1. The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Critique. Against Bruno Bauer and Co. – the first joint work of Karl. Marx and Frederick Engels. It was written from September to November 1844 and published in February 1845 in Frankfurt-on-Main.
“The Holy Family” is a humorous nickname for the Bauer brothers and their followers grouped around Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (General Literary Gazette). Attacking Bauer and the other Young Hegelians (or Left Hegelians), Marx and Engels at the same time criticized Hegel’s own idealist philosophy.
Marx gave evidence of deep divergencies with the Young Hegelians as early as summer 1842, when the club of the “Free” was formed in Berlin. When, in October 1842, Marx became editor of Rheinische Zeitung (Rhine Gazette), on the staff of which there were several Berlin Young Hegelians, he opposed the publication in the paper of insipid pretentious articles from the club, which had lost touch with reality and was absorbed in abstract philosophical disputes. During the two years following Marx’s break with the “Free,” the theoretical and political differences between Marx and Engels on the one hand and the Young Hegelians on the other became most profound and irreconcilable. This was due to the fact that Marx and Engels had abandoned idealism for materialism and revolutionary democratism for communism; it was also due to the evolution that the Bauer brothers and their fellow-thinkers went through during that time. Bauer and his group published in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung disavowals of the “1842 radicalism” and of its most conspicuous mouthpiece, Rheinische Zeitung; they slithered into the vilest vulgar subjective idealism, to propaganda of the “theory” according to which only selected individuals, vehicles of the “spirit,” of “pure criticism,” are the makers of history, while the mass, the people, serves as inert material, ballast, in the historical process.
Marx and Engels decided to devote their first joint work to the exposure of these pernicious reactionary ideas and to the defence of their new materialistic and communistic outlook.
During a ten days’ stay of Engels in Paris the plan of the book – at first entitled Critique of Critical Critique. Against Bruno Bauer and Co – was drawn up, the parts were divided between the authors and the Foreword was written, Engels wrote his parts before leaving Paris. Marx, to whose share the larger part of the book fell. continued to work on it until the end of November 1844. He considerably increased the intended size of the book by using, in the writing of his sections part of his manuscripts on economics and philosophy on which he had been working in the spring and summer of 1844, his study of the history of the French Revolution and a number of excerpts and synopses. While the book was in the printing Marx completed the title with the words The Holy Family The table of contents showed which sections had been written by Marx and which by Engels (see Contents of the present edition pp. 5-6). As the book was more than 20 signatures and of small format, it was exempted from preliminary censorship according to the regulations then in vigour in a number of German states.
2. Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (General Literary Gazette), a German monthly published by the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer in Charlottenburg from December 1843 to October 1844.
3. Marx here uses the world Mühleigner, a literal translation of the English mill-owner, to ridicule J. Faucher, of the editorial board of Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, who applied English methods of word formation in German.
4. The struggle for legislation limiting the working day to ten hours started in England as early as the end of the 18th century and spread by the 30s of the 19th century to the mass of the proletariat. As the landed aristocracy wanted to use this popular slogan in their fight against the industrial bourgeoisie they supported the Ten-Hour Bill in Parliament. The “Tory philanthropist” Lord Ashley headed the supporters of the bill in Parliament in 1833.
5. These words are from Bruno Bauer’s book, Die gute Sache der Frefheit und meine eigene Angelegenheit (The Good Cause of Freedom and My Own Affair), Zurich and Winterthur, 1842.
6. The article in question here is “Herr Nauwerk and the Faculty of Philosophy” published in No. VI of Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (May 1844) and signed “J” – the first letter of Jungnitz.
7. The reference is to the dismissal of Bruno Bauer whom the Prussian Government deprived temporarily in October 1841 and permanently in March 1842 of the right to lecture in Bonn University because of his writings criticizing the Bible.
8. In this section Engels analyzes and quotes E. Bauer’s review of Flora Tristan’s I'Union Ouvrière (The Workers’ Union), Paris, 1843, which was published in No. V of Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (April 1844).
9. From Schiller’s Das Madchen aus der Fremde (The Maid from Abroad).
10. The reference is to P. J. Proudhon’s Qu'est-ce que la propriete? ou Recherches sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement, (What is Property? or Studies on the Principle of Law and of Government), first published in Paris in 1840. Marx quotes the Paris edition of 1841.
