YAO Yuan*

 

 

Keywords: Karl Marx · historical materialism · rights · French view of history · Kreuznach Notes

 

 

The modern age has been solemnly proclaimed as the “Age of Rights.” At the beginning of getting to understand the phenomenon of rights in the modern age, Karl Marx did not resort to the theoretical construction and elemental analysis of the general model of rights, but rather, to the specific typical rights in experience, namely, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which was the primary target of criticism in On the Jewish Question. ¹ This paper seeks to show that Marx’s relevant critical analysis and his revelation of the historicity of rights benefit from the short- and long-term perspectives that he successively adopted in his research. To do so, we must look at Marx’s Kreuznach-Paris-Brussels period, searching for factual clues in previously unexamined places and adapting and reconstructing the interpretative framework based on these facts. While the short-term perspective is usually associated with the study of proximate causation, which tends to think more in terms of the context in which the event was taking place, the long-term perspective is usually associated with the study of distant causation, which tends to think more in terms of centuries (of course, the so-called short and long terms are relative concepts in this context). Not surprisingly, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen can be understood as a synthesis of the draft declarations of Lafayette, Sieyès, etc., as the result of the overall deliberations of the Constituent Assembly in August 1789, or of several years of development following the Assembly of Notables in 1787, or as the reform achievements over the decades since the launch of the criminal justice humanization initiative in the 1760s. It can also be understood as political reflections

of the Enlightenment political philosophy in 18th century France, as the final product of the European Enlightenment culture throughout the 17^th and 18^th centuries, or as the legal expression of the industrial and commercial claims in civil society since the early modern age — These obviously mean that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen takes on very different appearances, as if we could see disparate pictures of human life at disparate times. For finite things such as rights, their historicity — which is what historical materialism is all about — points, first and foremost, to time, implying that the form and substance of the right are to be grasped in a process of flux. Time reveals the theoretical illusions that “obliterate all historical differences” and misinterpret forms of rights that are subject to a particular stage of development as “natural” rights,² making all things plain and obvious to rationality — “Truth is the daughter of time,” so to speak.³ The application of the historical materialist approach involves, to a considerable extent, the so-called dialectics of the time period. This requires setting certain time coordinates and selecting periods of a specific length, i.e., the artificial division, construction, and reintegration of objective, homogeneous, and uniformly passing natural time. Setting time periods means adopting corresponding models of interpretation, and Marx’s study of rights may be summarized as a back-and-forth between the phenomenon of rights and models of interpretation.

 

 

Marx’s keen interest in the history of the French Revolution and the speeches on human rights of its main protagonists is widely reflected in the key works he wrote before and after his arrival in Paris. For example, in the manuscript of the Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”, Marx spoke of France as “[representing] the land of political upbringing,” and it was there that “the legislative power made the French Revolution,” and that “the French Revolution alone completed the process of transformation from political to social hierarchy... and thus completing the separation of political life from civil society.” ⁴ The articles in the German-French Yearbook, on the other hand, show that the understanding of the French Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and the inheritors of their ideological legacy (socialism and communism in the first half of the 19^th century) was also a vision and

theoretical preparation for the destiny of the Germanic nation.

 

 

As we have seen, Marx began his examination of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen from a short-term perspective. The first guide for Marx at this stage was the Geschichte Frankreichs Im Revolutionszeitalter by Wilhelm Wachsmuth. Marx’s Kreutznach Notes, Book IV (July and August 1843), contains 66 excerpts from Volumes 1 and 2 of that book. Among them, Marx transcribes in some detail (but not in full) the French Constitution of 1791, including, of course, above all, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, which serves as its preamble. In relation to this, “The Rights of Man” and the French Constitution of 1791 appear in the index he compiled for Book IV of his Notes, which shows the importance he attached to them. These two entries form a separate set of keywords, written consecutively at the bottom of the pages of the notebook, with a corresponding page range limited to the works of Wilhelm Wachsmuth. As seen from the work’s title and the relevant excerpts, Wilhelm Wachsmuth deals with the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen from a short-term perspective. The entire collection of Kreutznach Notes shows a keen interest in the subject of the French Revolution and its human rights documents. Marx took the unusual care to extract 117 bibliographical references from the works of Wilhelm Wachsmuth and, inspired by them, purchased the Compendium of Constitutions, Charters, and Fundamental Laws of the States in Europe and in North and South America, compiled by Defoe, Duvernier, and Gadet, as well as the History of the Revolutionary Parliament of France, or the Journal of the National Assembly, 1789-1815, compiled by Bichet and Lou Lavigne, both of which are cited in his On the Jewish Question. While reading Volume 1 of the first collection of books, Marx made many marks and annotations on the French Constitutions of 1793 and 1795, but did not apply this practice to the Constitution of

1791, as the Kreutznach Notes already contained corresponding excerpts of it. This collection of books helped Marx to grasp the generality and specificity of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in the sequence of constitutional documents in modern Europe and America. In contrast, the second collection of books is even more important, as it is the most authoritative collection of primary documents on the history of the French Revolution in the mid-19^th century, which enabled Marx to ascertain, in the contextual details of the archives of the parliamentary debates (i.e., the so-called sources of the legislative history), the original intentions and problematic reflections of the legislators in the French Revolutionary era (including members of the national assembly, especially the constitutional leaders). Needless to say, the second collection of books greatly complements the short-term examination already provided by Wachsmuth by reducing the mass of dull and dry historical codification narratives to vivid rhetoric, rich discourse, and precise instruments.

