Friends, Radical and Estranged: Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx

Abstract

Abstract This essay offers a careful and critical commentary on the deep, complex and conflictual relation between Karl Marx and Bruno Bauer – at personal, professional and political levels. I do so with a particular interest in religion, since Bauer was one of the towering biblical scholars in the Germany of his time (mid-nineteenth century). Bauer was Marx’s one-time teacher, friend and mentor who taught him a course on the book of Isaiah at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin in 1839. Not many years later, Bauer becomes a target for Marx’s polemic in The Holy Family and The German Ideology, as well as On the Jewish Question. Why the intense polemic? I argue that the problem with Bauer – for Marx – was that he developed a reasonably radical political position – his later works dealt extensively with politics – through his work as a biblical critic. Marx sought to close this path off entirely, although he does admit in a telling phrase that Bauer follows the ‘detour of theology’. Yet, despite all the polemic, Bauer and Marx kept in touch, the former visiting Marx in London many years later and the latter keeping up a lively interest in Bauer’s movements and writings.