The Holy Family Critique of Critical Criticism

. 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 Bauer brothers 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 between 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.Marx and Engels decided to devote their first joint work to the exposure of these pernicious reactionary ideas and to the defence of their new materialistic and communistic outlook.