London, 14 July ’93

Dear Herr Mehring,

Only today do I get round to thanking you for the copy of the *Lessing-Legende* you so kindly sent me. I did not wish to send you a merely formal acknowledgement of receipt of the book, but also, at the same time, to tell you something about it – about its contents. Hence the delay.

I begin with the end – the appendix “On Historical Materialism”, in which you have brought the main facts together excellently and in a manner convincing to any unbiased mind. If I find something to object to, it is that you ascribe more merit to me than falls to my share, even counting in everything that I might possibly have found out independently – given time – but which Marx, with his quicker *coup d’oeil* and broader overview, discovered much more rapidly. When one has had the good fortune to work together for forty years with a man like Marx, one does not usually receive, during his lifetime, the recognition one believes one deserves; when the greater man then dies, the lesser is easily overestimated – and that seems to me to be precisely my case just now; history will finally put all that in order, and by then one will be happily round the corner and know nothing of anything.

Otherwise, only one point remains, which, however, is regularly not sufficiently emphasised in Marx’s and my own writings as well, and for which we are all equally to blame. Namely, we all initially placed, and *had to place*, the main emphasis on the *derivation* of political, juridical and other ideological conceptions, and of actions mediated through these conceptions, from the basic economic facts. In doing so, we then neglected the formal side in favour of the substantive – the manner in which these conceptions etc. come into being. That has given our opponents a welcome pretext for misunderstandings, or rather distortions, of which Paul Barth is a striking example.

1
Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real driving forces which move him remain unknown to him; otherwise it would simply not be an ideological process. He therefore imagines false, or apparent, driving forces. Because it is a thought-process, he derives both its content and its form from pure thought – either his own or that of his predecessors. He works with mere thought-material, which he accepts without further inquiry as generated by thought, and does not investigate it further for a more remote origin independent of thought; and to him this is self-evident, since all action, being *mediated* by thought, also appears to him to be *grounded*, in the last instance, in thought.

The historical ideologist (historical is here simply meant to stand comprehensively for political, juridical, philosophical, theological, in short, for all spheres that belong *to society* and not merely to nature) – the historical ideologist thus has, in every scientific sphere, a material that has formed itself independently out of the thought of earlier generations and has passed through an independent, distinct developmental series of its own in the brains of these successive generations. External facts, belonging to the same or other spheres, may certainly have had a co-determining influence on this development, but these facts are, according to the tacit assumption, themselves once again mere fruits of a thought-process, and so we still remain always within the realm of mere thought, which has apparently successfully digested even the hardest facts.

It is this semblance of an independent history of state constitutions, legal systems, ideological conceptions in every separate domain that above all dazzles most people. If Luther and Calvin “overcome” the official Catholic religion, if Hegel overcomes Fichte and Kant, Rousseau indirectly with his republican *Contrat social* overcomes the constitutional Montesquieu, this is a process that remains within theology, philosophy, political science, represents a stage in the history of these spheres of thought, and never gets out of the realm of thought. And since the bourgeois illusion of the eternity and ultimate-instance finality of capitalist production has been added, the overcoming of the Mercantilists by the Physiocrats and Adam Smith is even regarded as a mere victory of thought; not as the thought-reflection of changed economic facts, but as the finally attained correct insight into factual conditions subsisting always and everywhere; if Richard the Lionheart and Philippe Auguste
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had introduced free trade instead of getting entangled in crusades, five hundred years of misery and stupidity would have been spared us.

This side of the matter, which I can only hint at here, we have all, I think, neglected more than it deserves. It is the old story: in the beginning the form is always neglected in favour of the content. As I said, I have done so as well, and the mistake has only ever struck me *post festum*. I am thus not only far from making any reproach to you on this score – as an older co-culprit I am, quite the contrary, simply not entitled to – but I should nonetheless like to draw your attention to this point for the future.

