Selected Essays | Page 7

society, it is
necessary for a class to stand out as a class representing the whole of
society. Thus further involves, as its obverse side, the concentration of
all the defects of society in another class, and this particular class must
be the embodiment of the general social obstacles and impediments. A
particular social sphere must be identical with the notorious crime of
society as a whole, in such wise that the emancipation of this sphere
would appear to be the general self-emancipation. In order that one
class should be the class of emancipation par excellence, another class
must contrariwise be the class of manifest subjugation. The
negative-general significance of the French nobility and the French
clergy was the condition of the positive-general significance of the
class of the bourgeoisie, which was immediately encroaching upon and
confronting the former.
But in Germany every class lacks not only the consistency, the
keenness, the courage, the ruthlessness, which might stamp it as the
negative representative of society. It lacks equally that breadth of soul
which would identify it, if only momentarily, with the popular soul,
that quality of genius which animates material power until it becomes
political power, that revolutionary boldness which hurls at the opponent
the defiant words: I am nothing, and I have to be everything. But the

stock-in-trade of German morality and honour, not only as regards
individuals but also as regards classes, constitutes rather that modest
species of egoism which brings into prominence its own limitations.
The relation of the various spheres of German society is therefore not
dramatic, but epic. Each of them begins to be self-conscious and to
press its special claims upon the others not when it is itself oppressed,
but when the conditions of the time, irrespective of its co-operation,
create a sociable foundation from which it can on its part practise
oppression. Even the moral self-esteem of the German middle class is
only based on the consciousness of being the general representative of
the philistine mediocrity of all the other classes.
Consequently it is not only the German kings who succeed to the
throne mal à propos, but it is every sphere of bourgeois society which
experiences its defeat before it celebrates its victory, develops its own
handicaps before it overcomes the handicaps which confront it, asserts
its own narrow-minded nature before it can assert its generous nature,
so that even the opportunity of playing a great part is always past
before it actually existed, and each class, so soon as it embarks on a
struggle with the class above it, becomes involved in a struggle with
the class below it. Consequently, the princedom finds itself fighting the
monarchy, the bureaucrat finds himself fighting the nobility, the
bourgeois finds himself fighting them all, while the proletariat is
already commencing to fight the bourgeois.
The middle class hardly dares to seize hold of the ideas of
emancipation from its own standpoint before the development of social
conditions and the progress of political theory declare this standpoint to
be antiquated, or at least very problematical. In France partial
emancipation is the basis of universal emancipation. In Germany
universal emancipation is the conditio sine quâ non of every partial
emancipation. In France it is the reality, in Germany it is the
impossibility of gradual emancipation which must bring forth entire
freedom. In France every popular class is tinged with political idealism,
and does not feel primarily as a particular class, but as the
representative of social needs generally. The rôle of emancipator,

therefore, flits from one class to another of the French people in a
dramatic movement, until it eventually reaches the class which will no
longer realize social freedom upon the basis of certain conditions lying
outside of mankind and yet created by human society, but will rather
organize all the conditions of human existence upon the basis of social
freedom. In Germany, on the other hand, where practical life is as
unintellectual as intellectual life is unpractical, no class of bourgeois
society either feels the need or possesses the capacity for emancipation,
unless driven thereto by its immediate position, by material necessity,
by its chains themselves.
Wherein, therefore, lies the positive possibility of German
emancipation?
Answer: In the formation of a class in radical chains, a class which
finds itself in bourgeois society, but which is not of it, an order which
shall break up all orders, a sphere which possesses a universal character
by virtue of its universal suffering, which lays claim to no special right,
because no particular wrong but wrong in general is committed upon it,
which can no longer invoke a historical title, but only a human title,
which stands not in a one-sided antagonism to the consequences, but in
a many-sided antagonism to the assumptions of the German community,
a sphere