Socialism and the Emergence of the Welfare State

In the beginning was Karl Marx. No other writer of nineteenth-century Europe had remotely as much influence as he. The time and place of his birth were crucial to that importance. Marx was born in the town of Trier (Trèves in French) on the Moselle River only a few miles from the intersection of Germany and France with Luxemburg. It also happens that Trier stood on the border between the Germanic and Roman worlds that had collided there centuries ago. Hence Trier is a historic crossing in the heart of Europe. As for the timing, Marx was born in 1818 near the climax of the first industrial revolution in Britain and at the post-Napoleonic beginning of a second industrial wave of growth that swept over western continental Europe as the nineteenth century unfolded. As a boy, therefore, Marx grew up in a largely rural setting that was soon to be transformed by the innovative force of new commerce and industry. For the first time, everything that we think of as “modern” – meaning a growing population, advancing technological innovation, a burgeoning factory system, mass transportation, an increasingly numerous working class, and much more – was putting in an appearance amid great confusion and conflict. It was Marx’s self-appointed task to bring all this remarkable unprecedented activity into focus. His earliest writings, starting about 1840, tended to get lost in the shuffle. More than a century later they were scooped up by scholars eager to show that Marx was really a humanist, an existentialist, or whatever. But what those first essays actually revealed was that Marx began as a thoroughly convinced Hegelian. It was, after all, Hegel’s theoretical Weltanschauung that preoccupied Marx during his initial philosophical studies at the university in Berlin. In 1846 he attempted to pull his own thoughts together in a treatise entitled The German Ideology. The lingering traces of Hegelianism were evident enough, but one crucial sentence set Marx apart from his master: “Here we do not descend from heaven to earth, but we ascend from earth to heaven.” If taken to its ultimate conclusion, this newly found conviction meant that Marx would no longer begin with some abstract notion seeking to realize itself in history, but he would take a more positivistic approach by deducing abstractions from historical facts. Of course, he never quite succeeded in making a total transition to that objective, and his writings remained marked by the titanic clash of great concepts. Let it be briefly added here that Marx well understood Hegel. A single illustration will serve to underscore that assertion: the most fundamental Hegelian proposition of the dialectic. This conception has often been presented as a kind of ethereal tennis match. First an idea (the thesis) is advanced, which is then met by an opposing idea (the antithesis). The resolution of their clash is another idea (the synthesis) that becomes a new thesis, and so on. But the fallacy of this analogy is exposed by asking a simple question: in a tennis tournament, where does the opponent come from? Of course the answer is: from another bracket. Not, however, in Hegel’s dialectic. For him the antithesis must be sought within the original thesis. Thus the dialectical method is a repeated process of self-contradiction and intellectual refinement. Marx well comprehended this distinction, and to suit his purposes he transposed it into historical terms with his signature assertion that the capitalist bourgeoisie plants the seeds of its own destruction by creating within the industrial system a revolutionary proletariat. Such was the setting for the most notorious of Marxian texts, The Communist Manifesto, written with his friend Friedrich Engels in 1848. The chaotic insurrectionary events of that year begged for a coherent interpretation, which Marx and Engels intended to supply. More than that, they hoped to move the historical process along with a provocative theory that the proletariat – Europe’s emerging industrial working class – was now rising to overthrow the currently prevailing dominance of the bourgeoisie, that despicable exploitative class of entrepreneurs. The state, invariably an instrument of the ruling class, would doubtless attempt to provide soldiers and arms to suppress this immense uprising of workers, but ultimately the revolution was bound to succeed in overthrowing the existing social order and establishing a classless society.