THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY NEVER TOOK PLACE

Terrell Carver1,2

Abstract: The German Ideology as a book dates only from the early 1920s and
1930s. The opening chapter I. Feuerbach was factitiously constructed to solve the
problem posed by Marxs engimatic reference in 1859 to self-clarification. This was
in autobiographical passages detailing his outlook, termed by Engels the materialist
interpretation of history. Factual evidence presented here makes this framing
untenable. The German ideology manuscript materials of 18456 are best studied
not as a smooth text of the last hand but as a variant-rich text that allows access
to a laboratory where Marx and Engels were learning to think as they did.
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The German Ideology (Die Deutsche Ideologie) by Karl Marx and Friedrich
(or Frederick) Engels has a very well established scholarly and interpretive
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reception. However, this dates from long after the authors deaths (in 1883
and 1895, respectively), and began with the archival and editorial work of
D.B. Ryazanov in the early 1920s, the initial publication of the chapter
I. Feuerbach in Russian (1924) and German (1926), and the first complete
publication as a single volume in 1932. Since that time there have been
numerous further editions and translations, the latest of which is in Marx-
Engels Jahrbuch 2003. 3 Currently a new edition is planned as MEGA2 I/5 in

1 Dept. of Politics, University of Bristol, 10 Priory Road, Bristol, BS8 1TU. Email:
T.Carver@bristol.ac.uk
2 I am indebted throughout to Daniel Blank PhD, of the University of Bristol, for his
research work, for our conversations and discussions and for reference access to his
unpublished dissertation The German Ideology by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels:
The Political History of the Manuscript and its Published Editions. While this manu-
script is referenced below as Blank, The German Ideology: Political History, I wish
to acknowledge that my work on this project has been influenced at every stage by his.
Errors and omissions are, of course, my own responsibility. My research work was sup-
ported by a Research Leave Scheme award from the Arts and Humanities Research
Council, which I acknowledge here and for which I express my thanks. I am also grateful
for a critique of my views privately communicated by Professor Georg H. Fromm of the
University of Puerto Rico, for comments from an anonymous reviewer for this journal,
and for questions and feedback from audiences at the MEGA-Symposium in Helsinki,
the Oxford Political Theory Conference, the University of California at Berkeley, The
Johns Hopkins University, the Center for the Study of Marxist Social Theory at Nanjing
University and the University of the West of England, Bristol.
3 For the most recent short, factual account of the history and reception of The
German Ideology, see Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Joseph Weydemeyer, Die
Deutsche Ideologie: Artikel, Druckvorlagen, Entwrfe, Reinschriftenfragmente und
Notizen zu I. Feuerbach und II. Sankt Bruno, Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch 2003 (issued by the
Internationale Marx-Engels-Stiftung, Amsterdam), ed. Inge Taubert and Hans Pelger
(2 vols., Berlin, 2004), Vol. 1, pp. 8*19*; hereafter referred to as Jahrbuch 2003. For a
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXXI. No. 1. Spring 2010
 108 T. CARVER

the ongoing scholarly publication of the complete works of Marx and

Engels. 4
While The German Ideology is well known to have been editorially con-
structed from uncorrected manuscripts, which are famously eccentric and dif-
ficult to decipher, it is worth reconsidering exactly what intellectual and
political significance has been assigned to these manuscripts and exactly how
their publication as The German Ideology has represented and reinforced
some of these judgments. Thus there are two large-scale areas of enquiry here.
The first is into the framing of the manuscript works from 18456 as impor-
tant and worth reading at all, and the second is into their construction as a
book of canonical status by Marx and Engels (only), beginning with the
chapter I. Feuerbach.
Most readers would take it that the German ideology5 obviously is a book
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by Marx and Engels, and that Marxism is a tradition of thought going back
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to Marx. With respect to both The German Ideology and Marxism, I take the
view that a deconstructive historicization will be productive of knowledge,
namely a history of the various moves through which these discursive
objects were assembled such that readers particularly those attuned to
political theory could acquire knowledge of them. It is not just that people
might disagree about the German ideology or Marxism in one way or another,
given that disagreements can be over a common object. Rather both locutions
represent considerable constructive work over many years by numerous people
such that a factuality has to date been produced through repetitions of
scholarly activity. This has been naturalized, in a sense, in interpretive works
of commentary, which are themselves in some instances canonical.
Marxism as an ism-construction originates in the later 1890s and thus
postdates the lives of Marx and Engels.6 In my view, those constructing it
relied much more on Engels work at the outset than on Marxs, for a variety
of reasons. Engels own view of Marxs thought was readily available to them
in the numerous works, prefaces, introductions and editions published by
Engels in the twelve years 1883 to 1895. In that way a tradition, framed as
philosophical system-building on certain self-styled materialist principles,

select bibliography of editions and translations, see Blank, The German Ideology:
Political History, appendix A.
4 For information on the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, second series (MEGA2),
which has been in progress since the 1970s, see http://www.bbaw.de/bbaw/Forschung/
Forschungsprojekte/mega/en/Startseite#gb (accessed 9 June 2009); see also http://
www.iisg.nl/~imes/intromega.php (accessed 10 June 2009).
5 I use The German Ideology to refer to the various editions of selected or complete
manuscript materials of 18456 published since 1924; on the origin of this title, see
below. I use the German ideology to refer collectively to the various manuscript materi-
als commonly assumed to be drafts for a planned work, publishable as a book; see the
detailed discussion below.
6 See George Lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (London, 1964).
 THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY NEVER TOOK PLACE 109

was founded. The fit between this tradition based on Engels works and
views, on the one hand, and Marxs works and projects from 1842 until the
early 1870s, on the other hand, is open to question.7
This article is intended to adjust the overall intellectual context through
which The German Ideology has been viewed as a canonical volume for
understanding Marx and Marxism. In particular the book as we know it opens
with a philosophical chapter where puzzling but important materials are said
to mark an advance in social theory, indeed the very theory that makes Marx-
ism distinctive, the materialist conception of history. This advance is said to
have taken place through Marxs engagement there with the Young Hegelian
philosopher, Ludwig Feuerbach. David McLellan writes:
The section of The German Ideology on Feuerbach was one of the most cen-
tral of Marxs works. It was a tremendous achievement in view of the low
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level of socialist writing and thought prevalent at the time. Marx never sub-
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sequently stated his materialist conception of history at such length and in

detail. It remains a masterpiece today for the cogency and clarity of its pres-
entation.8
However, drawing on recent contextual research, undertaken within the
framework of the MEGA2 project, I take issue with this long-standing and
widely held view. To do this I embark on a deconstructive historicization of
the German ideology, showing why and how the manuscripts were written
in 18456 and abandoned by 1847. These manuscripts were later negatively
received by the few who looked back at them, beginning in the 1880s with
Engels. However, in the early 1920s Ryazanov reversed these negative
judgments, heralding his project to publish The German Ideology by
Marx and Engels as a book with the quick publication in Russian transla-
tion of an opening chapter.9 In particular I subject that opening chapter
I. Feuerbach the section most commonly excerpted and read today to
factual scrutiny, showing that it was constructed factitiously to fill a void.
This void was in a plan, synthesized from correspondence and other sources,
by Ryazanov and successively modified by later editors. Those few pages
have been read since the 1960s as foundational to an understanding of Marxs
ideas in particular, the materialist interpretation of history and more
than any other text represent a certification of him as a political philosopher.

