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The Metaphysics of Law: An Essay on the Very Young Marx

1978; Oxford University Press; Volume: 83; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1862321

1937-5239

Donald R. Kelley,

Philosophical Ethics and Theory

IN A WORD I HATE ALL THE GODS! Karl Marx took this defiant cry of Prometheus, eminent saint and martyr of the philosophical calendar, as the motto and point of departure of his doctoral thesis presented at the University of Jena in I841, and in many ways it was symbolic of his entire career.' As a student at the Gymnasium of Trier in I835, the seventeen-yearold Marx, still a practicing Lutheran, was already celebrating the power of man to determine his own fate and envisaging the Promethean task of re-creating the world by uncovering its first principle, its arche, and using it for the benefit of all mankind. History calls those men greatest, he wrote in his reflections on the choice of a profession, who have ennobled themselves by working for the good; and this heaven-, or rather earth-, storming goal Marx also preserved for the rest of his life.2 Too little attention has been paid to the profession first chosen by Marx, namely, that of the law. For centuries the law had been represented by its practitioners as the most direct path to the common good (bonum publicum). In general (and intellectually genetic) terms it was by pursuing jurisprudence-not always the substance and methods, perhaps, but certainly the ideals of jurisprudence-that Marx began the heroic task by which he hoped to attain greatness. Needless to say, his enterprise was not without setbacks, and of these one of the first was Marx's disillusionment with conventional jurisprudence as it actually related to political and social matters. Another was the resistance of political authority, and with it professional law, to the pursuit of the social ideals embodied in jurisprudence. This resistance Marx felt most directly in the censorship legislation directly aimed at the Rheinische Zeitung, on which he served his apprenticeship in practical politics in the two