Karl Marx
The German Ideology
The form of intercourse determined by the existing productive forces atall previous historical stages, and in its turn determining these, is civilsociety. The latter, as is clear from what we have said above, has as itspremises and basis the simple family and the multiple, the so-calledtribe, the more precise determinants of this society are enumerated inour remarks above. Already here we see how this civil society is the truesource and theatre of all history, and how absurd is the conception ofhistory held hitherto, which neglects the real relationships and confinesitself to high-sounding dramas of princes and states.
Civil society embraces the whole material intercourse of individualswithin a definite stage of the development of productive forces. Itembraces the whole commercial and industrial life of a given stage and,insofar, transcends the State and the nation, though, on the other handagain, it must assert itself in its foreign relations as nationality, andinwardly must organise itself as State. The word “civil society” [bürgerliche Gesellschaft] emerged in the eighteenth century, whenproperty relationships had already extricated themselves from theancient and medieval communal society. Civil society as such onlydevelops with the bourgeoisie; the social organisation evolving directlyout of production and commerce, which in all ages forms the basis ofthe State and of the rest of the idealistic superstructure, has, however,always been designated by the same name.
History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations,each of which exploits the materials, the capital funds, the productiveforces handed down to it by all preceding generations, and thus, on theone hand, continues the traditional activity in completely changedcircumstances and, on the other, modifies the old circumstances with acompletely changed activity. This can be speculatively distorted so thatlater history is made the goal of earlier history, e.g. the goal ascribed tothe discovery of America is to further the eruption of the FrenchRevolution. Thereby history receives its own special aims and becomes “a person rating with other persons” (to wit: “Self-Consciousness,Criticism, the Unique,” etc.), while what is designated with the words “destiny,” “goal,” “germ,” or “idea” of earlier history is nothing more than an abstraction formed from later history, from the active influencewhich earlier history exercises on later history.
The further the separate spheres, which interact on one another,extend in the course of this development, the more the original isolationof the separate nationalities is destroyed by the developed mode ofproduction and intercourse and the division of labour between variousnations naturally brought forth by these, the more history becomes worldhistory. Thus, for instance, if in England a machine is invented, whichdeprives countless workers of bread in India and China, and overturnsthe whole form of existence of these empires, this invention becomes aworld-historical fact. Or again, take the case of sugar and coffee whichhave proved their world-historical importance in the nineteenth centuryby the fact that the lack of these products, occasioned by theNapoleonic Continental System, caused the Germans to rise againstNapoleon, and thus became the real basis of the glorious Wars ofliberation of 1813. From this it follows that this transformation of historyinto world history is not indeed a mere abstract act on the part of the “self-consciousness,” the world spirit, or of any other metaphysicalspectre, but a quite material, empirically verifiable act, an act the proofof which every individual furnishes as he comes and goes, eats, drinksand clothes himself.
This conception of history depends on our ability to expound the realprocess of production, starting out from the material production of lifeitself, and to comprehend the form of intercourse connected with thisand created by this mode of production (i.e. civil society in its variousstages), as the basis of all history; and to show it in its action as State,to explain all the different theoretical products and forms ofconsciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, etc. etc. and trace theirorigins and growth from that basis; by which means, of course, thewhole thing can be depicted in its totality (and therefore, too, thereciprocal action of these various sides on one another). It has not, likethe idealistic view of history, in every period to look for a category, butremains constantly on the real ground of history; it does not explainpractice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas from materialpractice; and accordingly it comes to the conclusion that all forms andproducts of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criticism, byresolution into “self-consciousness” or transformation into “apparitions,” “spectres,” “fancies,” etc. but only by the practical overthrow of theactual social relations which gave rise to this idealistic humbug; that notcriticism but revolution is the driving force of history, also of religion, ofphilosophy and all other types of theory. It shows that history does notend by being resolved into “self-consciousness as spirit of the spirit,” butthat in it at each stage there is found a material result: a sum ofproductive forces, an historically created relation of individuals to natureand to one another, which is handed down to each generation from itspredecessor; a mass of productive forces, capital funds and conditions,which, on the one hand, is indeed modified by the new generation, butalso on the other prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it adefinite development, a special character. It shows that circumstancesmake men just as much as men make circumstances.
This sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms ofintercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence assomething given, is the real basis of what the philosophers haveconceived as “substance” and “essence of man,” and what they havedeified and attacked; a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, inits effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact thatthese philosophers revolt against it as “self-consciousness” and the “Unique.” These conditions of life, which different generations find inexistence, decide also whether or not the periodically recurringrevolutionary convulsion will be strong enough to overthrow the basis ofthe entire existing system. And if these material elements of a completerevolution are not present (namely, on the one hand the existingproductive forces, on the other the formation of a revolutionary mass,which revolts not only against separate conditions of society up till then,but against the very “production of life” till then, the “total activity” onwhich it was based), then, as far as practical development is concerned,it is absolutely immaterial whether the idea of this revolution has beenexpressed a hundred times already, as the history of communismproves.
In the whole conception of history up to the present this real basis ofhistory has either been totally neglected or else considered as a minormatter quite irrelevant to the course of history. History must, therefore,always be written according to an extraneous standard; the realproduction of life seems to be primeval history, while the truly historicalappears to be separated from ordinary life, something extra-superterrestrial.With this the relation of man to nature is excluded fromhistory and hence the antithesis of nature and history is created. Theexponents of this conception of history have consequently only been ableto see in history the political actions of princes and States, religious andall sorts of theoretical struggles, and in particular in each historicalepoch have had to share the illusion of that epoch. For instance, if anepoch imagines itself to be actuated by purely “political” or “religious” motives, although “religion” and “politics” are only forms of its truemotives, the historian accepts this opinion. The “idea,” the “conception” of the people in question about their real practice, is transformed intothe sole determining, active force, which controls and determines theirpractice. When the crude form in which the division of labour appearswith the Indians and Egyptians calls forth the caste-system in their Stateand religion, the historian believes that the caste-system is the powerwhich has produced this crude social form.
While the French and the English at least hold by the political illusion, which is moderately closeto reality, the Germans move in the realm of the “pure spirit,” and makereligious illusion the driving force of history. The Hegelian philosophy ofhistory is the last consequence, reduced to its “finest expression,” of allthis German historiography, for which it is not a question of real, noreven of political, interests, but of pure thoughts, which consequentlymust appear to Saint Bruno as a series of “thoughts” that devour oneanother and are finally swallowed up in “self-consciousness.” —
Marginal note by Marx: So-calledobjectivehistoriography[23] consisted precisely, in treating the historical relations separately from activity. Reactionary character.
— and even more consistently the course of history must appear to Saint Max Stirner, who knows not a thing about real history, as a mere “tale of knights, robbers and ghosts,”[24] from whose visions he can, of course, only save himself by “unholiness”. This conception is truly religious: it postulates religious man as the primitive man, the starting-point of history, and in its imagination puts the religious production of fancies in the place of the real production of the means of subsistence and of life itself.
This whole conception of history, together with its dissolution and the scruples and qualms resulting from it, is a purely national affair of the Germans and has merely local interest for Germany, as for instance the important question which has been under discussion in recent times: how exactly one “passes from the realm of God to the realm of Man”[Ludwig Feuerbach,Ueber das Wesen des Christenthums] – as if this “realm of God” had ever existed anywhere save in the imagination, and the learned gentlemen, without being aware of it, were not constantly living in the “realm of Man” to which they are now seeking the way; and as if the learned pastime (for it is nothing more) of explaining the mystery of this theoretical bubble-blowing did not on the contrary lie in demonstrating its origin in actual earthly relations. For these Germans, it is altogether simply a matter of resolving the ready-made nonsense they find into some other freak, i.e., of presupposing that all this nonsense has a specialsensewhich can be discovered; while really it is only a question of explaining these theoretical phrases from the actual existing relations. The real, practical dissolution of these phrases, the removal of these notions from the consciousness of men, will, as we have already said, be effected by altered circumstances, not by theoretical deductions. For the mass of men, i.e., the proletariat, these theoretical notions do not exist and hence do not require to be dissolved, and if this mass ever had any theoretical notions, e.g., religion, these have now long been dissolved by circumstances.
