The Young Karl Marx

"What is interesting is the methodological angle here. This is part of my view that there is no timeless ‘young Marx.’ I’m interested in methodology, and we’re back to Oxford again. My DPhil is from Oxford too — I knew Berlin, and worked on the third edition of his biography of Marx; I knew McLellan, and I went to Jerry Cohen’s papers in Oxford. David Leopold is currently at Oxford. He’s much younger — he was a student of Cohen’s, but you would never know that from reading his book. Leopold’s is the first biographical/contextual account of Marx in any language that I’m aware of that seriously gets to grips with the political context of this highly philosophised politics of the late 1830s and 1840s. To do that, you have to go back to the 1770s and the origins of liberal ‘thinking’ in Germany and sort that out as a political historian — rather than as a philosopher or someone interested in the history of ideas as such. This was the first book that really reviewed works like Marx’s “On the Jewish Question,” which was an article published in 1844. It’s still one of his most difficult texts and not about what people think it’s about. Leopold resolves that for me with a thoroughly contextual study, going back decades earlier and sorting out what exactly the Jewish question was. I found that absolutely fascinating. This wasn’t any simple question about anti-Semitism. Going back to the 1770s and possibly earlier, the question was, ‘how do you exist in a society that is pre-constitutional and Christian without being a believing, confessing, doctrinal Christian?’ It is very recent in European history, even in British history, for religious tests of civil status and for full membership in the community to have dropped out. In the Rhineland, where Marx grew up, they lived under Napoleonic rule for a decade. There was quite a lot of Jewish emancipation. When the Confederation of the Rhine was absorbed into the kingdom of Prussia, the Prussians wanted to crack down and get Jews back in the ghetto, out of the universities, out of the professions. Marx’s father became a Lutheran. This sort of activity was going on. The Jewish question was not just a question about Jews, it was a question about religion, belief, and social conformity, and how conformist to conventional culture and religious tests you needed to be to be a member of the community — and, also, what sort of exceptions should be allowed. That’s right. Being involved with the Jewish question for liberals around Marx meant supporting their inclusion in the professions and supporting some kinds of exceptions, getting rid of extra taxes and whatever else was being used as a restriction. So you could no longer require baptism as a pre-requisite for a social role. It evolved, at that point, into a kind of liberal inclusivity or multiculturalism that we would be familiar with. It just happens that this was focused on Jews. What Marx did was to parody this, and to suggest, in rather a complicated way, that economics matters here and that liberal multiculturalists are not addressing the economic inequalities of society when they argue merely for liberal inclusivity. I think what he’s saying—though not everyone agrees with this interpretation—is that you can flatter yourself for your liberalism in this way and ignore economic issues. You can then fail to realise the way that bad aspects of capitalism are projected onto Jews. Liberals are saying Jews have lots of commercial practices, that’s fine, because that’s historically what they have done; but the anti-Semitism of the time got going because it portrayed Jews as money-lenders and sharp traders and so on. What Marx says is that there is a very interesting politics of capitalism going on here: some people who are liberal or conservative apologists for capitalism are failing to recognise themselves in the kind of activities that they project onto Jews. Anti-Semites claim that Jews are ‘dirty’ in doing these activities. What Marx is saying is that if they’re dirty, you’re dirty, too. “On the Jewish Question” is a very complex parody and hard to read. Leopold gives you a lot of context to help make sense of it. There are multiple Marxes and they are all constructions. Leopold didn’t get into a TARDIS and go back to the 1770s or 1840s. He’s making contextual sense out of this work, and resolving various puzzles that we have about Marx. I’m much more interested in this sort of historical account than in Cohen’s reductionism, taking a very limited number of sentences out of a very limited number of texts. For those who are interested in that kind of project, that was what they were interested in, and Marx was that kind of thinker. I think it would have been fairer to say ‘these are philosophical propositions that I have extracted from somebody’ so that others don’t make the mistake of thinking that the historical biographical Marx was really like that. I find Leopold’s approach much more interesting and much more vivid. It also highlights that much of what Marx was doing has similarities with what we do in political writing today, which also involves a lot of parody and satire. Reading Marx in context helps me think about our contemporary political problems much more than reading him out of context. Much more political thinking is like political contextualism than it is like logical positivism. For me, the sad thing about Leopold’s book is that it stops in 1844, which is when some of Marx’s more exciting ideas get going. The politics becomes more complex and less a matter of isolated writing of manuscripts published for very small numbers of people. When you get to 1845 through to 1848, Marx and Engels are involved in contexts which are physically outside Germany and are more involved with other people who are émigré Germans and exiles, and less involved with things that are only current in Berlin and a few places around there. Essentially, after 1844, they broadened their horizons and got involved with more activists in different places and different kinds of people. I’m not sure if Leopold will go on and look at that period, but I congratulate him on a superb look at Marx up to late 1844, a period when Engels was hardly involved."