By Bernard E. Harcourt

You know me by now. And knowing me, you understand well, I am sure, that my ambition for this inaugural seminar of Marx 13/13—and more broadly, for the entire series—is to actualize these texts and readings of Marx: to make them speak to our present, to help us think and act in the moment, to face our unique challenges today—those many crises of our own making, global warming, the Counterrevolution, Behemoth capitalism.

Why start with Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach? you may ask. And how can we actualize this text today, in theory and practice?

The answer to the first question, in large part, is that it is with the Theses on Feuerbach and Ernst Bloch’s commentary that Étienne Balibar proposes to begin this year’s study of Marx, and Étienne Balibar is one of the finest and most penetrating readers of Marx.

Beginning Marx 13/13 with Étienne Balibar, having him accompany us throughout the series, and having him close the final session next May, offers a unique opportunity to renew the formative work that Étienne Balibar accomplished with his mentor and teacher, Louis Althusser, and fellow students and colleagues, Jacques Rancière, Pierre Macherey, and Roger Establet, at their seminar on Marx at the École Normale Supérieure in 1964-65—the seminar that gave rise to the collected volume, Reading Capital.[1] It also gives us an opportunity to revisit Étienne Balibar’s formative reading of Marx in his groundbreaking book, The Philosophy of Marx.[2]

Étienne Balibar has written extensively about the Theses on Feuerbach and will explain his reasons for starting there at the inaugural seminar of Marx 13/13. For now, I will just share with you a brilliant introductory passage from one of Balibar’s commentaries on the Theses:

They are widely considered one of the emblematic formularies of Western philosophy and sometimes compared to other concise texts – such as Parmenides’ Poem or Wittgenstein’s Tractatus — that combine a speculative content of seemingly enigmatic, inexhaustible richness with a manifesto-like style of enunciation, apparently signaling a radically new mode of thinking. Some of the best-known aphorisms have achieved a posteriori the same value of a turning point in philosophy (or in our relationship to philosophy) as, for instance, not only Parmenides’s and Wittgenstein’s respective “tauton gar esti noein te kai einai” [“being and thinking are the same] and “Worüber man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen” [“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”], but also Spinoza’s “ordo et connexio idearum idem est ac ordo et connexio rerum” [“the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things”] (Ethics II, Prop. VII) or Kant’s “Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind” [Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought”] (Critique of Pure Reason B75/A51), etc.[3]

As Balibar notes there, given the ink, sweat, and blood that has been spilled over the Theses already, “it is both extremely tempting and imprudent to embark on a new commentary.” But that is our challenge in this inaugural session—along with explaining the reasons for choosing the Theses and Bloch’s commentary as our entry point into rereading Marx today.

Let me tell you mine.

Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach as a Model and Exemplar

The content and concepts in Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach model the kind of philosophical method and argumentative strategy that might serve us well today to get beyond, not the conservative Hegelian Idealism that dominated Marx’s intellectual milieu at the time, but the present political liberal hegemony that prevents collective cooperation and political action. Marx’s philosophical approach of using a popular intermediary who had already shifted ground and created momentum—in his case, Ludwig Feuerbach— to further the shift and stimulate action is exemplary. On one reading, influenced by Bloch as well as by Frederick Engels, Feuerbach’s writings had already shifted the prevailing worldview by about ninety degrees; using that momentum to turn things fully, 180-degrees, was brilliantly strategic. Marx’s approach could serve as an exemplar today to motivate change.

But before getting to our present—or, if that is all that interests you, please skip down to the section headed “Political Liberalism Today”—let me explain how Feuerbach’s writings served both as a foil and a springboard for Marx to develop his radical approach.

Feuerbach was a pivotal thinker, for Marx, who put him on the path to a new materialism having the standpoint of “human society, or socialized humanity” as Marx wrote in Thesis #10 .[4] Insofar as Marx turned the Hegelian system on its head and transformed Hegel’s idealist march towards rational administrative perfection into a materialistjourney toward social, political, and economic change and well-being, Feuerbach contributed to that process of inversion.

Feuerbach turned idealist systematicity on its head in order to focus attention on the being of humans (what was called human essence, human nature, species being). Although Feuerbach did not complete that turn to the satisfaction of Marx, Feuerbach launched, threw, or pitched a movement that would give Marx momentum. This is reflected well in Marx’s letter to Feuerbach dated August 11, 1844, in which he introduces himself and his critique of Hegel, and expresses admiration for the impact of Feuerbach’s writings:

I am glad to have an opportunity of assuring you of the great respect and — if I may use the word — love, which I feel for you. Your [writings] are certainly of greater weight than the whole of contemporary German literature put together.

In these writings you have provided — I don’t know whether intentionally — a philosophical basis for socialism and the Communists have immediately understood them in this way. The unity of man with man, which is based on the real differences between men, the concept of the human species brought down from the heaven of abstraction to the real earth, what is this but the concept of society!

[…]  The German artisans in Paris, i. e., the Communists amongst them, several hundreds, have been having lectures twice a week throughout this summer on your Wesen des Christenthums from their secret leaders, and have been remarkably responsive.[5]

Marx would write extensively about Feuerbach in the following months, especially in The German Ideology (unpublished, 1845). Several years later, in 1888, Frederick Engels published some of Marx’s jottings on Feuerbach which he found in a notebook under the title “Theses on Feuerbach” as an appendix to his book, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (1888).