The purely national character of these questions and solutions is moreover shown by the fact that these theorists believe in all seriousness that chimeras like “the God-Man,” “Man,” etc., have presided over individual epochs of history (Saint Bruno even goes so far as to assert that only “criticism and critics have made history,”[Bruno Bauer,Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs] and when they themselves construct historical systems, they skip over all earlier periods in the greatest haste and pass immediately from “Mongolism”[Max Stirner,Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum]to history “with meaningful content,” that is to say, to the history, of theHallische and Deutsche Jahrbücherand the dissolution of the Hegelian school into a general squabble. They forget all other nations, all real events, and thetheatrum mundi is confined to the Leipzig book fair and the mutual quarrels of “criticism,”[Bruno Bauer] “man,”[Ludwig Feuerbach] and “the unique”.[Max Stirner] If for once these theorists treat really historical subjects, as for instance the eighteenth century, they merely give a history of ideas, separated from the facts and the practical development underlying them; and even that merely in order to represent that period as an imperfect preliminary stage, the as yet limited predecessor of the truly historical age, i.e., the period of the German philosophic struggle from 1840 to 1844. As might be expected when the history of an earlier period is written with the aim of accentuating the brilliance of an unhistoric person and his fantasies, all the really historic events, even the really historic interventions of politics in history, receive no mention. Instead we get a narrative based not on research but on arbitrary constructions and literary gossip, such as Saint Bruno provided in his now forgotten history of the eighteenth century.[Bruno Bauer,Geschichte der Politik, Cultur und Aufklärung des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts] These pompous and arrogant hucksters of ideas, who imagine themselves infinitely exalted above all national prejudices, are thus in practice far more national than the beer-swilling philistines who dream of a united Germany. They do not recognise the deeds of other nations as historical; they live in Germany, within Germany 1281 and for Germany; they turn the Rhine-song[25] into a religious hymn and conquer Alsace and Lorraine by robbing French philosophy instead of the French state, by Germanising French ideas instead of French provinces. Herr Venedey is a cosmopolitan compared with the Saints Bruno and Max, who, in the universal dominance of theory, proclaim the universal dominance of Germany.
[...] It is also clear from these arguments how grossly Feuerbach isdeceiving himself when (Wigand’sVierteljahrsschrift, 1845, Band 2) byvirtue of the qualification “common man” he declares himself acommunist,[26] transforms the latter into a predicate of “man,” and therebythinks it possible to change the word “communist,” which in the realworld means the follower of a definite revolutionary party, into a merecategory. Feuerbach’s whole deduction with regard to the relation ofmen to one another goes only so far as to prove that men need andalways have needed each other. He wants to establish consciousness ofthis fact, that is to say, like the other theorists, merely to produce acorrect consciousness about an existing fact; whereas for the realcommunist it is a question of overthrowing the existing state of things.We thoroughly appreciate, moreover, that Feuerbach, in endeavouring toproduce consciousness of just this fact, is going as far as a theoristpossibly can, without ceasing to be a theorist and philosopher...
As an example of Feuerbach’s acceptance and at the same timemisunderstanding of existing reality, which he still shares with ouropponents, we recall the passage in thePhilosophie der Zukunft wherehe develops the view that the existence of a thing or a man is at thesame time its or his essence, that the conditions of existence, the modeof life and activity of an animal or human individual are those in whichits “essence” feels itself satisfied. Here every exception is expresslyconceived as an unhappy chance, as an abnormality which cannot bealtered. Thus if millions of proletarians feel by no means contented withtheir living conditions, if their “existence” does not in the leastcorrespond to their “essence,” then, according to the passage quoted,this is an unavoidable misfortune, which must be borne quietly. Themillions of proletarians and communists, however, think differently andwill prove this in time, when they bring their “existence” into harmonywith their “essence” in a practical way, by means of a revolution.Feuerbach, therefore, never speaks of the world of man in such cases,but always takes refuge in external nature, and moreover in naturewhich has not yet been subdued by men. But every new invention, everyadvance made by industry, detaches another piece from this domain, sothat the ground which produces examples illustrating such Feuerbachianpropositions is steadily shrinking.
