ey have nothing to lose but their chains (Marx 500). More will be said about this exhortation; however, the present point is that it is as if philosophical trends of Romanticism and the Enlightenment served as midwife to the revolutionary fervor being witnessed this year on the Continent. Consider as well the concern voiced for the ideas of individual human liberty and national alignments, notably in the aftermath of the American and French Revolutions. But in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and in the post-Napoleonic establishment of the Concert System, characterized by a suspicion of liberal thought, censorship of the press and history, and a more general attempt to freeze the society as it was in 1815 for all time (Hayes, et al. 561-2), a revolutionary countermovement on the Continent is perhaps inevitable.
And indeed, Herr Marx's response to earlier lines of political and economic thought has been to negate and reinterpret them to conform to the solutions articulated in the Manifesto. The Manifesto, by the way, is not a document that has appeared on the political horizon from nowhere. Herr Marx has been a familiar of social analysis on the Continent for some years, and it is important to put the Manifesto in perspective with other "Marxist" political theory. In 1845, Messrs. Marx and Engels produced a work called The German Ideology, which included an extended critique of German idealism, particularly the work of G.W.F. Hegel, which never leaves the metaphysical realm (148). For Mr. Marx, Hegel's system of philosophy is extraordinarily well structured. But Hegelian thought is flawed because it never leaves the consciousness, never leaves the mind (149ff). And Marx takes the view that philosophical categories and systems that do not translate to the actual, material conditions of human experience are not worthy of the name. Marx's critique of Enlightenment theorists takes shape as advocacy of materialism, which is important t...