Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

the human head and the propositions found through its thinking claimed to serve as the foundation for all human action and social organization; but later also in the broader sense that reality, which contradicted these propositions, was in fact overturned from top to bottom. All previous forms of society and state, and all age-old notions, were thrown into the lumber room as irrational; the world had hitherto let itself be guided merely by prejudices; everything of the past deserved only pity and contempt. Only now did the daylight, the realm of reason, break; from now on, superstition, injustice, privilege, and oppression were to be superseded by eternal truth, eternal justice, equality based on nature, and the inalienable rights of man.

We now know that this realm of reason was nothing more than the idealized realm of the bourgeoisie; that this eternal justice found its realization in bourgeois justice; that equality amounted to bourgeois equality before the law; that one of the most essential human rights was proclaimed to be—bourgeois property; and that the state of reason, the Rousseauian social contract, came into being and could only come into being as a bourgeois, democratic republic. Just as little as all their predecessors could the great thinkers of the 18th century transcend the limits that their own epoch had set for them.

But alongside the antagonism between the feudal nobility and the citizenry, which appeared as the representative of the entire remaining society, there existed the general antagonism between exploiters and the exploited, between rich idlers and working poor. It was precisely this circumstance that made it possible for the representatives of the bourgeoisie to present themselves as representatives not of one particular class, but of all suffering humanity. More. From its origin, the bourgeoisie was afflicted with its own antagonism: capitalists cannot exist without wage-laborers, and in the same proportion as the medieval guild burgher developed into the modern bourgeois, the guild apprentice and day laborer developed into the proletarian. And even if, on the whole, the bourgeoisie could claim to represent the interests of the various working classes of that Text appears to skip a line or phrase between "jener" and "Geistes". [time]...

Should it not be high time to set the Socialist Law in motion against such dangerous, subversive teachings of the late Professor Hegel?