The “essence” of the fish is its “being,” water – to go no further than this one proposition. The “essence” of the freshwater fish is the water of a river. But the latter ceases to be the “essence” of the fish and is no longer a suitable medium of existence as soon as the river is made to serve industry, as soon as it is polluted by dyes and other waste products and navigated by steamboats, or as soon as its water is diverted into canals where simple drainage can deprive the fish of its medium of existence. The explanation that all such contradictions are inevitable abnormalities does not essentially differ from the consolation which Saint Max Stirner offers to the discontented, saving that this contradiction is their own contradiction and this predicament their own predicament, whereupon then, should either set their minds at ease, keep their disgust to themselves, or revolt against it in some fantastic way. It differs just as little from Saint Bruno’s allegation that these unfortunate circumstances are due to the fact that those concerned are stuck in the muck of “substance,” have not advanced to “absolute self-consciousness and do not realise that these adverse conditions are spirit of their spirit.
[...] We shall, of course, not take the trouble to enlighten our wisephilosophers by explaining to them that the “liberation” of man is notadvanced a single step by reducing philosophy, theology, substance andall the trash to “self-consciousness” and by liberating man from thedomination of these phrases, which have never held him in thrall. Norwill we explain to them that it is only possible to achieve real liberationin the real world and by employing real means, that slavery cannot beabolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny,serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, ingeneral, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtainfood and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity.“Liberation” is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought aboutby historical conditions, the development of industry, commerce,agriculture, the conditions of intercourse...[There is here a gap in the manuscript]
In Germany, a country where only a trivial historical development istaking place, these mental developments, these glorified and ineffectivetrivialities, naturally serve as a substitute for the lack of historicaldevelopment, and they take root and have to be combated. But this fightis of local importance.
In reality and for the practical materialist, i.e. the communist, it is aquestion of revolutionising the existing world, of practically attacking andchanging existing things. When occasionally we find such views withFeuerbach, they are never more than isolated surmises and have muchtoo little influence on his general outlook to be considered here asanything else than embryos capable of development. Feuerbach’sconception of the sensuous world is confined on the one hand to merecontemplation of it, and on the other to mere feeling; he says “Man” instead of “real historical man.” “Man” is really “the German.” In the first case, the contemplation of the sensuous world, he necessarily lightson things which contradict his consciousness and feeling, which disturbthe harmony he presupposes, the harmony of all parts of the sensuousworld and especially of man and nature. To remove this disturbance, hemust take refuge in a double perception, a profane one which onlyperceives the “flatly obvious” and a higher, philosophical, one whichperceives the “true essence” of things. He does not see how the sensuousworld around him is, not a thing given direct from all eternity, remainingever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society;and, indeed, in the sense that it is an historical product, the result of theactivity of a whole succession of generations, each standing on theshoulders of the preceding one, developing its industry and itsintercourse, modifying its social system according to the changed needs.Even the objects of the simplest “sensuous certainty” are only given himthrough social development, industry and commercial intercourse. Thecherry-tree, like almost all fruit-trees, was, as is well known, only a fewcenturies ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and thereforeonly by this action of a definite society in a definite age it has become “sensuous certainty” for Feuerbach.
