The period immediately following the suppression of the Rheinische Zeitung was extraordinarily eventful for Marx: in personal life it included a new career decision, marriage, and emigration from his native land; in intellectual development it saw his endorsement of revolution as a means, a major reckoning with Hegel, and--most significantly --conversion to communism.
Marxist convention has long held that the master became a communist only in Paris and announced his conversion when he first called upon the proletariat to undertake "the emancipation of mankind" in his article, Toward the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law: Introduction, printed in the inaugural issue of Marx and Ruge Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in February 1844. This convention rests upon a myth, partly suggested by Marx and Engels themselves, which confuses scientific discovery and moral commitment. The Paris "Critique" did indeed first disclose the "scientific" law that assigned the proletariat its historic role in the realization of communism, but it is now clear that Marx's moral commitment to communism as an ideal antedated his emigration and was in fact the net result of his Kreuznach ruminations. There in the summer of 1843, Marx reached the conclusion that the ultimate emancipation of mankind could be achieved only in a society organized without a state, social classes, or private property. (Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1962)
The redating of Marx's conversion is principally the work of Shlomo Avineri, who has made his case in a brilliant analysis of Marx's hitherto obscure Kreuznach manuscript on Hegel. This manuscript has been recently published for the first time in English translation under the title Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right,' and will hereafter be called the Kreuznach Critique to distinguish it from the Paris "Critique" bearing an almost identical title. The Kreuznach document constitutes a close paragraph-by-paragraph assessment of Hegel's major work in political philosophy, set down by Marx in critical notes. It may be the first draft of a book--never to be finished--of which the Paris "Critique" was intended to form the introduction.
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