Karl Marx Essay, Research Paper
Essay on Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was the oldest surviving boy of nine children.
His father, Heinrich, a successful lawyer, was a man of the
Enlightenment, devoted to Kant and Voltaire, who took part in
agitations for a constitution in Prussia. His mother, born Henrietta
Pressburg, was from Holland. Both parents were Jewish and were
descended from a long line of rabbis, but, a year or so before Karl
was born, his father–probably because his professional career
required it–was baptized in the Evangelical Established Church.
Karl was baptized when he was six years old. Although as a youth
Karl was influenced less by religion than by the critical, sometimes
radical social policies of the Enlightenment, his Jewish background
exposed him to prejudice and discrimination that may have led him
to question the role of religion in society and contributed to his
desire for social change.
Marx was educated from 1830 to 1835 at the high school in Trier.
Suspected of harbouring liberal teachers and pupils, the school was
under police surveillance. Marx’s writings during this period
exhibited a spirit of Christian devotion and a longing for self-sacrifice
on behalf of humanity. In October 1835 he matriculated at the
University of Bonn. The courses he attended were exclusively in the
humanities, in such subjects as Greek and Roman mythology and the
history of art. He participated in customary student activities, fought
a duel, and spent a day in jail for being drunk and disorderly. He
presided at the Tavern Club, which was at odds with the more
aristocratic student associations, and joined a poets’ club that
included some political activists. A politically rebellious student
culture was, indeed, part of life at Bonn. Many students had been
arrested; some were still being expelled in Marx’s time, particularly
as a result of an effort by students to disrupt a session of the Federal
Diet at Frankfurt. Marx, however, left Bonn after a year and in
October 1836 enrolled at the University of Berlin to study law and
philosophy.
Marx’s crucial experience at Berlin was his introduction to Hegel’s
philosophy, regnant there, and his adherence to the Young
Hegelians. At first he felt a repugnance toward Hegel’s doctrines;
when Marx fell sick it was partially, as he wrote his father, “from
intense vexation at having to make an idol of a view I detested.” The
Hegelian pressure in the revolutionary student culture was powerful,
however, and Marx joined a society called the Doctor Club, whose
members were intensely involved in the new literary and
philosophical movement. Their chief figure was Bruno Bauer, a
young lecturer in theology, who was developing the idea that the
Christian Gospels were a record not of history but of human
fantasies arising from emotional needs and that Jesus had not been a
historical person. Marx enrolled in a course of lectures given by
Bauer on the prophet Isaiah. Bauer taught that a new social
catastrophe “more tremendous” than that of the advent of
Christianity was in the making. The Young Hegelians began moving
rapidly toward atheism and also talked vaguely of political action.
The Prussian government, fearful of the subversion latent in the
Young Hegelians, soon undertook to drive them from the
universities. Bauer was dismissed from his post in 1839. Marx’s
“most intimate friend” of this period, Adolph Rutenberg, an older
journalist who had served a prison sentence for his political
radicalism, pressed for a deeper social involvement. By 1841 the
Young Hegelians had become left republicans. Marx’s studies,
meanwhile, were lagging. Urged by his friends, he submitted a
doctoral dissertation to the university at Jena, which was known to
be lax in its academic requirements, and received his degree in April
1841. His thesis analyzed in a Hegelian fashion the difference
between the natural philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus. More
distinctively, it sounded a note of Promethean defiance:
Philosophy makes no secret of it. Prometheus’
admission: “In sooth all gods I hate,” is its own
admission, its own motto against all gods, . . .
Prometheus is the noblest saint and martyr in the
calendar of philosophy.
In 1841 Marx, together with other Young Hegelians, was much
influenced by the publication of Das Wesen des Christentums
(1841; The Essence of Christianity) by Ludwig Feuerbach. Its
author, to Marx’s mind, successfully criticized Hegel, an idealist
who believed that matter or existence was inferior to and dependent
upon mind or spirit, from the opposite, or materialist, standpoint,
showing how the “Absolute Spirit” was a projection of “the real man
standing on the foundation of nature.” Henceforth Marx’s
philosophical efforts were toward a combination of Hegel’s
dialectic–the idea that all things are in a continual process of change
resulting from the conflicts between their contradictory
aspects–with Feuerbach’s materialism, which placed material
conditions above ideas. (See dialectical materialism.)
In January 1842 Marx began contributing to a newspaper newly
founded in Cologne, the Rheinische Zeitung. It was the liberal
democratic organ of a group of young merchants, bankers, and
industrialists; Cologne was the centre of the most industrially
advanced section of Prussia. To this stage of Marx’s life belongs an
essay on the freedom of the press. Since he then took for granted
the existence of absolute moral standards and universal principles of
ethics, he condemned censorship as a moral evil that entailed spying
into people’s minds and hearts and assigned to weak and malevolent
mortals powers that presupposed an omniscient mind. He believed
that censorship could have only evil consequences.