 

The short-term examination centered on the groups of people who actually participated in and influenced the creation of the law back in those years is the most intuitive and logical approach to studying the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. As Durkheim rhetorically asked, “Is there anything more conspicuous and visible in political, legal, and religious institutions than the personalities of those who ruled the country, drafted the laws, and established the religious ceremonies?”⁵ Regardless of the adequacy of the interpretative approach based on the original intentions of the revolutionary legislators, it constitutes, after all, the first step in Marx’s study of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and thus provides the basic opportunity to move towards enlightened skepticism. Marx always took the creators’ original intentions seriously, although they never bound him and often used them as a starting condition for developing a critical perspective. The parliamentary debates during the French Revolution, carefully documented and heeded by Wachsmuth, were the pinnacle and model of public debate throughout the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was arguably its most important cultural achievement, and the uintessential text on which Marx based his examination of the spirit of the French Enlightenment (likewise, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right was viewed by Marx as the epitome of German legal and political awareness). By reading the History of the Revolutionary Parliament of France, Marx knew that the actual formulation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen involved a tug-of-war between moderates and radicals, a plot that could be described as convoluted. The deliberation of this Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen took less than a month, which should be regarded as rather hasty. But unlike the so-called revolutions that preceded the 18^th century, which merely replaced

some rulers or slightly changed the local conditions of the state, the French revolutionaries believed that a little tinkering could not make what was wrong right. With the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, they were to lay the foundations of a new legal order for France and even Europe. Henceforth, the legitimacy of the law was no longer guaranteed by the authority of the king’s personality, no longer guaranteed by the registration of the High Court of Paris, but by the universal will represented by the National Assembly, and by the law’s wholehearted defense of the people’s rights — whether it was acceptable or not, the discourse of the old doctrine of kingship, or the doctrine of judicature gave way to the new discourse of the will, or the doctrine of rights. It is conceivable that the shorter and more limited the period of time that serves as a benchmark for examination, the more we see in history the consciousness, the will, the intentions, and the surprises of the actors; in short, the more subjective choices and contingencies are rushing in, the more fantasies of the times are seducing us, and the more the deep-seated determinants, independent of the individual actors, are annihilated to the point where they become simply unimaginable.⁶

 

By reading the Compendium of Constitutions, Charters and Fundamental Laws of the States in Europe and in North and South America, Marx knew that the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, in contrast to the North American constitutional documents written in French, was characterized by a philosophical tone of innocence, courageousness, and grandeur, which gave full play to the free grammar and equality sentiment that were so popular with people in the modern age. This was already evident in the popular draft declaration of the time. For example, the Marquis de Lafayette, the “Hero of Two Worlds,” argued that “to love liberty, it is enough to know it, and to be liberated, it is enough to seek it” (an aphorism that mesmerized Penn), and that a declaration of the rights of man must therefore make known to the world “what everyone knows and what everyone feels.” His draft (10 articles in all) takes the form of a forceful and concise text, solemnly declaring that “Nature has made all men free and equal” (Article 1), that “all men are born with inalienable and everlasting rights, among which are: The freedom to express all their opinions; the right to take care of their honor and life; the right to property, including the complete dominion over his person, business, and talents; the right to communicate his ideas by all possible means; the right to pursue happiness; and the right to resist oppression” (Article 2), that “the origin of the whole Sovereignty lies in the nation” (Article 5), and that “the sole purpose of any government is the public welfare,” (Article 7) etc.⁷ This writing style was directly inherited by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which was later formally adopted. It was often even argued that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was actually written by Lafayette.

 

 

We find, however, that Marx did not trace back and forth along the conventional train of thought from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the draft declaration, and then to the Enlightenment, but rather focused his short-term examination on the period of the National Convention. According to Arnold Ruge’s report, Marx had spent the first half of 1844 (presumably from February to the end of May) in a sustained and extremely diligent study of the historical materials on the National Convention he had collected.⁸ The extant Paris Notes begins with excerpts from the Mémoires de R. Levasseur (de la Sarthe), a member of the Jacobins and of the National Convention. Besides, Marx studied the important newspapers and periodicals at the time of the French Revolution. His research on the history of the National Convention seemed to have made considerable progress, which was an open secret among the radical exiles. And we know that during the period of the National Convention, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen had ceased to be as glamorous as it had been in 1789, and seemed to have been removed from the central concerns of revolutionary politics, or rather that the political practice of the National Convention at times so flagrantly trampled on the principles of human rights proclaimed by itself that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen became a mere display and a silent caricature.

 

Now we have to ask why Marx focused on the tumultuous period of the National Convention during the French Revolution, which provides the most important context for understanding the modern state and its forms of rights. The answer, I think, lies in his judgment that the French Revolution was “the classic era of political reasoning” and that “the National Convention was the extreme point of political energy, political power and political reasoning.”⁹ In other words, the period of the National Convention was the pinnacle of the French Revolution, where the partisan struggles and political creeds more than ever highlighted all the glories, all the illusions, and all the absurdities of the revolutionary era. Dickens’s retrospection at the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities, which seems to me to have been very much to Marx’s liking, is particularly applicable to the history of the National Convention: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.”¹⁰ If one were to choose one person to represent the period of the National Convention, it would be Robespierre. This man most notably exemplified what Marx called “Political Reasoning” (which was the paradigm of French political ideology), i.e., the tendency to think and act only within the bounds of politics, based on the viewpoint of the abstract whole of state. Especially in the latter part of his reign, Robespierre was a staunch advocate of Greco-Roman republican

virtues, in the hope of consolidating and sustaining the French Republic by promoting revolutions in the moral and political world on the basis of the revolution in the material world that had already been fostered. Robespierre’s understanding of the issue of rights represents a view of rights based on authentic political reasoning, and it constituted a key reference for Marx in his study of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

 

The preamble of the Constitution of 1793,¹¹ created during the period of the National Convention and described by Marx as “the most radical of all constitutions,” was the 35-article Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1793, which was expanded from the 17-article Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. The substrate of the 1793 Declaration used for deliberations was the draft declaration (38 articles) submitted by Robespierre during his speech to the National Convention on April 24, 1793. Indeed, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1793 was the most daring declaration during the French Revolution, as it dared to rank “equality” as the foremost “natural and imprescriptible right” of man (see mainly Article 2, and also Articles 3, 4 and 5), overriding “liberty” “security” and “property” which were more highly regarded previously, and following this logic, the subordination of public officials to the people, as well as the right of the people to resist usurpation and overthrow oppression were further specified in Articles 26- 35.¹² Marx’s critical analysis of the droits de l’homme (the rights of man) itself in On the Jewish Question also starts from Article 2 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1793. Interestingly enough, however, Marx handles it in such a way that gives us the distinct impression that he is oblivious to the radicalism of the foregoing. He seems to be suggesting to his readers from the beginning that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1793 is not as extraordinary as everyone thinks. If there is an existing system that even the sweeping National Convention and Robespierre did not want to overhaul, but consciously spared no effort to preserve and protect, this is the kind of system that would best help Marx escape from the fascinating details of the Revolutionary era, and best reflect the true nature of the rock-solid Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Marx found out that the right to property (or, more precisely, the right to private property) in “the rights of man” was exactly such a thing!