7 See Terrell Carver, Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship (Brighton,
1983); see also Terrell Carver, Marx-Engels or Engels v. Marx , MEGA-Studien,
1996/2, pp. 7985.
8 David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (London, 1973), p. 151. See also
Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge, 1969),
passim.
9 Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 1, pp. 8*10*; see also Blank, The German Ideology:
Political History, ch. 3.
 110 T. CARVER

My conclusions in this article thus question the canonical status of the chap-
ter I. Feuerbach with respect to existing interpretations of Marxs life and
thought. Crucially these interpretations turn on the nature and locus of the
self-clarification concerning our conception that Marx mentions autobio-
graphically in 1859. Current texts and commentary link this self-clarification
directly to the The German Ideology and its opening chapter I. Feuerbach.10
Given the facts detailed in this article, this familiar linkage is no longer
tenable.

The Production of Manuscripts by Means of Polemic

The first order of business is to establish the context through which the
manuscript materials themselves were successively written and re-written in
For personal use only -- not for reproduction

18456. Following that it will be possible to see how subsequently they

acquired the title The German Ideology in 1902, such that a book by Marx
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and Engels (in that order, and not by anyone else) came to be editorially con-
structed in the 1920s.
Beginning in November 1845, Marx and Engels, as communist agitators, were
working together in Brussels, and during 1846 they continued to work jointly,
though sometimes by correspondence from various locations. During this
period the two (in conjunction with others, including Joseph Weydemeyer
and Moses Hess), planned and drafted and variously re-planned and
re-drafted a number of evolving polemical works for publication, most
probably in a multi-author special number resembling their preceding German-
French Annals (Deutsch-Franzsische Jahrbcher), edited with Arnold Ruge
and published in 1844.11
Only a tiny fraction of the manuscript material of 18456 found its way into
print in the authors lifetimes,12 and by early 1847 other works had overtaken

10 Karl Marx, Preface [to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: Part
One], in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works [hereafter referred to as CW],
Vol. 29 (London, 1987), p. 264. The phrase The manuscript, two large octavo volumes
is identified by an editorial footnote as The German Ideology; this title does not occur in
the manuscript materials, nor elsewhere in Marxs works as the title of a book; see the
detailed discussion of this passage below.
11 Inge Taubert, Manuskripte und Drucke der Deutschen Ideologie (November
1845 bis Juni 1846): Probleme und Ereignisse, MEGA-Studien, 1997/2, pp. 1213,
1620; see the detailed research on this period in Galina Golowina, Das Projekt der
Vierteljahrsschrift von 1845/1846: Zu den ursprnglichen Publikationsplnen der
Manuskripte der Deutschen Ideologie , in Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch, Vol. 3, ed. Insti-
tute for Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the CPSU and Institute for
Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the SED ([East] Berlin, 1980),
pp. 26074.
12 Inge Taubert, Die berlieferungsgeschichte der Manuskripte der Deutschen
Ideologie und die Erstverffentlichungen in der Originalsprache, MEGA-Studien,
1997/2, pp. 323; see also Blank, The German Ideology: Political History, appendix A.
 THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY NEVER TOOK PLACE 111

these projects. Marx himself referred to these manuscript materials as Schrift

(writing), Werk (work), Manuskript (manuscript) or Publication (publi-
cation) with volumes/parts/numbers (Bnde). The English translation book
is tendentious.13
Marxs own references to these manuscript materials occur in just four sur-
viving texts. The first two were in a subsequent but near contemporary press
note in 1847 and in items of contemporary correspondence. The third
occurred somewhat later in life in 1859, when he drew attention to them in
presenting a brief intellectual autobiography accompanying the first pub-
lished instalment of his major lifetime project, a critical work on political
economy. The fourth and last was in correspondence of 1860 relating to the
published volume of the previous year. In the discussion below I take the first
two references together, skip to the fourth and then return to the third. This
For personal use only -- not for reproduction

third reference is by far the most detailed and best known, and so for that rea-
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2013

son warrants close examination.

In the first reference, Marx wrote on 3 April 1847 from Brussels to correct
press reports that were, so he says, giving a false picture of his The Poverty of
Philosophy (Misre de la philosophie, 1847), just then with the publishers. He
wished to dissociate himself from the view, which he had detected in the
press, that he valued the work of the famous French socialist Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon equally with that of the German True Socialist Karl Grn, the
translator of Proudhons System of Economic Contradictions, or Philosophy
of Poverty (System des contradictions conomiques, o philosophie de la
misre, 1846). This was the widely-read work which Marx was attacking in
his French-language response through satire and parody, one of the few ways
through which critical politics could proceed at the time. In his press comment
he emphasized the distance between Grn, on the one hand, and Proudhon and
himself, on the other, in terms of ideas and influence. He did this by disparag-
ing Grns book, The Social Movement in France and Belgium (Soziale
Bewegung in Frankreich und Belgien, 1845). Damning with faint praise,
Marx wrote that he himself had:
so little urge to acquaint the German world with the results of my studies
of Herr Grns Soziale Bewegung in Frankreich und Belgien that I have
permitted a fairly comprehensive review of Grns book, prepared a year
ago, peacefully to sleep the sleep of the just in manuscript form, and only
now that I have been challenged by our friend in Berlin [Eduard Meyen, a
former associate, writing in the press TC] shall I send it to the
[monthly TC] Westphlisches Dampfboot to be printed. The review
forms an appendix to the book [sic TC, Marx writes Schrift] written
jointly by Fr. Engels and me on the German ideology (critique of modern
German philosophy as expounded by its representatives Feuerbach, B. Bauer

13 See below.
 112 T. CARVER

and Stirner, and of German socialism as expounded by its various proph-

ets).14
This is the origin of the title The German Ideology (and further subtitle)
assigned by later editors to their editions as a single work by Marx and
Engels (only)15 of selections from the various manuscript materials accumu-
lated during this period, and then largely left aside by the authors. It is also the
source, in conjunction with some examination of the numbering schemes
extant on the manuscript pages, of the ultimate plan for a book divided into
two volumes that editors of the last hand (Fassung letzter Hand)16 have
striven to fill out.17
The manuscripts themselves give no title at all for the overall work,18 or for
the planned first volume,19 but do record Der wahre Sozialismus (True
Socialism) in conjunction with what appears to be the second (critique . . . of
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German socialism according to its various prophets).20 At times in corre-