Incidentally, when we conceive things thus, as they really are andhappened, every profound philosophical problem is resolved, as will beseen even more clearly later, quite simply into an empirical fact. Forinstance, the important question of the relation of man to nature (Bruno[Bauer] goes so far as to speak of “the antitheses in nature and history” (p. 110), as though these were two separate “things” and man did notalways have before him an historical nature and a natural history) out ofwhich all the “unfathomably lofty works” on “substance” and “self-consciousness” were born, crumbles of itself when we understand thatthe celebrated “unity of man with nature” has always existed in industryand has existed in varying forms in every epoch according to the lesseror greater development of industry, just like the “struggle” of man withnature, right up to the development of his productive powers on acorresponding basis. Industry and commerce, production and theexchange of the necessities of life, themselves determine distribution,the structure of the different social classes and are, in turn, determinedby it as to the mode in which they are carried on; and so it happens thatin Manchester, for instance, Feuerbach sees only factories andmachines, where a hundred years ago only spinning-wheels andweaving-rooms were to be seen, or in the Campagna of Rome he findsonly pasture lands and swamps, where in the time of Augustus he wouldhave found nothing but the vineyards and villas of Roman capitalists.Feuerbach speaks in particular of the perception of natural science; hementions secrets which are disclosed only to the eye of the physicist andchemist; but where would natural science be without industry andcommerce? Even this pure natural science is provided with an aim, aswith its material, only through trade and industry, through the sensuousactivity of men. So much is this activity, this unceasing sensuous labourand creation, this production, the basis of the whole sensuous world asit now exists, that, were it interrupted only for a year, Feuerbach wouldnot only find an enormous change in the natural world, but would verysoon find that the whole world of men and his own perceptive faculty,nay his own existence, were missing. Of course, in all this the priority ofexternal nature remains unassailed, and all this has no application to theoriginal men produced bygeneratio aequivoca[spontaneous generation]; but this differentiationhas meaning only insofar as man is considered to be distinct fromnature. For that matter, nature, the nature that preceded human history,is not by any means the nature in which Feuerbach lives, it is naturewhich today no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a fewAustralian coral-islands of recent origin) and which, therefore, does notexist for Feuerbach.
Certainly Feuerbach has a great advantage over the “pure” materialists in that he realises how man too is an “object of the senses.” But apart from the fact that he only conceives him as an “object of thesenses, not as sensuous activity,” because he still remains in the realmof theory and conceives of men not in their given social connection, notunder their existing conditions of life, which have made themwhat theyare, he never arrives at the really existing active men, but stops at theabstraction “man,” and gets no further than recognising “the true,individual, corporeal man,” emotionally, i.e. he knows no other “humanrelationships” “of man to man” than love and friendship, and even thenidealised. He gives no criticism of the present conditions of life. Thus henever manages to conceive the sensuous world as the total livingsensuousactivity of the individuals composing it; and therefore when,for example, he sees instead of healthy men a crowd of scrofulous,overworked and consumptive starvelings, he is compelled to take refugein the “higher perception” and in the ideal “compensation in thespecies,” and thus to relapse into idealism at the very point where thecommunist materialist sees the necessity, and at the same time thecondition, of a transformation both of industry and of the social structure.
As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history,and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist. With himmaterialism and history diverge completely, a fact which incidentally isalready obvious from what has been said.
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. theclass which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time itsruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of materialproduction at its disposal, has control at the same time over the meansof mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas ofthose who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. Theruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominantmaterial relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped asideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the rulingone, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composingthe ruling class possess among other things consciousness, andtherefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determinethe extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this inits whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, asproducers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of theideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. Forinstance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy, andbourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery isshared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be thedominant idea and is expressed as an “eternal law.”
The division of labour, which we already saw above as one of thechief forces of history up till now, manifests itself also in the ruling classas the division of mental and material labour, so that inside this classone part appears as the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptiveideologists, who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class aboutitself their chief source of livelihood), while the others’ attitude to theseideas and illusions is more passive and receptive, because they are inreality the active members of this class and have less time to make upillusions and ideas about themselves. Within this class this cleavage caneven develop into a certain opposition and hostility between the twoparts, which, however, in the case of a practical collision, in which theclass itself is endangered, automatically comes to nothing, in which casethere also vanishes the semblance that the ruling ideas were not theideas of the ruling class and had a power distinct from the power of thisclass. The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular periodpresupposes the existence of a revolutionary class; about the premisesfor the latter sufficient has already been said above.
If now in considering the course of history we detach the ideas of theruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them anindependent existence, if we confine ourselves to saying that these orthose ideas were dominant at a given time, without bothering ourselvesabout the conditions of production and the producers of these ideas, ifwe thus ignore the individuals and world conditions which are thesource of the ideas, we can say, for instance, that during the time thatthe aristocracy was dominant, the concepts honour, loyalty, etc. weredominant, during the dominance of the bourgeoisie the conceptsfreedom, equality, etc. The ruling class itself on the whole imagines thisto be so. This conception of history, which is common to all historians,particularly since the eighteenth century, will necessarily come upagainst the phenomenon that increasingly abstract ideas hold sway, i.e.ideas which increasingly take on the form of universality. For each newclass which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled,merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as thecommon interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed inideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and representthem as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making arevolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to aclass, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; itappears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class. —
Marginal note by Marx: Universality corresponds to (1) the class versus the estate, (2) the competition, world-wide intercourse, etc., (3) the great numerical strength of the ruling class, (4) the illusion of the common interests (in the beginning this illusion is true), (5) the delusion of the ideologists and the division of labour.
