{"id":8416,"date":"2016-05-05T16:38:43","date_gmt":"2016-05-05T16:38:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/?p=8416"},"modified":"2025-05-13T14:18:49","modified_gmt":"2025-05-13T14:18:49","slug":"portrait-of-the-revolutionary-as-a-young-journalist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/portrait-of-the-revolutionary-as-a-young-journalist","title":{"rendered":"Karl Marx as a Young Journalist"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Rolf Hosfeld<\/h2>\n

\"HosfeldKarl\"<\/a><\/h3>\n

Excerpted by Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography<\/a><\/em> by Rolf Hosfeld, Translated from the German by Bernard Heise<\/p>\n

Karl Marx was born May 5, 1818. As a young man he was a journalist and an editor for Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal-socialist newspaper published in Germany. The paper was previously edited by Adolf Friedrich Rutenberg, who favored opinionated feuilletons, before Marx replaced him and gained recognition for his practical, evidence-based approach.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moses Hess was the \ufb01rst communist Karl Marx personally encountered. Both were from the Rhineland, came from bourgeois families, and were under the in\ufb02uence of Hegel\u2019s philosophy. Marx made an \u201cimpos\u00ading impression\u201d on Hess upon their \ufb01rst acquaintance in Septem\u00adber 1841. After their initial encounter Hess had the sense of having met the \u201cgreatest, perhaps the only real philosopher now living,\u201d one who would soon\u2014<\/em>Hess was referring here to the lecture halls of Bonn Univer\u00adsity\u2014<\/em>\u201cdraw upon him the eyes of Germany.\u201d
\n
\nAt this point, the perspectives of socialism and liberalism were still very similar. In contrast to Friedrich Wilhelm\u2019s Christian state, liberalism and socialism stood philosophically on the ground of immanentism\u2014happiness on earth. Bound more to Kant\u2019s ideas in East Prussia, and in the West more to the traditions of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period, liberalism was essentially a postrevolutionary movement, just as Hegel\u2019s philosophy was a postrevolutionary philosophy of the French Revolution. At \ufb01rst glance, it must come as a surprise that even people from the upper bourgeois cir\u00adcles around the Rheinische Zeitung <\/em>therefore felt close to the radical in\u00adtellectuals of the Hegelian school. Included among their fundamental demands were the rights to freedom of opinion and the press, whereas conservatives advocated the view that there could only be freedom for the truth as they themselves de\ufb01ned it. The liberals also demanded actual representative bodies, understanding them in the decidedly Hegelian sense as institutions of realized reason. Standing behind all of the parties was basically a metapolitical philosophy, a secularized theology.<\/p>\n

Marx\u2019s \ufb01rst article in the Rheinische Zeitung <\/em>appeared on May 5, 1842. Remarkable in a time of argumentative feuilletons, it reported well-researched, concrete details. Citing individual speakers and imparting a view of the narrow interests of the different estates, it concluded by persuading readers that a censorship law was not a law but rather a police mea\u00adsure, and that in contrast, only a law granting freedom of the press could be a real law because it is the positive existence of freedom.<\/em> Thus was Hegelian legal philosophy applied to concrete daily events, and on this issue the Rhenish liberals around Mevissen and Camphau\u00adsen were largely of one mind. They could feel themselves under\u00adstood even in Marx\u2019s sharp polemic against the historical school of law, for in reality its target was the king himself, whom Marx was accusing of representing the right of arbitrary power.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Rheinische-zeitung-1842a\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Marx was twenty-eight years old when he was appointed editor in chief of the Rheinische Zeitung.<\/em> Mevissen described him as \u201cdomineering, impetuous, pas\u00adsionate\u201d and \u201cfull of boundless self-con\ufb01dence,\u201d but also \u201cdeeply ear\u00adnest and learned.\u201d \u201cI will destroy you,\u201d he once hissed at Heinzen on the occasion of a controversy about the Prussian bu\u00adreaucracy. But Marx\u2019s dispute with the legacy of former editor Rutenberg also involved objective reasons.<\/p>\n

Rutenberg had given his Berlin friends too much free rein. In June in the Rheinische Zeitung, <\/em>Edgar Bauer, for example, railed against the upper bourgeoi\u00adsie, the exact opposite of those who, like him, wanted radically and critically to push \u201cprinciples to their extremes.\u201d The rhetoric was not very effective, but articles like this very much displeased the publishers, leading Marx to announce a corrective realignment of editorial policy in a letter to Dagobert Oppenheim. Under no circumstances did he want to challenge the censors with senseless provocations.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe concrete theory,\u201d he informed Oppenheim, \u201cmust be made clear and developed within the concrete conditions and on the basis of the existing state of things.\u201dBrie\ufb02y put, he wanted jour\u00adnalism that was well-grounded and empirically detailed.<\/p>\n

\"Marx4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Once the Rheinische Zeitung had departed from the form of the zeitgeist\u2019s argumentative Berlin feuilleton and increasingly turned to questions of the real state, practical questions,<\/em> and the speci\ufb01c prob\u00adlems of the Rhineland, the newspaper\u2019s circulation noticeably in\u00adcreased\u2014from under a thousand copies in October to over 3,500 prior to Christmas in 1842.<\/p>\n

While working there, Marx grew familiar with concrete poli\u00adtics. One subject he chose to address was a preindustrial prob\u00adlem that incidentally also preoccupied Mevissen: the hardship of pauperism, which, alongside child labor and poorly paid women\u2019s labor, was widespread. But Marx chie\ufb02y provoked irritation by justifying a Mosel correspondent\u2019s report on the misery of the peasants in the Mosel region, caused by the open borders of the German Customs Union. That these matters were even made public was in itself scandalous. As a rule, the censors energetically suppressed reports of social distress.<\/p>\n

Thus the modest freedoms of the liberal Cologne press came to an end in the wake of the investigative reports from the Mosel. And this meant the end of Marx\u2019s exclusive weapons of criticism, for the time being.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

\"author<\/a>Rolf Hosfeld<\/strong>\u00a0is the Academic Director of the Potsdam Lepsius House, a Research Center for Genocide Studies, and works as an independent writer. He is the author of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography<\/em>, from which this is adapted.<\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Rolf Hosfeld Excerpted by Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography by Rolf Hosfeld, Translated from the German by Bernard Heise Karl Marx was born May 5, 1818. As a young man he was a journalist and an editor for Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal-socialist newspaper published in Germany. The paper was previously edited by Adolf Friedrich… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[107,306,788,224,110,640,639,1601,519,2021,204,1835],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8416"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8416"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9850,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8416\/revisions\/9850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}