Connected with this is also the foolish notion of the ideologists: because we deny the various ideological spheres which play a role in history an independent historical development, we also deny them any *historical efficacy*. Here lies at bottom the ordinary, undialectical conception of cause and effect as rigidly opposed poles, the absolute forgetting of reciprocal interaction. The gentlemen almost deliberately forget that a historical moment, once it has been brought into the world by other causes, ultimately economic causes, also reacts, can retroactively influence its surroundings and even its own causes. Thus Barth, e.g., on the priesthood and religion, p. 475 in your book. I was very pleased about your dispatch of this fellow, who is shallower than all expectation. And they make this man a professor of history in Leipzig! Old Wachsmuth, who was also shallow in the brain-box but had a very great sense for facts, was a quite different sort of fellow by comparison.

For the rest, I can only repeat about the book what I have already said repeatedly about the articles when they appeared in the *N[eue] Z[eit]*: it is by far the best presentation of the genesis of the Prussian state that exists, indeed I can well say the only good one, developing the connections correctly in most matters right down to the details. One only regrets that you could not also immediately include the whole further development right up to Bismarck, and involuntarily hopes that you will do this another time and present the overall picture in context, from Elector Friedrich Wilhelm to the
old Wilhelm
. You have, after all, already done the preliminary studies and, at least as far as the main thing is concerned, they are as good as finished. And it must, after all, be done one day, before the lumbering old edifice collapses; the
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dissolution of the monarchic-patriotic legends is, if not exactly a necessary precondition for removing the monarchy that covers over the class rule (since a *pure* bourgeois republic in Germany is obsolete before it came into being), yet one of the most effective levers for this.

Then you will also have more space and opportunity to present Prussian local history as a piece of the overall German misery. That is the point where I diverge from your conception here and there in some measure, particularly in the conception of the preconditions for the fragmentation of Germany and the failure of the German bourgeois revolution of the 16th century. When I get round to reworking the historical introduction to my *Peasant War*, which, I hope, will happen next winter, I will be able to develop the relevant points there.
2
Not that I hold those you have given to be incorrect, but I place others alongside them and group them somewhat differently.

In studying German history – which, after all, represents one single continuous *misère* – I have always found that the comparison with the corresponding French epochs first provides the right standard, because there the exact opposite happens from what happens with us. There, the establishment of the national state from the *disjectis membris* of the feudal state, precisely when we had our main decay. There, a rare objective logic in the whole course of the process, with us, dreary and ever drearier fragmentation. There, the English conqueror in the Middle Ages, in his intervention in favour of the Provençal nationality against the northern French, represents the foreign intervention; the English wars represent, as it were, the Thirty Years’ War, but one which ends with the expulsion of the foreign intervention and the subjugation of the South under the North. Then comes the struggle of the central power against the *Burgundian vassal* relying on foreign possessions, who plays the role of Brandenburg-Prussia, but which ends with the victory of the central power and makes the establishment of the national state definitive. And precisely at that moment, with us, the national state collapses completely (insofar as one can call the “German kingship” within the Holy Roman Empire a national state) and the large-scale plundering of German territory begins. It is a comparison, in the highest degree, disgraceful for the German, but for that very reason all the more instructive, and since our workers have placed Germany back in the first
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rank of the historical movement, we can swallow the shame of the past somewhat more easily.

Quite particularly characteristic of German development is still the fact that the two part-states which finally divided the whole of Germany between them are neither of them purely German, but are colonies on conquered Slavic territory: Austria a Bavarian, Brandenburg a Saxon colony, and that they acquired power *in* Germany only through relying on foreign, non-German possessions: Austria on Hungary (not to speak of Bohemia), Brandenburg on Prussia. On the most threatened western frontier nothing of the kind took place, on the northern frontier it was left to the Danes to protect Germany against the Danes, and in the South there was so little to protect that the frontier-guards, the Swiss, could even tear themselves away from Germany!

But I am getting into all sorts of *Allotria* – let this chatter at least serve as proof of how stimulating your work has been on me.

Once again, heartfelt thanks and greetings from

Yours,

F. Engels

1
Paul Barth: "Die Geschichtsphilosophie Hegel's und der Hegelianer bis auf Marx und Hartmann. Ein kritischer Versuch", Leipzig 1890.
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2
Engels did not find the time to rework and expand his work *Der deutsche Bauernkrieg*. Notes for this are to be found in our archive, in the articles [Über den Verfall des Feudalismus und das Aufkommen der Bourgeoisie] written in 1884
and Zum "*Bauernkrieg*" likewise written in 1884.