The Holy Family After rendering most substantial services to
self-consciousness by humiliating itself to the extent of
nonsense in foreign languages, and thereby at the same time
freeing the world from pauperism, Criticism still further
humiliates itself to the extent of nonsense in practice and
history. It masters "English questions of the day" and gives us
a genuinely critical outline of the history of English industry.
Criticism, which is self-sufficient, and complete and perfect in
itself, naturally cannot recognise history as it really took
place, for that would mean recognising the base mass in all its
mass-like mass nature, whereas the problem is precisely to
redeem the mass from its mass nature. History is therefore freed
from its mass nature, and Criticism, which has a free attitude
to its object, calls to history: "You ought to have happened in
such and such a way!" All the laws of Criticism have
retrospective force: prior to the decrees of Criticism, history
behaved quite differently from how it di