Engels’ publication of the Theses on Feuerbach has been a source of controversy and commentary since, with the Theses themselves entering what Étienne Balibar referred to earlier as the pantheon of “emblematic formularies of Western philosophy.” With that, of course, comes the risk of distortions or misreadings or projections or, as well, excellent commentaries on such emblematic formulas. Engels had a project in mind when he published the Theses, possibly to systematize Marx’s thought, perhaps to solidify his interpretation of historical materialism. Let’s keep that in mind.

Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity

Marx interpreted Feuerbach as having been the first to successfully invert idealist systematicity when, in his book The Essence of Christianity (1841),  Feuerbach showed that the Christian ideal of God was merely a projection of the material reality of human nature and human perfection.[6] As Ernst Bloch succinctly and elegantly formulated the intervention, “Feuerbach brought religious content from heaven back to man, so that man is not made in the image of God but God in the image of man.”[7]

Although presented through the discourse of Christianity, the religious dimension of The Essence of Christianity can be understood as merely a vehicle, at the time, for a philosophical debate over idealism and materialism—in the same way in which the religious content of the medieval scholastic debates was the language in which thinkers in the Middle Ages debated what we would consider to be political questions today—questions of truth, epistemology, nominalism, authority, etc. The context of Feuerbach’s intervention was entirely religious, but what he accomplished was to ground a materialism based on human capabilities, such as rationality, will power, and love.[8]

Feuerbach was explicit about the operation of inversion. In fact, he used that metaphor overtly in The Essence of Christianity, where he wrote: “that which in religion holds the first place,—namely God,—is, as we have shown, in itself and according to truth, the second, for it is only the nature of man regarded objectively; and that which to religion is the second,—namely, man,—must therefore be constituted and declared the first.”[9]

Feuerbach encapsulated this inversion in succinct statements, such as “divine wisdom is human wisdom,” or “the secret of theology is anthropology.”[10]

The Reception by Marx and Engels

Feuerbach’s operation of inversion was exemplary for Marx along a number of dimensions: first, insofar as it managed to critique, deconstruct, and reconstruct a whole, totalizing, systematic, idealist structure (Christianity for Feuerbach; Hegelian Idealism for Marx); second, insofar as it showed idealism to be fundamentally material; and, third, because Feuerbach did not complete the operation or take it to its logical conclusion: so there was more to do. As Marx wrote in the fourth thesis, Feuerbach “overlooks the fact that after completing this work, the chief thing still remains to be done.”[11]

Feuerbach was a lynchpin because of the hegemonic role of Hegelian Idealism at the time. Marx understood Feuerbach to be a can-opener that could lead thinkers who had been raised by, steeped in, and shaped by the dominant way of thinking (Hegelian Idealism) to become, instead, materialist and focused on the perfection of material well-being—and to do so through a logical process, a philosophically rigorous method. He also felt that it operated perfectly among the French working class because of the newfound “irreligiosity — but an irreligiosity of men regarding themselves as men — [that] has descended to the French proletariat.”[12]

You need not take my word. Frederick Engels recounts this in real time in his short book, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, which he published in 1888—five years after the death of Marx—and which is where he first appended Marx’s eleven theses on Feuerbach, which he had then discovered, he wrote, in “an old notebook of Marx’s.”[13]

Engels writes that Feuerbach influenced Marx and him “more than any other post-Hegelian philosopher” during the mid-1840s, a time he described as “our period of storm and stress” or “the period of Germany’s preparation for the Revolution of 1848.”[14] Feuerbach’s book, The Essence of Christianity, caused an intellectual earthquake in their intellectual milieu. Engels writes:

With one blow it pulverized the contradiction, in that without circumlocutions it placed materialism on the throne again. Nature exists independently of all philosophy. It is the foundation upon which we human beings, ourselves products of nature, have grown up. Nothing exists outside nature and man, and the higher beings our religious fantasies have created are only the fantastic reflection of our own essence.

The spell was broken. The “system” was exploded and cast aside. And the contradiction, shown to exist only in our imagination, was dissolved. One must himself have experienced the liberating effect of this book to get an idea of it. Enthusiasm was general; we all became at once Feuerbachians.[15]

The momentum felt dizzying to Engels, possibly to Marx.[16] The intellectual context helps understand why.

Circa 1842-1845

In the early 1840s, Marx and Engels were living and working in an intellectual milieu dominated by a conservative Hegelian worldview. Although Hegel had passed away in 1831, his philosophical outlook continued to prevail through conservative thinkers known as “Right Hegelians” such as Heinrich Leo and Leopold von Henning, thinkers who are largely unknown today.

This form of conservative Hegelian Idealism defended the idea that Prussian bureaucratic rationalism and authority were the optimal form of political governance and the climax of historical progress; that rational administration of social and political life in the manner of enlightened despotism was the culmination of a Hegelian learning process; that this Hegelian learning process had both a historical dimension as well as a dimension of human consciousness maturing to the point of absolute rationality; and that the Hegelian worldview served to legitimize the Prussian state at the time. In effect, the Hegelian system justified the status quo in Germany at the time.