 

As we have seen, the concerns about the issue of property are ubiquitous in Marx’s Notes on Extracts from Wachsmuth. For example, in his excerpts from Article 2 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, he emphasizes only the right to property among the four so-called fundamental “natural” rights. Accordingly, the excerpt from Article 17 emphasizes the word “property” in the text. The term “active citizenship,” which appears several times in the notes of the excerpt in an emphasized form, is, moreover, a political identity that is delimited and created on the basis of the property.¹³ Here again, let’s get back to Robespierre. His position was certainly more radical than that of the framers at the beginning of the Revolution, and he had already recognized that an unfettered right to private property was difficult to justify, and that only legitimate private property was protected by law. The problem was that he was still determined to retain private ownership. On December 2, 1792, he made it clear that “the first law of society is the law that secures to all the members of society the means of subsistence, to which all other laws are subordinate; and the right to property is established or secured only to strengthen the first law of society.”¹⁴ In his parliamentary speech of April 24, 1793, on the revision of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, he stated that he would “first propose” articles concerning the issue of property, and to “faithfully lay down the principles of ownership.” These were articles 6 to 9 of his draft declaration (which he called “truths”), which, while recognizing the right to property, required citizens to respect the rights of others in the exercise of that right. The following words from this speech are most telling: “I do not want to touch your treasure, scoundrels who value only gold, no matter what filth it may have come from... The extreme disparity of property is the source of many calamities and crimes. But we firmly believe that equality of property is only a pipe dream.”¹⁵ The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1793), which was eventually adopted, appears to have incorporated Robespierre’s opinions, with Article 16 stating, “The right to property is the right of every citizen to enjoy and dispose of his assets, his income, the fruits of his labor and diligence, at will.”¹⁶ Compared to Article 17 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), this article somewhat downgraded the status of the right to property, and it clearly defined the scope of legitimate property, but the right to property itself was never fundamentally shaken. Similarly, On the Jewish Question also quoted Article 16 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1793). It is noteworthy that Marx quotes it three times in a row, and each time, he emphasizes the modifier “at will”!¹⁷ It is as if he were suggesting to his readers how surprisingly the right to private property, which is imbued with such egoistic principles, and which, together with other factors, constitutes the foundation of civil society, is justifiably accommodated by the revolutionary political leadership.

 

 

Although the French Revolution was one of the most dramatic political testing grounds, Marx did not intend to linger over the dazzling short-term details. Such details, like those of the American Revolution of the same era, cannot provide a satisfactory overall explanation of the modern phenomenon of rights, and cannot clearly reveal those forces that the individual cannot resist or influence and are not subject to his or her will. The materials on the history of debates during the French Revolution are like the pieces of a large children’s jigsaw puzzle, which can be properly understood only if they are linked to the whole pattern that serves as a guide and can be put in their proper place. Hundreds of sounds directly constitute not a symphony but a clamor, for they lack a silent but powerful bond. Likewise, the massive accumulation of mere factual elements — the day-after-day speeches and proposals around various issues of rights of each member of each parliament — does not automatically reveal the true reality, which requires the researcher’s de-cluttering conceptualized understanding (here the dichotomy between “Fakt” and “Wirklichkeit” is involved). Thus, Marx tried to stretch the time period of examination (which, of course, does not inhibit sensitivity to short-term phenomena and individual activities). The later result of such a stretching process gave rise to Marx’s famous Theory of Periodization, such as the five-periods theory offered in the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Of course, such periodization serves the goal of the critique of political economy, and its criterion of delineation is not the development of the phenomenon of rights, so it is not proper to apply it directly to the discussion in this paper. But it suggests that we should seek the causes and consequences of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, at least throughout the bourgeois era.

 

 

The short-term historical examination is quite natural, and was arguably prevalent in the days when Marx lived (and indeed remains so in our times). For example, according to the preface to the 2nd edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Hugo’s Petit Napoléon, the featured work in the narrative of the coup d’état of December 2, 1851, depicts the coup as a thunderbolt from the sky, as an atrocity that emanated exclusively from a key figure as if that person exerted a titanic subjectivity and initiative unparalleled in the history of the world.¹⁸ In this respect, the dramatic stretching of vision, the transition from a short-term perspective to a long-term perspective, and the overcoming of the blind spot of close observation require some kind of opportunity. This opportunity should be established through the exposure and refinement of internal contradictions, rather than something imposed from outside. We cannot apply to the topic at hand a simplistic predetermined binary framework such as “adopting the short-term perspective without losing sight of the long-term perspective”. Otherwise, the framework will easily be transformed into an abstract formula. On the contrary, a “true critique” based on the dialectic of time periods should reveal the existing contradictions visible in the short period and explain them by turning to the long period to understand the process and inevitability of their formation.¹⁹

 

By focusing on the National Convention, on Robespierre, and finally on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1793), Marx intended to find out from what was most intensely and centrally presented the key clue hidden behind the incident. We know that in those years, Robespierre showed a political radicalization of voluntarism, or even a political mania. “The principle of politics is the will”, and the more political reasoning is given to its fullest play, the more it is convinced of the omnipotence of the will, and the more difficult it is to distinguish between “the natural and spiritual boundaries of the will”.²⁰ It may be said that Robespierre illustrated this perfectly. He even dared to place in the body of the increasingly modernized civil society of France a political head more or less comparable to that of the ancient republic. In this light, the following paradoxical fact that Marx repeatedly draws the reader’s attention to is the main opportunity for turning to the examination of a longer period of time: That the National Convention of 1793, that revolutionary regime, which still had the greatest political fervor, which should have demanded the total elimination of egoism and the promotion of a spirit of fearlessness and devotion, and which did not hesitate to turn to the Reign of Terror, in spite of everything, through the preamble of its constitution, which was the beginning of the efficacy of its new system of law, openly declared its purpose to protect a series of “rights of man,” including the right to private property. That is to say, it declares that the “droits de l’homme” and the “droits du citoyen”, which correspond to the dualism of private and public law, and which were originally discrete and, in principle opposed to each other, are both constitutional fundamental rights, and that the political community, which is as high and independent as the Kingdom of Heaven — which is itself a modern phenomenon — is only a means to serve the life of civil society, and that the seemingly high-minded “citoyen” is subordinated to the seemingly self-interested “homme.” How to explain these “puzzling” or “enigmatic” facts?²¹ This question fundamentally defines Marx’s long-term examination of rights, and it is an important pivot for understanding the modern age.

