THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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back far more to Fichte's active deeds than forward to a comprehension of the economic­material factors of history. He adopted Marx's economic­materialist
interpretation of history, but almost at the same time accused Marx and Engels of having ‘exchanged the nebulous standpoint of German philosophy for the narrow and
petty standpoint of English economics’. Economics was thus defined by Hess himself in the narrow sense, not in the total social sense of Marx; he regarded it as the
typical class science of the bourgeoisie. Consequently even ‘energy and will’, the driving forces in dialectics activistically introduced by Hess, were not primarily
understood in terms of radical economic change but ethically, approximating to Fichte's active deeds, and finally in terms of racial theory. Alongside the proletariat,
which is still celebrated as the real subject of radical practice, race was the shaping force of history for the later Moses Hess. Of course, Marx and Engels also
discussed race, as a kind of inner aspect of nature, and this must not be forgotten. In a letter of 1894, Engels acknowledged race ‘as an economic factor’, and Marx
also declared economic development to be ‘dependent on the favourable nature of the circumstances, on the racial character’. There were nations with more or less
‘temperament and disposition for capitalist production’, and Marx names the Turks among the less disposed. But Marx and Engels made race neither into an
intrinsically determining factor nor into a constant factor within history; racial fetishist ideas are totally smashed. The racial disposition is also historically redisposed again
and again in Marx by man's work: ‘Because he acts through this movement on the nature outside him and changes it, he also changes his own nature at the same time.’
It is different in the case of Moses Hess, different because apart from appearing as an economic factor race also appears in his work as a factor independently shaping
ideology, even with the same economic substructure: and for him the strongest spiritual race is and remains Jewish. There have been several small Near Eastern nations
with a fairly similar agrarian economy and political constitution but, Moses Hess adds, ‘only the Jews have carried the banner which the nations are following today’. It
is the moral­prophetic banner, and only for its sake, for the sake of the inscription: Zion, are Jews to be planted in their old soil again. Thus Zionism wanted this to be
done on the basis of Zion and not on that of a chance sojourn of the Jews in Palestine two thousand years ago: ‘Carry your banner high, my people’, Hess demands in
‘Rome and Jerusalem’ — ‘The living corn is stored in you which, like the seed corns in Egyptian mummies, has lain dormant for thousands of years but has not lost its
powers of germination … Only from national rebirth will