Selected Essays | Page 2

form, its
spiritualistic Point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its
solemn complement, its general basis of consolation and justification. It
is the fantastic realization of the human being, inasmuch as the human
being possesses no true reality. The struggle against religion is
therefore indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual
aroma is religion.
Religious misery is in one mouth the expression of real misery, and in
another is a protestation against real misery. Religion is the moan of the
oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, as it is the spirit
of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion, as the illusory happiness of the people, is the
demand for their real happiness. The demand to abandon the illusions
about their condition is a demand to abandon a condition which
requires illusions. The criticism of religion therefore contains
potentially the criticism of the Vale of Tears whose aureole is religion.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers which adorned the chain,
not that man should wear his fetters denuded of fanciful embellishment,
but that he should throw off the chain, and break the living flower.
The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he thinks, acts, shapes
his reality like the disillusioned man come to his senses, so that he
revolves around himself, and thus around his real sun. Religion is but
the illusory sun which revolves around man, so long as he does not
revolve around himself.
It is therefore the task of history, once the thither side of truth has
vanished, to establish the truth of the hither side.
The immediate task of philosophy, when enlisted in the service of
history, is to unmask human self-alienation in its unholy shape, now
that it has been unmasked in its holy shape. Thus the criticism of

heaven transforms itself into the criticism of earth, the criticism of
religion into the criticism of right, and the criticism of theology into the
criticism of politics.
The following essay--a contribution to this work--is in the first place
joined not to the original, but to a copy, to the German philosophy of
politics and of right, for no other reason than because it pertains to
Germany.
If one should desire to strike a point of contact with the German status
quo, albeit in the only appropriate way, which is negatively, the result
would ever remain an anachronism. Even the denial of our political
present is already a dust-covered fact in the historical lumber room of
modern nations. If I deny the powdered wig, I still have to deal with
unpowdered wigs. If I deny the German conditions of 1843, I stand,
according to French chronology, scarcely in the year 1789, let alone in
the focus of the present.
German history flatters itself that it has a movement which no people in
the historical heaven have either executed before or will execute after it.
We have in point of fact shared in the restoration epoch of modern
nations without participating in their revolutions.
We were restored, in the first place, because other nations dared to
make a revolution, and, in the second place, because other nations
suffered a counter revolution: in the first place, because our masters
were afraid, and, in the second place, because they regained their
courage.
Led by our shepherds, we suddenly found ourselves in the society of
freedom on the day of its interment.
As a school which legitimates the baseness of to-day by the baseness of
yesterday, a school which explains every cry of the serf against the
knout as rebellious, once the knout becomes a prescriptive, a derivative,
a historical knout, a school to which history only shows itself a
posteriori, like the God of Israel to his servant Moses, the historical
juridical school would have invented German history, were it not itself

an invention of German history.
On the other hand, good-humoured enthusiasts, Teutomaniacs by
upbringing and freethinkers by reflexion, seek for our history of
freedom beyond our history in the Teutonic primeval woods. But in
what respect is our freedom history distinguished from the freedom
history of the boar, if it is only to be found in the woods? Moreover, as
one shouts into the wood, so one's voice comes back in answer ("As the
question, so the answer"). Therefore peace to the Teutonic primeval
woods.
But war to German conditions, at all events! They lie below the level of
history, they are liable to all criticism, but they remain a subject for
criticism just as the criminal who is below the level of humanity
remains a subject for the executioner.
Grappling with them, criticism is no passion of the head, it is the head
of passion. It is no anatomical knife, it is a weapon. Its object is its
enemy,