The Sublation of Hess’s Thought in the Young Marx’s View of Socialism

The intellectual relationship between the young Marx and Moses Hess is a long-standing and highly contentious topic. In exploring the lineage of their socialist ideas, French scholar Auguste Cornu, British scholars Isaiah Berlin and David McLellan, Israeli scholar E. Silberner, and Polish scholar Zvi Rosen have all affirmed the importance of Hess’s communist theory for Marx’s thought; Japanese scholar Hiroshi Matsuzawa even proposed Hess’s “overwhelming” influence on Marx. In contrast, Georg Lukács, German scholar W. Menke, and Soviet scholar V. I. Malinin argued that Hess’s influence on Marx was negligible, that he was a “thoroughly failed precursor of Marx.” The divergence and conflict among foreign scholars have led domestic scholars to pay attention to and reinterpret this issue; Hou Cai, Zhang Yibing, Chen Dongying, Wang Daiyue, and others believe that Hess inspired the young Marx’s view of socialism. Today, a limited acknowledgment of Hess’s influence on Marx’s early socialist thought has become a scholarly consensus, but current research overemphasizes “influence” and “failure” in theoretical evaluation, neglecting the historical evolution and practical purposes of both parties’ socialist ideas, thereby obscuring the process of Marx’s dialectical sublation of Hess’s socialist thought. Therefore, this article starts from the historical background of the emergence of German socialist thought, specifically examines Hess’s intellectual contributions in the history of socialist development, focuses on analyzing the young Marx’s critical absorption of Hess’s socialist thought during their interaction, and further reveals how Marx’s view of socialism moved from abstract ethics to a scientific system through historical practice and theoretical critique. This study not only seeks to re-anchor Hess’s coordinates in the history of scientific socialism but also, by excavating the rational foundation of scientific socialism, dissects the generative logic of its theory, providing a historical mirror for contemporary socialist theoretical innovation.

青年马克思与赫斯之间的思想关系是一个由来已久、争议颇多的话题。在探讨双方社会主义思想传承关系上，法国学者奥古斯特·科尔纽、英国学者以赛亚·伯林及麦克莱伦，以色列学者埃·西尔伯纳尔、波兰学者兹维·罗森，都肯定了赫斯的共产主义理论对马克思思想的重要性，日本学者广松涉甚至提出赫斯对马克思的“压倒性”影响。与此相反，卢卡奇、德国学者沃·门克、苏联学者马利宁等人认为，赫斯对马克思的影响微乎其微，是“彻底失败的马克思的先行者”。国外学者观点的差异与冲突，使得国内学者对这一问题开始关注与重新解读，侯才、张一兵、陈东英、王代月等认为赫斯启发了青年马克思的社会主义观。如今，有限度地承认赫斯对马克思早期社会主义思想构成的影响已成为学界的共识，但目前的研究过于强调理论评价上的“影响”与“失败”,忽视了双方社会主义思想的历史流变与现实目的，遮蔽了马克思对赫斯社会主义思想的辩证扬弃过程。因此，本文从德国社会主义思想出场的时代背景出发，具体考察赫斯在社会主义发展史上的思想贡献，重点分析青年马克思在与赫斯的交往过程中对赫斯社会主义思想的批判性吸收，进一步揭示马克思社会主义观是如何在历史实践与理论批判中，从抽象伦理而走向科学系统的。本研究不仅力求重新锚定赫斯在科学社会主义发展史中的坐标，更通过挖掘科学社会主义合理性的基点问题，解剖其理论的生成逻辑，为当代社会主义理论创新提供历史镜鉴。

I. The Historical Context of German Socialism

一、德国社会主义的时代语境

In the 1830s and 1840s, German intellectuals, through comparison and understanding of the socio-economic and political conditions of England, France, and Germany, urgently sought to identify the root causes of poverty and reflect on Germany’s path of social modernization. At the same time, due to continuous exposure to French socialist theory, German intellectuals naturally used foreign literature and conceptual frameworks to discover and analyze “social problems,” contemplating the possibility and realization path of the Germanization of socialism.

19世纪30、40年代，德国知识分子通过英、法、德社会经济政治状况的对比与认识，迫切地想要弄清导致贫困的根源何在，反思德国的社会现代化道路。同时，由于不断接触到法国社会主义理论，德国知识分子自然地借助于外来文献资料和概念框架来发现和分析“社会问题”,思考社会主义德国化的可能性及实现路径。

On the practical level, “social problems” such as the poverty of the lower classes, the emergence of the proletariat, and the contradiction between wealth and poverty gradually became a dimension of German intellectuals’ thinking. In the 1830s, German men of insight increasingly noticed the plight of Germany’s lower strata, finding that what had long been considered the inherent difficulties of the poor had developed into a continuously worsening general condition. Large-scale poverty was due, on the one hand, to the rapid population growth since the late 18th century, and on the other hand, to the slow-developing economy’s inability to absorb the large-scale workforce formed during the early transition from feudal society to industrial society. In rural areas, after peasants were liberated from serfdom, common lands were appropriated, and the newly enacted Poor Law reduced relief obligations to the poor, ultimately giving rise to a new landless impoverished stratum. In Germany at that time, the defects of civilization were combined with the barbaric defects of the old system, so that the proletariat gradually grew out of the development of emerging industrial capitalism. Facing the apparent victory of the bourgeoisie, German intellectuals pointed to the growing opposition between wealth and poverty in Western European society. Hegel had keenly perceived that in civil society, “the unequal distribution of wealth in the hands of a few” was increasingly concentrated, leading to the expansion of a “poverty-stricken underclass,” making “how to solve poverty” “an important problem that drives modern society and troubles it.” [1]1 G. W. F. Hegel, *Elements of the Philosophy of Right*, §244–245.

在现实层面，底层人群的贫困、无产者的出现、贫富矛盾等“社会问题”,逐渐成为德国知识分子的思考维度。19世纪30年代，德国的有识之士越来越注意到德国下层群体的窘境，他们发现过去长期被认为是贫困者固有的困难，已发展成一种不断恶化的普遍状况。大规模的贫困一方面是由于18世纪晚期以来人口的急剧增长，另一方面是缓慢发展的经济根本无力吸收从封建社会到工业社会转型初期形成的大规模就业大军。在乡村地区，农民摆脱农奴身份获得解放后，公有土地被占用，加之新出台的《贫困法》减少了对贫民的救济义务，最终催生出一个新的无土地贫困阶层。在当时的德国，文明缺陷同旧制度的野蛮缺陷结合在一起，使无产者渐渐从新兴工业资本主义的发展中生长出来。面对资产阶级表面上的胜利，德国知识分子指向了西欧社会日益增长的财富与贫困的对立。黑格尔曾敏锐觉察到，市民社会中“少数人手中不平均的财富”日益集中，并由此导致“贫困底层社会”的扩大倾向，使得“如何解决贫困”成为“推动现代社会并使它感到苦恼的一个重要问题”。

On the theoretical level, early 19th-century French utopian socialists Saint-Simon and Fourier attempted to solve the problems brought by the new industrial society, proposing early socialist theories; by around the 1840s, “socialism” and “communism” had become buzzwords among French intellectuals, revolutionaries, and workers. In 1842, Lorenz von Stein’s book *Socialism and Communism in Contemporary France* was published in Germany, systematically introducing French socialism and communism to German academia for the first time. The book mentioned “concepts such as society, socialism, communism, the proletariat, and poverty, opening up a new problem domain centered on the concept of society for German academia.” [2]2 Lorenz von Stein, *Der Socialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs* (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1842). With the publication of Stein’s work and the influx of French socialist thought, socialist theory, as an attempt to fundamentally eliminate social ills, quickly attracted the interest of German intellectuals, including August Cieszkowski, Heinrich Heine, Hess, Engels, and Marx. They began to turn their attention to socialist and communist theory and initially formed a “socialism with German characteristics.”

在理论层面，19世纪初法国空想社会主义者圣西门、傅立叶试图解决新的工业社会所带来的问题，提出了早期社会主义理论；到了19世纪40年代左右，“社会主义”和“共产主义”成为法国知识分子、革命家、工人群体中的流行词。1842年施泰因《当今法国的社会主义和共产主义》一书在德国出版，初次系统性地向德意志学术界介绍法国的社会主义和共产主义，该书中提到“社会、社会主义、共产主义、无产阶级、贫困等概念，为德国学术界开出了一个以社会概念为核心的新的问题域”。随着施泰因这部著作的出版和法国社会主义思潮的涌入，作为试图从根本上消除社会弊病的社会主义理论，很快引起了德国知识分子的兴趣，其中包括切实考夫斯基(August Cieszkowski)、海涅、赫斯、恩格斯、马克思等人，他们开始转向对社会主义和共产主义理论的关注，并初步形成了“具有德国特色的社会主义”。

At that time, two key figures exploring the early German socialist path were Wilhelm Weitling and Hess. Known as the “founder of German communism,” Weitling completed two works in 1838 and 1842, *The World as It Is and as It Ought to Be* and *Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom*, which influenced many German workers. Weitling inherited the revolutionary stance of French communists such as Gracchus Babeuf, Auguste Blanqui, and Étienne Cabet, believing that capitalist reform could not solve workers’ poverty and that only violent means could establish a new society. He trusted that poor workers themselves could achieve liberation, rather than relying on a minority elite conspiracy, and that it was possible to skip the bourgeois revolution and achieve a society of “common ownership and sharing” by abolishing private property. If Weitling represented the tradition of the French socialist movement, then Hess constructed socialism starting from German philosophy. In 1837, Hess first published one of the important works of early German utopian socialism, *The Holy History of Mankind*; in 1841, he continued to publish *The European Triarchy*, transitioning from religious socialism to philosophical communist thought, initially forming a “philosophy of action,” which demanded the combination of philosophical spirit with the socialist movement as a guide for revolutionary practice. Thereafter, in *Twenty-One Sheets from Switzerland* (hereinafter referred to as *Twenty-One Sheets*) and *On the Essence of Money*, Hess elaborated his socialist thought in detail and systematically, which can be regarded as the theoretical crystallization of “devoting himself to the philosophical development of communism,” [3]3 Friedrich Engels, “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent,” *The New Moral World* No. 21 (November 18, 1843). an indispensable link in the history of German socialist development, and also providing intellectual inspiration for the formation of Marx’s socialist theory.

