Opening Polemic Against Young Hegelians (Verbal Irony)
The opening pages of The German Ideology showcase Marx’s ironic wit at its finest and most vicious. Through his dramatic rendering of the Young Hegelians’ philosophical “revolution” in language fit to depict an actual revolution, Marx is extremely effective at demonstrating the absurd self-importance of their understanding of the impact of their philosophical debates.
“Saint Max” Stirner (Verbal Irony)
The Young Hegelians in general, and Max Stirner in particular, saw themselves as radical partially because they espoused what they thought of as a militant secularism, which makes Marx’s persistent use of ironic religious honorifics such as “Saint” or “Blessed” Max Stirner especially biting. Beyond mere sarcasm and needling, Marx’s use of irony here is meant to highlight the contradiction between the apparent secularism of Young Hegelian thought and its actual reproduction of a fundamentally religious conception of the world as governed by quasi-divine “ideals.” It also serves to sharpen and add rhetorical weight to his accusations of dogmatic nature of Young Hegelian thought, which, cloistered off from reality, imagines itself “pure” of the corruption of material interests.
Capitalism and Freedom (Situational Irony)
A deep irony, thematic rather than rhetorical, that runs throughout Marx’s argument is that, while capitalism as a form of social organization is antithetical to human freedom and produces a form of domination in some ways more total and oppressive than any seen so far in human history, it simultaneously, also for the first time in human history, creates the necessary preconditions for a truly free society. By emphasizing the irony in this state of affairs, Marx draws the reader’s attention to a crucial element of his analysis of capitalism as a system that, unlike its predecessors, is rife with internal contradictions. These contradictions—such as the fact that the capitalist division of labor simultaneously causes a massive expansion of the productive forces available to humanity, even as it similarly constricts the sphere of activity of the vast majority of individual humans—make revolution, though not necessarily communist revolution, an intrinsic feature and persistent possibility of and within the system.