On Oct. 15, 1842, Marx became editor of the Rheinische
Zeitung. As such, he was obliged to write editorials on a variety of
social and economic issues, ranging from the housing of the Berlin
poor and the theft by peasants of wood from the forests to the new
phenomenon of communism. He found Hegelian idealism of little use
in these matters. At the same time he was becoming estranged from
his Hegelian friends for whom shocking the bourgeois was a
sufficient mode of social activity. Marx, friendly at this time to the
“liberal-minded practical men” who were “struggling step-by-step
for freedom within constitutional limits,” succeeded in trebling his
newspaper’s circulation and making it a leading journal in Prussia.
Nevertheless, Prussian authorities suspended it for being too
outspoken, and Marx agreed to coedit with the liberal Hegelian
Arnold Ruge a new review, the Deutsch-franz sische Jahrb cher
(”German-French Yearbooks”), which was to be published in Paris.
First, however, in June 1843 Marx, after an engagement of seven
years, married Jenny von Westphalen. Jenny was an attractive,
intelligent, and much-admired woman, four years older than Karl;
she came of a family of military and administrative distinction. Her
half-brother later became a highly reactionary Prussian minister of
the interior. Her father, a follower of the French socialist
Saint-Simon, was fond of Karl, though others in her family opposed
the marriage. Marx’s father also feared that Jenny was destined to
become a sacrifice to the demon that possessed his son.
Four months after their marriage, the young couple moved to Paris,
which was then the centre of socialist thought and of the more
extreme sects that went under the name of communism. There,
Marx first became a revolutionary and a communist and began to
associate with communist societies of French and German
workingmen. Their ideas were, in his view, “utterly crude and
unintelligent,” but their character moved him: “The brotherhood of
man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility
of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies,” he wrote
in his so-called “+konomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem
Jahre 1844″ (written in 1844; Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844 [1959]). (These manuscripts were not
published for some 100 years, but they are influential because they
show the humanist background to Marx’s later historical and
economic theories.)
The “German-French Yearbooks” proved short-lived, but through
their publication Marx befriended Friedrich Engels, a contributor
who was to become his lifelong collaborator, and in their pages
appeared Marx’s article “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen
Rechtsphilosophie” (”Toward the Critique of the Hegelian
Philosophy of Right”) with its oft-quoted assertion that religion is the
“opium of the people.” It was there, too, that he first raised the call
for an “uprising of the proletariat” to realize the conceptions of
philosophy. Once more, however, the Prussian government
intervened against Marx. He was expelled from France and left for
Brussels–followed by Engels–in February 1845. That year in
Belgium he renounced his Prussian nationality.
Marx, Karl
Brussels period
The next two years in Brussels saw the deepening of Marx’s
collaboration with Engels. Engels had seen at firsthand in
Manchester, Eng., where a branch factory of his father’s textile firm
was located, all the depressing aspects of the Industrial Revolution.
He had also been a Young Hegelian and had been converted to
communism by Moses Hess, who was called the “communist rabbi.”
In England he associated with the followers of Robert Owen. Now
he and Marx, finding that they shared the same views, combined
their intellectual resources and published Die heilige Familie
(1845; The Holy Family), a prolix criticism of the Hegelian idealism
of the theologian Bruno Bauer. Their next work, Die deutsche
Ideologie (written 1845-46, published 1932; The German
Ideology), contained the fullest exposition of their important
materialistic conception of history, which set out to show how,
historically, societies had been structured to promote the interests of
the economically dominant class. But it found no publisher and
remained unknown during its authors’ lifetimes.
During his Brussels years, Marx developed his views and, through
confrontations with the chief leaders of the working-class
movement, established his intellectual standing. In 1846 he publicly
excoriated the German leader Wilhelm Weitling for his moralistic
appeals. Marx insisted that the stage of bourgeois society could not
be skipped over; the proletariat could not just leap into communism;
the workers’ movement required a scientific basis, not moralistic
phrases. He also polemicized against the French socialist thinker
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in Mis re de la philosophie (1847; The
Poverty of Philosophy), a mordant attack on Proudhon’s book
subtitled Philosophie de la mis re (1846; The Philosophy of
Poverty). Proudhon wanted to unite the best features of such
contraries as competition and monopoly; he hoped to save the good
features in economic institutions while eliminating the bad. Marx,
however, declared that no equilibrium was possible between the
antagonisms in any given economic system. Social structures were
transient historic forms determined by the productive forces: “The
handmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steammill, society
with the industrial capitalist.” Proudhon’s mode of reasoning, Marx
wrote, was typical of the petty bourgeois, who failed to see the
underlying laws of history.
An unusual sequence of events led Marx and Engels to write their
pamphlet The Communist Manifesto. In June 1847 a secret
society, the League of the Just, composed mainly of emigrant
German handicraftsmen, met in London and decided to formulate a
political program. They sent a representative to Marx to ask him to
join the league; Marx overcame his doubts and, with Engels, joined
the organization, which thereupon changed its name to the
Communist League and enacted a democratic constitution.
Entrusted with the task of composing their program, Marx and
Engels worked from the middle of December 1847 to the end of
January 1848. The London Communists were already impatiently
threatening Marx with disciplinary action when he sent them the
manuscript; they promptly adopted it as their manifesto. It
enunciated the proposition that all history had hitherto been a history
of class struggles, summarized in pithy form the materialist
conception of history worked out in The German Ideology, and
asserted that the forthcoming victory of the proletariat would put an
end to class society forever. It mercilessly criticized all forms of
socialism founded on philosophical “cobwebs” such as “alienation.”
