The German Ideology Study Guide

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were the leading theorists and advocates of the 19th-century communist movement, creating the historical and economic critique of capitalism known as Marxism. Marx was born in Trier to a converted Jewish family. He studied law and, after a failed literary career, fell in with the Young Hegelians. Marx’s radical journalism attracted the ire of the Prussian government, forcing him into exile in Paris, where in 1844 he met Engels, a fellow radical who was the son of a successful industrialist. Engels would help support his friend throughout his life as Marx struggled to support his family with his meager income as a writer and journalist. Marx and Engels continued to develop their ideas and advocate for revolutionary causes, with both men eventually moving to England to escape persecution after the failed revolutions of 1848. They published The Communist Manifesto that same year. Marx and Engels played leading roles in the leading communist organization of their time, the International Workingmen’s Association, and fleshed out their ideas in the multiple volumes of Capital. Engels continued to write and organize after Marx’s death, most notably publishing The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in 1884.

Marx and Engels wrote The German Ideology in exile in Brussels, when the revolutionary spirit was about to explode across Europe. The continent (and Germany in particular) was still in turmoil after over two decades of revolution and war following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. Napoleon’s conquest of most of central Europe paradoxically helped spread the values of liberalism and constitutionalism and nationalist independence movements. In Germany, this took the form of the movement for unification. While the Romantic nationalism of the early 19th century had a fraught relationship to liberalism and conservativism, many Germans of the time saw unification as a way to modernize and liberalize Germany, which was divided into a patchwork of small states and systems of aristocratic privilege. The apparent success of the old regimes in defeating Napoleon and restoring the prerevolutionary status quo was thrown into question by the 1830 July Revolution in France. In 1848, two years after Marx and Engels wrote The German Ideology, first France and then almost all of Europe (Germany included) experienced a wave of revolutions demanding democracy, national independence, and (in some places) equality and freedom for the working class. While the revolutions of 1848 were ultimately suppressed or subverted, Marx and Engels saw them as proof of the urgency and vitality of the proletarian cause.

In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels harshly criticize the leading representatives of German philosophy—and their erstwhile peers and comrades—for their idealistic, speculative approach. The book is structured around critiques of Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Max Stirner, as well as several lesser-known German socialists. While The German Ideology analyzes Stirner’s The Unique and Its Property at length, it discusses Feuerbach’s ideas more generally. Meanwhile, the work attacks Bauer for his article “The Characteristics of Ludwig Feuerbach,” and, more indirectly, his book The Good Cause of Freedom and My Own Cause. (Marx and Engels certainly had Feuerbach’s famous The Essence of Christianity in mind, too.) Equally important are Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Right, as well as his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, all of which greatly influenced the Young Hegelians. The vision of communism in The German Ideology also foreshadow Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto and the greatly expanded theory of value, labor, and production in Capital.