The discussion (in Die Frau) about the meaning and purpose (Sinn) of our war could perhaps be augmented by placing more emphasis on a point, the importance of which you in particular will readily appreciate, namely our responsibility before history – I can only put it in these rather pathetic terms. The facts themselves are plain enough.

Any numerically ‘large’ nation organised as a Machtstaat finds that, thanks to these very characteristics, it is confronted by tasks of a quite different order from those devolving on other nations such as the Swiss, the Danes, the Dutch or the Norwegians. There is of course a world of difference between this assertion and the view that a people which is ‘small’ in numbers and in terms of power is thereby less ‘valuable’ or less ‘important’ before the forum of history. It is simply that such nations, by their very nature, have different obligations and therefore other cultural possibilities. You are familiar with Jakob Burckhardt's arguments, which have caused so much astonishment, about the diabolical nature of power. In fact this evaluation is a wholly consistent one, when considered from the standpoint of those cultural values which have been entrusted to a people, such as the Swiss, who are not able to bear the armour of great military states and who therefore have no historical obligation so to do.

Karl Emil Maximilian Weber was born in Erfurt in 1864. His father, Max Weber Sr, was a lawyer and a deputy in the Prussian Chamber of Deputies for the National Liberal Party from 1868 to 1882 and from 1884 to 1897. He was also a member of the Reichstag from 1872 until 1884. Weber's mother, Helene Fallenstein Weber, had an interest in questions of religion and social reform which she did not share with her husband.

The Weber household in Berlin attracted a large number of academics and politicians, including von Bennigsen, Dilthey, Theodor Mommsen and Treitschke. The discussions which took place there must have made a strong impression on the young Weber. In 1882 Weber began his studies at Heidelberg University. His main subject was law but he also attended courses in political economy, history, philosophy and theology. He moved to Strasbourg in 1883 where he combined his year of national service with study at the university. In 1884 Weber continued his studies in Berlin. Here he attended courses in law, including Gierke's course on German legal history. Weber was not impressed by the lectures of Treitschke which, because of their extreme nationalism, he considered to be little more than demagogy and propaganda. After graduation Weber did not find the practice of law sufficiently stimulating and continued his studies in the field of political science (Staatsmissenschaft) as well as in legal and economic history.

Preface

I was prompted to publish the following arguments by the opposition rather than the assent which they elicited from my audience. They offer colleagues in the same discipline, and others, new information only on points of detail, and the occasion that gave rise to them explains the special sense in which alone they lay claim to the name of ‘science’. Essentially, an inaugural lecture is an opportunity to present and justify openly the personal and, in this sense, ‘subjective’ standpoint from which one judges economic phenomena. The exposition on pages 17–20 was omitted for reasons of time and in view of the audience, while other parts of the argument may have assumed a different form when I was actually delivering them. It should be noted that the opening remarks give a very simplified account of events which were naturally a good deal more complicated in reality. During the period 1871–85 the population movements in individual districts and communities in West Prussia were not uniform, although they changed in characteristic ways, and they are much less transparent than the examples selected here. In other instances the tendency I have tried to illustrate from these examples is subject to the influence of other factors.

Big industry brings together in one place a crowd of people who are unknown to one another. Competition divides them in regard to their interests. But maintaining their wages, this common interest which they have against their master, unites them in a single thought of resistance – coalition. Thus, the coalition always has a double purpose, that of bringing the competition among them to an end, in order to be able to mount a general competition against the capitalist. If the first aim of the resistance was only to maintain wages, to the extent that the capitalists in their turn unite in the thought of repression, the coalitions, at first isolated, form themselves into groups and, in the face of the always united capital, the maintenance of the association becomes more important for them than the maintenance of wages. So true is this, that the English economists are all astonished to see the workers sacrifice a good part of their wages on behalf of the associations which, in the eyes of the economists, were established only to advance wages. In this struggle – veritable civil war – all the elements necessary for a coming battle are united and developed. At this point, the association assumes a political character.

Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the country into labourers. The domination of capital has created for this mass a common situation and common interests.

Bruno Bauer, The Jewish Question Braunschweig, 1843

The German Jews desire emancipation. Which emancipation do they want? Civic, that is, political emancipation.

Bruno Bauer replies to them: nobody in Germany is politically emancipated. We ourselves are not free. How are we supposed to liberate you? You Jews are egoists if you demand a special emancipation for yourselves as Jews. You have to participate as Germans in the political emancipation of Germany, as human beings in the emancipation of humanity, and not perceive the special form of your oppression and your humiliation as an exception to the rule, but rather as confirmation of the rule.

Or do the Jews demand equality with the Christian subjects? In that case they recognise the Christian state to be justified, they acknowledge the regime of general subjugation. Why should your special yoke displease you when you are satisfied with the general yoke? Why should the Germans take an interest in the liberation of the Jews when the Jews take no interest in the liberation of the Germans?

The Christian state knows only privileges. In this state the Jews have the privilege of being Jews. As Jews they have rights which the Christians do not have. Why do they desire rights which they do not have and which the Christians enjoy?

If the Jew wishes to be emancipated from the Christian state, he demands that the Christian state renounce its religious prejudice.

So you've read Grotius, Hobbes and Montesquieu. What do you think of these three famous men?

