Very few people even in the USSR, where the study of Marxism was virtually mandatory, have ever heard of Moses Hess, which is one of those little historical paradoxes that mean something only to those who have an interest in digging deeper than the curriculum requires. One thing to say about Hess is that without him and his initial influence on Friedrich Engels, the history of the so-called Scientific Communism might have been rather different.
Yes, before Karl Marx there was Moses Hess (1812-1875), a wealthy Jewish Socialist who introduced the young Friedrich Engels to his own, Hess’s, brand of socialism, which happened to closely resemble what was later to become Marxist philosophy: Hess’s most effective argument held that the logical consequence of Hegel’s philosophy and his dialectic was communism. He also predictably pointed to England as the land of the future socialist transformation, which resulted in Engels’s 1842-1844 trip there, followed by several more trips, and a final sojourn in England, until his death in 1895, in London. As for Moses Hess, although initially on friendly terms with both Engels and Marx, he broke up with them soon after the 1848 revolution to join Ferdinand Lassalle in Paris, and to become an early (pre-Herzl) champion of Zionism.
To sum it up, an ignorance of Moses Hess, which is quite prevalent, is a great disservice to the history of Judaism and Communism, and hopefully, this little prompter about will serve a useful purpose by putting him prominently back into the respectable (some will say disrespectable, but I disagree!) niche that is rightfully his.
Yes, before Karl Marx there was Moses Hess (1812-1875), a wealthy Jewish Socialist who introduced the young Friedrich Engels to his own, Hess’s, brand of socialism, which happened to closely resemble what was later to become Marxist philosophy: Hess’s most effective argument held that the logical consequence of Hegel’s philosophy and his dialectic was communism. He also predictably pointed to England as the land of the future socialist transformation, which resulted in Engels’s 1842-1844 trip there, followed by several more trips, and a final sojourn in England, until his death in 1895, in London. As for Moses Hess, although initially on friendly terms with both Engels and Marx, he broke up with them soon after the 1848 revolution to join Ferdinand Lassalle in Paris, and to become an early (pre-Herzl) champion of Zionism.
To sum it up, an ignorance of Moses Hess, which is quite prevalent, is a great disservice to the history of Judaism and Communism, and hopefully, this little prompter about will serve a useful purpose by putting him prominently back into the respectable (some will say disrespectable, but I disagree!) niche that is rightfully his.
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