当时，探索早期德国社会主义道路的两位关键人物是魏特林和赫斯。被称为“德国共产主义创始人”的魏特林，于1838年和1842年分别完成了《现实的人类和理想的人类》《和谐与自由的保证》两部著作，影响了众多德国工人阶级。魏特林继承了法国共产主义者巴贝夫、布朗基和卡贝的革命立场，认为资本主义的改良无法解决工人的贫困问题，必须以暴力形式为手段才能建立新社会。他相信依靠贫困的工人自身能够完成解放，而非依赖少数精英密谋，同时可以跳过资产阶级革命，通过废除私有制实现“共有共享”的社会。如果说魏特林代表了法国社会主义运动的传统，那么赫斯就是从德国哲学出发建构起社会主义的。赫斯在1837年初次发表了德国早期空想社会主义的重要著作之一《人类的圣史》;1841年他继续出版了《欧洲三同盟》,从宗教社会主义过渡到了哲学共产主义思想，初步形成了“行动的哲学”,要求将哲学精神同社会主义运动相结合，成为革命实践的指南。此后，赫斯在《来自瑞士的二十一印张》(以下简称《二十一印张》)、《论货币的本质》中详尽系统地阐述他的社会主义思想，可视为“专心致力于共产主义的哲学发展”的理论结晶，是德国社会主义发展史上不可或缺的一环，同时也为马克思社会主义理论的形成提供了思想启发。

II. The Triple Contributions of Hess’s Philosophical Communism

二、赫斯哲学共产主义思想的三重贡献

Hess’s philosophical communist thought combined German philosophy, French socialism, and political economy, constructing a theoretical path for socialism, laying a realistic foundation for political economy, clarifying the essential goals of socialism, and providing a philosophical basis, materialist scale, and humanistic perspective for socialism. Therefore, he is called the “father of German socialism.” [4]4 This epithet for Hess is used by some scholars, e.g., in the context of early German socialist history.

赫斯的哲学共产主义思想将德国哲学、法国社会主义、政治经济学相结合，构建了社会主义的理论路径，奠定了政治经济学的现实基石，明确了社会主义的本质目标，提供了社会主义的哲学基础、唯物尺度和人学视角，因此他被称为“德国社会主义之父”。

(A) Constructing the Theoretical Path for Realizing Socialism: The Philosophy of Action

(一)建构社会主义实现的理论路径：行动的哲学

Hess believed that in the process of realizing socialism, the philosophy of action was the rational form and precursor of social transformation.

赫斯认为在实现社会主义的过程中，行动的哲学是社会变革的理性形式和先导。

First, in *The Philosophy of Action*, he constructed the principle of self-action. The core of the philosophy of action is action, which refers to the form of human self-production and development: “Life is activity. Activity is the process of establishing identity, producing its equivalent and its own self-identity, through setting and sublating its opposite, through breaking through the boundaries in which the self and the non-self act—in a word, self-production. Spirit, through its own self-creation, penetrates the law of self-production.” [5]5 Hess’s *The Philosophy of Action* (1843) is a key early work in which he attempts to synthesize German idealism with French socialism, arguing for the unity of thought and action in realizing human freedom. Thus action is a dynamic behavior in spirit and consciousness, capable of breaking the boundaries of self-creation. Hess linked action with freedom and proposed “free activity,” that is, the unity of free spiritual activity and free social activity. It is an active, self-determining “active spirit” that can transcend the existing and the achieved. “In servitude, production binds the producer himself, while any limitation of the free spirit in alienation does not become a natural constraint but is overcome to become self-determination.” [6]6 Hess’s philosophical communism: A term used to describe the early socialist thought of Moses Hess, which combined German philosophy (especially Feuerbach’s humanism) with French socialist ideas, but lacked a materialist analysis of class struggle and the proletariat as a revolutionary agent. It can be seen that the nature of this “action” also implies that it can overcome the state of alienation through conscious, creative action, manifesting the subjective initiative of the human being itself.

首先，他在《行动的哲学》中，构建了自我行动的原理。行动哲学的核心是行动，它指的是人的自我生产和发展的形式：“生命即活动。活动，乃是通过设定并扬弃其对立面、通过突破自我与非我活动于其中的界限，来确立同一性、产生其等同物及其自身同一性的过程，一句话，自我生产。精神则通过自身的自我创造，洞悉了自我生产的法则”。因此行动是精神和意识上的能动行为，能打破自我创造的界限。赫斯把行动与自由联系起来，提出了“自由的活动”,即自由的精神活动和自由的社会活动相统一。它是一种主动性的、自我决定的“主动精神”,能超越现存和既得成果。“在奴役中，生产束缚生产者本身，而自由精神在异化中的任何限制都不会变成自然的约束，而是得到克服而成为自我决定”,可见这种“行动”的性质也意味着它可以通过自觉的、创造性的行动克服异化的状态，展现了人本身的主体能动性。

Second, Hess demonstrated the necessity of social revolution by criticizing religious alienation and political alienation. In modern society, the separation between individuals produces a split between the individual and the species, leading to the destruction of the free spirit of the human being by religion and politics. Religion is the unfreedom of the individual, politics the unfreedom of society. Religion and politics were originally the manifestation of the essence of the human being as an abstract universal, but in human society they are ruled and dominated by power. Christianity coexists with autocratic politics, cutting off the lifeline of freedom, that is, the unity of labor and enjoyment, and negating freedom and the goal of human life. In the final analysis, religion is merely spiritual enslavement, politics merely material enslavement, and “as long as the masses languish in material enslavement and poverty, the masses cannot be free in spirit.” [7]7 *Rheinische Zeitung*: A liberal newspaper published in Cologne from 1842 to 1843, edited by Marx for a period, which served as a platform for critical discussions of politics, economics, and society. In view of this, Hess advocated combining the struggle against religion with the struggle against politics, proposing social change encompassing ideological, political, and even economic transformation. So how is social change to be carried out? Under the general principle, Hess advocated using the union of love among people to eliminate separation, return to spirit itself, and consciously sublate the drive of material desires. At the same time, concretely, regarding the problems of religion and politics, he regarded “organizing education” and “organizing labor” as two basic paths to realizing socialism.

其次，赫斯通过批判宗教异化和政治异化来论证社会革命的必要性。在近代社会人与人之间相分离，产生了个人与类的分裂，导致宗教与政治对人自由精神的破坏。宗教是个人的不自由，政治则是社会的不自由，宗教与政治本来是人作为抽象普遍物的本质展现，但在人类社会却受权力所统治和支配。基督教与专制政治共生，切断了自由的生命线即劳动与享受的统一，否定了自由与人的生命的目标。说到底，宗教不过是精神奴役，政治不过是物质奴役，且“只要民众在物质的奴役和贫困中憔悴，民众在精神上就不能自由”。鉴于此，赫斯主张必须把反对宗教的斗争同反对政治的斗争结合起来，提出包括思想、政治甚至经济变革在内的社会变革。那么，如何进行社会变革?赫斯在总的原则下，主张用人与人之间爱的联合来消除分离，回归精神本身，自觉扬弃物质欲望的驱动，同时具体来说，针对宗教和政治问题，将“组织教育”和“组织劳动”视为实现社会主义的两种基本途径。

It can be seen that although Hess pushed theoretical critique toward social action, the action he emphasized was to a large extent tinged with subjective idealism and ethical significance; its revolutionary subject was more directed toward the abstract “human being” than toward concrete classes. These problems also became key points in Marx’s later critique of Hess’s thought. In short, Hess’s philosophy of action combined German philosophy with socialist action, advancing the theoretical path for realizing socialism: starting from the unity of spirit and action, it held that only through creative action can human beings correctly understand the relationship between thought and reality. To realize freedom and equality in accordance with human nature, social reform is necessary. Therefore, human initiative and social transformation are two major factors in the development of socialism.