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spondence of 184621 Marx mentions two volumes (Bnde), but it is less than
clear that these are volumes of a book as such, rather than numbers of a
publication (Marx uses Publication as a German word twice in this connec-
tion).22 Moreover Marx did not always list the contents of such a publication
in the same order, viz. Bauer[,] Feuerbach up to Stirner, a reversal between

14 Marx, [Declaration against Karl Grn], in CW, Vol. 6 (London, 1976), pp. 72
note b, 73; emphasis in original; the newspaper note had no title so the editors have
assigned the one in square brackets; see also Inge Taubert, Hans Pelger, Jacques
Grandjonc, Dokument: Marx Erklrung vom 3. April 1847, MEGA-Studien, 1997/2,
pp. 15461. For information on the Westphlisches Dampfboot, where Marxs review
appeared in August/September 1847, see CW, Vol. 5 (London, 1976), pp. 6045, note
128; B. Bauer is distinguished from his brother Edgar; see CW, Vol. 5, p. 610.
15 Taubert, Manuskripte und Drucke, p. 5; Jahrbuch 2003 departs somewhat from
previous practice by including Joseph Weydemeyer in the list of authors; see note 3
above; see also note 17 below.
16 Taubert, Manuskripte und Drucke, p. 19; of the last hand is a bibliographical
term signifying the authors final intentions as recorded on a text.
17 This includes the projected MEGA2 Vol. 1/5; see Inge Taubert, Hans Pelger,
Jacques Grandjonc, Die Konstitution von MEGA2 I/5 Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,
Moses Hess: Die deutsche Ideologie. Manuskripte und Drucke (November 1845 bis Juni
1846) , MEGA-Studien, 1997/2, pp. 4953.
18 Taubert, Manuskripte und Drucke, p. 12.
19 Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 1, p. 7*.
20 Taubert, Manuskripte und Drucke, pp. 5, 1112; see also Taubert, Pelger,
Grandjonc, Die Konstitution von MEGA2 I/5, p. 57.
21 Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer, 1416 May 1846, CW, Vol. 38, pp. 413; Marx to
Carl Friedrich Julius Leske, 1 August 1846, CW, Vol. 38, pp. 4851.
22 Taubert, Pelger, Grandjonc, Die Konstitution von MEGA2 1/5, p. 53.
 THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY NEVER TOOK PLACE 113

Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach in the order that later editors have gener-
ally used.23
The manuscripts were mentioned by Marx for the fourth and last time (in a
letter to J.M. Weber of 3 March 1860)24 as a work [Werk] in two volumes on
latter-day German philosophy and socialism.25 Engels referred to the manu-
scripts a number of times without mentioning either a two-volume structure or
an overall title.26 The primary, and probably first, association of these manu-
scripts with the overall title The German Ideology was by Franz Mehring in
his 1902 selection of materials from Marxs literary legacy (Nachlass).27 This
was then amplified by him for his biography, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life
(Karl Marx: Geschichte seines Lebens), originally published in 1918, the first
full-length study and very widely read. In that book The German Ideology
appears as a chapter sub-heading and the two big volumes are given the now
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familiar title.28
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The third time that Marx discusses the German ideology, however, is by
far the most important. He looked back to his largely unpublished manu-
script (Manuskript) of 18456 in his brief autobiographical introduction to A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Zur Kritik der politischen
konomie, 1859).29 In that Preface (Vorwort) he formulated a guide to the
intellectual content of his work in order to help his readers along. He began
this account with his stint as editor of the liberal paper Rheinische Zeitung in
Cologne in 18423, saying:
I first found myself in the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is
known as material interests . . .[regarding TC] thefts of wood and the
division of landed property . . . the condition of the Mosel peasantry . . . the
debates on free trade and protective tariffs [which TC] caused me in the

23 Ibid. Bauer[,] Feuerbach up to Stirner occurs in Marx to Leske, 1 August 1846,

though not in the English text (see note 21 above; my thanks to Sun Leqiang, PhD student
of Nanjing University, for pointing this out). The context suggests that Marx crossed out
this descriptive phrase so as not to have to write a similar one for German socialism
(emphasis in original); see the full text with variants in MEGA2 III/2, pp. 23, 622; cf. the
English text without variants in CW, Vol. 38, p. 50. Feuerbach, B. Bauer and Stirner
occurs in the press note dated 3 April 1847 discussed above.
24 CW, Vol. 41, pp. 92104.
25 Tauber, Pelger, Grandjonc, Die Konstitution von MEGA2 I/5, p. 54; CW, Vol. 41
(London, 1985), p. 101.
26 Taubert, Pelger, Grandjonc, Konstitution von MEGA2 I/5, p. 54.
27 Blank, The German Ideology: Political History, which references Mehrings
Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand
Lassalle: Gesammelte Schriften von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels 18411850, Vol. 2,
July 1844 to November 1847 (Stuttgart), p. 346.
28 Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: TheStory of His Life, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (Lon-
don, 1936, 3rd imp. 1951), pp. 10911.
29 CW, Vol. 29, pp. 257417.
 114 T. CARVER

first instance to turn my attention to economic questions. On the other hand,

at that time when good intentions to push forward often took the place of
factual knowledge, an echo of French socialism and communism, slightly
tinged by philosophy, was noticeable in the Rheinische Zeitung. I objected
to this dilettantism, but at the same time frankly admitted . . . that my previ-
ous studies did not allow me to express any opinion on the content of the
French theories.
The first work which I undertook to dispel the doubts assailing me was a
critical re-examination of the Hegelian philosophy of law;30 the introduc-
tion31 to this work being published in the Deutsch-Franzsische Jahrbcher
issued in Paris in 1844.32
After that point in his brief autobiography Marx began to sketch out his
guide (Leitfaden)33 in a very long paragraph, noting at the end that his con-
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clusion was:
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that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended

whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of
the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material con-
ditions of life, the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English
and French thinkers of the eighteenth century, embraces within the term
civil society; that the anatomy of this civil society, however, has to be
sought in political economy. The study of this, which I began in Paris, I con-
tinued in Brussels, where I moved [on 11 January 1845 TC]34 owing to
an expulsion order issued by M. Guizot [government minister to King Louis
Philippe of the French].35
Marxs discussion then advances to a general conclusion [Das allgemeine
Resultat] . . . which, once reached, became the guide [or more literally guid-
ing thread TC] of my studies.36 This long paragraph contained material
highlighted by Engels in his subsequent 1859 review of Marxs work.37