Frederick Engels describes this hegemonic, conservative, Hegelian idealist worldview in the following terms: “this state is rational, it corresponds to reason in so far as it is necessary; and if it nevertheless appears to us to be evil, but still, in spite of its evil character, continues to exist, then the evil character of the government is justified and explained by the corresponding evil character of its subjects. The Prussians of that day had the government that they deserved.”[17]

Of course, the idea of a “learning process” elided completely the domestic exploitation of labor, the subservience of women and household work, the brutality and conquest of colonialism and imperialism, and the effects on the environment, among other things. What was so remarkable was how systemic and totalizing the received Hegelian worldview could be at the same time that it essentially ignored whole swaths of human experience.

Salvaging Hegel’s Dialectic

Marx attributed this worldview to the reception of Hegel at the time, not to the logic of Hegel’s argument or dialectical method. And rather than discard it, Marx drew on the Hegelian dialectic to suggest that the method itself could lead to quite an opposite conclusion. In this sense, Marx would use Hegel against the received, conservative reading of Hegel, to argue against the idea of the absolute, of dogmatism, of absolute truth, or of a perfect state.[18]

Marx began there, with Hegelianism, drawing on the dialectical method, in an immanent way, precisely because Hegel’s thought was so dominant—doubly immanent, in a sense, because the dialectical method itself should be interpreted as a form of immanent critique, at least according to the Frankfurt School. Marx started with Hegel to meet his audience where his audience was at. He did so not only for methodological reasons, but also strategic reasons: to try to convince people who were steeped in the dominant ideology. Marx thus appropriated from Hegel the historical movement, or dialectical movement, according to which objects (whether ideas or practices) are transformed through contradictions or conflict. He retained the idea of dialectical change and a learning process; but he turned it from an idealist to a materialist project.

Marx accomplished this, arguably, in two stages. First, by using Feuerbach, whose writings had been so well received by thinkers on the Left at the time, the Young Hegelians or Left Hegelians (Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner, David Strauss), as well as by “the German artisans in Paris.”[19] Second, by going beyond Feuerbach.

Step 1: Ludwig Feuerbach

Feuerbach’s writings had accomplished a few things.

First, as noted earlier, Feuerbach modeled a way to invert a totalizing, systematic, idealist schema so as to demonstrate instead the reality of a materialist worldview. The Christian ideals of perfection, he argued, were nothing more than projections of human perfection. The ideals projected onto God were actually human qualities known best by people themselves. “Thou believest in love as a divine attribute because thou thyself lovest,” he wrote; “thou believest that God is a wise, benevolent being, because thou knowest nothing better in thyself than benevolence and wisdom; and thou believest that God exists […] because thou thyself existest, art thyself a subject.”[20] Feuerbach entered the subjectivity of his readers to flip their understanding of the world. And this is what gave rise, first, to that process of inversion, of creating what Engels called a “mirror-image.”[21]

Second, Feuerbach centered and valorized these human attributes. He was particularly taken by human affection, love, and will to power. He developed a new type of materialism grounded on these attributes of humans, writing eloquently about the force of love and affection. “To will, to love, to think, are the highest powers, are the absolute nature of man as man, and the basis of his existence,” Feuerbach wrote. “Man exists to think, to love, to will.”[22] His prose was uplifting and poetic, almost Romantic, like Schiller or Goethe:

True existence is thinking, loving, willing existence. That alone is true, perfect, divine, which exists for its own sake. But such is love, such is reason, such is will. The divine trinity in man, above the individual man, is the unity of reason, love, will. Reason, Will, Love, are not powers which man possesses, for he is nothing without them, he is what he is only by them; they are the constituent elements of his nature, which he neither has nor makes, the animating, determining, governing powers—divine, absolute powers—to which he can oppose no resistance.[23]

It is not surprising that we still use today the English translation by the novelist and poet George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) done in 1854.

One can imagine Feuerbach as having completed the first 90-degrees of a turn. But the full inversion would be a two-step process: first, following Feuerbach; and then going beyond him. The second stage involved a critique of Feuerbach, which Marx sketched out in his Theses on Feuerbach.

Step 2: The Critique of Feuerbach

Feuerbach had fallen short of the task for several reasons.

According to Engels, there were two main weaknesses to Feuerbach’s book: first, it was too literary and romantic, too much of a “deification of love,” and as a result, it put literary sentiment above scientific knowledge[24]; second, and relatedly, it mistook liberation by love for class struggle, or in Engels’ words, it put “the liberation of mankind by means of “love” in place of the emancipation of the proletariat through the economic transformation of production—in short, losing itself in the nauseous fine writing and sentimentalizing typified by Herr Karl Grün.”[25] In other words, Engels maintained, “the lower half of him was materialist, the upper half idealist.”[26]

An additional weakness, according to Engels, is that Feuerbach ended up discarding the Hegelian system rather than overcoming it in a way that preserved something of it.[27] Marx would achieve that, Engels claimed, through historical materialism.