可见，赫斯虽然将理论批判推向社会行动，但他所强调的行动，很大程度上带有主观唯心色彩和伦理意义；其革命主体更多指向抽象的“人类”而非具体的阶级，这些问题也都成为后来马克思批判赫斯思想的关键。总之，赫斯的行动哲学将德国哲学与社会主义行动相结合，推进了实现社会主义的理论路径：从精神与行动的统一出发，认为人只有通过创造性的行动，才能正确理解思维与现实之间的关系，为了实现合乎人性的自由与平等，就必须进行社会改革，因此人的能动性与社会的变革是社会主义发展中的两大重要因素。

(II) The Precursor to the Critique of Political Economy: Intercourse and Money Alienation

(二)政治经济学批判的先声：交往与货币异化

Inspired by Feuerbach’s theory of alienation, Hess, in *The Essence of Money*, for the first time took intercourse as the

赫斯受到费尔巴哈异化理论的启发，在《货币的本质》中，初次将交往作为人的类本质。他提到“个体的生命活动的交换、交往，个体力量的互相激发，这种共同活动，是个人的现实的本质，是他们的现实的能力”。一方面赫斯改变了《行动的哲学》中个人“自由的活动”的本质，立足于多主体，把交往作为人的生存方式，认为人只有同社会联系才能进入现实生活；另一方面强调人们之间的“共同活动”,既能体现人的本质和力量，又展示了“各种不同的个性”,只有“这种共同活动才能实现生产力”。赫斯用交往与共同活动来把握人与经济社会的关系，考察了社会交往与生产劳动之间的关系，突破了费尔巴哈内在、无声的“类”,实现了类本质的社会化，具有唯物主义的倾向。

Further, Hess took “money,” the exchange medium of the commodity economy, as his entry point. Starting from the socioeconomic phenomena of capitalist society, he used the theory of alienation to analyze the essence of money and proposed the concept of money alienation. Money was originally a medium of intercourse and a product of human economic development. However, under capitalist conditions, egoism emerged. To obtain more money, people willingly sold their species-essence, using the quantity of money to manifest human essence and measure human value. Thus, the species became a means, and the individual became an end. Under this modern social system, which inverted natural relations, people were separated from their true species-essence and species-life. In theoretical life (i.e., religion), people alienated their essence into God; in practical life, they alienated their intercourse activities into money. Money, like God, became an alienated force that dominated and enslaved them. Therefore, money is not only a manifestation of human social essence but also an alienation of that essence. This both explains the cause of money fetishism and analyzes the phenomenon of social alienation. In Hess’s view, early human social alienation was due to a lack of human capacity and wealth, whereas in the contemporary era it was due to the social system. Private property formed the opposition between the propertied and the propertyless, and the alliance of the capitalist system with Christianity led to the prevalence of atomism and egoism. But with the increase in human capacity and the growth of productive forces, in communist society “the union of human beings, the ability to engage in direct intercourse, the inhuman, external means of intercourse will necessarily be abolished”; money as a medium will disappear, and indirect intercourse among people will no longer exist.

进一步地，赫斯以“货币”这个商品经济的交换中介为切入点，从资本主义社会经济现象出发，用异化学说来分析货币的本质，提出货币异化。货币本来是作为交往的中介、人类经济发展的产物，但是在资本主义条件下，产生了利己主义，人为了获取更多的金钱，情愿出卖自己的类本质，用金钱的数量来体现人的本质、衡量人的价值。于是类成为手段，个体成为目的。在这种颠倒了自然关系的现代社会制度下，人脱离了自己真正的类本质和类生活。在理论生活(即宗教)中，人把自己的本质异化为神；在实际生活中，他又把自己的交往活动异化为金钱，而金钱就和神一样，成了一种统治着并奴役着他的异化力量。因此，货币不仅是人的社会本质的体现，也是这种本质的异化，既解释了货币拜物教的原因，又分析了社会异化的现象。在赫斯看来，人类早期的社会异化是由于人的能力和财富不足，而在当代则是由于社会制度，私有制形成了有产者与无产者的对立，资本主义制度与基督教联盟，使得原子主义和利己主义盛行。但随着人的能力的提高和生产力的增长，在共产主义社会“人与人的联合、能直接进行交往，那非人的、外在的交往手段必然将要被废除”,货币作为中介将会消失，而人们之间的间接交往也将不复存在。

The regrettable point is that Hess did not see that intercourse is constrained by relations of production and determined by production. Without “intercourse” linked to production and the division of labor, it could only be abstract intercourse. Nevertheless, in his theory of intercourse alienation, Hess adopted a multi-subject perspective, based his analysis on the essence of human intercourse, and introduced political economy to critique money alienation. Through the alienation of people and things, he revealed the comprehensive alienation of capitalist society, thereby logically concluding that communism is an inevitable trend of economic development. This became the precursor of the critique of political economy within socialist theory.

遗憾的地方在于，赫斯没有看到交往是受制于生产关系、决定于生产的，没有同生产与分工所联系的“交往”,只能是抽象的交往。不过，赫斯在交往异化理论中，采用多主体视角的方法，立足人的交往本质，引入政治经济学来批判货币异化，通过人和物的异化展现了资本主义社会的全面异化，从而合乎逻辑地得出共产主义是经济发展的必然趋势，成为了社会主义理论中政治经济学批判的先声。

(3) The Goal of Socialism: A Free and Equal Organic Community

(三)社会主义的目标：自由平等的有机共同体

“Community” is the core concept in the construction of Hess’s socialist theory. In *Socialism and Communism*, Hess “explicitly recognized the direction of the new epoch-making movement as the essence of socialism.” Hess believed that, on the one hand, there was the lineage of spiritual freedom represented by German philosophy—Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and others—and on the other hand, the lineage of social equality represented by French socialism—Babeuf, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, and others. He discussed a new prospect of combining these two lineages and understood the real task facing both as “one and complete freedom.” He argued that philosophy must transform from thought into the actual freedom of the people and develop toward practical action. The task of realizing popular freedom was twofold, including material freedom and spiritual freedom. The unity of this freedom and equality was the “free community.”

“共同体”是赫斯社会主义学说建构的核心概念。在《社会主义和共产主义》中，赫斯将“新的划时代运动的方向明确地作为社会主义的本质来认识”。赫斯认为，一方面是以康德、费希特、谢林、黑格尔等德国哲学为代表的精神自由的谱系，另一方面是以巴贝夫、圣西门、傅立叶、蒲鲁东等法国社会主义为代表的社会平等的谱系，他对将这两个谱系相结合的新展望进行了论述，并将两者都面临的现实课题理解为“一而全的自由”,主张哲学必须从思想变为现实的民众自由，并朝着实践行为发展。实现民众自由的任务是双重的，包括物质自由和精神自由，这种自由与平等的统一就是“自由的共同体”。

The essay *The Philosophy of Action* was written precisely to solve the above real tasks and to attempt a philosophical justification for socialism. Starting from Fichte’s subjective idealism, Hess held that freedom lies in “the identity of the thinking subject and the thinking object.” On this basis, he took spiritual activity as the starting point of human beings and regarded the self-identity of the essence of human freedom, even of labor and enjoyment, as a characteristic of communist principles. Hess said: “Sweating labor makes humanity unhappy; labor born of joy makes people happy.” Clearly, he believed that labor in capitalist society makes people unhappy and deprives them of freedom, and that eliminating the opposition between labor and enjoyment is the superiority of communism.

《行动的哲学》一文就是为了解决以上现实课题并试图为社会主义进行哲学论证。赫斯从费希特的主观唯心主义出发，认为自由在于“思维的主体和思维客体的同一”,在此基础上，把精神活动作为人的出发点，将人类自由的本质乃至劳动和享受的自我同一性视为共产主义原理的特征。赫斯说道：“汗流浃背的劳动使人类不幸，发自喜悦的劳动使人变得幸福。”显然他认为资本主义社会的劳动使人不幸，使人丧失了自由，而消除劳动与享受的对立才是共产主义的优越性。

In writing *The Essence of Money*, Hess did not proceed from Fichte’s “self” but, following Feuerbach’s method, understood the essence of the human as the commonality of the species. At the same time, by re-grasping this commonality of the species as the mutual exchange of life activities in social relations, Hess even perceived that the development of this intercourse and cooperation was the root of the development of productive forces, and further proposed an “organic community,” that is, “a rational, organic human society,” emphatically stressing the diverse unity and organized character of this community. In his view, this society was a diverse, harmonious, cooperative, and organized production, such that each individual could develop his or her talents according to his or her own inclinations within society. Thus, this was the mature form of his thought on community: each person contributes his or her abilities and talents, achieving the unity of labor and enjoyment, and everyone can develop freely. Therefore, the “organic community” is the inevitable choice for the development of the individual and society.

