请将“As for its audience, the 1843 Critique has received only a moderate reception. Whereas The 1844 Manuscripts inspired numerous interpretations - ranging from that of the young Marcuse, to Christian or spiritualist versions, inspiring anti-bureaucratic struggles against totalitarian domination - the 1843 Critique has for the most part been studied academically as an important phase in the genesis of Marx’s thought, but only as a phase.19 Of course, the 1843 Critique does not have the scope of the Manuscripts, since this work transforms the critique of political economy into a cohesive criticism of modern society. But the 1843 Critique is nonetheless an exceptional work in the sense that, by making Hegel’s philosophy of right emblematic for political thought in the modern period, it simultaneously offers a veritable critique of political modernity under the banner of democracy, making it, in Michel Henry’s view, an extraordinary text of unlimited philosophical significance.
Why then the relative disinterest? Shall we conclude that the “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” which Marx himself published, threw a shadow over the manuscript of 1843 by reducing it to the status of a preparatory work? Or did Marx’s judgment in 1859 intimidate critics from exploring a route that would challenge his self-interpretation?
Perhaps the explanation is to be found at a more fundamental level. Would a careful and unprejudiced reading of the 1843 Critique throw Marx’s standard image into question? Would it reveal an unexpected dimension to his thought, as though alongside the naturalization of the political, the “impassioned questioning of the being of politics” simultaneously persisted, as well as the no less impassioned investigation into figures of liberty that appear under names such as “true democracy” or “disappearance of the State”?
The questions addressed in this study on Marx are undoubtedly tied to questions of our own day. Are we at a Machiavellian moment that would constitute itself in the Marx-Machiavelli relationship, or in the opposition of these two ways of thinking? Before exploring the significance of this opposition in its own right, my purpose here is to show how the Marx-Machiavelli device works in Marx himself, to make it reemerge as an inner tension of his thought, and to reveal in Marx’s writings, by way of this course, several possibilities of an unfinished modernity.
THE UTOPIA OF THE RATIONAL STATE
Marx’s essays from 1842 and the beginning of 1843 (the 15 January article on the vine-growers of Mosel) may at first be interpreted as a complete and coherent expression of the theory of the rational democratic State - as it were, an epitome of the democratic movements’ practical struggle during the French Revolution and the theoretical struggle of the German philosophers - written in the wake of those whom Walter Benjamin describes as “the Germans of 1789.5,1 Marx’s radical journalism put a theme into play that reappears as a leitmotif in the Left Hegelian movement: the present time is - or rather, must be - a time of politics. In 1841, Arnold Ruge welcomes the new movement, essentially Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach, as the latest German equivalent of the Montagnards. And in the Deutsche Jahrbücher, in 1842, the same Ruge launches his critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right by describing the character of the new era: “Our times are political, and our politics intend the freedom of this world. No longer do we lay the ground for the ecclesiastical State, but for the secular State, and the interest in the public issue of freedom in the State grows with every breath that humans take.”2
This rediscovery of politics, or better still, this reawakening of the political element itself, is in Ruge’s view the manifestation of a spiritual revolution whose fulfillment in a new form of life will depend on the rejuvenation of political virtue. It is in the name of this new life that Ruge criticizes the old-guard of diplomatic, compromising German philosophers, such as Kant and Hegel. “Their systems are systems of reason and freedom in the midst of irrationality and lack of freedom.”3 Ruge thus focuses on emphasizing Hegel’s contradictions: he who understood the essence of the State as the realization of the ethical idea, who rightly flogged the Germans for their political nothingess and favored political praxis, nonetheless shut himself into a unilaterally theoretical viewpoint, was blind to the relationship between theory and existence, and conceived reconciliation only in the realm of spirit and in the form of speculative mediation. The new movement aims at overcoming these contradictions by working for the realization of reason in existence, by abandoning a purely theoretical point of view and giving priority to the free will of human beings. The new critical tendency - and in this respect it constitutes a profound reawakening of the political element - presents itself as the unity of free will and thought and proposes to replace the philosophy of spirit with a philosophy of free will and action.
