Franz Mehring > Quotes

“Hegel did not deceive himself about the revolutionary character of his dialectic, and was even afraid that his Philosophy of Right would be banned. Nor was the Prussian state entirely easy in its mind for all its idealization. Proudly leaning on its police truncheon, it did not want to have its reality justified merely by its reason. Even the dull-witted King saw the serpent lurking beneath the rose: when a distant rumor of his state philosopher's teachings reached him he asked suspiciously: but what if I don't dot the I's or cross the T's? The Prussian bureaucracy meanwhile was grateful for the laurel wreath that had been so generously plaited for it, especially since the strict Hegelians clarified their master's obscure words for the understanding of the common subjects, and one of them wrote a history of Prussian law and the Prussian state, where the Prussian state was proved to be a gigantic harp strung in God's garden to lead the universal anthem. Despite its sinister secrets Hegel's philosophy was declared to be the Prussian state philosophy, surely one of the wittiest ironies of world history. Hegel had brought together the rich culture of German Idealism in one mighty system, he had led all the springs and streams of our classical age into one bed, where they now froze in the icy air of reaction. but the rash fools who imagined they were safely hidden behind this mass of ice, who presumptuously rejoiced who bold attackers fell from its steep and slippery slopes, little suspected that with the storms of spring the frozen waters would melt and engulf them.

Hegel himself experienced the first breath of these storms. He rejected the July revolution of 1830, he railed at the first draft of the English Reform Bill as a stab in the 'noble vitals' of the British Constitution. Thereupon his audience left him in hordes and turned to his pupil Eduard Gans, who lectured on his master's Philosophy of Right but emphasized its revolutionary side and polemicized sharply against the Historical School of Law. At the time it was said in Berlin that the great thinker died from this painful experience, and not of the cholera.”
― Franz Mehring, Absolutism and Revolution in Germany, 1525-1848

“So humanity is not the helpless plaything of a dead mechanism, but its development consists precisely in the growing power of the human mind over the dead mechanism of nature. But - and this is only said by historical materialism - the human spirit develops from, with and out of the material mode of production. The human mind is not the father of the mode of production, but the mode of production is the mother of the human mind.”
― Franz Mehring, On historical materialism

“As the biggest property owners of the middle ages the Church underwent the same process as the rest of the landed proprietors. In order to use agricultural production as a source of money they ruined the peasant class, seized their common woods and meadows for themselves, and either drove the peasants from the land or squeezed them in the most pitiless manner. Life was no longer easy under the crozier. The growing lust for property led the Church to limit their alms to the poor. Their income in kind, the surplus of which they had earlier gladly given away as they could not consume it themselves, had now become saleable commodities, and the greed for profits that this aroused seized the Church too.

If this made the Church more and more hated by the peasant class, it also failed to win the friendship of the rising bourgeoisie. However much it neglected the care of the poor, it could not give it up entirely without losing its last hold on the masses. To a certain extent it still formed a line of defense against the impoverishment of the masses, whose proletarianization could not be carried through quickly enough, as far as capital was concerned. The propertyless were still not delivered bound hand and foot to capitalist exploitation as long as they received alms, however miserable, from the Church. Moreover the religious holidays were a thorn in the flesh of the burgeoning towns. The more numerous they grew, the more they contradicted the capitalist wisdom according to which the worker does not work to live, but rather lives to work.”
― Franz Mehring, Absolutism and Revolution in Germany, 1525-1848

“and so mankind only posed for itself such tasks as it could solve. Looked at more closely, as Marx explains, it will be found that the task only arises where the material conditions for its solution are already in existence, or at least in the process of becoming.”
― Franz Mehring, On historical materialism

“Luther's theses, too, were drafted in Latin, and written in the peculiar mysterious style of scholastic theology, which was absolutely incomprehensible to the masses.”
― Franz Mehring, Die Lessing-Legende

“Like all ideology, aesthetic and literary criticism is in the last analysis determined by the economic structure of society.”
― Franz Mehring, Die Lessing-Legende

“the foremost philosopher of the German petty bourgeoisie also drew this conclusion. Schopenhauer rejected the whole of the ‘charlatan’ Hegel; above all he rejected Hegel’s philosophy of history. He did not see any progressive process of development in the history of humanity; he only saw in it a history of individuals; the German petty-bourgeois, whose prophet he was, is the same person he was from the very beginning and will be in the future. Schopenhauer’s philosophy reached its highest point in the ‘insight’ that ‘at all times, the same was, is and will be the same.’ He writes:

‘History shows on all sides, only the same thing, except in different forms: the chapters of the history of humanity are basically only different in name and the dates; the really essential content is the same everywhere ... The material of history is the individual in his solitude and fortuitousness, what always is, and then is not, forevermore, the fleeting intertwining like clouds in the wind of moving humanity, which so often can be transformed completely, through the slightest chance.’

