This appraisal of the Revolutions of 1848, written at the end of the nineteenth century by a follower of Marx, encapsulates Bauer's own estimation of the emancipatory prospects of the movement, despite the vehement disagreements between these former allies. The nature of the new goals and the new ways has remained a subject of controversy, and widely divergent assessments have continued to be produced. Among the array of issues raised by the Revolutions of 1848, the participants themselves agreed on the vital political importance of the social question, the existence of new forms of poverty and resistance linked to the end of the old agrarian order and the beginnings of capitalist industrial production. They disagreed violently on its causes and its solution.

It has not been recognised to what extent the social question shapes the work of Bruno Bauer, especially in the later years of the Vormärz. Since 1843, Bauer had posed the relation of political and social emancipation as an object of critical theory. Even before the polemics occasioned by the publication of Marx's Holy Family, Bauer was responding to the emergence of the social question, which was a determinant of political debate in Germany, as elsewhere in Europe.