Bloch as well would read into Marx’s Theses (especially into the sixth thesis) class struggle, writing there that “A class barrier is thus finally noted, the same barrier which blocked revolutionary activityin Feuerbach’s epistemology, and now blocks history and society in his anthropology.”[28] Althusser as well would read class conflict into the social division. This is a question, and controversy, that Étienne Balibar discusses in his work[29]—and may address at the seminar.  

The Theses Themselves

At this point, I would like to set aside Engels, Althusser, and other commentators, and attempt to retrace Marx’s critique from the Theses themselves—which I realize is imprudent and possibly already biased by the fact of Engels having published them the way he did, in such a systematic way. With apologies, then.

Marx argues in the Theses that a central problem with Feuerbach was that his conception of the human was too abstract, perfect, undialectical, unhistorical. Marx conveys this critique in parts of Theses #6 and #7. Here, and in the following, I will bold the language that is most relevant and important. So, here, Feuerbach’s conception of the human was too abstract:

Thesis VI — Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.[30]

Thesis VII — Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the […] abstract individual whom he analyses belongs to a particular form of society.[31]

Marx’s argument is that Feuerbach’s conception of the human remains too abstract and idealist. It is not contextualized, historicized, or real.

In the Theses, Marx proposes both a reason or explanation for this, and he fleshes out the consequences.

The reason he offers is epistemological. This is the epistemological claim that the only way to know is through practice. Mere contemplation, mere thinking does not lead to true knowledge. Feuerbach and old materialists, Marx argues, do not recognize this and as a result are unable to properly decipher human essence.

The argument is that only practical engagement with the world can lead to an understanding and critique of reality. The opposition is between:

Contemplation	Activity; practice
Of the object	Subjectively
Theoretical attitude	Practice; “revolutionary” activity; practical-critical activity

Marx sets this forth in a number of theses, including Theses #1 and #5 (some of which Bloch identifies as being in the cluster of the “Epistemological group: perception and activity”[32]).

Thesis I — The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, it happened that the active side, in contradistinction to materialism, was developed by idealism – but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. Hence, in Das Wesen des Christentums [The Essence of Christianity], he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical manifestation. Hence he does not grasp the significance of “revolutionary”, of practical-critical, activity.[33]

Thesis V — Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, appeals to sensuous contemplation; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.[34]

The centrality of practice to knowledge means that non-practical questions are purely academic—or what Marx calls “scholastic.” Marx emphasizes this in the second thesis:

Thesis II — The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.[35]

And the consequence of not appreciating the importance of practice is that Feuerbach is left with a hollow idea of human essence that leaves us only with abstract, isolated individuals and no social context. As Marx writes in the other part of Thesis #6:

Thesis VI — Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is consequently compelled: (1)  To abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract – isolated – human individual. (2) Essence, therefore, can be comprehended only as “genus”, as an internal, dumb generality which naturally unites the many individuals.[36]

In effect, Marx suggests, Feuerbach offers only a vision of atomistic, uncontextualized individuals that together form a human nature. They are detached from the social context, mere abstractions.[37] At best, the abstract human is placed in an abstract conception of “civil society.” As Marx writes in Thesis #9:

Thesis IX — The highest point attained by contemplative materialism, that is, materialism which does not comprehend sensuousness as practical activity, is the contemplation of single individuals in civil society.[38]

With the term “civil society,” bürgerliche Gesellschaft, Marx is referring to Hegel’s concept of civil society as opposed to the state, in other words the cultural, social, economic, and personal relations. But again, because Feuerbach’s conception of the human is so abstract, it produces an equally abstract concept of civil society.

By contrast, a more dialectical or truly Hegelian (for Marx) approach would place this abstract human being in history and conflict—whether by this he meant class conflict is a contentious matter.[39]Feuerbach had remained too wedded to a form of idealism or abstraction.

In order to correct this, Marx returns to Hegelian dialectics: to find the contradictions and complexity of social life. Marx argues, in the first half of Thesis #4, that the heavenly projection can only be the product of contradictions within the earthly world—hence inserting contradiction and conflict into the human material realm. Marx then proposes to locate the human in practices in the social context. As he explains in Theses #4 and #10:

Thesis IV — Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a religious, imaginary world and a real one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. He overlooks the fact that after completing this work, the chief thing still remains to be done. For the fact that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm can only be explained by the cleavage and self-contradictions within this secular basis.[40]

Thesis X — The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity.[41]

All of this leads, ultimately, to a forward-looking project: to use practice not only to understand the world, but to change it. Marx states this in several theses, most famously the eleventh, but in another one as well, Thesis #4—and he lays the foundation for it in Theses #3 and #8.

The foundation is that humans make their history, which Marx asserts as follows in Thesis #3 ; and that “all social life is essentially practical,” which he asserts in Thesis #8.

Thesis III — The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. Hence, this doctrine necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.