Qu'est-ce que la propriété was written from the contradictory standpoint of the petty bourgeoisie. The sharp attacks it made on private property produced a profound impression. Marx gave an exhaustive critical appraisal of the book in his article “On Proudhon,” published in the form of a letter to Schweitzer, editor of Social-Demokrat, in 1865 (see Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, two-vol. edition, Vol. 1, pp. 390-398). Edgar Bauer’s article “Proudhon,” which Marx criticizes in this section of The Holy Family was published in No. V of Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (April 1844).
11. Marx here means the political grouping formed around the Paris paper La Réforme, consisting of petty-bourgeois Democratic-Republicans and petty-bourgeois Socialists.
12. Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (German-French Year-Book) was published in German in Paris and edited by K. Marx and A. Ruge. The only issue was a double number in February 1844, carrying Marx’s articles “On the Jewish Question” and Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction and Engels’ works, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and “The Position of England. Thomas Carlyle. ‘Past and Present.'” These works mark the final transition of Marx and Engels to materialism and communism. Publication of the journal was discontinued chiefly because of differences of principle between Marx and the bourgeois Radical Ruge.
13. The reference is to a review published by Szeliga in No. VII of Allgemeine Lileratur-Zeitung (June 1844) on the French writer Eugene Sue’s novel Mystères de Paris. The novel is written in the spirit of petty-bourgeois sentimentality and social fantasy. It was published in Paris in 1842-1843 and was popular in France and abroad.
14. The reference is to the Charte conslitutionnelle adopted in France after the 1830 Revolution as the basic law of the July monarchy. The expression “Charter of Truth” is an ironic allusion to the conclusive words of Louis-Philippe’s proclamation on July 31, 1830: “henceforth the Charter will be the truth.”
15. Marx here paraphrases a couplet from Goethe’s Faust, Part 1, Scene 6 (The Witches’ Kitchen).
16. Quoted from Ch. Fourier’s Theorie de l'unite universelle, Vol. III, Part 11, Chap. 3.
17. Here and lower quotations are made from B. Bauer’s article “Latest Works on the Jewish Question” published in No. 1 of Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (December 1843); this was B. Bauer’s reply to press criticism of his book Die Judenfrage.
18. Bruno Bauer’s book Die Judenfrage (The Jewish Question) is a reprint with a few additions of his articles on the same subject published in Deutsche Jahrbücher (German Year-Book) in November 1842. The book was published in Brunswick in 1843.
19. The reference is to the weekly paper Revolutions de Paris, which appeared in Paris from July 1789 to February 1794. Until September 1790 it was edited by the revolutionary publicist Eliseé Loustallot.
20. Doctrinaires – a group of French bourgeois politicians during the Restoration (1815-30); they were constitutional monarchists and rabid enemies of the democratic and revolutionary movement and wished to establish in France a bloc of the bourgeoisie and gentry after the English fashion; the best known among them were the historian F. Guizot and the philosopher P. Royer-Collard.
21. Marx has in mind B. Bauer’s article “Latest Works on the Jewish Question.”
22. The reference is to Marx’s article “on the Jewish Question.”
23. The reference is to B. Bauer’s review of the first volume of a course of lectures on law by the right Hegelian Hinrichs published in Halle in 1843 under the title Politische Vorlesungen, Bd. I-II (Political Lectures, Vols. I-II), Bauer’s review was published in No. I of Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (December 1843). Lower, in the section “Hinrichs No. 2” the reference is to B. Bauer’s review on the second volume of the lectures published in No. V (April 1844) of the same journal.
24. This and the following quotations are from the second article written by B. Bauer against the critics of his book Die Judenfrage. This article, entitled as the first “Now Works on the Jewish Question,” was given in No. IV of Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (March 1844).
25. The title of B. Bauer’s article, published in No. VIII of Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (July 1844). Nearly all the quotations made by Marx in Absolute Criticism’s Third Campaign are taken from this article.
26. Deutsche Jahrbücher – abridged title of the literary-philosophical Young Hegelian journal Deutsche Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst (German Year-Book on Science and Art). The year-book was published in Leipzig and edited by A. Ruge from July 1841. From 1838 to 1841 it appeared under the name Hallische Jahrbücher für deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst (the Halle Year-Book on German Science and Art). The transfer of the editorial office from the Prussian town of Halle to Saxony and the alteration in the title of the year-book were motivated by the threat of prohibition in Prussia But the journal did not exist long under its new name. In January, 1843 it was closed down by the Saxonian government and prohibited in the whole of Germany by a decree of the Diet.