30 The manuscript Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Law, first

published in 1927; CW, Vol. 3 (London, 1975), pp. 3129.
31 Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Law: Introduction (1844),
CW, Vol. 3, pp. 17587.
32 Marx, Preface, CW, Vol. 29, pp. 2612.
33 CW, Vol. 29, p. 262 reads guiding principle; cf. Karl Marx, Preface to A Contri-
bution to the Critique of Political Economy, in Karl Marx, Later Political Writings, ed.
and trans. Terrell Carver (Cambridge, 1996), p. 159, which reads guide.
34 Marx, Preface, CW, Vol. 29, p. 262, note d.
35 Ibid., p. 262.
36 Ibid.
37 Frederick Engels, Karl Marx: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Econ-
omy, CW, Vol. 16 (London, 1980), pp. 46577; for an analysis and discussion of Engels
review, see Terrell Carver, Engels (Oxford, 1981), pp. 3744.
 THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY NEVER TOOK PLACE 115

However, further on in his autobiographical narrative of 1859, Marx

returned to the Brussels years when he introduced readers to his then
collaborator
Frederick Engels . . . [who TC] arrived by another road (compare his
Condition of the Working-Class in England)38 at the same result as I, and
when in the spring of 1845 he too came to live in Brussels, we decided to set
forth together our conception [Ansicht] as opposed to the ideological one of
German philosophy, in fact to settle accounts with our former philosophical
conscience [Gewissen]. The intention was carried out in the form of a cri-
tique of post-Hegelian philosophy. The manuscript, two large octavo vol-
umes [Oktavbnde],39 had long ago reached the publishers in Westphalia
when we were informed that owing to changed circumstances it could not
be printed. We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the
For personal use only -- not for reproduction

mice all the more willingly since we had achieved our main purpose
self-clarification.40
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At this point the editors of CW refer the reader to The German Ideology,41
published as a book by Marx and Engels (only), such as various editors have
produced since the first complete publication of this material in volume for-
mat in 1932.42

The Chapter I. Feuerbach

However, this complete edition was preceded by the publication of the
chapter I. Feuerbach by an editorial team headed by Ryazanov at the Marx-
Engels-Institute in Moscow, first in Russian translation in 1924,43 and then in
German in 1926. This latter publication was in the Marx-Engels-Archiv, a

38 CW, Vol. 4 (London, 1975), pp. 295583.

39 No trace of any temporary binding to collect draft-material into convenient vol-
umes survives; inspection of original mss and queries to Ursula Balzer at the Interna-
tional Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, 15 March 2007; I am responding here to a
point raised in Georg H. Fromm, Remarks on T. Carvers Proposals for a Critical Edi-
tion of The German Ideology, pp. 78, unpublished manuscript, privately communi-
cated.
40 Marx, Preface, CW, Vol. 29, p. 264.
41 Ibid., n. b; for The German Ideology, see CW, Vol. 5, pp. 19539.
42 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Die Deutsche Ideologie, in Marx-Engels-
Gesamtausgabe, Abt. 1, Bd 5, ed. V.V. Adoratskii (Berlin, 1932); series now generally
referred to as MEGA1.
43 See Harry Waton, Preface, The Marxist (New York), July 1926, p. 240. Waton
translated Ryazanovs chapter I. Feuerbach from Russian into English under the title
German Ideology (The Materialist Conception of History), pp. 245303, and added
an Analysis and Criticism of the Materialist Conception of History, pp. 30733.
Ryazanovs editorial work is discussed in Blank, The German Ideology: Political
History, ch. 3, where it is argued that MEGA1 1/5, published under Adoratskiis editor-
ship, largely reproduces his predecessors work.
 116 T. CARVER

joint venture between German socialists and Russian bolsheviks.44 It is this

short work that has come to be associated with the self-clarification, the
settling of accounts with German philosophers (an unwanted conscience
for Marx and Engels),45 and with the wider political movements and philo-
sophical enquiries in the twentieth century through which the works (vari-
ously) of Marx and Engels have been interpreted as sources doctrinal to
Marxism. In particular, the manuscript materials that went into the editorially
constructed opening chapter I. Feuerbach of the editorially constructed
book The German Ideology, over time and in various ways, have come to be
one of the most influential texts of twentieth-century philosophy.
The editors of the Jahrbuch 2003 edition of these manuscript materials are
now in no doubt that they do not include a draft of a chapter I. Feuerbach,
even though one was evidently planned by Marx and Engels from the spring
For personal use only -- not for reproduction

of 1846, some time after most of the German ideology manuscripts were
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actually written.46 The manuscript materials that were organized by Ryazanov

and subsequent editors in a chapter-like way have been re-presented by the
Jahrbuch 2003 editors rather as independent sequences of manuscript text of
the last hand, ordered in a manner that reflects both chronological and the-
matic considerations. These sequences, known since 1924 as I. Feuerbach,
were not in fact part of the materials actually prepared by Marx, Engels and
Weydemeyer for publication in April and June 1846, and so were never sent
by them to any publishers at all.47
Later in life, when introducing his pamphlet work Ludwig Feuerbach and
the End of Classical German Philosophy (Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang
der klassischen deutschen Philosophie, 1888), Engels remarked that:
. . . I have once again ferreted out and looked over the old manuscript of
18456. The section dealing with Feuerbach is not completed. The finished
portion consists of an exposition of the materialist conception of history
which proves only how incomplete our knowledge of economic history still
was at that time. It contains no criticism of Feuerbachs doctrine itself; for
the present purpose, therefore, it was useless. On the other hand, in an old
notebook of Marxs I have found the eleven theses on Feuerbach . . . These
are notes hurriedly scribbled down for later elaboration, absolutely not
intended for publication, but invaluable as the first document in which is
deposited the brilliant germ of the new world outlook.48

44 Taubert, Die berlieferungsgeschichte der Manuskripte, pp. 446.

45 Marx, Preface, CW, Vol. 29, p. 264.
46 Taubert, Manuskripte und Drucke, p. 16; Taubert, Pelger, Grandjonc, Die
Konstitution von MEGA2 I/5, pp. 49, 55.
47 Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 1, p. 7*; Taubert, Manuskripte und Drucke, p. 10; Taubert,
Pelger, Grandjonc, Die Konstitution von MEGA2 I/5 p. 53.
48 CW, Vol. 26 (London, 1990), p. 520; for Marxs Theses on Feuerbach see CW,
Vol. 5, pp. 35; these Theses pre-date the German ideology sequence of manuscript
 THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY NEVER TOOK PLACE 117