而在撰写《货币的本质》时，赫斯不是从费希特的“自我”出发，而是按照费尔巴哈的方式将人类的本质作为类的共同性来理解。与此同时，赫斯通过将这个类的共同性作为社会关系中的生命活动的相互交换来重新把握，甚至洞察到这种交往和协作的发展才是生产力发展的根源，更进一步地提出“有机的共同体”,即“一种合乎理性的、有机的人的社会”,并着力强调这种共同体的多样性统一与有组织的特征。在他看来，这种社会是多种多样、和谐协作、有组织的生产，以致每个人在社会中都能按照自己的爱好发挥自己的天赋。可见，这是其共同体思想的成熟形态，人们各尽其才、各尽其能，实现了劳动与享受的统一，每个人都能得到自由的发展。因此，“有机的共同体”是个人与社会发展的必然选择。

The goal of socialism as conceived by Hess, moving from “free community” to “organic community,” on the one hand provided German socialist theory with a direction for the future development of society, and on the other hand combined the realization of human essence with socialist doctrine, clarifying that the value orientation of the future community is the realization of human essence and the unity of the individual and the species.

赫斯所设想的社会主义的目标从“自由的共同体”到“有机的共同体”,一方面为德国社会主义理论提供了未来社会发展的走向，另一方面将人本质的实现与社会主义学说结合起来，明确了未来共同体的价值旨归就是人的本质的实现、个人与类的统一。

It should be noted that, due to the backwardness of Germany at the time, which lacked a strong proletariat domestically and could not become a revolutionary, transformative force for society, Hess’s philosophical communist thought had a clear utopian character. [6]6 Hess’s philosophical communism: A term used to describe the early socialist thought of Moses Hess, which combined German philosophy (especially Feuerbach’s humanism) with French socialist ideas, but lacked a materialist analysis of class struggle and the proletariat as a revolutionary agent. Nevertheless, overall, Hess’s critique of social reality, from the positive exposition combining ethics and humanism with philosophy and economics, all pointed toward “the communist principle that becomes the necessary result of historical development,” demonstrating the rationality and possibility of communism, exerting a significant influence on German intellectuals of the time, providing valuable intellectual resources for the development of socialist theory, and simultaneously accelerating the formation of Marx’s socialist thought. But Hess was only a forerunner; Marx was the completer.

应该看到，由于当时德国的落后性，国内缺少强大的无产阶级，未能成为革命的、改造社会的有生力量，赫斯的哲学共产主义思想具有明显的空想性。但总的来说，赫斯对社会现实的批判，从伦理学与人本主义，哲学与经济学相结合的正面阐发都指向了“成为历史发展必然结果的共产主义原则”,论证了共产主义的合理性与可能性，对当时的德国知识分子产生了很大影响，为社会主义理论的发展提供了宝贵思想资源，同时也加速推进了马克思社会主义思想的形成。但赫斯只是先行者，马克思才是完成者。

III. Resonance between Young Marx’s and Hess’s Thought

三、青年马克思与赫斯思想的共鸣

In 1841, after obtaining his doctorate, Marx, after much deliberation, began working at the *Rheinische Zeitung*, [7]7 *Rheinische Zeitung*: A liberal newspaper published in Cologne from 1842 to 1843, edited by Marx for a period, which served as a platform for critical discussions of politics, economics, and society. coming into contact with a large number of practical social problems and beginning to test philosophical theory with the practice of social life. The challenges of reality prompted a transformation in his thought. The period from 1841 to 1845 was an important time when Marx’s thought underwent drastic changes, continuously penetrating into the essentiality of history, and was also a crucial stage in the gestation and formation of young Marx’s socialist thought. At this time, Hess was an important intellectual forerunner and fellow traveler for Marx. Marx dialectically absorbed the positive elements of Hess and reconstructed his own socialist thought.

1841年，马克思取得博士学位以后，几经思考进入《莱茵报》工作，接触了大量社会现实问题，开始用社会生活实践来检验哲学理论，现实的挑战促使他的思想发生了转变。1841年到1845年间是马克思思想剧烈变化、不断深入到历史的本质性中去的重要时期，同时也是青年马克思社会主义思想酝酿、生成的关键阶段。此时，赫斯是马克思的重要思想先行者和同路人，马克思辩证地吸收赫斯的积极因素，重新构建起自己的社会主义思想。

(I) The Impact of Socialist Thought on Marx

(一)社会主义思想对马克思的触动

Marx’s attention to socialism began during his time at the *Rheinische Zeitung*. On the one hand, he focused on a large number of “social problems,” discussing events such as the theft of wood and the situation of the Moselle winegrowers, [8]8 The theft of wood and the Moselle winegrowers: References to debates in the *Rheinische Zeitung* about the criminalization of wood-gathering by the poor and the economic distress of winegrowers, which led Marx to question Hegel’s ideal of the rational state. rethinking the contradiction between Hegel’s concept of the state and material interests, shifting from pure politics to the study of economic relations, and thereby moving toward socialism. On the other hand, in a more direct sense, it was Hess’s publication of articles on communism in the *Rheinische Zeitung* that provoked criticism from the *Allgemeine Zeitung*, [9]9 *Allgemeine Zeitung*: A conservative newspaper based in Augsburg, representing the interests of the established political order, which attacked the *Rheinische Zeitung* for its sympathetic coverage of communist ideas. forcing Marx to counterattack, and thus he began to directly confront the issues of socialism and communism.

马克思对社会主义的关注是在《莱茵报》时期开始的。一方面他关注到大量的“社会问题”,讨论了林木盗窃、摩塞尔葡萄农状况等事件，重新思考黑格尔的国家理性与物质利益之间的矛盾，由纯政治转向研究经济关系，并从而走向社会主义。另一方面，在更为直接的意义上，是赫斯在《莱茵报》上登载了关于共产主义的文章，才引起《奥格斯堡总汇报》的责难，马克思被迫进行反击，因此他开始直接面对社会主义与共产主义的问题。

Hess published in the *Rheinische Zeitung* two communist articles on the “Berlin Family Housing” and a report on the communist speech at the Tenth Congress of French Scholars, which led the *Allgemeine Zeitung*, representing the ruling forces, to accuse the *Rheinische Zeitung* of sympathizing with communism and to criticize communism for abolishing the doctrine of private property, bringing the “chaos of neighboring countries” into German newspapers. As editor-in-chief, Marx immediately wrote *Communism and the Augsburg “Allgemeine Zeitung”* to counter this accusation. Marx retorted: First, poverty had already become a real problem; the opposition between rich and poor “remains a fact visible to all in the streets of Manchester, Paris, and Lyon,” and “it is an extremely important issue in France and England at present”; what is needed now is to “present communism to the public without embellishment.” Second, if one wants to criticize the utopian forms of communism, one cannot, like the *Allgemeine Zeitung*, engage in “superficial, momentary imaginings” due to a conservative and bourgeois standpoint and a lack of serious study; it can only be criticized “after long-lasting, in-depth research.”

赫斯在《莱茵报》上登载了两篇关于“柏林家庭住宅”的共产主义文章以及第十次法国学者大会共产主义演说的报道,使得代表执政势力的奥格斯堡《总汇报》谴责《莱茵报》同情共产主义，并批判共产主义废除所有制的学说,把“邻国的混乱”引进德国报刊。马克思作为主编立刻写下了《共产主义和奥格斯堡〈总汇报〉》来回击这一指责。马克思反诘道：首先，贫困已经成为现实问题，贫富对立“仍旧是曼彻斯特、巴黎和里昂大街上有目共睹的事实”,“它是法国和英国当前的一个极端重要的问题”,现在需要“向公众不加粉饰地介绍共产主义”;其次，如果要批判空想形式的共产主义，就不能像奥格斯堡的《总汇报》那样，由于保守和资产阶级的立场以及从未认真研究就进行“肤浅的、片刻的想象”,只有在“长期持续的、深入的研究之后才能加以批判”。

Later, Marx recalled: “At that time when the good will to ‘go forward’ far outweighed actual knowledge, in the *Rheinische Zeitung* one could hear the echo of French socialism and communism, tinged with a weak philosophical color. I expressed opposition to this superficial discourse, but at the same time, in a controversy with the Augsburg *Allgemeine Zeitung*, I frankly admitted that my previous studies did not yet permit me to pass judgment on the content of the French currents of thought themselves.” [10]10 This quotation is from Marx’s preface to *A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy* (1859), where he reflects on his intellectual development. Soon after, Marx’s interest in social problems and communism prompted him to participate in regular discussions about a socialist club initiated by Hess in Cologne. He also diligently studied the works of Stein, Proudhon, Dézamy, Leroux, and Considérant, [11]11 Stein, Proudhon, Dézamy, Leroux, and Considérant: Lorenz von Stein (German theorist of socialism), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (French anarchist and socialist), Théodore Dézamy (French communist), Pierre Leroux (French socialist), and Victor Considérant (French Fourierist socialist). becoming more convinced of the necessity of thoroughly analyzing and concretely grasping reality. The intellectual debates and reflections triggered by Hess’s propaganda of communism in the *Rheinische Zeitung* accelerated Marx’s transformation toward socialist thought.

