Karl Grün (1817–1887)

German petty-bourgeois publicist; one of the chief representatives of “true socialism”.

Grün was born in 1817, in Germany. In his youth, Grün once believed in Hegelian philosophy and was a typical Young Hegelian. From 1842 to 1843, Grün was the editor-in-chief of the bourgeois radical newspaper Mannheimer Abendzeitung (Mannheim Evening News). In 1843, he met Hess and was influenced by the thought of “true socialism”, of which he later became the chief representative. In December 1844, he published an article entitled “Feuerbach and the Socialists” in the Deutsches Bürgerbuch (German Citizen’s Book). In May 1845, he edited and published in Darmstadt Neue Anekdota, which included Hess’s The Social Movement in France and Belgium as well as his own Movement of Production, The Socialism and Communism of Contemporary France. A Contribution to the Contemporary History by L. Stein, T. Mundt’s History of Society, T. Oelckers The Movement of Socialism and Communism, etc. From August to September 1845, he published another book, the preface to the multi-volume history of socialism, The Social Movement in France and Belgium. In 1848, he served as a member of the Prussian Constituent Assembly, belonging to the left wing; in 1849 he was a member of the Prussian Second Chamber. From 1851 Grün was exiled to Belgium, returning to Germany in 1861, where he was professor of the history of art, literature, and philosophy at the School of Commerce and Higher Crafts in Frankfurt (1862–1865). In 1874 he published a collection of Feuerbach’s letters and a posthumous work. He died in 1887.

The representative work where Grün expounded on his “true socialism” thought is The Social Movement in France and Belgium. In this work, Grün made a comparative analysis of the historical development of French utopian socialist theory of Saint-Simon, Fourier, and others as well as classical German philosophical theory of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Feuerbach , and others, and from the, and made an evaluation of the development of these two theories from the standpoint of “true socialism” with the so-called understanding of the “real” (or “true”) nature of man as its ground. According to Grün, both French socialist theory and German philosophical theory were “one-sided”, “superficial” and “unsatisfactory”. In Grün’s view, Germany’s national conditions were different from those of England and France, and German socialist thought came directly from the progress of philosophical theory and resulted from the self-evolution of “thought” rather than being pushed forward by “external needs”. Starting from the abstract human nature and humanism, Grün agitated for class peace and co-operation, and advocated the replacement of class struggle with a supra-class “charity” and “philanthropy”, so as to realize human emancipation. He strongly opposed class struggle and violent revolution and denied the necessity of a democratic revolution in Germany. The “true socialism” advocated by Grün represented the interests of the German petty-bourgeoisie, which has an essential difference from the scientific socialism advocated by Marx and Engels. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels criticized the point of view of “true socialism” represented by Grün. In his article On Proudhon, Marx gave Grün a biting satire: “After my expulsion from Paris. Mr Karl Grün continued what I had begun. As a teacher of German philosophy he also had the advantage over me that he himself understood nothing about it.”