I was often bored by Grotius; but he is very learned; apparently he loves reason and virtue; but reason and virtue don't affect you very much when they are boring. What's more, he sometimes seems to me to be very bad at arguing. Montesquieu is very imaginative on a subject that only appears to require judgement: he is too often mistaken about the facts; but I believe he also makes mistakes in his arguments. Hobbes is very tough, as is his style, but I fear his toughness often stems from truth. In short, Grotius is an utter pedant, Hobbes a sad philosopher and Montesquieu a fine wit.

I agree to some extent. Life is too short, and we have too much to do to learn from Grotius that, according to Tertullian, ‘cruelty, fraud and injustice are the companions of war’; that ‘Carnaedes defended error as much as truth’; that Horace said in a satire: ‘Nature cannot tell the just from the unjust’; that, according to Plutarch, ‘children have compassion’; that Chryssipus said ‘the origin of the law is in Jupiter’; that, if Florentine is to be believed, ‘nature has established a kind of kinship between men’; that Carnaedes said that ‘usefulness is the mother of justice’.

I confess that Grotius gives me great pleasure when he says, at the start of his first chapter in the first book, that ‘Jewish law did not bind foreigners.’

Karl Marx (1818–1883) wrote no single work in which the essential themes of his political thought are spelled out, no work analogous to, say, Plato's Republic, Hobbes' Leviathan, or Hegel's Philosophy of Right. To get the essentials of his political doctrine, one must read many of Marx's writings, both early and late, including not only things he published but also things left in manuscript form at his death. The editors of this series have decided to offer these writings in two volumes: the present one, which includes texts that pre-date The Communist Manifesto, which was published in February 1848, and a second, being edited by Dr Terrell Carver, which will include the Manifesto and writings subsequent to it.

Of Marx's writing of 1847 we include here two short pieces: an excerpt from the conclusion of Poverty of Philosophy, which was published in the middle of that year, and a speech he gave at the end of the year, shortly before he (and Friedrich Engels) began drafting the Manifesto. Our principal texts date from the period spring/summer 1843 to fall 1846. The first of these is Marx's ‘Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right’, excerpts from which are included here, and the last is chapter 1 of‘The German Ideology’. This latter text represents the culmination of a process that began in the earlier ‘Critique’ of Hegel: Marx's development of a complex insight which he called the ‘guideline’ (Leitfaden) for all of his subsequent theoretical work, and which others have dubbed his ‘materialist’ theory of history, society and politics (or ‘historical materialism’ etc.) – about the details of which we will say more below.

(Special reasons lead me to state that the following article is the first that I have submitted to Vorwärts! K.M.)

Issue no. 60 of ‘Vorwärts!’ contains an article entitled ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform‘ and signed ‘A Prussian’.

The alleged Prussian begins by reporting the contents of the royal Prussian Cabinet order concerning the Silesian workers' revolt and the opinion of the French journal La Réforme about the Prussian Cabinet order. According to the Réforme, the Cabinet order had its source in the ‘terror and the religious sentiment’ of the King. It even finds in this document the presentiment of the great reforms that await bourgeois society.

[Hegel's Mystification of the State]

[In §262 of The Philosophy of Right Hegel says that] the manner and means of the state's mediation with the family and civil society are ‘circumstances, arbitrary will, and personal choice of vocation’. Accordingly, the rationality of the state has nothing to do with the division of the material of the state into family and civil society. The state results from them in an unconscious and arbitrary way. Family and civil society appear as the dark natural ground from which the light of the state emerges. ‘Material of the state’ here means the business of the state, i.e. family and civil society, in so far as they constitute components of the state and, as such, participate in the state.

This development is remarkable in two respects.

(1) Family and civil society are conceived of as spheres of the concept of the state, specifically as spheres of its finiteness, as its finiteness. It is the state which divides itself, which presupposes them, and indeed does this only in order to emerge from its ideality and become infinite and actual spirit for itself … The so-called ‘actual Idea’ (spirit as infinite, actual) is described as though it acted according to a determinate principle and toward a determinate end. It divides itself into finite spheres, and it does this ‘in order to return to itself, to be for itself’, and it does this such that things turn out exactly as they are.

Here [Hegel's] logical, pantheistic mysticism is clearly evident.

The first president of the Reich was elected by the National Assembly. In future the president of the Reich absolutely must be elected directly by the people. The decisive reasons for this are as follows:

(1) Regardless of whatever name it is given and whatever changes are made to its powers, the Bundesrat will under all circumstances be carried over into the new constitution of the Reich in one form or another, for it is utterly Utopian to imagine that the bearers of governmental authority and state power, namely the governments installed by the peoples of the individual free states, will allow themselves to be excluded from the process of shaping the will of the Reich and above all from the administration of the Reich. It is therefore essential for us to create a head of state resting unquestionably on the will of the whole people, without the intervention of intermediaries. Indirect elections have been abolished everywhere; are they then to be preserved here, for the election of the highest office? That would be regarded, quite rightly, as a mockery of the democratic principle in favour of the interest members of parliament have in horse-trading, and it would discredit the unity of the Reich.

(2) Only a president of the Reich who has the votes of millions of people behind him can have the authority to initiate the process of socialisation.