So closely comes Schopenhauer’s philosophical idealism to mechanical materialism in its conception of history. In fact, they are opposite poles of the same narrow outlook. And when Schopenhauer said grimly of the materialism of the natural sciences:

‘These gentlemen of the crucible must be taught that simple chemistry makes one capable of being a chemist but not a philosopher’

so he should be taught that simple philosophizing makes one capable of sneaking about, but not of historical investigation. However Schopenhauer was consistent in his own fashion, and as soon as he had thrown away Hegel’s dialectical method, then he had to throw away Hegel’s historical constructions with it.”
― Franz Mehring, On historical materialism

“This glorious ‘liberty of the press’ was nothing but an old and yet eternally new diplomatic trick, making it possible to say all sorts of unpleasant things to foreign powers and yet disclaim responsibility.”
― Franz Mehring, Die Lessing-Legende

“Una grande epoca storica non muore mai tanto rapidamente quanto i suoi tendono a sperare e forse anche devono sperare per poterla colpire con il dovuto rigore.”
― Franz Mehring

“the national point of view is always determined by the social interests of the classes representing it”
― Franz Mehring, Die Lessing-Legende

“Marx correctly says that every history of religion that sees it independently from its material base is uncritical”
― Franz Mehring, On historical materialism

“throughout the whole of the Middle Ages Islamic culture ranked far above Christian culture. Of the three great areas of culture which inherited the Roman-Hellenic culture, the Roman-German, the Greek-Slav, and the Egyptian-Syrian, Arab culture, the latter took over the whole of the knowledge of antiquity in the fields of mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, mechanics and medicine; it was not Rome and not Constantinople but Alexandria which was the centre of science in the Roman Empire. Now the religious expression of the Germanic-Roman sphere of culture was the Roman church, and that of the Greek-Slav sphere was the Greek Church, but that of the Arab Egyptian-Syrian sphere was Islam.”
― Franz Mehring, On historical materialism

“No ring is the true one, the true ring possibly was lost, but he who believes his ring to be the true one, should reveal its power”
― Franz Mehring, Die Lessing-Legende

“It is certainly not the task of the history researcher to use moral standards. He should tell us how things were on the basis of an objective scientific investigation. We do not demand to know what he thinks about them according to his subjective moral outlook. ‘Moral standards’ are caught up, involved in a continuous transformation, and for the living generation to impose on former generations its changing standards of today, is like measuring the geological strata against the flying sand of the dunes. Schlosser, Gervinus and Ranke, and Janssen – each of them has a different moral standard, each has his own class morals, and even more faithfully than the times they depict, they reflect in their works the classes they speak for.”
― Franz Mehring, On historical materialism

“there are two kinds of sovereigns: those that see all with their own eyes, and govern their states themselves, and those that rely on the honesty of their ministers and are ruled by whoever gets power over their minds.”
― Franz Mehring, Die Lessing-Legende

“Of the intellectual leaders of the Reformation, Luther. the narrowest mind among them, survived, while the more important intellects, Hutten, Münzer, Wendel Hipler perished. Behind Luther stood the power which was economically the most important - the princes.”
― Franz Mehring, Die Lessing-Legende

“The great advance in mathematics and the natural sciences which mark the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the result of an international traffic which conquered more and more the whole earth.”
― Franz Mehring, Die Lessing-Legende

“Nothing is more unfounded than to see a “world historical action” in Luther’s theses against indulgences and to date the beginning of the Reformation from them. The Anti-Roman movement had been in existence for decades in all classes of the German nation, and the fight against the abuses of the church had already found literary expression, for instance in the writings of the humanists. They were much more scathing than the rather tame theses of Luther. who did not even blame the indulgences themselves, but only their “abuses.”
― Franz Mehring, Die Lessing-Legende