It rejected the avenue of “social Utopias,” small experiments in
community, as deadening the class struggle and therefore as being
“reactionary sects.” It set forth 10 immediate measures as first steps
toward communism, ranging from a progressive income tax and the
abolition of inheritances to free education for all children. It closed
with the words, “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their
chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries,
unite!”
Revolution suddenly erupted in Europe in the first months of 1848,
in France, Italy, and Austria. Marx had been invited to Paris by a
member of the provisional government just in time to avoid
expulsion by the Belgian government. As the revolution gained in
Austria and Germany, Marx returned to the Rhineland. In Cologne
he advocated a policy of coalition between the working class and
the democratic bourgeoisie, opposing for this reason the nomination
of independent workers’ candidates for the Frankfurt Assembly and
arguing strenuously against the program for proletarian revolution
advocated by the leaders of the Workers’ Union. He concurred in
Engels’ judgment that The Communist Manifesto should be
shelved and the Communist League disbanded. Marx pressed his
policy through the pages of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, newly
founded in June 1849, urging a constitutional democracy and war
with Russia. When the more revolutionary leader of the Workers’
Union, Andreas Gottschalk, was arrested, Marx supplanted him
and organized the first Rhineland Democratic Congress in August
1848. When the king of Prussia dissolved the Prussian Assembly in
Berlin, Marx called for arms and men to help the resistance.
Bourgeois liberals withdrew their support from Marx’s newspaper,
and he himself was indicted on several charges, including advocacy
of the nonpayment of taxes. In his trial he defended himself with the
argument that the crown was engaged in making an unlawful
counterrevolution. The jury acquitted him unanimously and with
thanks. Nevertheless, as the last hopeless fighting flared in Dresden
and Baden, Marx was ordered banished as an alien on May 16,
1849. The final issue of his newspaper, printed in red, caused a
great sensation.
Early years in London
Expelled once more from Paris, Marx went to London in August
1849. It was to be his home for the rest of his life. Chagrined by the
failure of his own tactics of collaboration with the liberal bourgeoisie,
he rejoined the Communist League in London and for about a year
advocated a bolder revolutionary policy. An “Address of the
Central Committee to the Communist League,” written with Engels
in March 1850, urged that in future revolutionary situations they
struggle to make the revolution “permanent” by avoiding
subservience to the bourgeois party and by setting up “their own
revolutionary workers’ governments” alongside any new bourgeois
one. Marx hoped that the economic crisis would shortly lead to a
revival of the revolutionary movement; when this hope faded, he
came into conflict once more with those whom he called “the
alchemists of the revolution,” such as August von Willich, a
communist who proposed to hasten the advent of revolution by
undertaking direct revolutionary ventures. Such persons, Marx
wrote in September 1850, substitute “idealism for materialism” and
regard
pure will as the motive power of revolution instead of
actual conditions. While we say to the workers: “You
have got to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of
civil wars and national wars not merely in order to
change your conditions but in order to change
yourselves and become qualified for political power,”
you on the contrary tell them, “We must achieve power
immediately.”
The militant faction in turn ridiculed Marx for being a revolutionary
who limited his activity to lectures on political economy to the
Communist Workers’ Educational Union. The upshot was that
Marx gradually stopped attending meetings of the London
Communists. In 1852 he devoted himself intensely to working for
the defense of 11 communists arrested and tried in Cologne on
charges of revolutionary conspiracy and wrote a pamphlet on their
behalf. The same year he also published, in a German-American
periodical, his essay “Der Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis
Napoleon” (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte), with
its acute analysis of the formation of a bureaucratic absolutist state
with the support of the peasant class. In other respects the next 12
years were, in Marx’s words, years of “isolation” both for him and
for Engels in his Manchester factory.
From 1850 to 1864 Marx lived in material misery and spiritual
pain. His funds were gone, and except on one occasion he could not
bring himself to seek paid employment. In March 1850 he and his
wife and four small children were evicted and their belongings
seized. Several of his children died–including a son Guido, “a
sacrifice to bourgeois misery,” and a daughter Franziska, for whom
his wife rushed about frantically trying to borrow money for a coffin.
For six years the family lived in two small rooms in Soho, often
subsisting on bread and potatoes. The children learned to lie to the
creditors: “Mr. Marx ain’t upstairs.” Once he had to escape them
by fleeing to Manchester. His wife suffered breakdowns.
During all these years Engels loyally contributed to Marx’s financial
support. The sums were not large at first, for Engels was only a
clerk in the firm of Ermen and Engels at Manchester. Later,
however, in 1864, when he became a partner, his subventions were
generous. Marx was proud of Engels’ friendship and would tolerate
no criticism of him. Bequests from the relatives of Marx’s wife and
from Marx’s friend Wilhelm Wolff also helped to alleviate their
economic distress.
