Karl Marx, Bruno Bauer, and the ends of classical German theology

This paper aims to evaluate the political-theological significance of Karl Marx’s early collaborations with his academic mentor and personal friend Bruno Bauer. For much of the twentieth century, and in part due to Marx’s and Engels’s own later reflections on their intellectual development, the dominant interpretations of this socalled ‘Young Hegelian’ moment in Marx’s career tended to characterise it as excessively theoretical and essentially liberal in its orientation. However, more recent historical and contextual scholarship has revealed the limitations of this approach. Building on new political readings of Bauer’s work in particular, and the theoretical polemics of the Vormärz more generally, I explore the radical and revolutionary implications of Marx’s youthful writings. The salient shift in Marx’s position was less from theory and liberalism to practice and communism, I maintain, than it was from a politics of institutional struggle via the coded discourse of political theology to one of mass mobilisation and democratic action.