Possibly at this point, or possibly earlier when listing the Nachlass after
Marxs death,49 Engels wrote I. Feuerbach: Gegensatz von materialistischer
& idealistischer Anschauung [I. Feuerbach: Opposition of the Materialist
and Idealist Outlooks]50 in pencil on a page of the manuscript.51 In his Pref-
ace to his pamphlet Ludwig Feuerbach he seems to give only an ambiguous
assurance that those incomplete manuscript pages on what he termed the
materialist conception of history52 represent something that would have gone
into a critique of Feuerbach, had the two completed their apparent plan of
spring 1846 to write one. In any case it is not clear at all exactly which manu-
script pages Engels was examining in the 1880s (other than the one on which
he made his note).53 The manuscript pages that were arranged as the chapter
I. Feuerbach by later editors (and variously re-arranged, along with other
materials), comprise several distinct runs of pages and fragments that are in
For personal use only -- not for reproduction

fact discontinuous with each other.54

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2013

Nonetheless Engels broad point is true enough none of these materials

contains any sustained critique of Feuerbach, either of the kind that Engels
was interested in conducting retrospectively in the late 1880s (when the
socialist paper Die Zeit asked him to review C.N. Starckes new book on the
philosopher),55 or of some other kind within the context of the political inter-
ventions in which the two were engaged in France, Belgium and Germany in
late 1845 and the first half of 1846 (and, of course, later on during 1847 and
into the revolutionary period of 1848).
Following the general outline of Engels discussion, Mehring, in his Marx-
biography of 1918, set out what became the standard interpretive terms for
commentary on The German Ideology as a supposed book of which the manu-
scripts of 18456 were presumed to be drafts in some fairly obvious sense:

writings and are contained, as Engels says, in a separate notebook. Contrary to editorial
opinion summarized in CW, Vol. 5, pp. XIV, 585 note 1, these Theses were not part of
the German ideology project as initially conceived, since the original targets in that
manuscript sequence were Bruno Bauer and then Stirner and later others, such as Grn,
and only eventually, Feuerbach; Taubert, Pelger, Grandjonc, Konstitution von MEGA2
I/5, p. 55; Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 1, pp. 6*7*; cf. McLellan, Karl Marx, p. 143, and
Golowina, Das Projekt.
49 Taubert, Die berlieferungs der Manuskripte, p. 34.
50 The usual English translation of this phrase is Outlooks, whereas Anschauung is
singular.
51 Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 1, p. 100.
52 Engels, Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, CW,
Vol. 16, p. 469.
53 Taubert, Die berlieferungsgeschichte der Manuskripte, p. 34.
54 Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 1, p. 8*; see also Taubert, Manuskripte und Drucke, p. 23;
and Taubert, Pelger, Grandjonc, Konstitution von MEGA2 I/5, pp. 512; see the
detailed discussion below.
55 C.N. Starcke, Ludwig Feuerbach (Stuttgart, 1885).
 118 T. CARVER

The work is a still more discursive super-polemic than The Holy Family56
even in its most arid chapters, and the oases in the desert are still more rare,
though they are by no means entirely absent, whilst even when dialectical
trenchancy does show itself it soon degenerates into hair-splitting and quib-
bling, some of it of a rather puerile character . . . [Mehring then compares
Marx and Engelss very small circle with that of Shakespeare {! TC}
and his dramatic contemporaries] . . .
Something of the sort is probably the explanation of the tone which Marx
and Engels consciously or unconsciously adopted when dealing with Bauer
and Stirner and others of their old companions in the art of purely intellec-
tual gymnastics. What they had to say about Feuerbach would have been
much more interesting because it would have been something more than
purely negative criticism, but unfortunately this part of the work was never
completed.57
For personal use only -- not for reproduction

Mehring thus established a very clear break between the presumed (but
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2013

apparently non-existent) chapter I. Feuerbach and the fair copy super-

polemic manuscript materials ultimately left aside in 1847. The incomplete
manuscript pages on the materialist conception of history which Engels was
apparently examining when searching for a critique of Feuerbach (and not
finding it) were though Engels does not say it themselves discontinuous
extractions from the super-polemical manuscript materials about which
Mehring was so dismissive.58
As mentioned above, in late 1845 and very early 1846 Marx and Engels
were working on polemical critiques of Bruno Bauer, a former intellectual
associate of Marxs. Bauer had concerned himself in a recently published
article (Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs)59 with the political implications
of Feuerbachs philosophy, and very briefly with the recently published work
by Engels and Marx, The Holy Family, which had been critical of him.60 One
short critique of Bauer (dated 20 November 1845) was published anony-
mously in a periodical edited by Hess;61 the other critique was begun shortly
56 Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Die heilige Familie oder Kritik der kritischen
Kritik: Gegen Bruno Bauer und Consorten (Frankfurt a.M., 1845); see CW, Vol. 4 (Lon-
don, 1975), pp. 5211. The German ideology manuscript materials (end November/
beginning of December 1845 and on through 1846) were at the outset effectively a con-
tinuation of the authors engagement in The Holy Family with a critique of post-Hegelian
philosophical politics; Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 1, p. 6*.
57 Mehring, Karl Marx, pp. 11011.
58 Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 2, pp. 17880, 304; Taubert, Manuskripte und Drucke,
pp. 234.
59 Wigandsvierteljahrschrift, Vol. 3 (1845); Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 2, p. 163.
60 Taubert, Pelger, Grandjonc, Die Konstitution von MEGA2 I/5, p. 49.
61 Karl Marx, [Gegen Bruno Bauer], Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 1, pp. 35; Vol. 2,
pp. 1578; published in English translation as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, [A Reply
to Bruno Bauers Anti-Critique], CW, Vol. 5, pp. 1518; the editors of Jahrbuch 2003
trace the assignment of authorship of this work originally to Engels (by his biographer
 THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY NEVER TOOK PLACE 119

thereafter, though never published. The two authors seem to have retained
some printers sheets62 from the latter, numbered by Engels, whereas other
printers sheets from this work are not preserved. The exact reason for pre-
serving certain sheets is not obvious, but later editorial supposition has gener-
ally been that they were retained because of their possible relevance for a
subsequent Feuerbach-critique.63 They are apparently divided up with the
words Feuerbach, History, and Bauer.64 Some sections of text on these
pages were subsequently marked as deleted because they had been copied out
again for insertion into the subsequent fair copy when Marx and Engels
started their critique of Bauer afresh. This eventually became the critique
Saint Bruno,65 which is extant in fair copy manuscript and appears in
Volume I of complete editions of The German Ideology as II. Saint
Bruno.66
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At around the same time in early 1846 Marx and Engels were also working
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2013