Marx had one relatively steady source of earned income in the
United States. On the invitation of Charles A. Dana, managing
editor of The New York Tribune, he became in 1851 its European
correspondent. The newspaper, edited by Horace Greeley, had
sympathies for Fourierism, a Utopian socialist system developed by
the French theorist Charles Fourier. From 1851 to 1862 Marx
contributed close to 500 articles and editorials (Engels providing
about a fourth of them). He ranged over the whole political universe,
analyzing social movements and agitations from India and China to
Britain and Spain.
In 1859 Marx published his first book on economic theory, Zur
Kritik der politischen +konomie (A Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy). In its preface he again summarized his
materialistic conception of history, his theory that the course of
history is dependent on economic developments. At this time,
however, Marx regarded his studies in economic and social history
at the British Museum as his main task. He was busy producing the
drafts of his magnum opus, which was to be published later as Das
Kapital. Some of these drafts, including the Outlines and the
Theories of Surplus Value, are important in their own right and
were published after Marx’s death.
Role in the First International
Marx’s political isolation ended in 1864 with the founding of the
International Working Men’s Association. Although he was neither
its founder nor its head, he soon became its leading spirit. Its first
public meeting, called by English trade union leaders and French
workers’ representatives, took place at St. Martin’s Hall in London
on Sept. 28, 1864. Marx, who had been invited through a French
intermediary to attend as a representative of the German workers,
sat silently on the platform. A committee was set up to produce a
program and a constitution for the new organization. After various
drafts had been submitted that were felt to be unsatisfactory, Marx,
serving on a subcommittee, drew upon his immense journalistic
experience. His “Address and the Provisional Rules of the
International Working Men’s Association,” unlike his other writings,
stressed the positive achievements of the cooperative movement and
of parliamentary legislation; the gradual conquest of political power
would enable the British proletariat to extend these achievements on
a national scale.
As a member of the organization’s General Council, and
corresponding secretary for Germany, Marx was henceforth
assiduous in attendance at its meetings, which were sometimes held
several times a week. For several years he showed a rare
diplomatic tact in composing differences among various parties,
factions, and tendencies. The International grew in prestige and
membership, its numbers reaching perhaps 800,000 in 1869. It was
successful in several interventions on behalf of European trade
unions engaged in struggles with employers.
In 1870, however, Marx was still unknown as a European political
personality; it was the Paris Commune that made him into an
international figure, “the best calumniated and most menaced man of
London,” as he wrote. When the Franco-German War broke out in
1870, Marx and Engels disagreed with followers in Germany who
refused to vote in the Reichstag in favour of the war. The General
Council declared that “on the German side the war was a war of
defence.” After the defeat of the French armies, however, they felt
that the German terms amounted to aggrandizement at the expense
of the French people. When an insurrection broke out in Paris and
the Paris Commune was proclaimed, Marx gave it his unswerving
support. On May 30, 1871, after the Commune had been crushed,
he hailed it in a famous address entitled Civil War in France:
History has no comparable example of such greatness.
. . . Its martyrs are enshrined forever in the great heart
of the working class.
In Engels’ judgment, the Paris Commune was history’s first example
of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Marx’s name, as the leader
of The First International and author of the notorious Civil War,
became synonymous throughout Europe with the revolutionary spirit
symbolized by the Paris Commune.
The advent of the Commune, however, exacerbated the
antagonisms within the International Working Men’s Association and
thus brought about its downfall. English trade unionists such as
George Odger, former president of the General Council, opposed
Marx’s support of the Paris Commune. The Reform Bill of 1867,
which had enfranchised the British working class, had opened vast
opportunities for political action by the trade unions. English labour
leaders found they could make many practical advances by
cooperating with the Liberal Party and, regarding Marx’s rhetoric
as an encumbrance, resented his charge that they had “sold
themselves” to the Liberals.
A left opposition also developed under the leadership of the famed
Russian revolutionary Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin. A veteran of
tsarist prisons and Siberian exile, Bakunin could move men by his
oratory, which one listener compared to “a raging storm with
lightning, flashes and thunderclaps, and a roaring as of lions.”
Bakunin admired Marx’s intellect but could hardly forget that Marx
had published a report in 1848 charging him with being a Russian
agent. He felt that Marx was a German authoritarian and an
arrogant Jew who wanted to transform the General Council into a
personal dictatorship over the workers. He strongly opposed
several of Marx’s theories, especially Marx’s support of the
centralized structure of the International, Marx’s view that the
proletariat class should act as a political party against prevailing
parties but within the existing parliamentary system, and Marx’s
belief that the proletariat, after it had overthrown the bourgeois
state, should establish its own regime. To Bakunin, the mission of
the revolutionary was destruction; he looked to the Russian
peasantry, with its propensities for violence and its uncurbed
revolutionary instincts, rather than to the effete, civilized workers of
the industrial countries. The students, he hoped, would be the
officers of the revolution. He acquired followers, mostly young men,
in Italy, Switzerland, and France, and he organized a secret society,
the International Alliance of Social Democracy, which in 1869
challenged the hegemony of the General Council at the congress in
Basel, Switz. Marx, however, had already succeeded in preventing
its admission as an organized body into the International.
