negated and subsumed by the following epoch. ‘Position, opposition, composition’, as a young Karl Marx explained. ‘Or to speak Greek we have the thesis, antithesis and synthesis. For those who do not know the Hegelian language, we shall give the ritual formula: affirmation, negation, negation of the negation.’16 Thus, the realization of Spirit in history involved a perpetual critique of every preceding political system and form of consciousness – each era successively undermined by the tension within itself – until rationality and freedom prevailed. ‘Therein lay the true significance and the revolutionary character of Hegelian philosophy,’ as Engels put it, ‘… all successive historical states are only transitory stages in the endless course of development of human society from the lower to the higher… Against it [the dialectic] nothing is final, absolute, sacred.’17

  This interpretation offered an extraordinarily powerful ideological solvent. For Hegel's more radical readership there now existed no immutable, eternal truths: every civilization had its own realities, philosophies and religion, all liable to be negated and subsumed. What was more, this was as much the case for Hegel's own thinking as for any previous philosophy. The publicly funded Berlin professor had made the crucial mistake of thinking that the reformist-era Prussian state – of Stein, Hardenberg and Humboldt – might have been the culmination of Reason in history. But, in fact, it was just another transitory stage now set to be negated. For those sceptical students sitting through Schelling's lectures, Hegel's philosophical method provided not a justification of the Prussian status quo, but tools for a progressive critique of the Hohenzollern state. To these ‘Left’ or ‘Young Hegelians’, Hegel's philosophy became a spur to action, his writings a demand for liberal reform.

  As was so often the case with the origins of early socialism, it was religion which generated the sharpest attacks. Just as Hegel had regarded the Prussian state as the final fulfilment of Reason, so his Lutheran faith had led him to endorse a narrow conception of Protestant Christianity dominant in the 1820s as the summum bonum of spiritual life. Once again it appeared that history had conveniently managed to culminate precisely in the cultural and religious practices of Hegel's own era. And, just as with politics so with religion, the Young Hegelians criticized Hegel for not appreciating his own historicism, for not understanding that what he considered the realization of freedom was simply another step along the path towards the Idea. How, they asked, was modern European Christianity different from Roman paganism or the Hindu faith of ancient India? Was not each simply a product of it
s times? In an anonymous critique of Schelling's lectures, published in Leipzig in 1842 under the title ‘Schelling and Revelation’, Engels announced how the Young Hegelians would ‘no longer regard Christianity’ as off-limits for critical investigation. ‘All the basic principles of Christianity, and even of what has hitherto been called religion itself, have fallen before the inexorable criticism of reason.’18

  As we have seen, the groundwork for this religious critique had been laid by David Strauss's reinterpretation of the Gospels as myth. Bruno Bauer, a theologian and philosopher who had studied under Hegel, took the critique a stage further with a detailed analysis of Christianity as a cultural construct. Known as ‘a very decided man who, under a cold exterior, burns with an inner fire’, Bauer thought the dialectic could progress only through a process of violent intellectual assault. Each age's verities needed to be ripped down in the face of reason. And such a process of rational assault led Bauer to conclude that in the modern era Christianity was an obstacle to the development of self-conscious freedom. The worship of an exterior God, the submission to creed and dogma, alienated man from his true essence. There could be no chance of human self-consciousness or realization of freedom as long as the ritual demands of mystical subservience remained in place. Summoning the dialectic, Bauer declared that such alienation was hindering the onward march of history and had to be transcended.

