WorkKarl Marx

The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism

The first Marx–Engels book: a mocking demolition of the Young Hegelians who thought ideas, not people, made history — nine-tenths of it written by Marx alone.

by Karl Marx463 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Die heilige Familie oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik
First published: 1845(aged 27)
Original language: German

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Overview

Marx and Engels had spent ten days together in Paris in the late summer of 1844 and found they agreed about almost everything; The Holy Family is the first thing they published as a pair. It is wildly lopsided — Engels wrote some sixteen pages before leaving town, and Marx, left to it, swelled the rest into a book. The target was their own recent circle. Bruno Bauer and his brothers, editing a Berlin review, had refined Young Hegelianism into a doctrine they called Critical Criticism: history is made by enlightened Spirit and critical self-consciousness, while the uncomprehending "Mass" merely lags behind. Marx and Engels set out to bury that idea under three hundred pages of ridicule and argument, insisting that history in itself does nothing and possesses nothing — that only real people, pursuing material interests, ever act. The mocking title, casting the Bauers as a sanctimonious holy family, came from the publisher rather than the authors. The book appeared in Frankfurt in February 1845 and made little noise. Its interest now is almost entirely retrospective: read today, it catches Marx mid-stride between the philosophy he was raised in and the materialism he was moving toward, still leaning on Feuerbach, whom he would drop within the year in the unpublished German Ideology. Marx thought little of it afterward. The partnership it opened lasted until his death.

Key concepts

What was 'Critical Criticism'?

The doctrine Marx and Engels set out to demolish. Bruno Bauer and his circle, editing a Berlin review, had refined Young Hegelianism into the idea that history is made by enlightened Spirit and critical self-consciousness, while the uncomprehending 'Mass' of ordinary people merely lags behind. The book's whole polemic is aimed at burying this notion under ridicule and argument.

Who were the 'Young Hegelians'?

The radical followers of Hegel, Bauer, Feuerbach and Marx himself among them, who turned Hegel's philosophy against religion and the Prussian state in the 1840s. The Holy Family is Marx breaking with the wing of this movement led by the Bauers. It catches him mid-stride, still leaning on Feuerbach while moving toward the materialism he would soon state on his own.

What is Marx's 'fruit' example about?

It is his famous mockery of speculative philosophy. An idealist, Marx says, notices that apples, pears and almonds share something, calls it 'the Fruit,' and then declares this abstraction the real essence from which actual fruits spring. That inverts things: the abstraction is made the creator of the concrete. Marx uses it to expose how the Bauers make 'Spirit' the author of history.

Who is 'the Mass' in the Bauers' scheme?

The uncomprehending majority of ordinary people, whom Critical Criticism casts as passive matter trailing behind the enlightened critics who supposedly drive history. Marx and Engels reverse the picture: history in itself does nothing and possesses nothing; only real people, pursuing material interests, ever act. Far from lagging, the mass of living human beings is the sole thing that moves events at all.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

History Makes Nothing; People Do

Is history driven by enlightened Spirit and critical self-consciousness, with the unthinking masses trailing behind, or does nothing happen except through real people pursuing material interests? The quarrel decides whether ideas or life come first.

Marx and Engels bury Bruno Bauer's Critical Criticism under three hundred pages of ridicule and argument. Against the Bauers' doctrine that history is the work of Spirit while the uncomprehending Mass merely lags, they insist history in itself does nothing and possesses nothing — only living people, driven by material need, ever act. Written while Marx still leaned on Feuerbach, it catches him mid-stride from idealism toward the materialism he would state fully within the year, and opened the partnership that lasted until his death.

critique
materialism
ideology
idealism
speculative philosophy
abstraction
methodology
subjectivity
agency
intellectual history
social critique
emancipation
religion

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Within this work

passages held: 463
distinct concepts: 616
by passages held, corpus-wide: #76

What this book thinks together

Every arc around the wheel is one concept in this book. A ribbon joins two the text reaches for together, and its width is how many of its passages hold both. Strongest: critique with methodology.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 16 pairings. 125 shared passages in all. 84 weaker pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
critique	methodology	17
abstraction	critique	16
critique	ideology	13
critique	theology	11
critique	subjectivity	10
abstraction	methodology	9
critique	epistemology	9
critique	materialism	8
materialism	methodology	7
epistemology	methodology	6
abstraction	theology	4
ideology	theology	4
abstraction	epistemology	3
epistemology	materialism	3
ideology	methodology	3
abstraction	materialism	2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1843 Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts)
His earliest sustained work, written at twenty-five before he had read a page of political economy: a reckoning with the German idealism he had been raised inside. Its published introduction announced the proletariat; the manuscript behind it waited eighty years for a reader.
DE
1844 On the Jewish Question (Zur Judenfrage)
Written alongside the Hegel critique and published in the same short-lived Paris journal, this is Marx settling accounts with Bruno Bauer and the Young Hegelians. It marks his turn away from religion and the state toward the economic life he came to think lay underneath them.
DE
1845 The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism (Die heilige Familie oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik) you are here DE
1845 Theses on Feuerbach (Thesen über Feuerbach)
Eleven notebook jottings, not an argument built for readers but private markers Marx set down in 1845 and Engels rescued in 1888. They register the moment he broke with Feuerbach and put human practice at the centre of his thinking.
DE
1848 The Communist Manifesto (Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei)
Commissioned to a deadline as revolution gathered in 1848, and the most public thing Marx ever put his name to — the opposite pole from the manuscripts he left unfinished in drawers. It states in a few pages the view of history his longer works spent decades grounding.
DE
1849 Wage Labour and Capital (Lohnarbeit und Kapital)
An early, popular run at the economics Marx would spend the next twenty years perfecting. Engels reissued it in 1891 with the term "labour-power" set where Marx had written "labour" — repairing it with a concept that arrived only later.
DE
1852 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte)
Marx as historian and political analyst rather than economist or agitator: a close reading of a single French coup, written for a New York émigré paper in 1852. It handed later Marxism its theory of the state's independence from the classes beneath it.
DE
1858 Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie)
Written a decade before Capital and unknown for almost a century: the notebooks Marx filled to clarify his own thinking, rediscovered only after 1953 and central to the Marx revival that came with the New Left.
DE
1865 Value, Price and Profit (Lohn, Preis und Profit)
A pair of lectures rather than a book — Marx answering a fellow member at the General Council of the International in 1865, in English. His daughter Eleanor found the manuscript and published it in 1898, and it became the shortest way into the economics of Capital.
DE
1867 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Das Kapital)
The work of Marx's maturity and the one book of his economics he saw into print. Volume one appeared in 1867; Engels assembled volumes two and three from the unfinished manuscripts after Marx died, in 1885 and 1894.
DE

— or open another of their works