To the Bakuninists, the Paris Commune was a model of
revolutionary direct action and a refutation of what they considered
to
sections of the International for an attack on the alleged dictatorship
of Marx and the General Council. Marx in reply publicized
Bakunin’s embroilment with an unscrupulous Russian student leader,
Sergey Gennadiyevich Nechayev, who had practiced blackmail and
murder.
Without a supporting right wing and with the anarchist left against
him, Marx feared losing control of the International to Bakunin. He
also wanted to return to his studies and to finish Das Kapital. At the
congress of the International at The Hague in 1872, the only one he
ever attended, Marx managed to defeat the Bakuninists. Then, to
the consternation of the delegates, Engels moved that the seat of the
General Council be transferred from London to New York City.
The Bakuninists were expelled, but the International languished and
was finally disbanded in Philadelphia in 1876.
Last years
During the next and last decade of his life, Marx’s creative energies
declined. He was beset by what he called “chronic mental
depression,” and his life turned inward toward his family. He was
unable to complete any substantial work, though he still read widely
and undertook to learn Russian. He became crotchety in his political
opinions. When his own followers and those of the German
revolutionary Ferdinand Lassalle, a rival who believed that socialist
goals should be achieved through cooperation with the state,
coalesced in 1875 to found the German Social Democratic Party,
Marx wrote a caustic criticism of their program (the so-called
Gotha Program), claiming that it made too many compromises with
the status quo. The German leaders put his objections aside and
tried to mollify him personally. Increasingly, he looked to a
European war for the overthrow of Russian tsarism, the mainstay of
reaction, hoping that this would revive the political energies of the
working classes. He was moved by what he considered to be the
selfless courage of the Russian terrorists who assassinated the tsar,
Alexander II, in 1881; he felt this to be “a historically inevitable
means of action.”
Despite Marx’s withdrawal from active politics, he still retained
what Engels called his “peculiar influence” on the leaders of
working-class and socialist movements. In 1879, when the French
Socialist Workers’ Federation was founded, its leader Jules Guesde
went to London to consult with Marx, who dictated the preamble
of its program and shaped much of its content. In 1881 Henry
Mayers Hyndman in his England for All drew heavily on his
conversations with Marx but angered him by being afraid to
acknowledge him by name.
During his last years Marx spent much time at health resorts and
even traveled to Algiers. He was broken by the death of his wife on
Dec. 2, 1881, and of his eldest daughter, Jenny Longuet, on Jan.
11, 1883. He died in London, evidently of a lung abscess, in the
following year.
Character and significance
At Marx’s funeral in Highgate Cemetery, Engels declared that
Marx had made two great discoveries, the law of development of
human history and the law of motion of bourgeois society. But
“Marx was before all else a revolutionist.” He was “the best-hated
and most-calumniated man of his time,” yet he also died “beloved,
revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow-workers.”
The contradictory emotions Marx engendered are reflected in the
sometimes conflicting aspects of his character. Marx was a
combination of the Promethean rebel and the rigorous intellectual.
He gave most persons an impression of intellectual arrogance. A
Russian writer, Pavel Annenkov, who observed Marx in debate in
1846 recalled that “he spoke only in the imperative, brooking no
contradiction,” and seemed to be “the personification of a
democratic dictator such as might appear before one in moments of
fantasy.” But Marx obviously felt uneasy before mass audiences
and avoided the atmosphere of factional controversies at
congresses. He went to no demonstrations, his wife remarked, and
rarely spoke at public meetings. He kept away from the congresses
of the International where the rival socialist groups debated
important resolutions. He was a “small groups” man, most at home
in the atmosphere of the General Council or on the staff of a
newspaper, where his character could impress itself forcefully on a
small body of coworkers. At the same time he avoided meeting
distinguished scholars with whom he might have discussed questions
of economics and sociology on a footing of intellectual equality.
Despite his broad intellectual sweep, he was prey to obsessive ideas
such as that the British foreign minister, Lord Palmerston, was an
agent of the Russian government. He was determined not to let
bourgeois society make “a money-making machine” out of him, yet
he submitted to living on the largess of Engels and the bequests of
relatives. He remained the eternal student in his personal habits and
way of life, even to the point of joining two friends in a students’
prank during which they systematically broke four or five
streetlamps in a London street and then fled from the police. He was
a great reader of novels, especially those of Sir Walter Scott and
Balzac; and the family made a cult of Shakespeare. He was an
affectionate father, saying that he admired Jesus for his love of
children, but sacrificed the lives and health of his own. Of his seven
children, three daughters grew to maturity. His favourite daughter,
Eleanor, worried him with her nervous, brooding, emotional
character and her desire to be an actress. Another shadow was cast
on Marx’s domestic life by the birth to their loyal servant, Helene
Demuth, of an illegitimate son, Frederick; Engels as he was dying
disclosed to Eleanor that Marx had been the father. Above all,
Marx was a fighter, willing to sacrifice anything in the battle for his
conception of a better society. He regarded struggle as the law of
life and existence.
