Karl Marx’s father, Heinrich—his original name was Hirschel ha-Levi Marx—was a liberal, cultivated, “enlightened” lawyer, a convert to Evan-gelical Protestantism. At his bidding, on August 26, 1824, his son Karl and Karl’s five sisters were baptized into the Evangelical Church. Shortly before graduation from the Trier Gymnasium, the seventeen-year-old Marx wrote a commentary on the Gospel of Saint John entitled “On the Union of the Faithful with Christ according to John XV, 1-14, described in its Ground and Essence, in its Unconditioned Necessity and in its Effects.” Chief among the “effects” of this union with Christ, Karl Marx writes, is that heathen virtue itself is gentled; it is no longer gloomy, stoic, difficult, and dutiful. “Every repulsive aspect is driven out, all that is coarse is dissolved, and virtue is made clear, becoming gentler and more human”1 (my emphasis). This early theological work of Marx, as important, in its way, for an understanding of Marxism as the publication of Hegel’s Theologische Jugendschriften were for an understanding of Hegel,2 is structured by the contrast between the highest achievements possible to pre-Christians—“crude greatness and untamed egoism”’—and the higher world, which “draws us up purified to Heaven” made possible by the union with Christ described in the Gospel of John.3 This dialectic of “the crude” and “the refined” is central to Marx’s thought.
Once at the University of Bonn, the young Marx’s behavior takes a decisive turn—in parental eyes anyway—toward the coarse and the crude. What has been called “The Struggle with the Father”4 begins. The issue between them was clear: the son had repudiated his father’s commitment to “the social art,” to bourgeois conversation, respectability, and propriety. The smooth parental solution of the “Jewish problem” did not work for the more passionate and more fastidious son. Because of Marx’s deeper acculturation, he was esthetically revolted by the “dis-crepant profile” the parental conversion had bequeathed to him; he “shuddered at the grotesque admixture in himself of the Prussian and the Jew.”5 To convert was for him to conceal, and to conceal, his high good taste informed him, was to be vulgar. “Coarseness reveals; vulgarity conceals,” E. M. Forster has told us.
Karl Marx’s behavior at Bonn University was the despair of his father. First it was his beer drinking, dueling, reckless spending, and general carousing. The son, after a time, ceases to violate the Protestant Ethic, only to commit a deeper offense. He reads all night, seeking . answers; truth becomes more important than sociability; the strength of his convictions offends his friends and family; he is becoming a fanatic, violating the enlightened Protestant Esthetic. The aging father writes his son from Trier (December 10, 1837):
God help us!!! Complete disorder, stupid wandering through all branches of knowledge, stupid brooding over melancholy oil-lamps. Going to seed in a scholastic dressing gown and unkempt hair as a change from going to seed with a glass of beer. Repellent un-sociability regardless of all propriety and even of all feelings for your father. The limitation of the social art to a filthy room…. Meanwhile the common crowd slip ahead undisturbed and reach their goal in a better or at least more comfortable way compared with those who despise their youthful joys and destroy their health in order to snatch at the shadow of erudition, which they would come to possess more easily through an hour’s talk with some com-petent person, and in addition they would have enjoyed the social pleasure of conversation.67
Six years later Marx in his first public article attacks the Prussian bureaucrats who, while allowing him to publish any convictions he pleases, insist on their right to censor the manner of expression of these views. In an enlightened bourgeois, liberal era, civil society enjoins its members to be moderate. Obsession as such has become disreputable. This form of adverbial censorship is, as we shall see, particularly costly for the secular Jewish intellectual.
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Another father would later write a son who was in the course of developing strong convictions quite other than those of Marx: “Your mother and I like very much your attitude of having strong convictions and of not being too bashful to express them. What I meant was that you would have to learn to be more moderate in the expression of your views and try to express them in a way that would give as little offense as possible to your friends.” Memo of William F. Buckley, Sr., to William F. Buckley, Jr. (age fifteen), quoted in L. Clayton Dubois, “The First Family of Conservatism,” New York Times Magazine, August 9, 1970, p. 28.↩︎
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