and Weitling's allies were apparently not cordial, though they had so
much in common that, on the one hand, Weitling's correspondents urge him
to keep on good terms with "Young Germany," and, on the other, Marr says
he actually tried to get a common standing ground with the communists,
and thought he had found it in the negation of the present system of
things--the negation of religion, the negation of patriotism, the
negation of subjection to authority.
Now the importance of this excursus on the Young Hegelians lies in the
fact that Karl Marx was a humanist, and looked on humanism as the vital
and creative principle in the renovation of political and industrial
society. In the _Deutsche Französische Jahrbücher_ he published an
article on the Hegelian Philosophy of Right, in which he says: "The new
revolution will be introduced by philosophy. The revolutionary tradition
of Germany is theoretical. The Reformation was the work of a monk; the
Revolution will be the work of a philosopher." The particular philosophy
that was to do the work is that of the German critics, whose critique of
religion had ended in the dogma that man is the highest being for man,
and in the categorical imperative, "to destroy everything in the present
order of things that makes a man a degraded, insulted, forsaken, and
despised being." But philosophy cannot work a revolution without
material weapons; and it will find its material weapon in the
proletariat, which he owns, however, was at the time he wrote only
beginning to be formed in Germany. But when it rises in its strength, it
will be irresistible, and the revolution which it will accomplish will
be the only one known to history that is not utopian. Other revolutions
have been partial, wrought by a class in the interests of a class; but
this one will be a universal and uniform revolution, effected in the
name of all society, for the proletariat is a class which possesses a
universal character because it dissolves all other separate classes into
itself. It is the only class that takes its stand on a human and not a
historical title. Its very sorrows and grievances have nothing special
or relative in them; they are the broad sorrows and grievances of
humanity. And its claims are like them; for it asks no special
privileges or special prerogatives; it asks nothing but what all the
world will share along with it. The history of the world is the judgment
of the world, and the duration of an order of things founded on the
ascendancy of a limited class possessing money and culture, is
practically condemned and foredoomed by the rapid multiplication of a
large class outside which possess neither. The growth of this latter
body not merely tends to produce, but actually _is_, the dissolution of
the existing system of things. For the existing system is founded on the
assertion of private property, but the proletariat is forced by society
to take the opposite principle of the negation of private property for
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