MOSES HESS AS MARX’S FEUERBACHIAN “SPECTER”

Abstract

This paper offers elements for a revealing genealogy of Marx’s mature conceptions, brought up by a reconsideration of the philosophical positions of his ally Moses Hess and of the close theorietical relations between them. It resorts first to a narrative mode to underscore the place of Hess in that development, bringing into closer association their ideas, also with Young Hegelianism and Feuerbachianism from which they start. The companionship of Hess presents itself, then, as the living shadow of a lingering philosophical past, as a specter still haunting Marx all along the dev elopment of “German Theory” into the materialist conception of history and the critique of political economy – from theology to anthropology to materialism, more of a continuum than a rupture. Involved in that process, we find their common concern for a “positive” critical position, through a transformation of the “philosophical fundament for socialism” offered by Feuerbach: man as species-being, bestowed with a universal, objective essence, now, with Marx, as the ensemble of social relations. Also on the background, the idea of Christianity as the distorted revelation of that real essence, and the religious realm as the illusory reflex of the earthly one.