  Behind this lofty metaphysics lurked a direct political challenge to the Christian principles that legitimized the Hohenzollern monarchy and its right to govern. Once regarded as the very bulwark of the state, Hegelian philosophy was now being deployed to undermine Prussia's religio-political foundations. Unsurprisingly, Frederick William IV was appalled and, in March 1842, he had the subversive Bruno Bauer dismissed from his post at the University of Bonn. But it would take more than a departmental demotion to temper the Young Hegelian advance. The next salvo had already been launched by Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity (1841). It finally expunged any conservative remnants of Hegelianism. As Engels recalled:

  With one blow it pulverized the contradiction, by plainly placing materialism on the throne again… Nothing exists outside nature and man, and the higher beings our religious fantasies have created are only the fantastic reflection of our own essence. The spell was broken; the ‘system’ was exploded… One must have experienced the liberating effect of this book for oneself to get an idea of it. Enthusiasm was universal: we were all Feuerbachians for a moment.19

  Feuerbach too was a former pupil of Hegel and just as keen as Bauer to apply the dialectical method to Christianity. Expanding upon Bauer's notion of alienation, he argued that the advance of religion must be understood as the progressive separation of man from his human, sensuous self. In the Christian God-head man had created a deity in his own image and likeness. Yet so replete with perfection was this objectified God that man started to abase himself before its spiritual authority. Consequently, the original power relationship was reversed. ‘Man – this is the secret of religion – projects his essence into objectivity and then makes himself an object of this projected image of himself that is thus converted into a subject.’ And the more fervently man worshipped this exterior God, the more internally impoverished he became. It was a zero-sum relationship: for the deity to prosper, man had to be degraded. ‘Religion by its very essence drains man and nature of substance, and transfers this substance to the phantom of an other-worldly God, who in turn then graciously permits man and nature to receive some of his superfluity,’ as Engels put it. ‘Lacking awareness and at the same time faith, man can have no substance, he is bound to despair of truth, reason and nature…’ In his 1844 A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Karl Marx would put it more succinctly: ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’20

  True to the critical ethos of the Young Hegelians, Feuerbach then performed intellectual parricide by turning his fire on his former tutor, Hegel himself. What, Feuerbach wanted to know, was the substantive difference between the theology of Christianity and the philosophy (or ‘rational mysticism’) of Hegel? Were they not both metaphysical belief systems involving self-alienation – in order to elevate God in one case and the even more intangible Geist in the other? ‘Speculative theology [i.e. Hegelianism] distinguishes itself from ordinary theology by the fact that it transfers the divine essence into this world. That is, speculative theology envisions, determines, and realizes in this world the divine essence transported by ordinary theology out of fear and ignorance into another world.’21 Philosophy was nothing more than religion brought into the realm of thought.

  In terms of separating man from the realities of life, Feuerbach suggested, there was little to choose between Hegelian philosophy and the Christian religion. Feuerbach advocated an end to both and, with it, the transference of Christ and Geist to humanity. In place of God or the Idea, he wanted Man: anthropology not theology. ‘Whoever fails to give up the Hegelian philosophy, fails to give up theology. The Hegelian doctrine, that nature or reality is posited by the Idea, is merely the rational expression of the theological doctrine that nature is created by God.’22 And both needed to be shed for man to regain his true essence, his ‘species-being’. The idealistic Hegel had made the mistake of deriving being from thought, rather than thought from being, and, as such, had turned reality on its head. What Feuerbach urged was not idealism but materialism: in place of the metaphysical theorizing of Hegel and ethereal march of Spirit, a concentration on the lived reality of man's natural, corporeal, ‘immediate’ existence.

  *

  This was all heady stuff for a young artillery officer meant to be learning his way around a smooth-bore six-pounder and seven-pound howitzer. Yet the allure of parade-ground drilling and projectile arithmetic had quickly paled for Engels. Allowed, as a volunteer with a generous private income, to live in private lodgings rather than barracks, he spent his days at the lecture halls, reading rooms and beer cellars of demi-monde Berlin. There was only one element of military life he truly relished. ‘My uniform, incidentally, is very fine,’ he wrote to his sister Marie soon after his arrival in Berlin, ‘blue with a black collar adorned with two broad yellow stripes, and black, yellow-striped facings together with red piping round the coat tails. Furthermore, the red shoulder-straps are edged with white. I assure you the effect is most impressive and I'm worthy to be put on show.’ Engels liked nothing more than wowing polite society with his glittering attire. ‘Because of this the other day I shamefully embarrassed Ruckert, the poet, who is here at present. I sat down right in front of him as he was giving a poetry reading and the poor fellow was so dazzled by my shining buttons that he quite lost the thread of what he was saying… I shall soon be promoted to bombardier, which is a sort of non-commissioned officer, and I shall get gold braid to wear on my facings.’23