The influence of Marx’s ideas has been enormous. Marx’s
masterpiece, Das Kapital, the “Bible of the working class,” as it
was officially described in a resolution of the International Working
Men’s Association, was published in 1867 in Berlin and received a
second edition in 1873. Only the first volume was completed and
published in Marx’s lifetime. The second and third volumes,
unfinished by Marx, were edited by Engels and published in 1885
and 1894. The economic categories he employed were those of the
classical British economics of David Ricardo; but Marx used them
in accordance with his dialectical method to argue that bourgeois
society, like every social organism, must follow its inevitable path of
development. Through the working of such immanent tendencies as
the declining rate of profit, capitalism would die and be replaced by
another, higher, society. The most memorable pages in Das Kapital
are the descriptive passages, culled from Parliamentary Blue Books,
on the misery of the English working class. Marx believed that this
misery would increase, while at the same time the monopoly of
capital would become a fetter upon production until finally “the knell
of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are
expropriated.”
Marx never claimed to have discovered the existence of classes
and class struggles in modern society. “Bourgeois” historians, he
acknowledged, had described them long before he had. He did
claim, however, to have proved that each phase in the development
of production was associated with a corresponding class structure
and that the struggle of classes led necessarily to the dictatorship of
the proletariat, ushering in the advent of a classless society. Marx
took up the very different versions of socialism current in the early
19th century and welded them together into a doctrine that
continued to be the dominant version of socialism for half a century
after his death. His emphasis on the influence of economic structure
on historical development has proved to be of lasting significance.
Although Marx stressed economic issues in his writings, his major
impact has been in the fields of sociology and history. Marx’s most
important contribution to sociological theory was his general mode
of analysis, the “dialectical” model, which regards every social
system as having within it immanent forces that give rise to
“contradictions” (disequilibria) that can be resolved only by a new
social system. Neo-Marxists, who no longer accept the economic
reasoning in Das Kapital, are still guided by this model in their
approach to capitalist society. In this sense, Marx’s mode of
analysis, like those of Thomas Malthus, Herbert Spencer, or
Vilfredo Pareto, has become one of the theoretical structures that
are the heritage of the social scientist.
(L.S.F./D.T.McL.)
Durkhiem
Childhood and education.
Durkheim was born into a Jewish family of very modest means. It
was taken for granted that he would study to become a rabbi, like
his father. The death of his father before Durkheim was 20, which
burdened him with heavy responsibilities, and the increased rivalrous
tensions between France’s eastern provinces and Germany, may
have contributed to making Durkheim a severely disciplined young
man. As early as his late teens Durkheim became convinced that
effort and even sorrow are more conducive to the spiritual progress
of the individual than pleasure or joy.
His outstanding success at school designated him clearly as a
candidate to the renowned +cole Normale Sup rieure in Paris–the
most prestigious teachers’ college in France. While preparing for the
+cole Normale at the Lyc e Louis le Grand, Durkheim took his
board at the Institution Jauffret in the Latin Quarter, where he
became acquainted with another gifted young man from the
provinces, Jean Jaur s, later to lead the French Socialist Party and
at that time inclined like Durkheim toward philosophy and the
moral and social reform of his countrymen.
Durkheim passed the stiff competitive examination for the +cole
Normale one year after Jaur s, in 1879. It is clear that his religious
faith had vanished by then. His thought had become altogether
secular but with a strong bent toward moral reform. Like a number
of French philosophical minds during the Third Republic, he looked
to science and in particular to social science and to profound
educational reform as the means to avoid the perils of social
disconnectedness or “anomie,” as he was to call this condition in
which norms for conduct were either absent, weak, or conflicting.
(See anomie.)
He enjoyed the intellectual atmosphere of the +cole Normale–the
discussion of metaphysical and political issues pursued with
eagerness and animated by the utopian dreams of young men
destined to be among the leaders of their country. He soon enjoyed
the respect of his peers and of his teachers, but he was impatient
with the excessive stress then laid in French higher education on
elegant rhetoric and surface polish. His teachers of philosophy
struck him as too fond of generalities and of monotonous worship of
the past.
Fretting at the conventionality of formal examinations, he passed the
last competitive examination in 1882, but without the brilliance that
his friends had predicted for him. He then accepted a series of
provincial assignments as a teacher of philosophy at the state
secondary schools of Sens, Saint-Quentin, and Troyes between
1882 and 1887. In 1885-86 he took a year’s leave of absence to
pursue research in Germany, where he was impressed by Wilhelm
Wundt, pioneer experimental psychologist. In 1887 he was
appointed as lecturer at the University of Bordeaux, where he
subsequently became professor and taught social philosophy until
1902.
Analytic methods.
Durkheim was familiar with several foreign languages and reviewed
volumes in German, English, and Italian at length in the learned
journal L’Ann e Sociologique, which he founded in 1896. But it
has been noted, at times with disapproval and amazement, by
non-French social scientists, that he travelled little and that, like
many French scholars as well as the notable British anthropologist
Sir James Frazer, he never undertook any fieldwork. The vast
information he studied on the tribes of Australia or of New Guinea
or on the Eskimos was all collected by other anthropologists,
travellers, or missionaries.