 

If the above involves the opportunity to switch perspectives in terms of historical facts, it may not be easy to notice that Marx’s exercise of a long-term examination also has an opportunity in the sense of cultural geography; that is, he voluntarily chose the first stop of his exile to be the capital of France, Paris. Comte, who was roughly his contemporary, once said, with a little exaggeration: “Since the fall of the Roman Empire, and especially since Charlemagne’s accession to the throne, France has always been, both socially and geographically, the center of Western Europe, which might be called the center of mankind.”²² Danton said: “Everyone knows that France is in Paris.” ²³ Just as London was a convenient place to observe first-hand the capitalist model of production and thus to develop a critique of political economy, Paris was a convenient place for Marx to gain insights into the significance of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Would Marx have discussed the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in the same way as he did if the corresponding sequels of On the Jewish Question and The Holy Family had been written in London, Berlin, or New York? I think not. In Paris in the 1840s, many of those who lived through the French Revolution had only recently passed away, and some were still alive. Although France had gone through the Restoration and the Monarchie de Juillet, the national memory of the Revolution was still relatively clear, not to mention the remains of the Revolutionary Assembly, the Political Club, and the Pantheon, which silently spoke of the stormy past. When Marx arrived in Paris, more than half a century had passed since the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Such an interval of time made it possible for him to see whether the contents of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen really constituted an “indisputable truth” as its framers claimed, and to see what counted as “general principles” and what counted as “exceptions.” Paris, the “new capital of the new world,” with its philosophical and political blend,²⁴ the cosmopolitan city that was then expanding at an almost unprecedented rate and plagued by conflicting rights due to an immigration wave of the working-class,²⁵ more than any other city Marx was familiar with at the time, was deeply affected by the violent collision between the old system and the new civilization, and more deeply embedded in the surging tide of world history created by capitalism. In front of Marx, civil society was coming to life, where “the rights of man no longer existed merely as a theory”. The time has come for people to judge things retrospectively according to their fruits!²⁶

 

 

Two passages by Marx declare his orientation for us here: “The legislator should regard himself as a natural scientist. He is not creating laws, he is not inventing laws, but he is merely enunciating laws, he is giving expression to the inner laws of spiritual relations by means of conscious positive laws.” “We cannot judge a man by what he thinks of himself, and likewise, we cannot judge such an age of change by its consciousness.”²⁷ The immediate implication of these two passages taken together is that laws established by legislators are not essentially to be regarded as creations of the subjective will, nor can we judge legislation on the basis of the subjective will of the legislators. This means, in turn, that in order to gain insight into the real principles expressed in the words of the creators of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and the combined effects of individual activities overlapping in history beyond individual expectations, i.e., historical regularities, Marx would have to adopt a certain approach of long-term examination, so as to be able to look beyond the French Revolution as an event in itself. “To go beyond the event means to go beyond the short period of time, the period of chronicles and news reports, which it lends itself to, that ephemeral moment of human consciousness which enables us to get a vivid sense of past events and lives. It means to inquire whether there is an unconscious, or somehow conscious, history at a level above the flow of events, but one that is largely…unrecognized by the actors.”²⁸ In the metaphorical terms of Marx’s youth, it can be argued that we must go beyond the way of observation by looking at the “Hauptund Staatsaktion”, beyond the traditional political history centered on the ruling group, i.e., the “history of kings, assemblies, wars and treaties” (which is the “school of politicians”),²⁹ and turn our gaze slowly away from the legislators as the glowing protagonists of the great political drama, to the deep-seated forces that are at work behind them, latently, intrinsically, and lengthily. Needless to say, such a broad-minded approach was not unrelated to the influence of his teacher Savigny, although Marx did not buy the Romanticized notion of the “national spirit” of the German historical school of law.

 

By turning from a short time period to a long time period, that is to say, from the more bewildering history of the names of certain outstanding figures to the far broader but less distinct realm than that of individual roles, Marx would not have become a prisoner of the web of complex facts, often made up of heroes who come and go as in the blink of an eye, and would have had the opportunity to re-examine and explore the truly stable elements (if only some of them) of all the materials on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen that he had read earlier, and to discover that the people who made history with their own hands “did not make it at their whims, not under conditions of their choosing, but under conditions directly encountered, established, and inherited from the past”.³⁰ For Marx at this time, Robespierre’s vision of the figure of the legislator, as follows, was a pure illusion: “The legislator, because he deals with things through general law... does not harbor prejudices.”³¹ On the contrary, Marx was well aware that the French revolutionaries’ conception of rights and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, its formal expression, especially its provisions on the right to private property, were but the general result of the centuries of development of European civil society “prepared since the 16^th century and brought to maturity in the 18^th century with great strides”, and merely a normative stereotypical processing of and an official certificate issued to the claims of rights that have been deposited in it layer by layer and accumulated from generation to generation.³² The Poverty of Philosophy distills this linkage into a familiar jurisprudential proposition of historical materialism: “One must be destitute of all historical knowledge not to know that it is the sovereigns who in all ages have been subject to economic conditions, but they have never dictated laws to them. Legislation, whether political or civil, never does more than proclaim, express in words, the will of economic relations.”³³

 