on a critique of Max Stirner, who had published a lengthy critique of Hegel

and various Young Hegelians, including Bauer and Feuerbach, under the
title The Ego and Its Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, 1844).67 Marx and
Engels critique, as it eventually developed, was divided into two sections (an
old testament for Saint Max, and a new testament).68 The printers sheets
of this fair copy manuscript were again numbered by Engels, and two
Gustav Mayer), then to Marx and Engels (in MEGA1), but argue themselves for Marx
alone; Vol. 2, p. 157.
62 These are Bogen, each containing four manuscript pages (Seite); this particular
sequence is actually somewhat defective, in that it consists of two manuscript pages from
printers sheet 1, and then of printers sheets 6 to 11, each containing 4 manuscript pages;
Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 2, pp. 172, 178.
63 See Taubert, Manuskripte und Drucke, p. 21, where she argues that Marx and
Engels draft critique of Bauer followed the various divisions of Bauers original article,
and that the contents of the extracted material on printers sheets 6 to 11 has its origin in
Bauers discussion of Feuerbachs materialism.
64 Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 1, pp. 168, 1723; Daniel Blank (personal conversation, 23
May 2007) has noted that History never appears in later editorial chapter plans as an
independent item, and there are of course similar notes made on the text (such as Reli-
gions, Sismondi, Hegel etc.) which do not figure in these thematic discussions either;
see Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 1, pp. 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 18, 73, 88, and passim; the Jahrbuch 2003
editors refer to these manuscript pages, after Marx had later paginated them 1) to 29), as
Feuerbach and History [Feuerbach und Geschichte]; Vol. 2, p. 168.
65 Ordered by Marx and Engels firstly as I. Saint Bruno, and then later as II. Saint
Bruno, as the authors changed their plans in order to subject further writers to critique;
Taubert, Manuskripte und Drucke, pp. 212.
66 Taubert, Manuskripte und Drucke, pp. 215; Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 2, pp. 16370,
1723, 3378.
67 The Ego and Its Own, ed. David Leopold (Cambridge, 1995); see Jahrbuch 2003,
Vol. 2, p. 328; cf. McLellan, Karl Marx, p. 143.
68 An anonymous reviewer for this journal points out that this two-part structure is a
parody of Stirners Man/I, which was itself a parody of Feuerbachs God/Man.
 120 T. CARVER

sequences, discontinuous with each other, were evidently extracted (num-

bers 2021 from the old testament, and 8492 from the new testament). In
the first sequence there was again a process of marked deletions where
Weydemeyer had copied out material for use in another fair copy manuscript.
In the second, a run of printers sheets was set aside, and the fair copy begun
again on the same subject but with wholly altered text, suggesting that the
content was for some reason unsuitable.69 The so-called main manuscript of
the so-called Feuerbach chapter thus derives from three discontinuous runs of
printers sheets: one from an early draft critique of Bauer, and two from the
fair copy of a two-part critique of Stirner (and each from a different part of
that critique).
However, the question that now arises is, were Marx and Engels assem-
bling a Feuerbach-chapter (given that Marx later renumbered these three
For personal use only -- not for reproduction

sequences himself in a continuous series),70 or were they, while working on

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2013

their fair copy critiques of Bauer and Stirner, merely preserving some materi-
als that might prove useful later in composing a Feuerbach-critique such as
they were planning? The latter seems more likely, especially since there are
three other very short, quite separate opening salvos specifically on Feuer-
bach. These fragments appear to inaugurate this process of beginning a
Feuerbach-critique in the summer of 1846.71 The process of composition
seems to have got no further after that, and to have produced no extensive
reference back to the so-called Feuerbach materials amongst those eventually
left aside, other than some very brief notes appended on the last page, which
do not mention Feuerbach at all.72
What is crucial then is that the three parts of the so-called main manuscript
(as through-numbered by Marx), which has formed the core of the so-called
Feuerbach chapter in successive editions, are not only discontinuous with
each other, but all three runs of printers sheets derive from Marx and Engels
critiques of Bauer and Stirner. These extractions from manuscript printers
sheets are thus already at a considerable remove from a direct critique of
Feuerbach such as Marx and Engels were apparently planning to write later on
in 1846, but never did. Why then the intense editorial determination to produce
69 Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 2, pp. 1735; this fair copy critique appears in Volume I of
most editions of The German Ideology as III. Saint Max.
70 Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 2, p. 163; Taubert, Manuskripte und Drucke, pp. 1314,
234; Taubert, Pelger, Grandjonc, Die Konstitution von MEGA2 I/5, pp. 512.
71 For these three texts, see Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 1, pp. 10410; for dating, see Vol. 2,
pp. 300, 308, 315; these three short texts in rough draft are the original source for
I. Feuerbach as the numbered chapter heading within Marx and Engels plans of
1846 for a sequence of German ideology critiques. In most editions of The German
Ideology they are editorially amalgamated and then incorporated into the text of
I. Feuerbach as a single Preface (Vorrede).
72 Taubert, Pelger, Grandjonc, Die Konstitution von MEGA2 I/5, p. 52; Jahrbuch
2003, Vol. 1, pp. 99100.
 THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY NEVER TOOK PLACE 121

a Feuerbach chapter, or at least to order these materials into that position, as

happens in effect even in Jahrbuch 2003?
Had the various parties involved in 18456 actually obtained a publisher,
and had they completed their latest scheme in full fair copy, the rough-draft
and extracted character of the manuscript pages that have gone into a chap-
ter I. Feuerbach would have been readily visible to later scholars and easily
acknowledged (if indeed such rough manuscript pages had been preserved,
which was not often the case). The German ideology polemic, variously
planned by Marx, Engels and others, has not yet been fully contextualized,
precisely because textual scholarship and scholarly commentary have been
teleologically focused on an outcome to which the manuscript materials were
presumed for reasons I investigate below to have been leading.
As indicated above, the manuscripts went through a number of substantial
For personal use only -- not for reproduction

revisions by the authors, and all the manuscript materials are therefore a col-
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2013

lection of starts, some of which are quite fragmentary, some of which are
extractions from longer sequences of printers sheets, and some of which are
fair copy (but of exactly what?). This means that a process of fitting all the
surviving materials together into a book-length scheme authored by Marx
and Engels alone is factitious. In the absence, then, of a finished product
authorially titled and specifically ordered as fair copy and/or published text,
the editorial urge to construct a publishable book by Marx and Engels (only),
and in particular its supposedly crucial opening chapter, has nonetheless been
as overwhelming as it has been misplaced.
The process began with Ryazanov, who introduced his work on these
manuscripts by abbreviating Engels account even more than Mehring had
done, evidently rejecting Engels and Mehrings shared conclusion about
their irrelevance to a Feuerbach-critique. From 1923 Ryazanov communi-
cated through his announcements and his editorial productions the impression
that he had identified in the manuscripts of 18456 the earliest account and
originary schema of the materialist interpretation of history, the scientific
and political value of which would be enormous in the hands of the workers
movement, and in particular in the hands of the emerging socialist state in
Russia. His view was that the key to this lay in a critique of the materialist
philosopher Feuerbach, and that some manuscript pages were in fact drafts of
a chapter I. Feuerbach, however incomplete and discontinuous they might
be.73 The chapter was assembled and published in German in 1926,74 and
from that point on, scholarship on the German ideology has generated com-
mentaries on how to present it as a book (or something very like a book), by
Marx and Engels alone. In particular there has been intense effort expended
on exactly which materials, and in exactly what order, a crucial opening

