The German Ideology: An Internal Clarification within the School
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
In the fall of 1845, Marx and Engels began work together on an extensive manuscript that was only published in the twentieth century under the title The German Ideology. The work was meant to be a reckoning with the Young Hegelians — with Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Max Stirner. It became the most incisive critique of Left Hegelian philosophy and, at the same time, a clarification of the authors’ own theoretical standpoint.
The manuscript opens with a striking diagnosis: “The German philosophers descend from heaven to earth; here we ascend from earth to heaven.”[1] This formulation sounds like a radical break with all previous philosophy. But what does it mean systematically?
Marx does not criticize thinking as such but a particular way of thinking: beginning with abstract ideas that are then supposed to be “applied” to reality. Against this method, he sets a beginning in “real practice” — not as blind action, but as conscious activity that becomes transparent to itself. The movement “from earth to heaven” is not a rejection of theory but a reversal of the direction of grounding: ideas arise from practice, not the reverse.
The critique of Feuerbach unfolds the consequences of this insight. Feuerbach had criticized religion as a projection of human qualities onto an imaginary being. Marx radicalizes this: even Feuerbach’s “human essence” is still too abstract. The human being is not a timeless species-being but “the ensemble of social relations” — determined by concrete historical practice.[2]
At first this formulation sounds like a break with Hegel. But on closer inspection it merely explicates what is already developed in Hegel’s philosophy of right. There, the human being constitutes himself through family, civil society, the state — through the “ensemble of social relations.” Hegel’s objective spirit is nothing other than the systematic unfolding of what Marx here formulates as a program. The difference lies not in the matter but in the mode of presentation: Hegel develops it systematically, Marx formulates it programmatically.
The entire critique of the Young Hegelians in The German Ideology can be read in agreement with our interpretation of Hegel’s Logic. What Marx criticizes are not Hegel’s systematic insights but their one-sided absolutization by his students. The Young Hegelians had isolated individual moments — critique (Bauer), species-being (Feuerbach), singularity (Stirner) — and let them harden into anti-systems. Marx shows: these moments must be mediated.
The critique of Bruno Bauer targets his absolutization of critique. Bauer had elevated the permanent critique of all existing conditions to a principle. Marx shows: pure critique remains abstract if it does not issue into practical transformation. Dialectic is not permanent destruction but determinate negation — a negation that builds up even as it negates.
The critique of Stirner is the most extensive — and the most illuminating for Marx’s own position. Stirner had set the absolute singularity of the “unique one” against all general structures. Marx shows: this absolute singularity is itself still abstract. The concrete individual is not isolated but constitutes itself through its social relations. True individuality arises not through abstraction from all mediations but through their conscious appropriation.
This threefold critique reveals the systematic logic of Marx’s position. Against Feuerbach: the universal (the human essence) is not abstractly generic but historically concrete. Against Bauer: negation is not abstractly destructive but determinately constructive. Against Stirner: the particular is not abstractly isolated but concretely mediated. The structure of this threefold determination corresponds exactly to Hegel’s critique of one-sided moments in the doctrine of the concept.