The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionising practice.[42]

This passage underscores the role of practice in creating history and the possibility of revolutionary practice. The next passage underscores the prospective power of practice:

Thesis VIII — All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which mislead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.[43]

On its basis, Marx asserts the future-oriented project of changing the world, first in the fourth thesis, where he speaks of the task of destroying “in theory and in practice” the abstract idea of “the earthly family”:

Thesis IV — The latter [the secular world] must itself, therefore, first be understood in its contradiction and then, by the removal of the contradiction, revolutionised in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be criticised in theory and in practice.[44]

And of course, in perhaps the most famous passage, the last, in which he contends that philosophers must change the world:

Thesis XI — The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

One could say that Marx’s overarching project operates at two levels, then, a methodological and a political level. At the methodological level, it serves to turn Hegel’s dialectic on its head from idealism to materialism: instead of Hegel’s dialectic of the concept, of consciousness, of rationality, of the idea leading to perfect self-consciousness and absolute reason, Marx proposed a materialist dialectic involving the transformation of the human world. At the political level, it serves to focus the method on the conflicts within human society or socialized humanity.

Engels would give all this a historical materialist spin. Engels referred to the dialectic as “the science of the general laws of motion.”[45] From a phenomenology of spirit, it became a material dialectic—or historical materialism. As Engels famously wrote:

Thereby the dialectic of concepts itself became merely the conscious reflex of the dialectical motion of the real world and thus the dialectic of Hegel was turned over; or rather, turned off its head, on which it was standing, and placed upon its feet.[46]

For Engels, Marx turned Hegel’s dialectical analysis into the discovery of the laws of motion of history and society—rather than consciousness.[47] In this sense, according to Engels, Marx was able to peel away the conservative aspect of Hegel (the idealism) and retain the revolutionary aspect (the dialectical method[48]).

So how can we actualize this today?

Political Liberalism Today

Our mindset in the West today is shaped by a different, but not entirely dissimilar worldview. I am speaking here about the mainstream view represented, in the United States for instance, by Democrats, centrists, and old-fashioned Republicans (putting aside, effectively, Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans on the extreme right, and at the other pole, anyone further left than the DSA). Most centrist Democrats and Republicans—most of the normal distribution—share a faith in political liberalism. Without necessarily voicing all this explicitly, they effectively believe that political liberalism is and should be the end of history (as Francis Fukuyama provocatively said in his eponymous book).

Note that there is a similar idea of a learning process that underlies the belief in political liberalism: it took the passage from feudalism and monarchy to forms of liberal democracy to put in place a framework of political liberalism. It represents progress from earlier political institutions, one that is threatened by anti-democratic forces today.

Political liberalism rests on the belief that individuals should be free to pursue their own ideals and ambitions so long as they do not get in the way of others doing the same. It puts in place democratic institutions and practices that are intended to safeguard liberal theory, including rights, courts, and enforcement mechanisms. Although an enlightened despot could enforce these rules, political liberalism is inextricably tied to the rule of democracy (with counter-majoritarian checks-and-balances).

Political liberalism is, paradoxically, systemic and totalizing. In many people’s imagination, it goes hand-in-hand with an economic belief in competitive capitalism and the idea of “free markets.” It rests on an idea of individual freedom and choice that tends to exclude, as non-liberal, or paternalistic, or as forms of collusion, collectively-oriented arrangements. Some liberal democrats would go so far as to say that it excludes forms of socialism.

Like Hegelian Idealism in nineteenth century Prussia, political liberalism serves to justify the status quo under most presidential administrations in the United States, such as those of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, etc., excluding possibly that of Donald Trump (or certain aspects of Trump’s presidency, such as the Muslim Ban, or the overturning of Roe v. Wade by a Supreme Court stacked by Trump).

Like Hegelian Idealism of the nineteenth century, political liberalism is systematic and idealist. It is an airtight systematic schema that excludes foreign elements by characterizing them as irrational, outside-the-bounds, or illiberal. It is also idealist in important ways, although less so perhaps than earlier forms of Idealism. It has a more pragmatic character. But it nevertheless tilts idealist because it rests most importantly on concepts like the rule of law, rights, and law as hedges. It elevates the ideal of human freedom and private human action (that does not interfere with other’s freedom) and abstracts from the material reality of human pursuits and of their violence. It prefers to operate at the abstract level than to delve into the material complexity and messiness and violence of people trying to achieve their ambitions and ideals of the good life. (This requires, of course, a much longer treatment than I can do in this introductory essay for Marx 1/13; I would refer the reader to “Chapter 9: The Problem of Liberalism” and “Chapter 12: The Problem of Violence,” or more generally, Part II of Critique & Praxis.)

And like Hegelian Idealism, it needs to be set straight—turned on its head—because the status quo is unacceptable. Humans have become interdependent in a way that could not have been imagined by earlier political thinkers, economists, or social theorists—not even forty years ago. As a result, most of our inherited liberal political ideas and economic models are now outdated or not up to the task. Enlightenment ideals of individual autonomy, of man mastering nature, of growth maximization, of the wealth of nations—all those political, economic, and social theories have proven to be illusory and deceptive, if not perilous in light of the new reality of complete human interdependence in the face of global warming. (This too requires far more elaboration, I would refer the reader to Cooperation, from which this paragraph is drawn).

But that which needs to be turned on its head is no longer, as with Marx, the idealism. Political liberalism today is much more pragmatic than earlier systems.

