Romantic Reaction

The young bourgeoisie that had developed in Germany was not, by and large, the flower of the nation. The manner of its formation and the limitations placed on its existence gave it the petty outlook of the peddlar. It was brutal towards the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat, sycophantic towards absolutism and feudalism. The worst short-coming of Prussian industry according to Privy Councillor Kunth, who knew it better than anyone, was the astonishing lack of education of most manufacturers. Among the leading factory owners in Berlin, he found many who could scarcely write their own name properly. The literature and philosophy that had lifted Germany, politically and economically backward as it was, at least culturally onto a level with the other civilized western nations, had arisen in the eighteenth century from petty-bourgeois layers, from craftsmen and petty officials in church, school and state, and not from the big and medium bourgeoisie.

There was little left of this great national heritage by the twenties of the last century. The Romantic school, which followed the Classical movement like a feudal reaction from the East to a bourgeois advance from the West, degenerated more and more after Waterloo into the shallowest inanity. Poets who wrote a lot about very little, oscillating between sentimental tears and lewd obscenity, were the darlings of the general public. Already there were heralds of a new age, but all of them, Immermann and Platen, Börne and Heine, were still much more at the stage of struggling with Romanticism rather than victoriously overcoming it.

Just as, three hundred years previously, the development of the language had been the brightest aspect of the Lutheran reaction, the real scientific fruit of Romanticism was in the area of linguistic research. In economics, politics and religion, it advocated a restoration of the Middle Ages, which, after the historical decay of the medieval forms of society, inevitably led to a fantastic glorification of feudal methods of exploitation. Moreover, the spokesmen of Romantic theories of government, the Adam Müllers and Hallers and all the rest of them, were the paltriest imitators of the more brilliant Frenchmen Bonald and Maistre. To be sure, the necessity of abolishing more or less of the rubbish of feudalism and the guild system under the Napoleonic whip, had called forth in Germany a certain echo of classical bourgeois political economy. But even its exponents remained unoriginal pupils of Adam Smith and Ricardo. They lacked the living soil of modern bourgeois society, so that in their hands the theoretical expression of foreign reality was transformed into a collection of dogmas that they misinterpreted to fit the petty-bourgeois world around them. Perhaps nothing expresses the economic backwardness of German conditions better than the fact that Friedrich List, the only German economist to be original in his own way, attacked Adam Smith’s theories, not from the front, as happened in England and France, but from behind; not from the point of view of socialism, but from that of mercantilism. List, who was no great scientist, but had practical common sense, recognised nevertheless what the next step had to be for German capitalism. He agitated passionately for a German customs union and a German railway system. But the particularist governments persecuted the nationalist demagogue and the bourgeoisie left its most eloquent pioneer to starve, until in the end he shot himself.

Of all Adam Smith’s German pupils, only Heinrich von Thünen had some ideas he could call his own. In 1826 he wrote A Dream of Serious Content: On the Lot of the Workers, but he locked it away in a drawer for ten years. Thünen was a practical agriculturalist of some scientific education, born in Friesland, who had grown up among the free peasants around Jever and had settled as a landowner in Mecklenburg, where feudal commodity production made life terribly hard for the rural proletariat. This contradiction sharpened Thünen’s insight into the sufferings of ‘the most numerous class of citizens, the common labourers’, who even in a state with a representative constitution had no way of representing their interests and who were paid too little in comparison with the income of the manufacturer or the tenant farmer. Before anyone else in Germany, Thünen recognized in the July revolution of 1830 the signal for the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. He asked how, since capital was the product of human labour, the creature could subject the creator, how the worker had become the slave of capital instead of its ruler. Thünen found the answer in the mathematical formula of the natural wages of labour, which he thought so infallible that he had it carved on his tombstone. It was no more than scholastic hair-splitting, however, and it was not until shortly before his death in 1850 that he was able to realize his idea of forming associations of rural workers. Despite his good intentions this turned out in practice to be a new advantage for the owners and a new chain for the workers.

German Romanticism proved to be more original in the study of law than in the study of government. The Historical School of Law was its own peculiar creation. It was intended as a protest against the allegedly frivolous spirit of the eighteenth century, but was in fact a protest against its revolutionary spirit. It may be that the rationalist school of law was based on bourgeois reason, but as such it represented historical progress, while an historical school of law cut off all progress by making what was hallowed by history the basis of law simply because it was hallowed by history. Thus Hugo defended slavery, manorial privileges and the law of entail. When, in Heidelberg in 1813, the law lecturer Thibaut, shaken by the hordes of young Germans he saw armed to the teeth streaming off to France, demanded a universal bourgeois legal code for Germany, Savigny replied that the age lacked a vocation for legislation. Savigny’s book became the programme of the historical school of law. It closed its eyes to the bourgeois laws of France, in which the age had indeed proved its vocation for legislation, and sought to mock the laws of the bourgeois class, which were in the process of becoming historical. It mocked them, as the famous criminal lawyer, Feuerbach, said, as a child of the gods, born of reason out of the ideal, striking the past out of the book of history and boldly leaping over the present into centuries still to come. As Hegel said, it was the greatest disgrace any nation ever had to endure. Soon a young fighter was to arise who was to brand the historical school of law for ever as a school that used the vileness of yesterday to justify the vileness of today and denounced as rebellious every cry of the serf against the knout, as long as the knout was an age-old, an ancestral, an historical knout.

That same young fighter, Karl Marx, said of the 1820s that philosophy, the only branch of literature that still pulsed with the spirit of life, had ceased to speak German because German had ceased to be the language of thought. The spirit spoke in mysterious words because words that could be understood were no longer allowed to be understood. But we must go deeper into the meaning of these mysterious words if the origins of scientific communism are not themselves to remain shrouded in mystery.