In a polemical vein, it is this veritable faith of the young Hegelians that was targeted in 1845 by the critical arrows of Max Stirner’s The Ego and its Own: “State! State! So ran the general cry, and thenceforth people sought for the ‘right form of State,’ the best constitution, and so the State in its best conception. The thought of the State passed into all hearts and awakened enthusiasm; to serve it, this mundane god, became the new divine service and worship. The properly political epoch had dawned.”4 Arthur Rosenburg is therefore quite right, in his History of Bolshevism, to bring out Marx’s Jacobin inspiration, in the broad sense of the term. For Marx, editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, a daily founded in January 1842 by representatives of the Rhenish bourgeoisie opposing Prussian absolutism, the task of the present times is to bring the model of the French revolutionary State over to Germany, to create a rational State in which Germans, still submerged in the immaturity of spirit, would be raised to political modernity and transformed into a people of citizens. Announcing to Ruge in March 1842 his intention to elaborate a critique of Hegel’s theory of natural right, and especially the internal political system, Marx writes: “The central point is the struggle against constitutional monarchy as a hybrid which from beginning to end contradicts and abolishes itself. Res publica is quite untranslatable into German.”5 And, tested by failure, shortly before his move to “Paris, capital of the nineteenth century,” where he would collaborate with Ruge in editing the first and only issue of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Marx confesses the absurdity of this project in the Germany of Frederick William IV: “. . . Germany is sunk deep in the mire and will sink still deeper . . . one has a feeling of national shame, even in Holland. The most insignificant Dutchman is still a citizen compared with the greatest German.”6 The reference to Holland should catch our attention, for it has a significant place in Marx’s intellectual development; Holland is first of all the land of Spinoza and of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which Marx had cited extensively in a notebook from 1841. But at that time Holland is also a rare example of republicanism in the midst of absolutist Europe - proof, in other words, that the republic is not a mere ideal of the past but a possible destiny for the modern world.
Marx’s contributions as a political journalist may therefore be analyzed, on a first level, as a harmonious conjunction of Jacobinism and Left Hegelianism. This means, then, a program that consists in emancipating the State from religion through the creation of secular political community, and destroying the political forms of the Ancien Régime - the hierarchical structures, the rule of privilege - in order to replace them with a democratic republic based on political equality.
Yet a reading of these writings in strictly political terms, no matter how exact, is evidently insufficient. For the political positions that are here asserted are in a sense derived. Indeed - and this is what legitimates seeing in this new movement the presence of a Machiavellian moment - we may perceive in this political thematic, beyond the opposition to the Christian State and the political forms of the Ancien Régime, the reactivation, or even the repetition, of a phenomenon of far greater breadth, since it puts the very being of society into question, reformulating the relationship of thought and action, phi-losophy and politics. In Claude Lefort’s analysis, this movement of thought conditions the emergence of a universalist and rationalist conception of politics, in this case Florentine humanism. This is a groundbreaking phenomenon, since at stake is “a radical change not only in political thinking but also in the very categories according to which reality is determined.”7 With the rupture from the theological representation of the world, there is a disentangling “of the place of politics for thought, and consequently an attributing of reality to the place specific to politics. What could then be realized is a relationship to that place, not a new political discourse, but a discourse on politics as such.”8
To justify this “maximal” reading and grasp the constitution of the Machiavellian moment, we will recall two essays, one by Feuerbach and one by Marx. Both of these essays indeed exemplify how the political discourse of the “modern French,” held at the German scene in the years 1841-3, is the derived effect of a foundational discourse on politics, or more precisely, on the place of politics, and are completely inclined toward reclaiming the political dimension as a dimension constitutive of humanity.
In his essay on the “Necessity for a Reform of Philosophy” (1842), Feuerbach calls for a transformation of philosophy; and to highlight the radical and innovative character of this project, he distinguishes between two types of reforms: a reform internal to philosophy, “the child of philosophical need,” and an external reform that refers to the historical world outside the field of philosophy, and is therefore of a kind to satisfy a need of humanity. It is this second type of reform that he eagerly recommends, and its necessity is seen as stemming from two changes in the historical situation: on the one hand, a religious transformation in the form of a negation of Christianity, on the other, the upsurge of a new need of humanity, the need of political liberty, or simply, the political need. Feuerbach’s reform therefore rests on a principled hostility between Christianity and the new fundamental need of humanity, and he describes this hostility in Machiavellian terms: “Men throw themselves into politics today because they recognize in Christianity a religion which destroys their political energy.”9 In a word, politics has replaced religion. From this conversion of the human gaze, redirected from heaven to earth, Feuerbach deduces simultaneously the exigency of a reform in philosophy and the tendency of that reform. Philosophy must now transform religion, or more precisely, it must elaborate the “supreme principle” that would allow politics to become a new religion, so that the political need is not simply registered in the mind but penetrates through to the heart.”翻译为中文