Marx’s long-term examination of the modern phenomenon of rights first appeared publicly in On the Jewish Question. Marx did indeed understand the creation of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen as the product of an authentically modern political way of life. But in order to provide a preliminary explanation to the aforementioned enigmatic facts, he went back even further in the long process of structural transformation of the feudal world into the modern world, so as to understand the split between the political state and the civil society, or the emergence of the modern abstract political life (the only historical premise on which one can speak of the political logic of the rule of law in the modern sense). Marx pointed out that the basic characteristic of the old society was its Feudalitat, i.e., the pluralistic fragmentation of power. In this feudal world, lordship, hierarchy, and guilds constituted feudal (rather than modern) forms of political life. These forms indicate that the “universal state power” was still hidden within civil society, and only manifested itself in the “special affairs” of small ruling groups, or, on the contrary, the civil society at this time was “directly” political, and private law and public law were in a mixed state. The life cycle of the feudal world could be very long. State power would not be truly universal until after the political revolution, which took place in 1789, when the National Assembly took over the Estates General to control and exercise national sovereignty in the name of the entire French nation (rather than any estate).

 

Based on a long-term examination, it can be seen that the French Revolution accomplished two historical tasks at the same time, and the social foundation of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was thus laid. (1) Civil society was broken down into “simple components,” i.e., individuals and the material and spiritual elements that constitute the content of their lives. That is to say, the old bonds of civil society were forcibly torn apart, and the members of civil society lost their traditional feudal identities and personal attachments, and were transformed into discrete, self-interested “homme,” which the modern world recognizes by the “droits de l’homme.” “Homme” is the equivalent of the French word “bourgeois” (citizen, bourgeois). Legal relations, represented by contractual relations, became the new normal of civil society relations. It can be argued that the kind of social process described as “atomization” during the great political debates of the 1820s in France (which constitutes one of the core problematics of Tocqueville’s thesis cited by Marx) intensified. For example, in his classic speech in early 1822, Royer-Collard stated: “After the revolution, even natural associations such as the commune were dissolved, and all that remained was the individual man. This is an unprecedented sight. Before, it was only in the writings of philosophers that one has ever seen a state disintegrate to such an extent that only its ultimate members remain. Centralization is a consequence that follows the atomization of society, and there is no need to seek for its source separately.” ³⁴ (2) If the old civil society suffered from disintegration and fission, the political state was able to break out of hiding and gain a new lease of life through revolution as a result of the convergence of the political spirit that had been dispersed in the culde-sacs of feudal society. At this point, the political activity took on a modern significance and was truly manifested in the realm of universal “national affairs.” Marx summarized the two-fold achievement of the political revolution, exemplified by the French Revolution, as follows: “The establishment of the political state and the breakdown of civil society into independent individuals, whose relations are expressed through the legal system, just as the relations of men in the hierarchical system and in the guild system are expressed through privileges, are realized through the same act.”³⁵ Civil society in the modern world, the one that did not really surface and get its name until the 18th century, corresponds to the natural, directly deterministic, sensual realm, whose subject is the natural man (der natürliche Mensch) with his “droits de l’homme” (as natural rights), which Marx saw as the modern form of the “realistic person” (der wirkliche Mensch); while the political state in the modern world corresponds to the self-conscious, universal, abstract realm, whose subject is the “citoyen,” i.e., the political man (der politische Mensch), who is but “an individual in a metaphorical and moral sense” (allegorische, moralische Person), and whom Marx regarded as the modern form of the “real person” (der wahre Mensch). The political revolution, which had made two-fold achievements, saw civil society and the rights of man as a prerequisite and a natural foundation for which no further argumentation was needed.³⁶ This is the riddle of the modern phenomenon of rights, which Marx sought to solve with the help of a long-term examination, and which really reveals the order and the unity of opposites of the two categories of rights, “droits de '’homme” and “droits du citoyen.”

 

 

What we want to ask now is not so much about the dualistic social structure Marx recounts and its emergence, but how he was able to realize the need to grasp the depth of the modern phenomenon of rights from a long-term perspective while avoiding the need to understand things only in a purely ideological and cultural context. We have seen, for example, that he did not follow the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen back to the slightly crude conception of rights by the likes of Diderot and Voltaire. It is not that Marx did not have this kind of material at hand, but that such a tracing would amount to interpreting the relations of law in terms of the so-called “general development of the human spirit.” without touching on the more fundamental level of the relations of material life, which is Bruno Powell’s main shortcoming in discussing matters of Jewish rights. According to Fernand Braudel, it is true that. “The secret of Marx’s genius and the durability of his influence lies in the fact that he was the first to construct a true model of society based on a long historical period.”³⁷ But Marx’s “first” was by no means an unsolicited initiative, but rather a conscientious abandonment of the fruits of previous thought. Many passages in the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right show that he was aware of the popular historical writings of his time (e.g., Schlosser’s History of the 18^th and 19^th Centuries before the Overthrow of the French Empire) and its derivations.³⁸ The central question that urgently needs to be explored by us here is the ideological source of Marx’s materialist approach to long-term examination of rights. That source does not seem to lie in the classical German philosophy, Romanticism, and the historical school of law with which he was familiar, nor even in the Historiography of Germany pioneered by Ranke (whose work is excerpted in the Kreuznach Notes) — as it was pointed out in Die Deutsche Ideologie, when compared to the world’s most advanced French historical codification in particular, it is arguably that Germany has yet to produce a true historian.³⁹

 

 

The primary significance of these notes is that they helped Marx to see the intricate interrelationships between the political state and civil society (and their legal relations) in the long history of Europe from the Middle Ages to the modern era, especially the various influences of political history on the history of the social-economic-legal history, the different historical natures of the social relations and the forms of ownership in each particular space and time, and the rise of urban communes, which harbored the power of the emerging bourgeoisie, in the feudal society, thus illuminating a journey of Marx that should not be underestimated toward the materialist conception of history by virtue of the many historical facts that converge in the three major problematic domains of the law of the state, ownership, and hierarchical-class relations.⁴⁰ Without these theoretical preparations, it would be difficult to envision On the Jewish Question as being able to offer a long-term examination of rights with such high skill and great ease. A closer look at the Kreuznach Notes also reveals that just as Marx regarded the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen as the quintessence of the modern phenomenon of rights, he likewise regarded French civilization as the main line of problematic consciousness in the Notes: France provided a typical case of feudalism, monarchical absolutism, and the bourgeois political revolution, and the medieval period in France epitomizes the heyday of the hierarchical system. The transition from hierarchical representation under a system of aristocratic privileges to a modern representative system was the institutional manifestation of the process of separation of the political state and civil society, and the history of the