后来，马克思回忆道：“在善良的‘前进’愿望大大超过实际知识的当时，在《莱茵报》上可以听到法国社会主义和共产主义的带着微弱哲学色彩的回声。我曾表示反对这种肤浅言论，但是同时在和奥格斯堡《总汇报》的一次争论中坦率承认，我以往的研究还不容许我对法兰西思潮的内容本身妄加评判。”不久后，马克思对社会问题和共产主义的兴趣，促使他参加了由赫斯发起、在科隆举行的关于社会主义俱乐部的定期讨论。他还潜心研究了施泰因、蒲鲁东、德萨米、勒鲁和孔西得朗的著作,更加确信有必要彻底地分析和具体把握现实。赫斯在《莱茵报》上对共产主义的宣传所引发的思想争论和反思，加速了马克思向社会主义思想的转变。

(II) Marx’s Limited Absorption of Hess’s Social Perspective

(二)马克思有限度地吸收了赫斯的社会视角

Faced with the “difficulty of material interests” and the “good will to go forward,” Marx recognized that his previous philosophical weapon of using Hegel’s concept of the “state” to critique society had failed. His urgent task was to explore how to supersede civil society and find a new subject to replace the rationality of the state. At this time, Feuerbach’s humanism provided Marx with a new clue, but Feuerbach “emphasized nature too much and politics too little.” After Marx moved to Paris and felt the real power of the workers’ movement, under the indirect influence of Hess, he recognized the new possibilities presented by the “social perspective” and the “proletariat” that communists demonstrated in reflecting on property and transforming society.

在“物质利益的难题”和“善良的前进愿望”面前，马克思认识到他以往用黑格尔的“国家”概念来批判社会的哲学武器失效了，他的当务之急是探索如何扬弃市民社会、寻找让位于国家理性的新的主体。这时费尔巴哈的人本主义为马克思提供了新的线索，但费尔巴哈“过多地强调自然而过少地强调政治”。马克思移居巴黎感受到工人运动的现实力量后，在赫斯间接的影响下，他认识到共产主义者在反思财产和改造社会时所展现出的“社会视角”和“无产阶级”具有的新可能性。

Hess’s acute sensitivity to reality made him realize that the solution to the problem of poverty lay in social revolution. After the Chartist movement in England, [12]12 Chartist movement: A working-class political movement in Britain from 1838 to 1848, demanding political reforms such as universal male suffrage and social rights. he very clearly pointed out that the disaster of the poverty problem in capitalist society was fundamental, and the path to a solution was not political change but social change; the task of the 19th century was not to liberate a part of society, but to liberate the whole of society, to eliminate the opposition between the destitute and the rich, and to achieve the unity of the state. Later, in his three articles in *Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz*, [13]13 *Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz*: A collection of essays published in Switzerland in 1843, in which Hess contributed articles developing his socialist ideas. Hess also emphasized that the most important thing was to carry out social change encompassing ideological, political, and economic transformation. Marx absorbed Hess’s social perspective and Feuerbach’s concept of the “species,” and in his two articles in the *Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher*, [14]14 *Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher*: A journal edited by Marx and Arnold Ruge in 1844, in which Marx published *On the Jewish Question* and *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction*, marking his turn toward communism. he initially answered Germany’s social problems, namely what kind of liberation to achieve and how to achieve it. Marx believed that in civil society, the real human being is divided into religious, political, and economic existences. After religious liberation, humans live a dual life: the life of a citizen in the political state and the private life in civil society. This is a manifestation of the alienation of the human species-essence. On the one hand, after political liberation, humans gain political freedom, but in actual civil society they remain constrained, while actual society is the true species-life of humans. On the other hand, the root of the split between the state and civil society lies in the alienation of the human species-essence. Thus, it is the human being in civil society that is the decisive force for self-transcendence. Therefore, human liberation can only be completed when the individual in actual society returns the abstract citizen to himself and becomes a species-being, and when humans recognize that their own inherent power is social power and no longer separate this social power from themselves in the form of political power.

赫斯对现实的敏锐感，让他意识到贫困问题的解决之道在于社会革命。英国宪章运动发生后，他十分明确地指出，资本主义社会贫困问题的灾难是根本性的，解决的途径不是政治变革，而是社会变革；19世纪的任务不是要解放社会的一部分，而是要解放整个社会，消除赤贫和富人之间的对立，实现国家的统一。后来，赫斯在《二十一印张》的三篇文章中也强调最重要的就是进行包括思想、政治、经济变革在内的社会变革。马克思吸收了赫斯的社会视角与费尔巴哈“类”的概念，在《德法年鉴》的两篇文章中初步回答了德国的社会问题，即实现什么样的解放和如何实现解放。马克思认为，在市民社会中，真正的人被分割成宗教、政治和经济的存在，宗教解放后人处于双重生活之中，即政治国家的公民生活与市民社会中的私人生活，这是人自身类本质异化的表现。一方面，在政治解放后，人获得政治自由，但在现实的市民社会中仍然受到束缚，而现实社会才是人真正的类生活；另一方面，国家与市民社会分裂的根源就在于人的类本质的异化，可见市民社会中的人才是自我突破的决定性力量。因此，只有当现实社会中的个人把抽象的公民复归于自身，并且成为类存在物时，只有当人认识到自己的固有力量就是社会力量，不再把社会力量以政治的形式同自身分离时，人的解放才能完成。

At this time, Marx had already discovered the positive factor and subject force of civil society, namely the “proletariat.” Surpassing the legal-philosophical logic of Hegel’s rational state with the logic of social emancipation became the philosophical starting point for the conception of socialism, and gave birth to a conception qualitatively different from Anglo-French socialist thought, taking the first step toward a specifically Marxian socialist theory.

这时，马克思已经发现市民社会的积极因素和主体力量即“无产阶级”,用社会解放逻辑超越黑格尔理性国家的法哲学逻辑，成为社会主义构想的哲学起点，并孕育了与英法社会主义思想相异质的构想，走向通往特殊的马克思社会主义理论的第一步。

(3) Marx critically accepted Hess’s method of combining multiple dialectical ideas

(三)马克思批判地接受了赫斯多元辩证的思想结合方法

French utopian socialism takes Enlightenment rationality as its theoretical premise, but Marx had already transcended Enlightenment rationality through his critique of legal philosophy; the philosophical basis for his analysis of practical problems at that time was Feuerbach’s humanist theory of alienation. To construct his own view of socialism, Marx still had to transform French socialism, converting it into a new socialism grounded in German philosophy. On this point, Marx critically inherited Hess’s method of synthesizing multiple dialectical elements, but sublated its utopian coloration.

法国空想社会主义的理论前提是启蒙理性，而马克思已经通过法哲学批判超越了启蒙理性，他当时分析现实问题的哲学基础是费尔巴哈的人道主义异化理论。要构建出自己的社会主义观，马克思还必须要改造法国社会主义，使其转化为在德国哲学基础上的新社会主义。在这点上，马克思批判地继承了赫斯多元辩证的思想融合方法，但扬弃了其乌托邦色彩。

The center of Hess’s theoretical construction was the relationship between philosophy and socialism. First, starting from the transformation of the mutual intelligibility of German and French philosophy, he took the philosophy of action as his entry point, emphasized free activity, and used Feuerbach’s humanism to lead toward practice, proposing that the world be transformed and the state of alienation be overcome through human action, thereby transforming the philosophical foundation of socialism. In addition, he pushed Feuerbach’s “sensuous man” toward “the activity of sensuous man,” injecting a dynamic process of activity into Feuerbach’s static concept of “man,” “so that Feuerbach’s humanism acquired a historical breadth.” This had a twofold significance for Marx: first, Marx had already analyzed civil society from the perspective of legal philosophy and consciously recognized the necessity of reclaiming man’s “species-being” and returning it to “real” man, while the process of the unity of the individual and the species in society is the communist movement itself, linking the species with socialism. Second, it directly propelled Marx’s reflection on the activity of man in the process of activity; however, beyond Hess’s “sensuous activity,” a material foundation had to be added. Therefore, Marx elevated the “species” to man’s free, conscious labor, clarifying that man is both the subject of labor and is generated in labor.