  He also acquired a dog – a handsome spaniel playfully named ‘Namenloser’ or ‘Nameless’ – which he took to his favourite Rhineland restaurant to fill up on pork and sauerkraut. ‘He had a great talent for boozing and if I go to a restaurant in the evening, he always sits near me and has his share, or makes himself at home at everybody else's table.’ Too skittish to be trained properly, the dog had managed to learn only one trick. ‘When I say “Namenloser” (that's his name) – “there's an aristocrat!” he goes wild with rage and growls hideously at the person I show him.’ In 1840s Berlin this could have been a rather regular occurrence.24

  In addition to evenings with his growling spaniel, Engels would pass his time thrashing out matters philosophical with the Young Hegelians over a glass of the capital's industrial-strength white beer. ‘We would meet at Stehely's and, in the evenings, at this or that Bavarian ale-house in Friedrichsstadt or, if we were in funds, at a wineshop in the Postrasse…’25 At various times the inner circle included Bruno Bauer and his brother Edgar, the philosopher of ‘ego’ Max Stirner, th
e historian and Buddhist scholar Karl Köppen, political science lecturer Karl Nauwerck, journalist Eduard Meyen, renegade University of Halle lecturer Arnold Ruge and others. Their iconoclastic ethos extended seamlessly from the philosophical realm to their public personae. Known as ‘Die Freien’ (‘The Free’) – or ‘beer literati’, as Bauer termed them – this band of aggressive, arrogant intellectuals ostentatiously discarded modern morality, religion and bourgeois propriety.26 In his memoirs, the proto-communist and apprentice typesetter Stephan Born recalled this world of ‘Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner and the circle of noisy characters that surrounded them, who had called attention to themselves through their open dealings with emancipated women’. Edgar Bauer's penchant for pornography was especially disturbing to the strait-laced young Born. ‘Already just upon entering his room, I was shocked by the obscene lithographs he had hung on the wall; and the conversation he began with me as he read the proofs [of his novella] was no less repulsive in character.’27

  Engels, always liberal-minded in matters of sex and morality, embraced the lifestyle of The Free with alacrity. If his father had hoped that Engels might shed his youthful radicalism in Berlin's rigid court society, he could not have been more disappointed. Instead, Engels now dropped the prevaricating idealism of Young Germany (just as he had earlier discarded the religiosity of the Graeber brothers) and gave his heart and head to Bauer, Stirner, Köppen et al.28 – with the attraction of the circle no doubt enhanced by the terrible shock such counter-culture camaraderie would have given his respectable parents. So enamoured was Engels with his new band of friends that he sketched a picture of The Free at one of their debauched drinking sessions. There are fallen chairs, half-empty wine bottles, an enraged Edgar Bauer smashing a table, a cool Max Stirner smoking, a grumpy (or sozzled) Koppen sitting at the table and a pugnacious Bruno Bauer marching towards Arnold Ruge with his fists raised. Rows, fights and splits were very much a part of the Young Hegelian ethic. In bitter tones Ruge later described this moment as Bauer and his cohorts ‘screamed insult after insult in the Weinstube [wine cellar] and huddled together about me as I left. All this they find brilliant and free.’29 Floating in the sky above the tussle are a squirrel, symbolizing the Prussian minister Eichhorn (in a play on the German Eichhörnchen for ‘squirrel’) and a guillotine, which is either an acknowledgement of Bruno Bauer as the ‘Robespierre of Theology’ or a signature reference to Engels himself.