The Need for an Inversion

What needs to be inverted is the individualism that is at the core of political liberalism. The inversion needs to be from individualism to a notion of the collective.

The individualism in political liberalism is the product of a centuries-long philosophical shift reflected in modern political theory and the birth of the social sciences. It traces to Kantian notions of autonomy that crystalized the idea that each person could govern themselves freely by individually consenting to the legal rules established by the state to govern their own behavior, as well as to Kant’s anthropology.[49] It traces as well to the English and French traditions of contract theory and what Benjamin Constant would come to refer to as the liberty of the moderns.[50] Philosophically, the idea of liberty became inextricably linked to the autonomy of the individual—for the most part, the individual white male property-owner.[51] And this went hand-in-hand with the economic idea that “private vices make public virtues.” As the social sciences emerged in the nineteenth century and developed in the twentieth, they became organized increasingly—at least in Western democracies—on the foundation of methodological individualism. This too accompanied an anthropologization and rise of the anthropological question in philosophy—what Michel Foucault would identify and critique in La Question anthropologique in 1954-55 and in Les Mots et les Choses in 1966, leaving us at the end of that book with the ominous vision: “alors on peut bien parier que l’homme s’effacerait, comme à la limite de la mer un visage de sable” (“then one can certainly wager that man will be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”)[52]  (This too would require longer elaboration).

How then to erase our obsession with “the individual”? How do we replace it with the well-being of the collectivity? That, I take it is our greatest challenge today.

And to continue the analogy, who is our Feuerbach today?[53]

Foucault as Intermediary

Perhaps it is here that Foucault becomes so important.

Foucault is the one who taught us about the “death of man.”[54] Perhaps is it not by accident that I referred to him and the famous last line of his book, Les mots et les choses. He, more than any of his contemporaries, taught us to beware of the abstraction of “man,” the individual. It was a theme that ran throughout his work—not just in 1966. It is one that he tilled over and over—at the end of his introduction to Kant’s anthropology in 1959-60, in his early writings on Nietzsche, in La Question anthropologique, and elsewhere.

As Foucault himself noted, it was a theme that Nietzsche inspired with his writings on the death of God. “The model for just such a critique,” Foucault wrote in 1960, “was given to us more than fifty years ago. The Nietzschian enterprise can be understood as at last bringing that proliferation of the questioning of man to an end. For is not the death of God in effect manifested in a doubly murderous gesture which, by putting an end to the absolute, is at the same time the cause of the death of man himself?”[55] Yes, it was but a small leap from the death of God to the death of Man—one that both Nietzsche and Foucault happily took. The death of man was but a reflection, a mirror-image.

You will recall the famous passage from the Gay Sciences—perhaps one of my favorite passages in Nietzsche, I cite it so often—about the Buddha. Nietzsche writes: “After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millenia be caves in which they show his shadow. — And we—we must still defeat his shadow as well!”[56] I have no doubt that Nietzsche had man in mind, humanism, the sanctification of the individual, when he spoke of God’s shadow. Without question, we learned to be anti-humanists with Foucault.

Perhaps Foucault, then, started to turn on its head our faith in the individual. Perhaps his book, Les mots et les choses, played the role of Feuerbach’s. Like Feuerbach, we might say with Engels, “The spell was broken…. One must himself have experienced the liberating effect of this book to get an idea of it.” And with but a slight edit, we might say, “Enthusiasm was general; we all became at once Foucaultians.”[57]

Another Turn Beyond Foucault

But somewhat like Feuerbach, Foucault may have been too dramatic, perhaps too taken by the poetic or literary dimensions. Too fascinated by the abyss. Too captivated by the darkness. In his early writings, he was possessed by Nietzsche’s line from Beyond Good and Evil, § 39: « Périr par la connaissance absolue pourrait même faire partie du fondement de l’Être » (“To perish through absolute knowledge could even be part of the fundamental composition of existence”).[58] Perhaps Foucault was too gripped with death and could not see past it. Maybe there was too much of a “deification” of death, to borrow a term from Engels’ critique of Feuerbach.

Foucault began to turn “man,” the individual, on its head, but only 90 degrees. He got rid of the individual, “comme à la limite de la mer un visage de sable.”[59] But he did not signal what might come next, or even point us in a direction. When he did, it was cryptic. Poetic, suggestive, but enigmatic at best. Like at the end of that introduction to Kant’s Anthropology. After reaching the death of man, tracing it back to Nietzsche, underscoring that “it is in the death of man that the death of God is realized,”[60] where did Foucault finally leave us? you may ask. The answer was obscure at best. “The trajectory of the question Was ist der Mensch? in the field of philosophy reaches its end in the response which both challenges and disarms it: der Übermensch.”[61]

Perhaps Zarathustra’s chosen few understood. Or perhaps it was a mirror for us to project onto. In any event, it did not indicate a material way forward, a next object, however temporary, another turn. In this sense too, we might say with Engels, “the lower half of him was materialist, the upper half idealist.”[62]

We have to do the rest, then, ourselves. And faced with our crises today, we may have no choice but to replace the “perished man” with the cooperating collective.