赫斯理论建构的中心是哲学与社会主义的关系问题。首先，他从德、法哲学互通性的改造入手，以行动哲学为切入，强调自由的活动，并以费尔巴哈的人本主义引向实践，提出通过人的行动来改造世界、摆脱异化状态，从而改造了社会主义哲学基础。此外，他将费尔巴哈“感性的人”推向“感性的人的活动”,把动态的活动过程注入费尔巴哈静止的“人”的概念，“使得费尔巴哈的人本学有了一种历史的广度”。这对于马克思来说有双重意义：其一，马克思已从法哲学上分析市民社会，自觉地认识到必须夺回人的“类存在”,使之回到“现实”的人手中，而在社会中个人与类的统一过程，就是共产主义运动本身，将类与社会主义联结。其二，直接推动了马克思对人在活动过程中的能动性的思考，不过在赫斯的“感性活动”之外，还必须加入物质基础，因此马克思将“类”提升为人的自由自觉的劳动，明确了人既是劳动主体，也在劳动中生成。

Second, Hess applied alienation to economic analysis, proposing the alienation of money, treating money as a relation of exchange, and arguing that this intercourse was the content of the species-essence, thereby launching a critique of the society of alienated intercourse and demonstrating the rationality of a communist society established on the basis of species-intercourse. This theoretical path linking philosophy, political economy, and socialism greatly inspired Marx. On the one hand, Hess’s *On the Essence of Money* prompted Marx to demonstrate from an economic perspective the communist theory he had only recently acquired; “under this influence, Marx now studied the problem of alienation not only from a socio-political viewpoint but also from a socio-economic one.” The sign of this is that in the *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844* (hereafter *Manuscripts*), Marx began to analyze the problem of alienation from an economic perspective, accurately placing the core concept of “labor” before people and dissecting it in detail, revealing the alienation of human labor and its four forms: the alienation of the worker from the product of labor, from the labor process, from the species-essence of man, and from other human beings. This analysis shifted the focus of critique from the sphere of exchange to the sphere of production, achieving a creative transformation of the theory of alienation. In the preface to the *Manuscripts*, Marx also mentioned that his critique of political economy “also made use of the works of German socialists. However, the rich and original German writings for this science, apart from Weitling’s works, are Hess’s several essays in the *Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz* and Engels’s *Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy* in the *Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher*.” On the other hand, in the *Manuscripts* Marx absorbed Hess’s argumentative logic of synthesizing multiple dialectical elements: extending Feuerbach’s theory of alienation to the economic and social realm, taking free, conscious labor as the essence of man, and through alienated labor and the sublation of alienated labor, achieving the return of man’s essence in communism, thereby demonstrating his own socialist theory. But soon afterward he began a thorough critique of Feuerbach, transforming the argumentative logic of communism from a humanist-alienation logic into a historical-genetic logic, thus making historical materialism the theoretical foundation of socialism.

其次，赫斯将异化运用于经济分析之中，提出货币异化，将货币作为交换关系，认为这种交往才是类本质的内容，从而展开对交往异化社会的批判，论证以类的交往关系建立起来的共产主义社会的合理性。这种哲学、政治经济学、社会主义相联系的理论路径给马克思很大启发。一方面，赫斯《论货币的本质》促使马克思从经济方面来论证自己在不久之前所获得的共产主义理论，“在这种影响之下，马克思现在不仅是从社会政治的观点，而且也从社会经济的观点来研究异化问题了。”其标志是，马克思在《1844年经济学哲学手稿》(以下简称《手稿》)中开始用经济视角来分析异化问题，准确地把“劳动”这一核心概念摆在人们面前，并进行详细地剖析，揭示出人的劳动异化及其四种表现形式：劳动者与劳动产品、劳动过程、人的类本质和他人之间的异化。这种分析将批判的焦点从交换领域转向生产领域，实现对异化理论的创造性转化。马克思《手稿》的序言中也曾提到，他对政治经济学的批判，“也利用了德国社会主义者的著作。但是，德国人为了这门科学而撰写的内容丰富而有独创性的著作，除去魏特林的著作，就要算《二十一印张》文集中赫斯的几篇论文和《德法年鉴》上恩格斯的《国民经济学批判大纲》”。另一方面，在《手稿》中马克思吸收了赫斯多元辩证思想结合的论证逻辑：以费尔巴哈的异化理论扩展到经济社会，把自由自觉的劳动作为人的本质，通过异化劳动以及异化劳动的扬弃，实现人本质的复归的共产主义，由此论证了自己的社会主义理论。但不久后他开始对费尔巴哈进行深入批判，将共产主义的论证思路也从人道主义异化逻辑转化为历史生成逻辑，从而将历史唯物主义作为社会主义的理论基石。

In sum, during the formation of young Marx’s socialist thought, he absorbed the positive elements of Hess’s philosophical communism. However, after the Silesian weavers’ uprising in June 1844, Hess and Marx went from “fellow travelers” to “separate paths”; Hess gradually became a representative of “true socialism,” while Marx, in the process of layer upon layer of critique of Hess and the speculative idealism of the Young Hegelians, continuously reflected, settled accounts, and transcended, thereby moving toward scientific socialism.

总的来说，在青年马克思社会主义思想形成的过程中，吸收了赫斯哲学共产主义思想的积极因素。但在1844年6月西里西亚纺织工人起义发生后，赫斯与马克思从“同路”到“分道”,赫斯渐渐成为“真正的社会主义”的代表，而马克思却在对赫斯及青年黑格尔派思辨唯心主义的层层批判过程中，不断地反思、清算、超越，从而走向科学社会主义。

IV. The Transcendence of Marx’s Socialist Thought over Hess

四、马克思社会主义思想对赫斯的超越

In 1845, Hess was invited by Marx and Engels to co-write *The German Ideology* (hereafter *The German Ideology*). Shortly after the writing of *The German Ideology* was completed, they broke off relations due to ideological differences. In fact, the differences in theoretical stance and methodology between Marx and Hess had long been latent in their thought. Although the formation of young Marx’s view of socialism was influenced by Hess’s thought, differences always existed on certain fundamental issues. When Marx placed the process of social development on material production, used political economy to investigate the laws of social movement, and truly found the subject force and the path of realization of socialism, he had already far surpassed Hess.

1845年赫斯受马克思恩格斯邀请一同完成《德意志意识形态》(以下简称《形态》)的写作，在《形态》写作结束后不久，他们就由于思想分歧而宣告决裂。其实，马克思和赫斯的理论立场和方法论的差别早就隐藏在思想之中，青年马克思社会主义观的形成虽然受到过赫斯思想的影响，但在一些基本问题上始终存在差异。当马克思将社会发展过程置于物质生产之上，用政治经济学探究社会运动的规律，真正找到社会主义的主体力量与实现路径时，他已远远超越了赫斯。

(A) The Positive Factor of Civil Society: The Dialectic of Labor

(一)市民社会的积极因素：劳动辩证法

Marx’s alienation of labor and Hess’s alienation of intercourse are both philosophical generalizations based on economic research; their direct common intellectual source is Hegel’s theory of civil society. But how to construct a theory of alienation to analyze capitalist society and find positive factors led the two down two different paths.

马克思的劳动异化与赫斯的交往异化都是在经济学研究基础上的哲学概括，其背后直接的思想来源都是黑格尔的市民社会理论，但如何构建起异化理论来分析资本主义社会并找到积极因素，两人却走向了两条不同的道路。

Hegel’s civil society presents a dual aspect: on the one hand, it is understood as a collection of atomized individuals, whose connections with each other take “self-interest” as their sole fundamental purpose; on the other hand, when civil society is fully developed, its inner dynamic promotes population growth and industrial progress. In this process, civil society, in pursuit of profit maximization, spontaneously realizes two “universalizations”: the universalization of the connections humans establish based on needs, and the universalization of the means and methods for satisfying these needs. Here Hess saw the former, treating civil society as a “world of petty commodities” of fraud, concealment, and mutual struggle, and as an inhuman society of mutually isolated individuals existing for egoistic purposes. Hess absorbed Hegel’s civil society in its dimension of the ethics of intercourse, and also cited the theory of alienation based on the human essence, combining the two to successfully develop his theory of money, emphasizing that in the state of human alienation, intercourse is indirect and inhuman, and that an external symbol for the exchange of material products must be invented; without this monetary means, intercourse cannot take place. Thus, the civil society that Hess focused on was limited exclusively to the sphere of commodity circulation mediated by money, completely ignoring the objective activity of the commodity production process. He wholly negated capitalist society and also overlooked the real activity within it. In fact, Hess rejected capitalism from the very outset, which instead hindered his internal understanding of capitalism, allowing him to remain only at the level of external critique, unable to find from within a path with possibility.

黑格尔的市民社会呈现一种双重面向：一方面，它被理解为原子化个体的集合，个体间的联系仅以“自身利益”为根本目的;另一方面，当市民社会得以充分发展时，其内在动力会推动人口增长与工业进步。在这一进程中，市民社会为了追求利润最大化，会自发地实现两大“普遍化”:一是人类基于需求而建立联系的普遍化，二是满足这些需求的手段与方法的普遍化。这里赫斯看到了前者，把市民社会看作欺诈、隐瞒、互相争夺的“小商品世界”,以及相互孤立、为利己的目的而存在的非人社会。赫斯吸收了黑格尔交往伦理维度的市民社会，还引用了立足于人类本质的异化理论，将两者结合成功展开了货币论，强调在人的异化状态中，交往是间接的、非人的，必须发明物质产品交换的外在象征，没有这种货币手段就无法进行交往。可见，赫斯所关注的市民社会只局限于以货币为中介的商品流通领域，而完全忽视了作为商品生产过程的对象活动。他全盘否定了资本主义社会，也忽视了其中现实的能动性。其实，赫斯从一开始就拒斥资本主义，反而妨碍了他对资本主义的内在理解，只能停留于外部批判的水准，无法从内在找到具有可能性的道路。

The key point where Marx surpassed Hess lay in his grasp of the dialectics of civil society, especially the active side within civil society, namely the positive factor of individual labor. Marx absorbed Hegel’s view that “labor is not only the transformation of the objective world, but also the self-transformation of man himself.” Marx discerned the positive value of Hegel’s conception of labor, namely that it “grasps the essence of labor and conceives of objective man—true, real man—as the result of his own labor”; at the same time, he inherited Feuerbach’s principle of sensuous objectivity and theory of alienation, successfully constructing a theory of alienated labor and distinguishing between objectified labor and alienated labor. He clearly pointed out that the significance of objectified labor lies in the fact that man not only creates the material conditions of life, but also creates social relations and human history, realizes self-generation, and manifests the subjective power of man, emphasizing that “for socialist man, the whole of what is called world history is nothing but the creation of man by human labor.” [19]19 *The German Ideology* (《德意志意识形态》): A work co-authored by Marx and Engels in 1845–1846, in which they first systematically elaborated the basic principles of historical materialism. In addition, he also understood labor and social activity as the objectivity of the objects of activity (nature and society), that is, the products of objectification are objective existences independent of the subject; although labor products and social relations are products of man, they possess greater objectivity, and the subject can have genuine subjectivity only when it is internalized in the object. Thus, private property is the premise of alienated labor, and the overcoming of alienation is possible only through the transformation of social relations.

