The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Critique. Against Bruno
Bauer and Co.—the first joint work of Karl Marx and Frederick
Engels. It was written from September to November 1844 and published
in February 1845 in Frankfurt-on-Main.
The "Holy Family" is a humorous nickname for the l^auer blathers
and their followers grouped around Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung
(General Literary Gazette). Attacking Bauer and the other Young
Hegelians (or Left Hegelians), Marx and Engels at the same time
criticized Hegel's own idealist philosophy.
Marx gave evidence of deep divergencies with the Young Hegelians
as early as summer 1842, when the club of the "Free" was
formed in Berlin. When, in October 1842, Marx became editor of
Rheinische Zeitung {Rhine Gazette), on the staff of which there
were several Berlin Young Hegelians, he opposed the publication
in the paper of insipid pretentious articles from the club, which had
lost touch with reality and was absorbed in abstract philosophical
disputes. During the two years following Marx's break with the
"Free," the theoretical and political differences betv/een Marx and
Engels on the one hand and the Young Hegelians on the other
^ became most profound and irreconcilable. This was due to the fact
/ that Marx and Engels had abandoned idealism for materialism
and revolutionary democratism for communism; it was also due
to the evolution that the Bauer brothers and their fellow-thinkers
went through during that time. Bauer and his group published
in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung disavowals of the "1842 radicalism"
and of its most conspicuous mouthpiece. Rheinische Zeitung- they
slithered into the vilest vulgar subjective idealism, to propaganda of
the "theory" according to which only selected individuals, vehicles
of the "spirit," of "pure criticism," are the makers of history, while
the mass, the people, serves as inert material, ballast, in the historical
process.