With Marx, we may need to think about this in processual terms, not in absolute or dogmatic terms.[63] And with Bloch, we may want to think about this in forward-looking terms, as a series of “Forwards in the changeable world.”[64] If indeed, as Bloch emphasized, Marx wanted the present to rule over the past, it must indeed be a present, as Bloch wrote, “together with the horizon within it…. The horizon of the future.”[65] One that points forward to a transition, not to the end of history. A necessary change to resolve our crises today. Notice, we end here on Marx’s eleventh thesis.

Two final thoughts.

First, the allusion to 90-degree turns, coupled with the idea that we never arrive at an end of history, may make this feel like a Sisyphean task—not in a bad way, just in an eternal way. But it does not land us, eventually, in the same place. Perhaps one way to think of these gradual turns is through the metaphor of “revolution” in the classic sense, the way the ancients thought about politics, or the stars in the sky, as “revolving.” But maybe, instead of revolving in a circling pattern that would land us back at the beginning, we could think of revolving in a spiral that constantly grows and takes us to new places.

Second, it would be essential to distinguish the different values underlying the notion of the collective that I am invoking here from those underlying the fascist notion, since both can be placed in opposition to individualism. Fascism, insofar as the term is associated with the fasces (that bundle of rods carried by the lictor of ancient Rome) also relies on an idea of the collective, but as a unified bundle of strength in contrast to individual weakness. The values are entirely different. It would be important to differentiate them and develop a radical theory of values.[66]

* * *

Once again, this year, our seminar series will be a constant confrontation of critique and praxis. I will often be thinking out loud as I reread and rethink these texts and interpretations of Marx. I am certain that my interventions, at times, will raise more questions than answers. But I will nevertheless persist because these times are too urgent. We do not have the luxury of waiting to formulate matters more carefully. The world is literally burning and flooding, in an ongoing, raging, human “ecocide.”[67] The crises could not be more urgent.

Welcome to Marx 1/13!

Notes

[1] Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Rancière, Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, trans. by Ben Brewster and David Fernbach (New York: Verso, 2016).

[2] Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx. New and Updated Edition, trans. Chris Turner and Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2017).

[3] Étienne Balibar, “From Philosophical Anthropology to Social Ontology and Back: What to Do with Marx’s Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach?,” Postmodern Culture: Journal of Interdisciplinary Thought on Contemporary Cultures,  Volume 22, Number 3, May 2012, available at https://www.pomoculture.org/2015/06/10/from-philosophical-anthropology-to-social-ontology-and-back-what-to-do-with-marxs-sixth-thesis-on-feuerbach-2/

[4] Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, in The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), 143-145, at 145; in the Appendices to Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, ed. C. P. Dutt (New York: International Publishers, 1978 [1888]), 82-84, at 84; in The Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2014); available on-line at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm.

[5] Marx, Letter to Ludwig Feuerbach in Bruckberg, Paris, August 11 1844, available at https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1844/letters/44_08_11.htm

[6] Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (Digireads.com Publishing, 2012).

[7] Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume 3, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986 [1959]), 1284.

[8] Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 20.

[9] Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 167.

[10] Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 166; see also id., 20 (“The divine being is nothing else than the human being, or, rather the human nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man, made objective—i.e., contemplated and revered as another, as distinct being. All the attributes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of the human nature.”)

[11] Marx, Theses on Feuerbach #4, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 144; in Engels, Appendices, 83.

[12] Marx, Letter to Ludwig Feuerbach, August 11, 1844.

[13] Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, ed. C. P. Dutt (New York: International Publishers, 1978 [1888]), 8. Note,  I realize that relying on Engels here is controversial because Engels represents only one motivated interpretation of Marx’s writings and life, one that is loaded: as Étienne Balibar emphasizes, Engels was systematizing Marx and entrenching the concept of “historical materialism” by publishing the Theses on Feuerbach as an appendix to his book on Feuerbach—something we will discuss at Marx 1/13. Engels had a project and a historical mission, namely of rendering Marx more coherent, more determinate, more politically usable. Nevertheless, his recollection here is important, no matter how motivated.

[14] Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, 8, 8, 9.

[15] Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, 18.

[16] Elsewhere, Engels writes that, among the Young Hegelians, “Feuerbach alone was of significance as a philosopher.” Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, 42.

[17] Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, 10.

[18] In attacking the false systematicity of the conservative Hegelians, Marx offers a perfect illustration of the fundamental problem with systems-based reasoning, or what I have called elsewhere “the systems fallacy.” You can hear this well at least in Engels’ writings. See Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, 14 (“It is self-evident that owing to the needs of the “system” he very often had to resort to those forced constructions about which his pigmy opponents make such a terrible fuss even today. But these constructions are only the frame and scaffolding of his work. […] With all philosophers it is precisely the “system” which is perishable; and for the simple reason that it springs from an imperishable desire of the human mind — the desire to overcome all contradictions. But if all contradictions are once and for all disposed of, we shall have arrived at so-called absolute truth: world history will be at an end. And yet it has to continue, although there is nothing left for it to do — thus, a new insoluble contradiction arises.”); cf.Bernard E. Harcourt, “The Systems Fallacy: A Genealogy and Critique of Public Policy and Cost-Benefit Analysis,” Journal of Legal Studies 47, no. 2 (June 2018): 419-447, https://doi.org/10.1086/698135.