马克思超越赫斯的关键之处，在于他把握了市民社会的辩证法，特别是市民社会中能动的一面，即个人劳动的积极因素。马克思吸取了黑格尔“劳动不仅是对客观世界的改造，也是人自身的自我改造”的观点。马克思辨析出黑格尔劳动观的积极价值，即“抓住了劳动的本质，把对象性的人、现实的因而是真正的人理解为人自己的劳动的结果”;同时又继承了费尔巴哈感性对象性原则和异化理论，成功构建起异化劳动理论，区分了对象化劳动和异化劳动。他明确指出对象化劳动的意义就在于，人不仅创造了物质生活条件，而且创造了社会关系和人类历史，实现了自我生成，展现了人的主体力量，强调“对社会主义的人来说，整个所谓世界历史不外是人通过人的劳动而诞生的过程”。另外，他也把劳动、社会的活动理解为活动对象(自然与社会)的客观性，即对象化的产物是独立于主体的客观存在，劳动产品与社会关系虽是人的产物但更具客观性，主体只有内化于客体时才具有真正的主体性，可见私有制是异化劳动的前提，异化的克服也只有通过变革社会关系才有可能。

In labor, Marx embodied the unity of subject and object, using the dialectics of labor to reveal the negative side of exploitation, oppression, and alienated state suffered by man in capitalist society, while also affirming capitalism as a progressive force that promotes the development of productive forces and fosters social association. He pointed out that “the transcendence of self-alienation follows the same road as self-alienation itself”; alienated labor and private property are both necessary and transitory forms at a certain stage of historical development. Thus, starting from an internal understanding of capitalism, Marx absorbed the positive factors of civil society, brought out the profound connotation of the dialectics of labor, took productive labor as the material foundation of social and historical development, made it the starting point of the new materialist theory, completely eliminated the utopian color of communism, and pointed out the new direction of the real movement of communism.

马克思在劳动中体现了主客体的统一，用劳动辩证法揭示了资本主义社会中人所受到剥削、压迫、异己状态的否定的一面，同时也肯定了资本主义作为推动生产力发展、促进社会联合的普遍性的进步力量。他指出“异化的扬弃同自我异化走的是同一条道路”,异化劳动和私有制都是历史发展一定阶段的必然、暂时的形式。可见，马克思是从对资本主义的内在理解出发，吸收了市民社会的积极因素，发挥出劳动辩证法的深刻内涵，把生产性劳动作为社会历史发展的物质基础，成为新唯物主义理论的起点，彻底消除了共产主义的空想色彩，指明了共产主义现实运动的新方向。

(II) The Elevation of Political Economy: The Relationship between Intercourse and Production

(二)政治经济学的提升：交往与生产的关系

Both Marx and Hess once regarded intercourse as the essence of man. Starting from philosophical humanism and naturalism, Hess defined intercourse as the species-essence inherent in man, and discovered the inversion and alienation of people’s intercourse in real activity. It

马克思与赫斯都曾把交往作为人的本质。赫斯从哲学人本主义和自然主义出发，将交往确定为人与生俱来的类本质，发现了现实活动中人们交往的颠倒和异化，可见赫斯并不是以政治经济学入手考察交往现象，而是以类哲学来提升经济学，这种交往只能是人本主义价值悬设上的抽象交往。

In studying the political economist James Mill’s content on money as a medium of exchange, Marx, following Hess’s line of thought, likewise defined social intercourse as the essence of man. But he creatively added the crucial link of “private property” to the alienation of intercourse that Hess had revealed. The alienation of money in the relation between man and man is realized through the externalization of private property itself: “the mediating movement of the man engaged in exchange is not a social, human movement, not a human relation; it is the abstract relation of private property to private property.” The relation between man and man is not the simple rupture that Hess described, but an inversion concealed by the relation between thing and thing. The first step in the alienation of intercourse should be the externalization of private property, and it is from this externalization of private property that the alienation of relations among men is formed. And private property is, in the final analysis, the product of labor; therefore, the addition of the link of “private property” is the key to the transition from the alienation of intercourse to the alienation of labor. Marx then points out that “the premise of the exchange relation is that labor becomes directly wage-earning labor,” shifting from a discussion of intercourse relations to a critique of alienated labor, and he develops this discussion concretely in the *Manuscripts*.

马克思在研究国民经济学家詹姆斯·穆勒关于货币作为交换中介的内容时，沿着赫斯的思路，同样把社会交往规定为人的本质，但他在赫斯所揭示的交往异化中创造性地增加了“私有财产”这一关键环节。货币对人与人关系的异化是通过私有财产本身的外化来实现的，“进行交换活动的人的中介运动，不是社会的、人的运动，不是人的关系，它是私有财产对私有财产的抽象的关系”。人与人的关系并不是赫斯所描述的那种简单的割裂，而是被物与物的关系所掩盖后的颠倒，交往异化的第一步应是私有财产的外化，再由私有财产的外化形成人们之间关系的异化。而私有财产归根结底是劳动的产物，因此“私有财产”这一环节的加入是交往异化向劳动异化过渡的关键。马克思接着指出，“交换关系的前提是劳动成为直接谋生的劳动”,从讨论交往关系转向了对异化劳动的批判，并在《手稿》中具体展开相关讨论。

The focus on productive labor shows that Marx had already taken a great step toward reality. Once Marx saw that labor production is a process of continuous becoming and is limited by objective historical conditions, he would discover that it is not man’s own labor, but objective material production, that historically constructs the present reality. In *The German Ideology*, Marx clearly states that “production itself is premised on the intercourse of individuals with one another. The form of this intercourse is again determined by production.” Production determines the form of intercourse. Marx places material production above intercourse and points out that the premise of history is “real individuals, their activity and their material conditions of life, including those which they find already existing and those produced by their own activity.” At this point, the “intercourse” Marx discusses is already completely different from Hess’s abstract intercourse; it is an intercourse closely interwoven with production, constructing history, and it extends into the concept of “form of intercourse.” Further, taking “real individuals” as his starting point, Marx proceeds from the various stages of the historical development of the division of labor among men, moving from the distant to the near, and finally alights on the analysis of the mode of production under capitalist conditions, thereby displaying a schema of historical development with “productive forces—forms of intercourse” as its analytical structure, which constitutes the explanatory framework and core principle of historical materialism.

对生产劳动的关注表明马克思已经向现实迈出了一大步，一旦马克思看到劳动生产是一个不断生成的过程并受到客观历史条件的限制时，他就会发现不是人自身的劳动，而是客观的物质生产历史地建构了当下的现实。在《形态》中，马克思明确表示“生产本身又是以个人彼此之间的交往为前提的。这种交往的形式又是由生产决定的。”生产决定交往形式，马克思将物质生产置于交往之上，并指出历史的前提是“现实的个人，是他们的活动和他们的物质生活条件，包括他们已有的和由他们自己的活动创造出来的物质生活条件”。这时马克思讨论的“交往”,与赫斯抽象的交往已截然不同，它是与生产紧密交织、构建历史的交往，并延伸出“交往形式”的概念。进一步地，马克思以“现实的人”为出发点，从人类劳动分工的历史发展各个阶段入手，由远及近，落脚于对资本主义条件下生产方式的分析，从而展示出以“生产力—交往形式”作为分析结构的历史发展图式，构成了历史唯物主义的解释框架和核心原则。

In *On the Essence of Money*, Hess used the important categories of money, intercourse, private property, and productive forces that form the backbone of historical materialism. But his understanding of political economy remained superficial; “once one reaches the level of historical analysis of real society, the application of these categories fails.” Marx, through his study of the political economy of Smith, Say, Mill, Ricardo, and others, engaged in a deep reflection on these categories, especially elevating the relation between production and intercourse. He scientifically analyzed the inner mechanism of social-historical development, which became an important theoretical cornerstone for constructing scientific socialism.