French Revolution is an example of the history of the birth of the modern state. An examination of the order of the Kreuznach Notes corroborates the above judgment: Almost all of the parts of the set of notes that first arose are closely related to France. Moreover, of all the 24 works included in the set of notes, 11 are directly related to France, especially to the ins and outs of the French Revolution, which paved the way for Marx’s profound understanding of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. ⁴¹

 

Given the overall orientation of the Kreuznach Notes, and given the fact that the typical example analyzed in this paper is the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, it is reasonable to further restrict our attention to the 11 aforementioned works on France. In terms of the subject matter here, the most important among them are Georg Henrich’s History of France and Carl Schmitt’s History of France. The “Henrich Notes” are of a more particular nature, representing the apprenticeship of Marx’s excerpting work during this period, and are filled with finer, almost verbatim, chronological excerpts. If these notes show Marx’s interest in and patience with the basic facts of the history of France, the “Schmitt Notes” are more indicative of historical and methodological perspectives, i.e., a distinctive angle of selection and way of treatment of the historical materials, it has voluminous excerpts, is full of jumps, and is clearly focused on the feoff system as well as on the urban communes: The former constituted the basis of the aristocracy and the form of feudal political life, and the latter was closely related the development of the middle classes (mittelstand) and the prosperity of industry and commerce. Apparently interested in the source of the distinctiveness of Schmitt’s views, Marx took a large-scale excerpt from a total of 80 bibliographical references to Schmitt’s work, which almost took up half of the “Schmitt’s Notes”! Going through the entire set of Kreuznach Notes, it is the first time that such an extraordinary occurrence is found. Almost all of Schmitt’s 80 references are historical materials over a long period, and two types of works are more conspicuous: A collection of normative documents from various periods, and masterpieces of Restoration-era French historical codifiers, such as Guizot’s Essays and Lectures on the History of France and Histoire De La Civilisation En France, and Thierry’s Lettres Sur L’histoire De France and A Short History of the Norman Conquest of England. ⁴² Given that Marx deliberately skipped over much of the discussion of legal norms in his excerpts and given that he was well aware that established historical facts get a whole new soul only when the research approaches change, the second category of literature, with its strong non-state-centered orientation, was clearly more appealing to him. Even one of his excerpts of Schmitt was simply copied from the recently published Histoire De La Civilisation En France and Lettres Sur L’histoire De France. ⁴³ In this way, the thinness of Marx’s excerpts from Schmitt’s account may be due to his reluctance to spend time on the German “duplicate” and his desire to see its French “original” directly as soon as possible. On the basis of Marx’s treatment of the Wachsmuth references, it is reasonable to assume that Marx must have taken advantage of the great accessibility of French-language sources in the French-speaking cities of Paris and Brussels (just as he took advantage of the opportunity to study the history of the French Revolution there) to acquire, by all means, the ideas of Guizot and Thierry, which would have helped him to re-appreciate the significance of the modern phenomenon of rights.

 

 

There are several reasons which prompt us to begin with Guizot. (1) A leader of French Restoration-era historians and renowned for his work on the history of European civilization and the history of French civilization, Guizot’s name was well known in Marx’s youth and especially in French cultural and geographical circles. (2) One of Guizot’s masterpieces, the five-volume edition of Histoire De La Civilisation En France, 1829, Paris, belonged to Marx’s book collection during the Paris period (it seems that he had the intention to purchase the book after the “Schmitt Notes”), and was numbered 53 according to Marx’s Notizbuch aus den Jahren 1844–1847, and was later cited in Die Deutsche Ideologie. ⁴⁴ (3) The methodological inspiration for the “Non-political View of Democracy” in Tocqueville’s De la démocratie en Amérique, cited in On the Jewish Question, comes directly from Guizot’s historiography.⁴⁵ (4) The text of the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), recalling the course of research during the Paris-Brussels period, hints at Marx’s special respect for Guizot.⁴⁶ (5) Engels once said that the historical codification of the Frenchman Guizot (as well as Thierry and Mignet) was an essential precursor to Marx’s materialist conception of history.⁴⁷ Guizot reminded people not to overestimate the connection between law and the conscious activity of the legislators, or simply reduce law to a corresponding political order or governmental action. In this respect, Guizot research has a distinctly non-political orientation.⁴⁸ Guizot, who carried forward the Saint-Simonian method of class analysis, had already outlined a new view of history in his Essays and Lectures on the History of France (1822): “Most authors wish to study the political system so as to understand the condition of a society, the degree of its civilization, or the type of its civilization; it is better, however, to study the society so as to understand its political system... To understand the political system, one must first understand the different social classes and their interrelationships; and to understand the different social classes, one must understand the nature and relationship of property rights.” ⁴⁹ Take, for example, the Histoire De La Civilisation En Europe (1828), with the nature of a general outline, the study of the history of civilizations can take two different approaches depending on the focus, and Guizot begins by examining aspects of social development. Guizot distinguishes between two basic types of civilization, those based on singularity (antiquity) and those based on diversity (i.e., the 15 centuries examined in the book), the latter stemming from the intertwining and interlocking of diverse elements: Such a social pattern, combined with the love of individual independence introduced to Europe by the barbarians and unknown in almost all ancient civilizations, as distinct from political or civil liberties, gradually gave birth to the spectacular liberty of later times, and which was the embryo of that liberty proclaimed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. “Individual liberty” and “public power” as the dual elements of political lawfulness constitute the framework used by Guizot to analyze modern civilization in Europe. Marx transferred it to the analysis of the history of the creation of the modern state by linking it directly to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and, following a hint in Die Deutsche Ideologie, the framework is compatible with the dualism of civil society and political state.⁵⁰

 

