ABSTRACT
Moses Hess played an important part in the young Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s journalistic and other writing endeavours as well as in their conversion to communism. In the view of both Marx and Engels, the communist revolution required the joint efforts of the most developed nations. It was Hess who injected the proposal of a triple alliance of the main ‘civilised countries’ of Europe into the communist movement, but he was not the proposal’s inventor. Hess predicted a wholly new kind of emancipatory revolution in England that would quickly trigger similar revolutions in France and Germany. The three countries would then have to join up in a ‘European triple alliance’. Engels added that the revolution in these countries would have a profound effect on the rest of the world, where developments would be accelerated: ‘It is a universal revolution and will therefore, accordingly, have a universal range’.