— It can do this because, to start with, its interest really is more connectedwith the common interest of all other non-ruling classes, because underthe pressure of hitherto existing conditions its interest has not yet beenable to develop as the particular interest of a particular class. Its victory,therefore, benefits also many individuals of the other classes which arenot winning a dominant position, but only insofar as it now puts theseindividuals in a position to raise themselves into the ruling class. Whenthe French bourgeoisie overthrew the power of the aristocracy, it therebymade it possible for many proletarians to raise themselves above theproletariat, but only insofar as they become bourgeois. Every new class,therefore, achieves its hegemony only on a broader basis than that of theclass ruling previously, whereas the opposition of the non-ruling classagainst the new ruling class later develops all the more sharply andprofoundly. Both these things determine the fact that the struggle to bewaged against this new ruling class, in its turn, aims at a more decidedand radical negation of the previous conditions of society than could allprevious classes which sought to rule.
This whole semblance, that the rule of a certain class is only the ruleof certain ideas, comes to a natural end, of course, as soon as class rulein general ceases to be the form in which society is organised, that is tosay, as soon as it is no longer necessary to represent a particular interestas general or the “general interest” as ruling.
Once the ruling ideas have been separated from the ruling individualsand, above all, from the relationships which result from a given stage ofthe mode of production, and in this way the conclusion has beenreached that history is always under the sway of ideas, it is very easy toabstract from these various ideas “the idea,” the notion, etc. as thedominant force in history, and thus to understand all these separateideas and concepts as “forms of self-determination” on the part of theconcept developing in history. It follows then naturally, too, that all therelationships of men can be derived from the concept of man, man asconceived, the essence of man, Man. This has been done by thespeculative philosophers. Hegel himself confesses at the end of theGeschichtsphilosophie that he “has considered the progress of theconcept only” and has represented in history the “true theodicy.” (p.446.) Now one can go back again to the producers of the “concept,” to the theorists, ideologists and philosophers, and one comes then to theconclusion that the philosophers, the thinkers as such, have at all timesbeen dominant in history: a conclusion, as we see[27], already expressed byHegel. The whole trick of proving the hegemony of the spirit in history(hierarchy Stirner calls it) is thus confined to the following three efforts.
No. 1. One must separate the ideas of those ruling for empiricalreasons, under empirical conditions and as empirical individuals, fromthese actual rulers, and thus recognise the rule of ideas or illusions inhistory.
No. 2. One must bring an order into this rule of ideas, prove amystical connection among the successive ruling ideas, which ismanaged by understanding them as “acts of self-determination on thepart of the concept” (this is possible because by virtue of their empiricalbasis these ideas are really connected with one another and because,conceived as mere ideas, they become self-distinctions, distinctionsmade by thought).
No. 3. To remove the mystical appearance of this “self-determiningconcept” it is changed into a person – “Self-Consciousness” – or, toappear thoroughly materialistic, into a series of persons, who representthe “concept” in history, into the “thinkers,” the “philosophers,” theideologists, who again are understood as the manufacturers of history,as the “council of guardians,” as the rulers. Thus the whole body ofmaterialistic elements has been removed from history and now full reincan be given to the speculative steed.
Whilst in ordinary life every shopkeeper is very well able todistinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he reallyis, our historians have not yet won even this trivial insight. They takeevery epoch at its word and believe that everything it says and imaginesabout itself is true.
This historical method which reigned in Germany, and especially thereason why, must be understood from its connection with the illusion ofideologists in general, e.g. the illusions of the jurist, politicians (of thepractical statesmen among them, too), from the dogmatic dreamingsand distortions of these fellows; this is explained perfectly easily fromtheir practical position in life, their job, and the division of labour.
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