Kommentar zu Hegel und Marx, Chapter 2
The Berlin Education
Marx enrolls in Berlin in 1836 and studies there until 1841. In the winter semester of 1836/37 he attends lectures on the Pandects with Friedrich Carl von Savigny and on criminal law with Eduard Gans at the same time. Without seeking it, he thus finds himself at the center of a methodological confrontation: Savigny represents the historical school of law, which understands law as something historically grown; Gans represents the Hegelian philosophy of law and asserts it against Savigny’s reduction of law to what is historically given. In the summer semester of 1838, Marx also attends Gans’s lectures on Prussian common law. From 1837 he belongs to the Doctors’ Club, the Berlin circle of the younger Hegelians, in which Gans also moves.
Marx himself has described what happens in this constellation. In a lengthy letter to his father dated November 10, 1837, he depicts a turning point. He had tried, he writes, to carry a philosophy of law through the entire domain of law, and had failed in the attempt — failed on the “opposition between what is and what ought to be,” which is “peculiar to idealism.” In place of this metaphysics of law, another demand had emerged: to grasp “the reason of the thing itself” as something “conflicting within itself.”
This sentence is the key to everything that follows. It says: one does not approach reality with ready-made concepts and measure it against whether it corresponds to them. One finds the concepts in the movement of the thing itself, and one finds them by seeking out the contradiction lodged within the thing. This is Hegel’s basic methodological demand, in the words of a nineteen-year-old, six years before he will turn it against Hegel’s philosophy of law and three decades before he carries it through in Capital.
This stance passes its first public test in 1842. In the debates over the Wood Theft Law in the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx does not argue in the manner of customary law, which justifies a practice by its age. He measures a positive legal form by what social content it has and what reason is lodged within it — he asks whose interest is here giving itself the form of law. This is the procedure of Gans’s lectures, applied to a decision of the provincial diet.
A second Berlin connection should be mentioned here only briefly and elaborated later. Carl Ritter taught geography in these same years, and many who attended Hegel’s lectures attended his as well. Hegel’s account of the geographical basis of world history draws on Ritter’s material. When The German Ideology later begins with the natural foundations, it is thus not entering new terrain but one that had already been cultivated in Berlin’s teaching. Part III returns to this.