赫斯在《论货币的本质》中使用了货币、交往、私有制、生产力这些构成历史唯物主义主干的重要范畴，但他对于政治经济学的理解还停留于表面，“一旦对现实社会进行历史分析这样的水准上，这些范畴的运用就失败了”。而马克思通过对斯密、萨伊、穆勒、李嘉图等人政治经济学的研究，对这些范畴进行了深入地思考，特别是对生产与交往关系的提升，科学分析了社会历史发展的内在机理，成为构建科学社会主义的重要理论基石。

(3) The Mode of Realizing Socialism: From Spiritual Action to Practical Movement

(三)实现社会主义的方式：从精神行动到实践运动

The difference between Marx and Hess on the mode of realizing socialism lies to a great extent in the difference in their philosophical positions. Hess attempted to overcome the speculative nature of Hegelian philosophy and turn speculative philosophy into a philosophy of action. Thus he retreated from the “absolute spirit” back to the “self,” taking spirit as the subject of man. He overcame the “subordination to spirit”—directing man’s object-oriented activity toward the return of his own spirit—but he neglected man’s “subordination to matter,” and also overlooked the importance of man’s activity in creating material objects. He failed to see the unique significance of material wealth, and could only, within the abstract totality of mankind, call for a “union of love” in order to realize a harmonious state of direct intercourse between man and man.

马克思与赫斯关于社会主义实现方式的差别，很大程度上在于哲学立场的差别。赫斯试图克服黑格尔哲学的思辨性，把思辨哲学变成行动哲学，于是就从“绝对精神”退回到“自我”,以精神作为人的主体。他克服了“对精神的隶属”——将人的对象活动引向自身精神的回归，但却忽略了人“对物质的隶属”,也忽视了人创造物质对象活动的重要性，没有看到物质财富的独特意义，就只能在抽象的全体人类中，呼唤“爱的联合”,以此实现人与人直接交往的和谐状态。

Hess’s line of thought at most abstractly developed human activity, but the essence of human real life and socio-historical development does not lie in spiritual activity; there is a deeper source of historical genesis—human labor and production. In fact, these two issues complement each other: once the location of the subject’s power is found, the path to socialism becomes clear. In “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” Marx already mentioned that the real possibility of German liberation lay in the proletariat, but he had no concrete thoughts on how to carry out the revolution. Shortly thereafter, in Paris, Marx delved deeply into the study of political economy, recognizing that the subjective essence of wealth is labor, and pointing out that the sublation of private property is the empirical and theoretical foundation of the entire revolutionary movement. In *The Holy Family*, Marx examined workers’ labor from the perspective of production practice; at this point, workers were truly regarded as the class that creates everything, while he also emphasized that the birthplace of history is material production, which in capitalist society is industry. Soon Marx’s theoretical focus shifted from alienated labor to practice. He separated industry from the capitalist social environment, abstracted industry from the height of a socio-historical view, and proposed the category of practice as objective material activity. This practice is both actively creative and constrained by natural conditions and socio-historical conditions. To break through these constraints, it is necessary to change people’s material living conditions and real social relations, that is, to develop productive forces and transform relations of production. It is precisely because the relations of production under capitalist conditions restrict the development of productive forces. Therefore, workers, as the subjects of universal production and representatives of advanced productive forces, must transform the relations of production through the practical movement of revolution, thereby liberating and developing productive forces, establishing a community of universal intercourse among people, and realizing communism.

赫斯的这一思路，至多抽象地发展了人的能动性，但人的现实生活和社会历史发展的本质不在于精神活动，还有着更深层次的历史发生源——人类的劳动与生产。实际上，这两个问题相辅相成，一旦找到主体力量所在，社会主义的实现途径就呼之欲出。在《〈黑格尔法哲学批判〉导言》中，马克思就提到德国解放的实际可能性就在于无产阶级，但对如何进行革命还没有具体的思考。不久后马克思在巴黎深入研究政治经济学，认识到财富的主体本质是劳动，并指出私有财产的扬弃才是整个革命运动的经验基础和理论基础。在《神圣家族》中，马克思从生产实践的方面来考察工人的劳动，这时工人真正被看作创造了一切的阶级，同时也强调了历史的发源地是物质生产，这种生产在资本主义社会就是工业。很快马克思的理论焦点由异化劳动转向了实践，他把工业从资本主义社会环境中剥离出来，从社会历史观的高度对工业进行抽象，提出作为客观物质活动的实践范畴。这种实践既具有能动创造性又受到自然条件和社会历史条件的限制，要突破这种限制，必须改变人的物质生活条件和现实社会关系，也就是发展生产力和变革生产关系，而正是由于资本主义条件下的生产关系限制了生产力的发展。因此，工人作为普遍生产的主体、先进生产力的代表，必须通过革命的实践运动变革生产关系，以此解放发展生产力，建立人们之间普遍交往的共同体，实现共产主义。

Hess’s philosophical stance was always confined to subjective idealism; he retreated from the socio-economic sphere to Feuerbach’s “authentic love,” pursuing a “union of love” among people. In contrast, Marx’s historical materialism, centered on practice, continuously delved into the material and social historical foundation, demonstrating that humans have the capacity to transform social existence, and ultimately found the subject force of communism and its mode of realization—the practical movement of the proletarian revolution.

赫斯的哲学立场始终囿于主观唯心主义，从社会经济领域退回到了费尔巴哈“本真的爱”,去追寻人与人之间“爱的联合”。而马克思以实践为核心的历史唯物主义，不断深入物质与社会的历史基础，展现了人具有改造社会存在的能力,最终找到共产主义的主体力量及其实现方式——无产阶级革命的实践运动。

Conclusion

结 论

Overall, Hess’s commendable quality lies in his courage to break out of the cage of speculation and implement humanism, but he failed to completely break free from idealist conceptions of history, stopping at a preliminary combination of philosophy and economics, lacking inherent historicity and concrete theoretical investigation, leading to a split between theory and practice. Young Marx, when entering the context of socialism, absorbed the essence of dialectics and the core of materialism through critical intellectual dialogue, delved deeply into the study of political economy, internalized socialist practice into the theoretical logic and conscious concepts of philosophy and economics, laid the theoretical foundation of practical materialism and political economy, and constructed scientific socialism.

总的来说，赫斯的可贵之处在于他勇于打破思辨的牢笼，贯彻人本主义，但却未能彻底摆脱唯心史观，止步于哲学与经济学的初步结合，缺乏内在的历史性和具体化的理论考察，导致了理论与实践的分裂。而青年马克思在进入社会主义语境时，通过批判性地思想对话，吸收了辩证法的精髓和唯物主义的核心，深入政治经济学的研究，将社会主义实践内化为哲学与经济学的理论逻辑和自觉理念，奠定了实践唯物主义与政治经济学的理论基础，构建起科学社会主义。

Young Marx’s reception and transcendence of Hess demonstrate the trajectory of socialism’s generation from ethical ideals to scientific theory. This trajectory also responds to today’s various trends of thought that reduce socialism to a value utopia, dogmatic communism, or social concern—trends that represent a regression from Marx’s scientific socialism. Communism is by no means a “state of affairs which is to be established” or an “ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself”; it is the *real movement* which abolishes the present state of things under existing conditions. The consciousness of the sphere of life should be reduced to life itself; the development of social history lies in the interweaving of human productive activity and intercourse activity. Marx’s intellectual break with Hess can be regarded as part of what Althusser called the “epistemological break”—Marx discarded Hess’s ethical socialism and turned to studying the objective laws of the mode of production and class struggle. However, scientific socialism does not reject subjective value; rather, it opposes setting it in opposition to objective logic and economic method. Just as Marx’s disagreement with the “true socialists” did not lie in the “philosophical-ethical method of interpretation,” but in the latter’s separation of this method from the empirical facts of the real movement; it did not lie in the latter’s discussion of “human essence,” but in the latter’s transformation of the concrete “human” into an abstract “human.” In *The German Ideology*, Marx’s “free and comprehensive development of the individual” still retains a humanist hue, and in the *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844*, “labor as the essence of man” serves as a precursor to scientific theory. Thus, Marx’s view of socialism is essentially a unity of ethical value and scientific logic. (Author affiliation: Fudan University)

青年马克思对赫斯的接受和超越，展现了社会主义从伦理理想到科学理论的生成轨迹，这一轨迹也回应了今日种种将社会主义还原为价值乌托邦、教条化共产主义和社会关怀的思潮，这种思潮是对马克思科学社会主义的倒退。共产主义绝不是“应当确立的状况”和“与之相适应的理想”,而是在现有的条件下消灭现存状况的现实运动。生活领域的意识应归结于生活本身，社会历史的发展就在于人的生产活动和交往活动的交织之中。马克思与赫斯的思想决裂，可被视为阿尔都塞所谓“断裂”的一部分——马克思摒弃了赫斯式的伦理社会主义，转而研究生产方式与阶级斗争的客观规律，但科学社会主义并不排斥主体价值，而是反对将其与客观逻辑、经济学方法对立。正如马克思与“真正的社会主义者”的分歧，并不在于“哲学—伦理的阐释方法”,而在于后者使用的这种方法与现实运动的经验事实相分离；并不在于后者谈论“人的本质”,而在于后者把具体的“人”变为抽象的“人”。马克思在《形态》中“人的自由而全面发展”依然保有人道主义的色彩，《手稿》中作为“劳动是人的本质”又是科学理论的前序，由此可见，马克思的社会主义观本质上是伦理价值与科学逻辑的统一。（作者单位：复旦大学）

Online editor: Paul

网络编辑：保罗