The German misery in the face of the bourgeois liberalism of The Free Ones from Berlin

Abstract

Based on what the Brazilian philosopher José Chasin called immanent analysis, this article investigates Marx and Engels’s critics, in The German Ideology, to the bourgeois form that liberal thought takes in the theorizations of the group of intellectuals known as The Free Ones from Berlin. Through the analysis of our duo, we perceive how such theorizations are gestated in the context of the German bourgeoisie that, in its condition of misery, opens the way to the formation of this class of intellectuals conducive to the invention of “illusions about real liberalism”. The German misery, which represents the late development of the Germanic bourgeoisie, is the way to the knowledge of such criticisms, therefore; reason why we will bring it here more extensively, understanding the German deformation of liberalism in relation to its French and English forms. Such mission leads us to an interesting aspect of Marxian theorization: sociability is a condition for the possibility of thinking and, in this way, it is determined and limited by the material and the production conditions corresponding to it. It is in the way that, faced with the delay in German development, the liberalism of the German ideologues takes on a deformation of its own, absent from real class interests and feeding illusions about the bourgeois State.