73 See Blank, The German Ideology: Political History, ch. 3.

74 Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 1, pp. 8*11*.
 122 T. CARVER

chapter I. Feuerbach (or Feuerbach and History, as in Jahrbuch 2003)

could be constituted.75
This opening chapter was so crucial for Ryazanov and other theoretically-
minded Marxists of the time because it was presumed to be the opening
gambit in a work of self-clarification by Marx and Engels as lifelong part-
ners in relation to a rival philosophical school (namely idealism, as opposed
to materialism); crucial because in 1888 Engels had identified Feuerbach (and
the earlier, and physically separate, Theses on Feuerbach by Marx) as
supremely important for a philosophical understanding of their conception,
termed materialist by Engels;76 and crucial because by the 1920s the Marxist
tradition of scholarly enquiry and philosophical debate on such issues had
become well established. This was through the work of Eduard Bernstein,
Karl Kautsky and G.V. Plekhanov, to name but a few, not excepting the even
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more politicized interest in V.I. Lenins Materialism and Empirio-Criticism

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2013

(1909), especially after the Bolshevik Revolution. Ryazanov was also battling
for scarce resources for his scholarly projects, so the discovery of a manu-
script that could be editorially linked with the defining principles of Marxism
was of obvious strategic utility.77
The editors of the Jahrbuch 2003 edition declare that they are breaking, in
principle, with this constructionist approach, announcing that their text will
be edited as Marx and Engels left it and therefore as text-instances
(Textzeugen).78 The editors are at considerable pains to justify their ordering
of these text instances according to a systematic structure, rather than
according to an order based on strict chronology, which would contradict this
and would include other materials. Moreover they apply their hybrid reason-
ing to a grouping of manuscripts from the period which they consider to be
authorially formative for a book The German Ideology, albeit newly sub-
titled Manuskripte und Drucke (November 1845 to June 1846), and with the
inclusion of Weydemeyer as an author. They include some thirteen text
instances separately listed but recognizably tracing a structure laboriously
deduced by them from fragmentary comments about plans and incomplete

75 Ibid., pp. V, 8*15*.

76 Engels does this in his 1859 review, CW, Vol. 16, pp. 46577; see Carver, Engels,
p. 38; see also note 37 above.
77 This discovery was vigorously contested by Gustav Mayer at the time on the very
good grounds that they had simply been split between Eduard Bernstein and the SPD
archive until brought together by Ryazanov at the Marx-Engels-Institute; there were also
right/left political differences between Mayer and Ryazanov colouring their exchanges;
see Blank, The German Ideology: Political History, ch. 3.
78 Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 1, p. 7*; Taubert, Pelger, Grandjonc, Die Konstitution von
MEGA2 I/5, p. 50.
 THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY NEVER TOOK PLACE 123

achievements, much as previous editors have done.79 There is thus not so

much distance between Jahrbuch 2003 and earlier editions as is claimed by
the editors of the former. Moreover the factual research presented there and in
allied MEGA2 research, in my view, has destroyed the case for publishing not
just a chapter I. Feuerbach in any form, but also a volume of German
ideology manuscripts as a work of the last hand.

Last Hand(s)?
Having undertaken a historical examination of the framing of the manu-
script materials of 18456 as crucially significant, and of their factitious
construction as a book The German Ideology with an opening chapter
I. Feuerbach, I turn briefly to strategies for reframing and republication.
For personal use only -- not for reproduction

This discussion requires some consideration of methodological principles

relating to joint authorship, namely that of Marx and Engels in their work on
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2013

the manuscript materials of 18456, and of bibliographical principles, namely

the presumption that the reader wants to view the text of the last hand.
In almost all commentary since Marxs death, and following on from
Engels lead as the first biographer of the Marx-Engels relationship, the two
authors are generally treated, from late 1844 onwards, as continuous collabo-
rators who are presumed to agree with each others ideas and texts (unless
there is explicit evidence to the contrary), to complement each other in their
works when dealing with similar subjects, and to supplement each others
works when dealing with different subjects.80 I take a different methodologi-
cal approach and jettison this set of presumptions by arguing instead that
agreement or disagreement will only be visible if the two are presumed to be
different individuals, each with his own intellect. This seems to me to be the
only position that responsible scholars can adopt, so that questions will not be
begged, nor evidence (one way or the other) neglected or overlooked. Readers
may then draw their own conclusions about exactly what is going on between
the two at any given point.
However, it should also be noted here that commentary on The German
Ideology since the 1920s has generally presumed as fact what Gustav Mayer
put forward as a speculative view about the way the two were working:
Engels wrote more legibly, he was faster and more precise, and was there-
fore always prepared to put on paper passages which he and Marx had
sketched out together. Other passages, which they had already talked

79 Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 1, pp. 11*15*; Taubert, Manuskripte und Drucke,

pp. 1325; Taubert, Pelger, Grandjonc, Die Konstitution von MEGA2 I/5, pp. 49, 545.
80 Carver, Marx and Engels: Intellectual Relationship, pp. xixv; Carver, Marx-
Engels or Engels v. Marx , pp. 7985; cf. McLellan, Karl Marx, pp. 1302.
 124 T. CARVER

through beforehand, Marx will perhaps [vielleicht my emphasis TC]

have dictated to his pen.81
In 1921 Mayer was the first to publish fragments of the German ideology
manuscripts, albeit from the super-polemical sections not included in any-
ones chapter I. Feuerbach, yet framing this work The Leipzig Coun-
cil as an insight into the workshop of so-called historical materialism.
This echoed Engels descriptive comment but omitted his negative judgment
(how incomplete our knowledge of economic history still was at that
time).82 Rather against the interpretive speculations quoted above, these were
assigned authorially to Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx.83 Almost all pages
of the manuscript materials from the German ideology period are in fact in
Engels hand, with Marx making comments, corrections, insertions and addi-
tions in his own hand from time to time. Mayer, of course, was Engels first
For personal use only -- not for reproduction

biographer,84 and had a stake in his subjects reputation and standing within
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2013

the Marxist movement and the wider world.

In its transcriptions Jahrbuch 2003 distinguishes Marxs hand from
Engels by using a superscript m (m), but does this only in the textual variants
recorded in line-by-line lists in Volume 2, Apparat (apparatus criticus). This
is necessarily separate from Volume 1 containing the transcribed text, as dic-
tated by the methodology of the last hand.85 The transcribed text thus
appears in Volume 1 as a smooth text of a single (albeit in some putative
sense joint) authorial hand. Unlike Ryazanovs original complete ver-
sion, where variants are listed in footnotes on the page,86 and unlike Wataru
Hiromatsus edition of 1974,87 where variants are included (using various
codes) in the text itself, Jahrbuch 2003 continues the otherwise common yet
scientific practice of making it quite difficult for readers to identify the two
separate hands involved.88 In the case of one very famous passage, I have pre-
viously argued that this practice of producing a smooth text occludes actual
debates between the two authors, and makes it easy for even experienced
81 Blank, The German Ideology: Political History, which cites Gustav Mayer,
Das Leipziger Konzil, Archiv fr Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, Vol. 47 (1921),
p. 776; my translation.
82 See Blank, The German Ideology: Political History, ch. 3; CW, Vol. 26 (Lon-
don, 1990), p. 520.
83 Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 1, p. 8*.
84 Gustav Mayer, Friedrich Engels, Vol. 1 (Berlin, 2nd edn, 1920), Vol. 2 (The
Hague, 1934).
85 Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 1, p. 23*.
86 MEGA1 1/5.
87 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Die Deutsche Ideologie: Neuverffentlichung
des Abschnittes 1 des Bandes 1 mit Text-Kritischen Anmerkungen, ed. Wataru Hiromatsu
(Tokyo, 1974).
88 See the discussion of these different modes of presentation in Blank, The
German Ideology: Political History, ch. 3.
 THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY NEVER TOOK PLACE 125