[19] Marx, Letter to Ludwig Feuerbach, August 11, 1844.

[20] Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 23.

[21] Engels uses that term, “mirror-image,” in his description of Feuerbach. See Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, 36 (“He [Feuerbach] proves that the Christian god is only a fantastic reflection, a mirror-image, of man.”)

[22] Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 14.

[23] Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 14.

[24] Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, 19 (“putting literary phrases in the place of scientific knowledge”).

[25] Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, 19.

[26] Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, 42.

[27] Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, 19.

[28] Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. I, 264.

[29] Balibar, “From Philosophical Anthropology to Social Ontology and Back: What to Do with Marx’s Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach?”

[30] Marx, Theses on Feuerbach #6, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 145; in Engels, Appendices, 83-84.

[31] Marx, Theses on Feuerbach #7, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 145; in Engels, Appendices, 84.

[32] Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume I, 255.

[33] Marx, Theses on Feuerbach #1, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 143; in Engels, Appendices, 82.

[34] Marx, Theses on Feuerbach #5, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 144; in Engels, Appendices, 83.

[35] Marx, Theses on Feuerbach #2, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 144; in Engels, Appendices, 82.

[36] Marx, Theses on Feuerbach #6, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 145; in Engels, Appendices, 83-84.

[37] Engels gets at this as follows: “[T]here is absolutely no mention of the world in which this man lives,” Engels explained; “hence this ‘man’ remains always the same abstract man who occupied the field in the philosophy of religion.” Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, 36.

[38] Marx, Theses on Feuerbach #9, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 145; in Engels, Appendices, 84.

[39] This is the controversy over the sixth thesis discussed earlier. Engels certainly believed so, says this explicitly: Feuerbach’s abstract idea of man “appears just as superficial, in comparison with Hegel, in his treatment of the antithesis of good and evil…. It is precisely the wicked passions of man—greed and lust for power—which, since the emergence of class antagonisms, serve as levers of historical development—a fact of which the history of feudalism and of the bourgeoisie, for example, constitutes a single continual proof.” Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, 37. See also Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. I, 252.

[40] Marx, Theses on Feuerbach #4, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 144; in Engels, Appendices, 83.

[41] Marx, Theses on Feuerbach #10, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 145; in Engels, Appendices, 84.

[42] Marx, Theses on Feuerbach #3, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 144; in Engels, Appendices, 83.

[43] Marx, Theses on Feuerbach #8, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 145; in Engels, Appendices, 84.

[44] Marx, Theses on Feuerbach #4, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 144; in Engels, Appendices, 83.

[45] Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, 44.

[46] Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, 44.

[47] Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, 48 (“the discovery of the general laws of motion which assert themselves as the ruling ones in the history of human society.”)

[48] Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, 43.

[49] Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’,” Political Writings, 2nd ed., ed. Hans Reiss, 54–63 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

[50] Benjamin Constant, “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns,” 308-328, in Benjamin Constant, Political Writings, trans. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

[51] Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1988).

[52] Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 398.

[53] Note that Feuerbach too remained at the individual human level… and, for Marx, did not place the individual in his social and historical context. Too abstract. Too metaphysical. Theses #6 and 7.

[54] For a discussion of this theme in Foucault, and its relation to the social sciences, you can listen to a podcast in the philosophy series of Geraldine Muhlmann, Avec philosophie, in the series “Qu’appelle-t-on les sciences humaines ?”, episode 3/5 : “La ‘mort de l’Homme’ selon Michel Foucault,” dated 29 May 2024, available here in French https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/avec-philosophie/la-mort-de-l-homme-selon-michel-foucault-1153208.

[55] Michel Foucault, Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, trans. Roberto Nigro and Kate Briggs (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 124.

[56] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), III, § 108, p. 109.

[57] Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, 18.

[58] For a discussion of this passage, and its importance and recurrence in the writings of Foucault, see Michel Foucault, Nietzsche. Cours, conferences et travaux, ed. Bernard E. Harcourt (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil/EHESS, 2024),131 n.33.

[59] Foucault, Les mots et les choses, 398.

[60] Foucault, Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, 124.

[61] Foucault, Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, 124.

[62] Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, 42.

[63] It is a processual theory. Andrew Abbott advocates for this as well. Engels makes it clear when he writes, in a powerful passage: “The great basic thought that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of readymade things, but as a complex of processes, in which the things apparently stable no less than their mind images in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away, in which, in spite of all seeming accidentally and of all temporary retrogression, a progressive development asserts itself in the end…” Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, 44.

[64] Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. I, 286.

[65] Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. I, 283.

[66] I attempt to develop a radical value of theories in Part II of Critique & Praxis.

[67] Jay Bernstein of the New School has a book coming out of that title, “Ecocide,” that calls for an international convention against ecocide. Bernstein just presented the concept at the Political Concepts conference at the New School on October 5, 2024. The term was first coined by the plant physiologist and bioethicist Professor Arthur W. Galston at a conference on war and national responsibility in Washington, D.C. in 1970. There is now a movement to outlaw ecocide, defined as the “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.” See https://ecocidelaw.com

 

© Bernard E. Harcourt. All rights reserved.