Judging from the discourse on the socio-historical prerequisites of political revolutions in On the Jewish Problem, the fourth lecture of Histoire De La Civilisation En Europe, with the feudal system as its subject, was bound to attract Marx’s attention. It can be said that Guizot eloquently recounts the effects of all relationships between law and power after they have taken a feudal form. He argues that previous studies on the subject have generally overlooked “the material conditions of society” and “the material changes introduced into the model of human existence by new facts, revolutions, and new social states.” Moreover, in order to achieve a more refined analysis, he proposes beginning with the simplest, most primitive, and most fundamental elements of feudal society, namely, the occupants of the fiefs and their circle of associates, which are “the molecules of feudalism” and “the typical and detailed image of the entire feudal society,” just as On the Jewish Question likewise begins with homme and citoyen as the basic elements to analyze the relationship between law and power in the modern age. This, in turn, makes us realize that Lecture 7 of Histoire De La Civilisation En Europe is crucial for Marx, for it shows the extent to which Europe underwent changes in social structure and order of identity over the course of seven centuries by envisioning that a 12^th century citizen of a self-governing town suddenly travels to the scene of the French Revolution, and by envisioning how he would have been astonished at (let us say) Emmanuel Sieyès’s book, What is the Third Estate? And its reference to the “French nation.” In Lecture 7, the method of class analysis was conveniently applied to discover that the formation of the bourgeoisie was the inevitable result of the citizens’ access to local suffrage, and that this class was formed gradually, with a composition that was not uniform in different ages; and that the struggles between the various social classes have pervaded the modern history, thus creating the space for the birth of modern Europe, and constituting a strong momentum for the development of European civilization, and so on.⁵¹ The principle of Guizot’s long-term periodization, which is not limited to major political and historical events, to the reigns of great men or heroes, or to the development of religion, but to the state of relations between the elements of European social life, is undoubtedly a significant methodological advance. These findings taught Marx to grasp, through the long course of time and in a wide geographical space, in the vast history of the development of civil society and class relations, the elements of European civilization that converged and erupted in the French Revolution and its Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen at the end of the 18^th century, and to develop a new and reliable view of history based on precise historical facts.

 

 

Next, we turn to Thierry, whom Marx called “the Father of the Class Struggle.” He was Saint-Simon’s first secretary and not only demonstrated to Marx the methods of class analysis in historical research, but was also an essential source of Saint-Simon’s industrial thought, which Marx inherited. Marx confessed that it was not to his credit that he had identified the existence of class phenomena and class struggle in modern society, for long before him, a group of historians, headed by Thierry, had made a fascinating account of the history of class in the past.⁵² In his Lettres Sur L’histoire De France, Thierry argues that there is no history of France in the true sense of the word because previous historical writings have focused only on a few privileged people or the ruling class of the court, preferring to elaborate pompous court ceremonies rather than the common people and their customs, etc. He reminds the reader to dispense with some of the chronic problems in the study of French history, such as the mistaken belief that there are rights that have fallen from the heavens that were not won by the bloodshed of our forefathers, or to measure and imagine the lives and ideas of the ancients by today’s yardstick. Finally, Thierry proposes to bridge the 12^th century communal revolution (whose members came to be known as “the third

estate”) and the 18^th century Revolution in French social history, and predicts the inexorable struggle and rise of the forces of civil society.⁵³ A History of the Norman Conquest of England states more specifically that he is prepared to use the Norman Conquest of England as a model, given that wars of aggression (one of the material life relations) were a staple of European history for a long time, directly shaping a variety of important political and social matters in later times. In this process, Thierry similarly emphasized the need for researchers to look beyond the bounds of their own time and similarly emphasized the importance of not falsely attributing major events to the ambitions of individual figures or to other contingencies, i.e., of paying attention to the general patterns that manifest themselves over time.⁵⁴

 

At the time of its publication, Thierry’s Recits Des Temps Mérovingiens was accompanied by a very long introduction titled Reflections on the History of France, which is a masterpiece of Thierry’s historiographical thought, and which contains four key points that seem to me to be particularly methodologically inspiring for the Young Marx. (1) A focus on the new school of historiography that emerged in France in the

1820s and 1830s. Of this group, Thierry pays particular attention to Guizot’s Essays and Lectures on the History of France, Histoire De La Civilisation En Europe, and Histoire De La Civilisation En France, which together constitute “the strongest foundation and the most faithful reflection of the modern historical science.” In contrast, the German idealistic conception of history prefers to see the imprint of ideas in every fact, to see the eternal spiritual struggle in the course of human events, and historiography has thus fallen from analysis and careful observation to a more or less hasty synthesis. Once history is “conceptualized” and reduced to “abstractions and formulas,” it loses its vitality. (2) A focus on the third estate and the development of civil society. The new school of historiography paid more attention to the Roman (rather than the Germanic) factors in the history of France, an academic revolution that reflected the great achievements of the “social revolution” in France at the end of the 18^th century. The Roman factors pointed to a long bourgeois tradition, which meant that the new historiography paid more attention to the third estate as the inheritors of the Gallo-Roman legacy. The most dramatic part of the history of the birth of the third estate was the history of communes and towns, which were closely related to “civil society”

and “civil life,” and which constituted the deepest roots of the modern French social order. (3) A clear understanding of the historical origins of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The legal documents created by the Constitutional Assembly, although purely philosophical on the surface, conceal certain historical elements, namely, the restoration of the old civil order left behind by Rome under the conditions of modern life in France, and they are “the most solid part” of those legal documents. Thierry concluded by solemnly declaring: “The Revolution of 1789 did not create anything; the social order we have today was not created out of thin air by the ideas of the Constitutional Assembly; the experience of centuries, the memory of history, and the decentralized local traditions of liberty, recognized by the philosophical conception of the rights of man (de l’idée philosophique des droits humains), has merged into the great symbol of our constitutional creed, whose letter is mutable but whose spirit lives on.⁵⁵

 

 

