HESS, MOSES
(1812–1877)

Moses Hess, the socialist journalist and organizer and intellectual precursor of Zionism, often called the father of German socialism, was born in Bonn of Jewish parents. A left-Hegelian, he was a mentor and coworker of Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, and Ferdinand Lassalle. He led radical workers' groups in Paris and Belgium, edited the famous Rheinische Zeitung, and was the leader of the "true," or "philosophical," German socialists of the 1840s. Later he became Lassalle's chief organizer in the Rhineland and a foreign correspondent for European and American newspapers. His published books and countless essays include works on the philosophy of history and on socialism, a famous call for a Jewish state, and a comprehensive theory of the laws of science, society, and socialism.

Hess used the principles of Benedict de Spinoza, G. W. F. Hegel, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte to demonstrate the inevitability and justice of a society lacking distinctions of class and wealth, without "contradictions" between private passion and public law, and without external compulsion. Hess took this to be both the social expression of pantheism and the inevitable result of the dialectical development of the self-realization of the Absolute Spirit in history. This was the theme of his early work, Die Heilige Geschichte der Menschheit (Stuttgart, 1837). Later, under the influence of Ludwig Feuerbach, Hess rejected Hegelian transcendentalism. He then created a "philosophy of the deed," based on a belief in the human spirit as the unconditioned ultimate reality. He stressed the creative power of man and man's historical "alienation" of that power to various mythical transcendent powers—God, the state, fate, or, in Hess's day, the laws of history and economics. Hess insisted that there are no objective limits to man's power to create a society free from exploitation and compulsion.

Marx and Engels attacked this kind of moralistic and philosophical socialism (and later Hess himself) as inadequate to the harsh realities of economic determinism and the class struggle. The influence of Marx and the failure of romantic idealism in the widespread revolutions of 1848 helped to convert Hess from idealism to materialism. He now spoke of ideas as the "reflex" of material conditions and the class struggle, and he predicted the inevitable termination of the economic "contradictions of capitalism" in overproduction, proletarian misery, depression, revolution, and finally, socialism.

In the end, however, Hess became pragmatic. He rejected dialectical materialism as he had rejected dialectical idealism. He worked with Lassalle to found German social democracy, and like Lassalle he hoped for radical social reform through universal suffrage and the nationalization of the means of production. And it was in this spirit, not Marx's, that the German Social Democratic Party started its career. In the 1860s, fearful of the future of the Jews of Europe, Hess worked for a Jewish and socialist state in Palestine.

See also Dialectical Materialism; Engels, Friedrich; Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas; Fichte, Johann Gottlieb; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Lassalle, Ferdinand; Marx, Karl; Socialism; Spinoza, Benedict (Baruch) de.

Bibliography

works by hess

Die europäische Triarchie. Leipzig, 1841.

Jüdische Schriften. Edited by Theodor Zlocisti. Berlin: Lamm, 1905.

Rom und Jerusalem. Leipzig, 1862. Translated by M. Waxman as Rome and Jerusalem, New York: Bloch, 1918.

Sozialistische Aufsätze, 1841–1847. Edited by Theodor Zlocisti. Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1920.

Moses Hess Briefwechsel. Edited by Edmund Silberner. The Hague: Mouton, 1959.

The Revival of Israel: Rome and Jerusalem, the Last Nationalist Question. Translated by M. Waxman. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

works on hess

Avineri, Shlomo. Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism. New York: New York University Press, 1985.

Berlin, Isaiah. The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess. Cambridge, U.K.: Heffer, 1959.

Koltun-Fromm, Ken. Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Lukács, Georg. "Moses Hess und die Probleme der idealistischen Dialectik." Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterwegung 12 (1926): 105–155.

Weiss, John. Moses Hess: Utopian Socialist. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1960.

Zlocisti, Theodor. Moses Hess, der Vorkämpfer des Sozialismus und Zionismus. 2nd ed. Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1921.

John Weiss (1967)

Bibliography updated by Philip Reed (2005)