commentators to produce incorrect or at least highly contestable inter-

pretations.89
The Bogen, that is, printers sheets, on which most manuscript pages were
written, are crucial to the numbering schemes which divide editorial presenta-
tion of the last hand from alternative modes of presentation. The Bogen for-
mat is not particularly visible from photocopies and photographs of single
pages, and is perhaps most easily explained as a kind of greeting card or
simple folder format, formed from a large sheet of paper folded once. What
you see then is a recto or first page with a fold on the left; you open out the
fold and see two pages (second page and third page) with a verso on the
left and another recto on the right; you then turn over the right-hand recto, and
you see its verso, with the fold now on the right. The individual pages (thus
four per printers sheet) are very approximately A4 in size, and in most
For personal use only -- not for reproduction

cases the fold and folded-over condition survive, though in some instances the
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2013

fold has deteriorated into a tear and the resulting two pages (recto/verso) sur-
vive separately. At some, probably early stage of their work, Engels himself
numbered each printers sheet in arabic numerals, and it is his sequencing
which presumably reflects a rough chronological order of composition.90
All editions, including Jahrbuch 2003, follow Marxs later numbering of
manuscript pages per printers sheet. This was because Marx was re-numbering
page-remnants per printers sheet, given that he and Engels had evidently
decided to have some materials on some manuscript pages (in some cases
whole manuscript pages) copied afresh and put back into a fair copy of their
redrafted Bauer-critique and Stirner-critique. This was presumably because
the extracted Bogen contained material that was mostly (but not wholly)
unwanted for the polemical plans of the moment. In common with other
editions Jahrbuch 2003 omits these copied out sections from their reproduc-
tion of the manuscript pages that were counted as contributions to the chap-
ter I. Feuerbach (or text-instances in a systematic structure) such as
various editors have been constructing since 1924. Jahrbuch 2003, however,
uniquely reproduces these copied out sections separately in Volume 2, with
a diagrammatic visual indication of where on each original manuscript page
of each Bogen they would have sat.91
Obviously this is an improvement in terms of making information available
to readers, but it raises an acute question concerning the methodology of the
last hand. Are readers necessarily interested in the final state of the text as
89 See Terrell Carver, Communism for Critical Critics? A New Look at The German
Ideology, History of Political Thought, IX (1) (1988), pp. 12936; see also Terrell
Carver, The Postmodern Marx (Manchester, 1998), pp. 98107.
90 Engels numbering per-Bogen clearly follows the draft discussions as they devel-
oped on paper, though Marx and Engels may, of course, have composed or re-composed
some passages out of sequence; Jahrbuch 2003 records some editorial inferences about
this with reference to particular passages.
91 Jahrbuch 2003, Vol. 2, pp. 178211.
 126 T. CARVER

it was abandoned by the authors? The German ideology manuscripts as a

whole were never prepared by them for submission to a publisher as a distinct
intellectual and commercial entity. Or are readers perhaps more interested in
the state of the text as the authors were composing it for the different and over-
lapping projects on which they were working successively during this period?
If the latter, then there is a point to restoring the copied out sections to the
actual pages presented to the reader, who would be interested in following the
thoughts of the authors as they put pen to paper (rather than in looking in a
separate volume for a fragment of text truncated for what are now extraneous
reasons).
Indeed this line of thinking argues for a variant-rich and contextual
approach to the manuscript materials, putting as much information as possible
on the actual printed page92 such that successive processes of (re)composition
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can be reproduced. In that way readers would follow the compositional

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2013

thought-process as the authors were working on pages 1/2/3/4 per printers

sheet, in the sequence of printers sheets as numbered by Engels, whatever
polemic was under construction at the time of writing. This presentation
would therefore catch the compositional process as the authors wrestled with
their ideas.
Drafts for published works as rough as this are rarely preserved, since most
authors are required by publishers to send fair copy. Arguably a mode of
presentation alternative to the smooth text of the last hand, as employed
throughout the MEGA2 project as a matter of principle, would lead readers in
this particular case into the laboratory where Marx and Engels were working
during a formative period in their intellectual development. In the course of
drafting successive polemical works, the authors developed some of the ideas
that Marx counted, albeit enigmatically, as self-clarification. However, if
we follow Marxs autobiographical account of this period 18437 as a
continuous discussion and if we read it independently of Ryazanovs star-
tling re-evaluation of the otherwise quite disparaged German ideology
manuscripts we now see that the manuscripts of 18456 represent a contin-
uation of the jointly published polemics of The Holy Family, which were
directed towards a German audience of radical intellectuals, and also a pre-
cursor to Marxs foray into the world of French socialism in The Poverty of
Philosophy, where he was trying to bring the new conception to a wider
public.

92 The International Institute for Historical Research and the Marx-Engels-

Gesamtausgabe project are jointly planning to present digital facsimile images of the
actual pages of the German ideology manuscripts rather than typographical tran-
scriptions on the internet; personal conversation with U. Balzer, International Insti-
tute of Social History, Amsterdam, 15 March 2007.
 THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY NEVER TOOK PLACE 127

Conclusions
While texts written before or after the manuscript polemics of late 1845 to
mid-1846 record and discuss the crucial insights of the new conception of
human life, history and future society that Marx and Engels were developing,
the precise moment of self-clarification, and its precise terms, have always
proved elusive. The German ideology manuscripts, as Marx says,93 were
part of this process. But the factitious chapter I. Feuerbach of the two-
volume book The German Ideology, as I have shown above, was not.
The broader project in Marxism of framing the new conception of soci-
ety, history and politics as a philosophy, crucially resting on a critique of
Feuerbach and Hegel, is itself questionable. Ryazanovs chapter I. Feuerbach
of 1924 was touted as a solution to the problem of what exactly in philosophi-
For personal use only -- not for reproduction

cal terms Marxs new conception actually was. Even if this is a valid problem,
and even if there is a solution to be found, my conclusion is that the manu-
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2013

script materials used to construct the chapter I. Feuerbach are of interest

not as a text of the last hand but as a rare record of a compositional pro-
cess. This can be explored in relation to any number of questions, not least
how exactly Marx and Engels were learning to think as they did. It follows
that future editions of the successive manuscript polemics against the Ger-
man ideology should proceed on this basis.

Terrell Carver UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL

93 Marx, Preface, CW, Vol. 29, pp. 262, 264.