Abstract
Marx and Engels's analysis of German society can be fruitfully viewed as a materialist adaptation of earlier Romantic views on German special development. The failure to develop a strong bourgeois class meant that Germany's pattern of development differed markedly from the general theory outlined in Part One of the Manifesto. If the bourgeoisie could not further the development of society, that task necessarily fell to the German proletariat, thereby placing them at the head of the international workers' movement. Thus the initial relative backwardness of the German working class could be transformed into a position prior to that of England, the country that industrialized first, and France, where the most complete bourgeois revolution had occurred.
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