This was not, in Durkheim’s case, due to provincialism or lack of
attention to the concrete. He did not resemble the French
philosopher Auguste Comte in making venturesome and dogmatic
generalizations and disregarding empirical observation. He did,
however, maintain that concrete observation in remote parts of the
world does not always lead to illuminating views on the past or even
on the present. To him facts had no meaning for the intellect unless
they were grouped into types and laws. He claimed repeatedly that
it is from a construction erected on the inner nature of the real that
knowledge of concrete reality is obtained, a knowledge not
perceived by observation of the facts from the outside. He thus
constructed concepts such as that of the sacred or of totemism,
exactly in the same way that Karl Marx developed the concept of
class.
In truth, Durkheim’s vital interest did not lie in the study for its own
sake of so-called primitive tribes, but rather in the light such a study
might throw on the present. The outward events of his life as an
intellectual and as a scholar may appear undramatic. Still, much of
what he thought and wrote stemmed from the events that he
witnessed in his formative years, in the 1870s and 1880s, and in the
earnest concern he took in them.
The Second Empire, which collapsed in the French defeat of 1870
at the hands of Germany, had seemed an era of levity and
dissipation to the earnest young Durkheim. France, with the
support of many of its liberal and intellectual elements, had plunged
headlong into a war for which it was unprepared; its leaders proved
incapable. The left-wing Commune that took over Paris after the
French defeat in 1871 led to senseless destruction, which appeared
to Durkheim’s generation, in retrospect, as evidence of the
alienation of the working classes from capitalist society.
The bloody repression that followed the Commune was taken as
further evidence of the ruthlessness of capitalism and of the
selfishness of the frightened bourgeoisie. Later, the crisis of 1886
over Georges Boulanger, minister of war, who demanded a
centralist government to execute a policy of revenge against
Germany, was one of several events that testified to the resurgence
of nationalism, soon to be accompanied by anti-Semitism. Such
major French thinkers of the older generation as Ernest Renan and
Hippolyte Taine interrupted their historical and philosophical works,
after 1871, to analyze those evils and to offer remedies.
Durkheim was one of several young philosophers and scholars,
fresh from their +cole Normale training, who became convinced that
progress was not the necessary consequence of the development of
science and technology, that it could not be represented by an
ascending curve, justifying complacent optimism. He perceived
around him the prevalence of “anomie,” a personal sense of
rootlessness fostered by the absence of social norms. Material
prosperity set free greed and passions that threatened the
equilibrium of society.
These sources of Durkheim’s sociological reflections, never remote
from moral philosophy, were first expressed in his very important
doctoral thesis, De la division du travail social (1893; The
Division of Labour in Society), and in Le Suicide (1897; Suicide).
In his view ethical and social structures were being endangered by
the advent of technology and mechanization. The division of labour
rendered workmen both more alien to one another and more
dependent upon one another, since none of them any longer built the
whole product by himself. Suicide appeared to be less frequent
where the individual was closely integrated with his culture; thus, the
apparently purely individual decision to renounce life could be
explained through social forces.
Effect of the Dreyfus affair.
These early volumes, and the one in which he formulated with
scientific rigour the rules of his sociological method, Les R gles de
la m thode sociologique (1895; The Rules of Sociological
Method), brought Durkheim fame and influence. But the new
science of society frightened timid souls and conservative
philosophers, and he had to endure many attacks. The Dreyfus
affair–resulting from the false charge against a Jewish officer, Alfred
Dreyfus, of spying for the Germans–erupted in the last years of the
century, and the slurs or outright insults aimed at Jews that
accompanied it opened Durkheim’s eyes to the latent hatred and
passionate feuds hitherto half concealed under the varnish of
civilization. He took an active part in the campaign to exonerate
Dreyfus. He was not elected to the Institut de France, although his
stature as a thinker suggests that he should have been named to that
prestigious, learned society. He was, however, appointed to the
University of Paris in 1902 and made a full professor there in 1906.
(See Dreyfus, Alfred.)
More and more, the sociologist’s thought became concerned with
education and religion as the two most potent means of reforming
humanity or of molding the new institutions required by the deep
structural changes in society. His colleagues admired Durkheim’s
zeal in behalf of educational reform. His efforts included participating
in numerous committees to prepare new curriculums and methods;
working to enliven the teaching of philosophy, which too long had
dwelt on generalities; and attempting to teach teachers how to teach.
A series of courses that he had given at Bordeaux on the subject of
L’+volution p dagogique en France (”Pedagogical Evolution in
France”) was published posthumously in 1938; it remains one of the
best informed and most impartial books on French education. The
other important work of Durkheim’s latter years dealt with the
totemic system in Australia and bore the title of Les Formes
l mentaires de la vie religieuse (1915; The Elementary Forms
of the Religious Life). The author, despite his own agnosticism,
evinced a sympathetic understanding of religion in all its stages.
French conservatives, who in the years preceding World War I
turned against the Sorbonne, which they charged was unduly
swayed by the prestige of German scholarship, railed at Durkheim,
who, they thought, was influenced by the German urge to
systematize, making a fetish of society and a religion of sociology.
(See “Elementary Forms of Religious Life, The”.)
