The Holy Family
신성가족
The first joint work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, written in Paris between September and November 1844 and published in Frankfurt in February 1845. It ridicules the "critical criticism" that Bruno Bauer, once Marx's mentor, his brother Edgar and other Young Hegelians put forward in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, and against a speculative idealism that treats the masses and history as mere material for spirit it sets a "real humanism" starting from real human beings and classes. It is the source of the proposition that what matters is not what the proletariat imagines as its aim but what it is and what, in accordance with that being, it will be historically compelled to do. The title, likening the Bauer brothers and their circle to the Holy Family, was the publisher's suggestion.
In depth
Why the title, and whom did it target?
At the end of August 1844 Engels stopped in Paris on his way back from England and met Marx properly for the first time. At this meeting they decided to write a book together, and the result is their first joint work. Their target was Bruno Bauer. Once Marx's senior and something of a mentor in Berlin, Bauer, with his brother Edgar and others, was publishing the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung in Charlottenburg and claiming that only their "pure criticism" moved history and that "the masses" were the enemy of spirit.
Marx and Engels mocked what Bauer called "pure criticism" as "critical criticism". The manuscript was originally titled Critique of Critical Criticism, and according to the German Wikipedia the publisher Zacharias Loewenthal proposed the final title on 27 December 1844: The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Company. Likening the Bauer brothers and their followers to the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph mocked their self-image as saviours. The book came out on 24 February 1845 from the Literarische Anstalt (J. Rütten) in Frankfurt.
Engels finished his short chapters before leaving Paris, and Marx wrote the rest by the end of November. The German Wikipedia states that about 90% of the text is Marx's. Engels found it "curious" that he was named as an author when he had written "almost nothing", but praised the book as "splendidly written and enough to make you split your sides laughing", while also remarking that it was too long and would be incomprehensible to the general public.
What does the "fruit" image expose about speculative philosophy?
The best-known passage is "The Mystery of Speculative Construction" in Chapter Five. Marx explains the method of speculative philosophy with fruit. From apples, pears, strawberries and almonds I form the general idea "fruit". So far there is no problem. But if I imagine that this abstract idea "fruit" is an essence existing outside me, indeed the true essence of the pear and the apple, then it becomes inessential for the pear to be a pear and for the apple to be an apple.
Wenn ich mir aus den wirklichen Äpfeln, Birnen, Erdbeeren, Mandeln die allgemeine Vorstellung "Frucht" bilde, wenn ich weitergehe und mir einbilde, daß meine aus den wirklichen Früchten gewonnene abstrakte Vorstellung "die Frucht" ein außer mir existierendes Wesen, ja das wahre Wesen der Birne, des Apfels etc. sei, so erkläre ich – spekulativ ausgedrückt – "die Frucht" für die "Substanz" der Birne, des Apfels, der Mandel etc.
The difficulty comes next. It is easy to form the abstract idea from real fruits, but impossible to produce real fruits again from the abstract idea. So the speculative philosopher declares that "the fruit" is not dead but a living essence that differentiates itself and moves, giving itself an apple-like existence in the apple and a pear-like existence in the pear. The ordinary person merely says that there are apples and pears; the philosopher, saying the same thing speculatively, has worked a miracle and created the fruits out of his own abstract understanding. The chapter was written to mock the Bauerite Szeliga's "critical" glorification of Eugène Sue's novel The Mysteries of Paris, but Marx saw the trick as the essence of Hegel's method. What he had criticised in the 1843 manuscript as making the Idea the subject and reality its predicate here becomes an image anyone can follow.
Who makes history, spirit or the masses?
Bauer held that historical actions had so far failed because the masses took an interest in them and became enthusiastic about them, and that a true idea is sullied when it mixes with the interests of the masses. Marx turns this around: "The 'idea' always disgraced itself insofar as it was distinct from the 'interest'." A mass interest that asserts itself historically goes, in its "idea", far beyond its real limits when it first enters the world stage, and the more thoroughgoing a historical action, the larger the mass whose action it is.
Die "Idee" blamierte sich immer, soweit sie von dem "Interesse" unterschieden war.
In the same chapter Marx goes after the habit of treating history as a person. "History does nothing, it 'possesses no immense wealth', it 'wages no battles'! It is man, real, living man, who does all that, who possesses and fights." History is not a separate person using man as a means to its own ends; it is "nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims". The chapter also contains the dispute over the French Revolution and "Critical Battle against French Materialism", which traces English and French materialism into socialism and communism.
What did it say about the proletariat?
In Chapter Four Marx defends Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's What Is Property? against the Bauerites' distortions and analyses the proletariat and wealth as two forms of the same world of private property. Private property is the positive side, compelled to maintain both itself and its opposite, the proletariat; the proletariat is the negative side, compelled to abolish itself and with it the condition that makes it a proletariat, private property. The propertied class and the proletariat represent the same human self-alienation, but the former feels at ease and confirmed in it, while the latter feels annihilated in it.
When socialist writers ascribe a world-historical role to the proletariat, it is not because they take proletarians for gods. Quite the reverse: in the fully formed proletariat all humanity has in practice been stripped away, all the conditions of life of present society are compressed into its situation in their most inhuman form, and so absolute need drives it to revolt against this inhumanity. Then comes the famous sentence: "It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do."
Es handelt sich nicht darum, was dieser oder jener Proletarier oder selbst das ganze Proletariat als Ziel sich einstweilen vorstellt. Es handelt sich darum, was es ist und was es diesem Sein gemäß geschichtlich zu tun gezwungen sein wird.
In the Introduction of early 1844 the proletariat had been philosophy's "material weapon". Here its role is derived from the real situation of the class and from the movement of private property itself. The English Wikipedia presents the book as an early treatment of what would later be called false consciousness.
Where does the book stand in the genealogy?
The preface states the book's purpose: "Real humanism has no more dangerous enemy in Germany than spiritualism or speculative idealism, which substitutes 'self-consciousness' or 'spirit' for the real individual man." Marx and Engels saw Bauer's criticism as speculation reproducing itself as caricature, German speculative nonsense at its peak, and announced that after this polemic each of them would set out his own positive views in independent writings.
Der reale Humanismus hat in Deutschland keinen gefährlicheren Feind als den Spiritualismus oder den spekulativen Idealismus, der an die Stelle des wirklichen individuellen Menschen das "Selbstbewußtsein" oder den "Geist" setzt.
As the phrase "real humanism" shows, the book still stands in Feuerbach's shadow. Engels wrote in 1886 that how much Marx was influenced by Feuerbach despite his critical reservations can be read in The Holy Family. The German Wikipedia treats it as a work of transition. Soon after publication, in spring 1845, Marx began to distance himself from Feuerbach in the Theses on Feuerbach, a turn prompted in part by the critique of Feuerbach in Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own of October 1844. Curiously, The Holy Family left Stirner, a close associate of Bauer's, out of the "company" it attacked. Bauer replied in Wigand's Vierteljahrsschrift in 1845 that Marx and Engels had misunderstood him; Marx answered briefly and then carried the dispute on in The German Ideology, calling Bauer and Stirner "Saint Bruno" and "Saint Max". Lenin later made a detailed set of excerpts and comments on the book, printed in his Philosophical Notebooks.