KARL MARX

BRUSSELS 127
political half which shows that he intended to continue the themes of his
Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and essays On the Jewish Question by
writing a detailed critique of the institutions of the liberal state viewed
as a stage leading towards the abolition of both the state and of civil
society." Engels had urged Marx even before he left Paris to finish the
book as 'people's minds are ripe and we must strike while the iron is
hot'. 7 Marx received many letters of inquiry and encouragement and
Engels even announced in the New Moral World that it was in print. 8
Engels, who was sitting in his parents' home in Barmen finishing off his
Condition of the Working Classes in England and in close contact with the
Rhineland socialists, produced a constant stream of publishing projects.
On two of these Marx agreed to collaborate: a critique of Friedrich List
as the chief proponent of protective tariffs as a means to ensure Germany's
economic development; and a series of translations of Utopian socialists
with critical introductions, beginning with Fourier, Owen, Morelly and
the Saint-Simonians. But neither of these projects came to anything. But
Marx was never a man to be hurried in his researches; and during the
first few months in Brussels he buried himself in the municipal library to
read books in French on economic and social problems in an effort
to understand more fully the workings of bourgeois society, the factors
that determined the general historical process, and the possibilities of
proletarian emancipation.
Engels said later that when he moved to Brussels at the beginning of
April Marx 'had already advanced from these principles [i.e. 'that politics
and its history have to be explained from the economic conditions and
their evolution and not vice versa'] to the main aspects of his materialist
theory of history'; 9 and in the Preface to the English edition of the
Communist Manifesto he wrote that Marx had already worked out his
theory in the spring of 1845 'and put it before me in terms almost as
clear as those in which I have stated it here'. 10 The only writing of Marx's
surviving from this period are the famous eleven Theses on Feuerbach
rightly called by Engels 'the first document in which the brilliant kernel
of the new world view is revealed'. 11 From his first reading of Feuerbach
in the early 1840s Marx had never been entirely uncritical; but both in
the 'Paris Manuscripts' and in the Holy Family Marx had nothing but
praise for Feuerbach's 'real humanism'. Marx was now becoming identified
too closely as a mere disciple of Feuerbach from whose static and unhistorical
views Marx was bound to diverge owing to the growing attention
he was paying to economics. In the Theses on Feuerbach Marx gave a very
brief sketch of the ideas that he and Engels elaborated a few months later
in The German Ideology. By any standard The German Ideology is one of
Marx's major works. In it by criticising Feuerbach, the most 'secular'