Letters on Historical Materialism
4. To Franz Mehring, 14 July 1893
Section summary
Thanking Mehring for his Lessing Legend, Engels admits that he and Marx neglected the “form”, the way ideas arise, for their economic “content”. Ideology is thought with a false consciousness, unaware of its real motive forces, which creates the semblance of an independent history of ideas. But ideas once produced react on their causes. He then compares Germany’s fragmentation with the rise of the French national state.
Only today do I get round to thanking you for the Lessing Legend, which you were kind enough to send me. I did not want to send you a mere formal acknowledgement of the book but at the same time to tell you something about it, about its contents. Hence the delay.
I begin at the end, with the appendix “On Historical Materialism”, in which you have set out the main facts excellently and convincingly for any unprejudiced person. If I find anything to object to, it is that you give me more credit than is my due, even if I count in everything that I might perhaps have found out for myself in the course of time, but which Marx, with his quicker coup d’œil and wider view, discovered much more rapidly. When one has had the good fortune to work for forty years with a man like Marx, one usually does not, during his lifetime, receive the recognition one thinks one deserves; then when the greater man dies, the lesser easily gets overrated, and that seems to me to be just my case at present; history will set all this right in the end, and by then one will be safely round the corner and know nothing about anything any more.
Otherwise there is only one point lacking, which, however, Marx and I regularly failed to stress enough in our writings and in regard to which we are all equally to blame. That is to say, we all laid, and had to lay, the main emphasis at first on deriving political, legal and other ideological notions, and the actions mediated through these notions, from basic economic facts. In doing so we neglected the formal side for the sake of the content: the ways and means by which these notions etc. come about. This has given our adversaries a welcome opportunity for misunderstandings or distortions, of which Paul Barth is a striking example.
Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it would simply not be an ideological process. He therefore imagines false or apparent motive forces. Because it is a process of thought, he derives both its content and its form from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors. He works with mere thought material, which he accepts without examination as the product of thought and does not investigate further for a more remote source independent of thought; indeed this is a matter of course to him, because, as all action is mediated by thought, it appears to him to be ultimately based upon thought.
The historical ideologist (historical is here simply meant to sum up political, juridical, philosophical, theological, in short all the spheres belonging to society and not merely to nature), the historical ideologist, then, has in every field of science a material that has formed itself independently out of the thought of earlier generations and has gone through an independent series of developments of its own in the brains of these successive generations. True, external facts belonging to its own or to other spheres may have helped to determine this development, but according to the tacit presupposition these facts are themselves in turn mere fruits of a process of thought, and so we still remain within the realm of mere thought, which has apparently succeeded in digesting even the hardest facts.
It is above all this semblance of an independent history of state constitutions, of systems of law, of ideological conceptions in every special field, that dazzles most people. When Luther and Calvin “overcome” the official Catholic religion, or Hegel “overcomes” Fichte and Kant, or Rousseau with his republican Contrat social indirectly “overcomes” the constitutional Montesquieu, this is a process that remains within theology, philosophy or political science, represents a stage in the history of these spheres of thought, and never leaves the sphere of thought at all. And since the bourgeois illusion of the eternity and finality of capitalist production has been added to this, even the overcoming of the mercantilists by the physiocrats and Adam Smith is regarded as a mere victory of the idea; not as the reflection in thought of changed economic facts, but as the correct insight, at last achieved, into actual conditions that have always and everywhere existed. Had Richard Coeur-de-Lion and Philip Augustus introduced free trade instead of getting mixed up in the crusades, we should have been spared five hundred years of misery and stupidity.
This side of the matter, which I can only indicate here, we have all, I think, neglected more than it deserves. It is the old story: at the beginning, form is always neglected for content. As I say, I have done that too, and the mistake has always struck me only post festum. So I am not only very far from reproaching you with it in any way (as an older accomplice I have no right to do so; on the contrary), but I should like all the same to draw your attention to this point for the future.
Bound up with this is also the fatuous notion of the ideologists that, because we deny an independent historical development to the various ideological spheres that play a part in history, we also deny them any effect on history. At the bottom of this lies the common undialectical conception of cause and effect as rigidly opposite poles, the total disregard of interaction. These gentlemen often almost deliberately forget that once a historical element has been brought into the world by other, ultimately economic, causes, it reacts in its turn and can react upon its environment and even upon its own causes. Barth, for instance, on the priesthood and religion, page 475 of your book. I was very pleased with the way you dealt with this fellow, who is shallow beyond all expectation. And they make that man professor of history in Leipzig! Old Wachsmuth, after all, who was also rather shallow-pated but had a very great sense for facts, was quite a different sort of fellow.
For the rest, I can only repeat about the book what I said repeatedly about the articles when they appeared in the Neue Zeit: it is by far the best account of the genesis of the Prussian state in existence; indeed, I may say the only good one, in most matters developing the connections correctly down to the details. One only regrets that you were not able to take in the whole further development down to Bismarck at the same time, and one cannot help hoping that you will do so another time and present the whole picture connectedly, from the Elector Frederick William to old William. After all, you have done the preliminary studies and, in the main at least, as good as finished them. And it has to be done some time, before the old shack collapses. The dissolution of the monarchist-patriotic legends is, if not exactly a necessary precondition for the removal of the monarchy that screens class rule (since a pure bourgeois republic in Germany was outlived before it came into being), still one of the most effective levers towards it.
Then you will also have more space and opportunity to present the local history of Prussia as part of Germany’s general misery. This is the point on which I differ here and there from your view, especially in the conception of the preconditions for the fragmentation of Germany and the failure of the German bourgeois revolution of the sixteenth century. If I get round to reworking the historical introduction to my Peasant War, which I hope will be next winter, I shall be able to develop the points in question there. Not that I consider the ones you give incorrect, but I put others beside them and group them somewhat differently.
In studying German history, which is one continuous story of misery, I have always found that only a comparison with the corresponding French epochs gives the right measure, because there exactly the opposite of what happens with us takes place. There, the establishment of the national state out of the disjecta membra of the feudal state, precisely when with us the main decline sets in. There, a rare objective logic in the whole course of the process; with us, dreary and ever drearier dislocation. There, in the Middle Ages, the English conqueror, intervening on behalf of the Provençal nationality against the northern French, represents foreign intervention; the English wars represent, so to speak, the Thirty Years’ War, which, however, ends in the expulsion of the foreign intervention and the subjugation of the South by the North. Then comes the struggle of the central power with the Burgundian vassal, who relies on his foreign possessions and plays the part of Brandenburg-Prussia, but which ends in the victory of the central power and makes the establishment of the national state final. And precisely at that moment the national state collapses completely with us (in so far as the “German kingdom” within the Holy Roman Empire can be called a national state at all), and the plundering of German territory on a large scale begins. It is a comparison most shameful for a German, but for that very reason all the more instructive; and since our workers have put Germany back in the front rank of the historical movement, we can swallow the ignominy of the past rather more easily.
Another especially characteristic feature of German development is that both the partial states which in the end divided the whole of Germany between them were not purely German but colonies on conquered Slav territory, Austria a Bavarian and Brandenburg a Saxon colony, and that they won power within Germany only by relying on foreign, non-German possessions: Austria on Hungary (not to mention Bohemia), Brandenburg on Prussia. On the western frontier, the one most threatened, nothing of the kind took place; on the northern frontier the protection of Germany against the Danes was left to the Danes; and in the south there was so little to protect that the frontier guards, the Swiss, were even able to tear themselves loose from Germany!
But I am wandering off into all kinds of digressions; let this chatter at least serve you as proof of how stimulating I find your work.