27. Rheinische Zeitung für Politik, Handel und Gewerbe (Rhine Gazette of Politics, Trade and Industry) – a daily paper which appeared in Cologne from January 1, 1842 to March 31, 1843. It was founded by representatives of the Rhineland bourgeoisie who were opposed to Prussian absolutism. Some young Hegelians were also on the staff. Marx wrote for it from April 1842 and became one of its editors in October of the same year. A number of Engels’s articles were also published in Rheinische Zeitung. During Marx’s editorship the paper became more and more markedly revolutionary-democratic. The government introduced a particularly strict censorship in regard to it and subsequently closed it.
28. Synoptics is the name given in the history of religion to the compilers of the first three gospels.
29. The reference is to Marx’s article “On the Jewish Question.”
30. The article in question is B. Bauer’s “Fahigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen, frei zu werden” (“The Capacity of the Jews and Christians of Today to Obtain Freedom”).
31. Cercle social – an organization established by democratic intellectuals and functioning, in Paris in the first years of the French Pevolution. Its place in the history of communist ideas in France is determined by the fact that its ideologist K. Foche demanded an equalitarian redivision of the land, restrictions on large fortunes and employment for all able-bodied citizens. Foche’s criticism of the formal equality proclaimed in the documents of the French Revolution prepared the ground for bolder action on the question by Jacques Roux, leader of the “Enragés.”
32. Jansenists – named after the Dutch theologian Jansenius – representatives of the opposition trend among Catholics in France in the 17th and early 18th centuries. They voiced the discontent of a part of the French bourgeoisie at the feudal ideology of official Catholicism.
33. Lamettrie’s book (L'homme machine) was published anonymously in Leyden in 1748. It was burnt and its author was banished from Holland whither he had emigrated from France in 1745.
34. The first edition of Helvetius’s book, which was published anonymously in Paris in 1758, was burnt by the executioner in 1759.
35. Allgemeine Zeitung (General Newspaper) a reactionary German daily newspaper founded in 1798; from 1810 to 1882 it appeared in Augsburg.
36. Goethe, Faust, Part 1, Sc. 3 (Faust’s Study).
37. Zeitschrift für spekulative Theologie (Journal of Speculative Theology) – published in Berlin from 1836 to 1838 under the editorship of B. Bauer, who then belonged to the right Hegelians.
38. From the French writer J. F. Marmontel’s one-act comedy Lucile, Scene 4.
39. Berlin Couleur was the name given by the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung correspondent to the Young Hegelians who did not belong to B. Bauer’s group and who criticized Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung on certain petty questions. One of them was Max Stirner.
40. Marx here means B. Bauer’s article “Leiden und Freuden des theologischen Bewusstseins” (Suffering and Joys of Theological Consciousness”) in Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publicistik.
41. La Democratie Pacifique – a daily paper of the Fourierists published in Paris from 1843 to 1851 tinder the editorship of V. Considerant.
42. Heine – Die Nordsee (Second cycle “Fragen”)
43. From the German folk song Nönnchen.
44. From the German comic folk-tale Seven Suabans.
45. Journal des Debats, abridged title of the French bourgeois daily paper Journal des Débats politiques et littéraires, founded in Paris in 1789. During the July monarchy it was a government paper and the organ of the Orleanist bourgeoisie.
46. Le Siècle (The Century) – a daily newspaper appearing in Paris from 1836 to 1939. In the forties of the 19th century it reflected the views of the part of the petty bourgeoisie which confined its demands to moderate constitutional reforms.
47. Petites Affiches (Short Announcements) – an old French periodical publication founded in Paris in 1612; a sort of information sheet in which short announcements and notifications were published.
48. Satan – a small bourgeois satirical paper appearing in Paris from 1840 to 1844.
49. Fortunatus, a hero of German popular legend who had a wonderful inexhaustible purse and a magic hat.
50. From Fourier’s Theorie des quatre mouvements et des destinies générales.
51. The allusion is to the petty German princes who lost their power and whose possessions were annexed to the territories of larger German states as the result of the reshaping of the German political map (luring the Napoleonic Wars and at the Vienna Congress (1814-15).
52. “Young England” – a group of English politicians and writers belonging to the Tories, formed in the early 40s of the 19th century. They voiced the dissatisfaction of the landed gentry at the strengthening of the economic and political might of the bourgeoisie and resorted to demagogic methods in order to bring the working class under their influence and make use of it in their fight against the bourgeoisie. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels described their views as “feudal socialism.”
53. Marx here quotes with ironic insertions correspondence from Hirzel in Zurich published in No. V of Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (April 1844).
54. From a French drinking song.