KARL MARX

116 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
the French Revolution, but Marx, pursuing the theme of his On the Jewish
Question, declared that it was only a ruthless selfishness that had been
really emancipated.
On the significance of French materialism, Marx also disagreed with
Bauer who held that the materialist movement in France was a direct
descendant of Spinoza's metaphysical monism. Marx wished to emphasise
the anti-metaphysical humanist aspects of French materialists such as
Helvetius and Holbach. He traced the influence on socialism and communism
of the materialist doctrine of the eighteenth-century social
philosophers:
If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc., from the world of the
senses and the experience gained in it, the empirical world must be
arranged so that in it man experiences and gets used to what is really
human and becomes aware of himself as man. If correctly-understood
interest is the principle of all morals, man's private interest must be
made to coincide with the interest of humanity. If man is unfree in the
materialist sense, i.e., is free not through the negative power to avoid
this or that, but through the positive power to assert his true individuality,
crime must be not punished in the individual, but the anti-social
source of crime must be destroyed, and each man must be given
social scope for the vital manifestation of his being. If man is shaped
by his surroundings, his surroundings must be made human. If man is
social by nature, he will develop his true nature only in society, and
the strength of his nature must be measured not by the strength of
separate individuals but by the power of society. 202
The Holy Family was little read at the time of its publication and was
certainly not one of Marx's major works. But several of the themes of
what was to become 'the materialistic conception of history' appeared
there for the first time and Marx, re-reading the book after twelve years,
was able to comment: 'I was pleasantly surprised to find that we do not
need to be ashamed of our work, although the cult of Feuerbach strikes
me as very amusing.' 203
Before The Holy Family was published Marx had to leave Paris. The
Prussian Government became more insistent in its complaints about Vorwiirts
and even Louis Philippe is said to have explained: 'We must purge
Paris of German philosophers!' On 25 January 1845 Guizot, the Minister
of the Interior, closed down Vorwiirts and issued an order expelling its
leading personnel, including Marx, Heine and Ruge. Marx took a little
longer than the twenty-four hours grace given him and he left for Liege
and Brussels on 2 February taking with him Heinrich Burgers, a young
radical journalist from the Vorwiirts staff. The two kept up their spirits
by singing choruses throughout the journey. Jenny sold off the furniture