Let us now turn to Saint-Simon, who was already familiar to Marx in his early days and although a key figure often overlooked in historical methodology. In fact, the aforementioned historical codification of Guizot and Thierry inherited and developed Saint-Simon’s doctrine in its basic ideas. By clarifying Saint-Simeon’s view of history, we can further understand the roots of Marx’s long-term examination approach. In contrast to his predecessor’s contempt for the Middle Ages, Saint-Simon’s efforts to identify the significance of medieval civilization for modern institutions and concepts (and even hope to find in it some clues to the cure for the ills of modern society), pointed the way for Guizot and Thierry, and was partly reflected in Marx’s writings since the Kreuznach period. Dissatisfied with history as a mere accumulation of facts, Saint-Simon demanded to grasp the theoretical connections and a certain order in it. This points to the idea of “regularity,” which is at the center of Saint-Simon’s ideological system. He believed that there was no properly compiled history of Europe because the method of periodization so far had always been based on “secondary or localized categories of events,” which had paid attention only to political, religious, or military facts, and had divided up time in a highly disproportionate manner.⁵⁶

 

Saint-Simon’s writings during the French Restoration period, while retaining a long-term perspective, became more and more concerned with the industrial base and the class factor in modern history, and thus offered a series of more penetrating insights of a historical materialist nature. He saw that a long-term examination of the process of “civilization” was conducive to distinguishing between the “fading remnants of the past” and the “growing seeds of the future.” If the period of observation was too short, it was easy to make a misjudgment (which was regarded as a common fault of politicians). Therefore, he considered that the Middle Ages, as the formative period of modern society, the most appropriate starting point for observation. The fundamental changes in the social situation, compatible with the old system, constituted the real cause of the French Revolution. The performance of the Revolution itself was only the natural conclusion of centuries of decline. The industrial class (i.e., the people), which was the “actual center and source of civilization,” unfortunately, ceded the leadership of the Revolution to the group of jurists as the “middle class,” whose metaphysical theories of human rights, though capable of awakening the desire for social improvement, were divorced from the experience and interests of the ndustrial class. We must not be too eager to base our rights on excessively narrow, short-term judgments or we risk losing some of them. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is merely an act of official promulgation, and is not capable of addressing the issue of liberty. Liberty is based on industry, and its full establishment depends on industry dominance. According to the “status quo of civilization,” it can be decided that “the most important issue” to be addressed is how to rationalize ownership.Saint-Simeon condensed his claims as: “All by industry, and all for industry.”⁵⁷ Hence, with a wide-ranging brushstroke, Saint-Simon reinterprets the background and essentials of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

 

It is worth noting that the aforementioned scattered arguments found their collective expression in Saint-Simon’s Questions and Answers for Industrialists, also cited in Marx’s Paris Manuscripts. It states that before the Revolution, the French nation was divided into the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the industrial class (Saint-Simon considered the “bourgeoisie” and the “industrial class” to be antithetical!), and that the industrial class was placed at the bottom by the social organization, but it would eventually take the first place. The industrial system is the only system that can be adapted to the status quo of civilization. The natural course of civilization is independent of all political and legal initiatives, the state of civilization defines the nature and basic form of social organization, and the optimum political system is the one best adapted to the state of civilization at the time. It would be absurd to look at the political-legal order in isolation from the civilizational factor, since the political-legal order is merely an expression of the “civil order.” The shallowness of the view of history so far has been that, intoxicated by coincidental events and appealing results, and mistakenly believing that the legislators have unlimited creative power over civilization, one has seen only the human factors in the great events, rather than “the things that act upon man with irresistible force (les choses qui les poussent avec une force irresistible). One should try to identify, through the long-term examination, the regularity of social development in the interplay of colorful phenomena. In this way, “the rule of things replaces the rule of men” (le gouvemement des choses remplace celui des hommes).⁵⁸ It is not difficult to see that this research approach of Saint-Simon in the later years, which focuses on industry from a civilizational perspective, opened the way for later generations of historical thought, including Marx’s materialist conception of history.

 

 

General Secretary Xi Jinping once pointed out that “history research is the foundation of all social sciences.”⁵⁹ In Marx’s view, the labors of the aforementioned thinkers might be criticized, but they constituted, after all, “an initial attempt to offer a materialist basis for the historical codification.” They took the “secular foundations” of history seriously, directing attention to the history of civil society, the history of industry, and the history of commerce, rather than mistakenly believing that it was only the political, theological, or literary aura that made history what it was, as was the case in the prevalent German historical writings of the time. More importantly, the aforementioned intellectual resources helped Marx to clarify the “peculiar illusions of the jurists and statesmen” who were the creators of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, especially the “juridical illusions” and their Germanic play-ups, which were manifested, inter alia, in the history of politics and of civil society ideologically dissolved into the history of the ruling of law one after another.⁶⁰ It was mainly through the aforementioned historical research with a materialist tone that Marx was able to acquire the principles of the law of historical materialism during the Kreuznach-Paris-Brussels period, and to further realize, beyond the prevailing short-term perspective, that the relations based on modern rights, which were formally proclaimed in such normative documents as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, were not simply the result of the continuous unfolding of liberty, equality, or other similar ideas in the minds of the intellectual elite, but were in fact rooted in the relations of material life. If political economy provides the “anatomy of civil society,” it can be said that the achievements of historical research by modern French thinkers give the “natural history of civil society.” Of course, the core of this kind of natural history is no longer a Linnaean system of fine typology, but a grandeur of Buffonian style, and the corresponding view of history is committed to displaying a long-term, material conditions-focused, spectacular macroscopic mobility, which is an essential step in the study of the rights of historical materialism that inherits the past and usher in the future. Balzac, who was highly regarded by Marx and who demonstrated a deep understanding of the “realistic relations” through La Comedie Humaine, was an excellent demonstrator of the natural history of civil society in its literary form. He demanded that the novel become an authentic “history of customs,” setting up for the reader an imposing “mirror of the earthly world” (speculum mundi).⁶¹ In this respect, Marx’s critique of the discourse of modern rights is actually something similar.

 

 

 

60. Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, The Complete Works of Marx and Engels, vol. 3 (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 2nd edition, 2002), 32, 379, 411, 413 and 421.

 

61. Jin Zhiping, Selected Works of Balzac (Jinan: Shandong Literature and Art Publishing House, 1998), 30 and 32.

 

(Translated by ZHANG Lianying)