In fact, Durkheim did not make an idol of sociology as did the
positivists schooled by Comte, nor was he a “functionalist” who
explained every social phenomenon by its usefulness in maintaining
the existence and equilibrium of a social organism. He did, however,
endeavour to formulate a positive social science that might direct
people’s behaviour toward greater solidarity.
The outbreak of World War I came as a cruel blow to him. For
many years he had expended too much energy on teaching, on
writing, on outlining plans for reform, on ceaselessly feeding the
enthusiasm of his disciples, and eventually his heart had been
affected. His gaunt and nervous appearance filled his colleagues with
foreboding. The whole of French sociology, then in full bloom
thanks to him, seemed to be his responsibility.
Death and legacy.
The breaking point came when his only son was killed in 1916,
while fighting on the Balkan front. The father stoically attempted to
hide his sorrow, but the loss, coming on top of insults by nationalists
who denounced him as a professor of “apparently German
extraction” who taught a “foreign” discipline at the Sorbonne, was
too much to bear. He died in November 1917.
Durkheim left behind him a brilliant school of researchers. He had
never been a tyrannical master; he had encouraged his disciples to
go farther than himself and to contradict him if need be. His nephew,
Marcel Mauss, who held the chair of sociology at the Coll ge de
France, was less systematic than Durkheim and paid greater
attention to symbolism as an unconscious activity of the mind.
Claude L vi-Strauss, who occupied the same chair of sociology and
resembles Durkheim in the way he combines reasoning with
intensity of feeling, also offered objections and corrections to
Durkheim’s views. With Durkheim, sociology had become in
France a seminal discipline that broadened and transformed the
study of law, of economics, of Chinese institutions, of linguistics, of
ethnology, of art history, and of history.
(H.M.P.)
|
collective behaviour
Individual motivation theories
Among the analytic theories that seek to eschew evaluation, the
most popular ones stress individual motivation in accounting for
collective behaviour. Frustration and lack of firm social anchorage
are the two most widely used explanations for individual
participation in collective behaviour of all kinds. In the psychiatric
tradition, frustration heightens suggestibility, generates fantasy, brings
about regressions and fixations, and intensifies drives toward wish
fulfillment so that normal inhibitions are overcome. Since most forms
of collective behaviour promote thoughts that are otherwise difficult
to account for and that breech behavioral inhibitions, this is often a
fruitful source of explanation.
In the sociological tradition of +mile Durkheim, absence of firm
integration into social groups leaves the individual open to deviant
ideas and susceptible to the vital sense of solidarity that comes from
participation in spontaneous groupings. Drawing upon both the
psychiatric and the sociological traditions, Erich Fromm attributed
the appeal of mass movements and crowds to the gratifying escape
they offer from the sense of personal isolation and powerlessness
that people experience in the vast bureaucracies of modern life.
Extending Karl Marx’s theory of modern man’s alienation from his
work, many contemporary students attribute faddism, crowds,
movements of the spirit, and interest-group and revolutionary
movements to a wide-ranging alienation from family, community,
and country, as well as from work. (See Marxism.)
According to the approach suggested by the U.S. political scientist
Hadley Cantril, participation in vital collectivities supplies a sense of
meaning through group affirmation and action and raises the
member’s estimate of his social status, both of which are important
needs often frustrated in modern society. Eric Hoffer, a U.S.
philosopher, attributed a leading role in collective behaviour to “true
believers,” who overcome their own personal doubts and conflicts
by the creation of intolerant and unanimous groups about them.
Crowds
A thin line separates crowd activities from collective obsessions.
The crowd is, first, more concentrated in time and space. Thus a
race riot, a lynching, or an orgy is limited to a few days or hours and
occurs chiefly within an area ranging from a city square or a stadium
to a section of a metropolitan area. Second, a concern of the
majority of the crowd (many participants do not always share the
concern) is a collaborative goal rather than parallel individual goals.
The “june bug obsession” cited earlier, in which dozens of women
went home from work because of imaginary insect bites, could have
turned into a crowd action if the women had banded together to
demand a change in working conditions or to conduct a ceremony
to exorcise the evil. Third, because the goal is collaborative, there is
more division of labour and cooperative activity in a crowd than in
collective obsessions. Finally, a major concern of a crowd is with
some improvement or social change expected as a result of its
activity. Labour rioters expect management to be more compliant
after the riot; participants in a massive religious revival expect life in
the community to be somehow better as a result.
The crucial step in developing crowd behaviour is the formation of a
common mood directed toward a recognized object of attention. In
a typical riot situation a routine police arrest or a fistfight between
individuals from opposing groups focuses attention. Milling and
rumour then establish a mood of indignation and hostility toward an
identified enemy or enemies. In a collective religious experience
there is usually an amazing event that rivets attention. Through
elementary collective behaviour the mood is defined as religious awe
and gratitude toward the supernatural and its agents.
As the mood and object become established, either an “active”
crowd or an “expressive” crowd is formed. The active crowd is
usually aggressive, such as a violent mob, though occasionally it acts
to propel members into heroic accomplishments. The expressive
crowd has also been called the dancing crowd because its
manifestations are dancing, singing, and other forms of emotional
expression.