Bruno Bauer, The Jewish Question, Braunschweig, 1843
The German Jews want emancipation. What kind of emancipation? Civil, political emancipation.
Bruno Bauer answers them: No one in Germany is politically emancipated. We are not free ourselves. How shall we liberate you? You Jews are egoists when you claim a special emancipation for yourselves as Jews. As Germans, you should work for the political emancipation of Germany, as men, for the emancipation of mankind; and you should feel the particular form of your oppression and shame not as an exception to the rule but rather as its confirmation.
Or do Jews desire to be put on an equal footing with Christian subjects? If so, they recognize the Christian state as legitimate, as the regime of general subjugation. Why should they be displeased at their particular yoke if the general yoke pleases them? Why should Germans be interested in the liberation of Jews if Jews are not interested in the liberation of Germans?
The Christian state takes cognizance only of privileges. In it the Jew has the privilege of being a Jew. As a Jew he has rights that Christians do not have. Why does he want rights he does not have and that Christians enjoy?
If the Jew wants to be emancipated from the Christian state, he is demanding that the Christian state abandon its religious prejudice. But does the Jew abandon his religious prejudice? Has he, then, the right to demand of another this abdication of religion?
By its very nature the Christian state cannot emancipate the Jew; but, Bauer adds, the Jew by his very nature cannot be emancipated. So long as the state remains Christian and the Jew remains Jewish, both are equally incapable of giving as well as receiving emancipation.
The Christian state can only behave toward the Jew in the manner of the Christian state—that is, permitting the separation of the Jew from other subjects as a privilege but making him feel the pressure of the other separate spheres of society, and feel them all the more heavily, since he stands in religious opposition to the predominant religion. But the Jew in turn can behave toward the state only in a Jewish manner, that is as a foreigner, since he opposes his chimerical nationality to actual nationality, his illusory law to actual law. He imagines that his separation from humanity is justified, abstains on principle from participation in the historical movement, looks to a future that has nothing in common with the future of mankind as a whole, and regards himself as a part of the Jewish people, the chosen people.
On what basis, then, do you Jews want emancipation? On the basis of your religion? It is the mortal enemy of the religion of the state. As citizens? There are no citizens in Germany. As men? You are not men, just as those to whom you appeal are not men.
After criticizing previous positions and solutions, Bauer formulates the question of Jewish emancipation in a new way. What is the nature, he asks, of the Jew who is to be emancipated and the Christian state that is to emancipate him? He answers with a critique of the Jewish religion, analyzes the religious antagonism between Judaism and Christianity, and explains the essence of the Christian state—all this with dash, acuteness, wit, and thoroughness in a style as precise as it is pregnant and energetic.
How then does Bauer settle the Jewish question? What is the result? The formulation of a question is its solution. Criticism of the Jewish question provides the answer to the Jewish question. The résumé thus follows:
We must emancipate ourselves before we can emancipate others.
The most persistent form of the antagonism between the Jew and the Christian is the religious antagonism. How is an antagonism to be resolved? By making it impossible. And how is a religious antagonism made impossible? By abolishing religion. Once Jew and Christian recognize their respective religions as nothing more than different stages in the evolution of the human spirit, as different snake skins shed by history, and recognize man as the snake that wore them, they will no longer find themselves in religious antagonism but only in a critical, scientific, and human relationship. Science, then, constitutes their unity. Contradictions in science, however, are resolved by science itself.
The German Jew is particularly affected by the general lack of political emancipation and the pronounced Christianity of the state. With Bauer, however, the Jewish question has a universal significance independent of specific German conditions. It is the question of the relation of religion to the state, of the contradiction between religious prejudice and political emancipation. Emancipation from religion is presented as a condition both for the Jew who seeks political emancipation and for the state which is to emancipate him and is to be emancipated itself as well.
“Very well, you say—and the Jew himself says it—the Jew should not be emancipated because he is Jew or because he has such excellent and universal ethical principles but rather because he takes second place to the citizen and becomes one in spite of being and wanting to remain a Jew. That is, he is and remains a Jew in spite of the fact that he is a citizen living in universally human relationships; his Jewish and restricted nature always triumphs in the end over his human and political obligations. The prejudice remains even though it has been overtaken by universal principles. But if it remains, it rather overtakes everything else.” “The Jew could remain a Jew in political life only in a sophistical sense, only in appearance; thus if he wanted to remain a Jew, this mere appearance would become the essential thing and would triumph. In other words, his life in the state would be only a semblance or a momentary exception to the real nature of things, an exception to the rule.” (“The Capacity of Present-day Jews and Christians to Become Free,” Twenty-one Sheets from Switzerland [Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz], p. 57.)
Let us see, on the other hand, how Bauer describes the role of the state:
“France,” he says, “recently (Proceedings of the Chamber of Deputies, 26 December 1840) gave us, in connection with the Jewish question and all other political questions (since the July Revolution), a glimpse of a life which is free but which revokes its freedom by law, thus revealing it to be a sham, and on the other hand, denies its free law by its acts.” (The Jewish Question, p. 64.)
“Universal freedom is not yet established as law in France, and the Jewish question is not yet settled because legal freedom—that all citizens are equal—is limited in actual life which is still dominated and fragmented by religious privileges, and because the lack of freedom in actual life reacts on the law, compelling it to sanction the division of inherently free citizens into the oppressed and the oppressors” (p. 65).
When, therefore, would the Jewish question be settled in France?
“The Jew, for instance, would really have ceased being a Jew if he did not let himself be hindered by his code from fulfilling his duties toward the state and his fellow citizens—if he went, for example, to the Chamber of Deputies and took part in public affairs on the Sabbath. Every religious privilege, including the monopoly of a privileged church, would have to be abolished, and if a few or many or even the overwhelming majority still felt obliged to fulfill their religious duties, such a practice should be left to them as a purely private matter” (p. 65). “There is no longer any religion if there is no privileged religion. Take from religion its power of excommunication and it ceases to exist” (p. 66). “Just as M. Martin du Nord saw the proposal to omit any mention of Sunday in the law as a declaration that Christianity had ceased to exist, with equal right (and one well-founded) a declaration that the Sabbath-law is no longer binding for the Jew would proclaim the end of Judaism” (p. 71).
Bauer thus demands, on the one hand, that the Jew give up Judaism and man give up religion in order to be emancipated as a citizen. On the other hand, he holds that from the political abolition of religion there logically follows the abolition of religion altogether. The state which presupposes religion is as yet no true, no actual state. “To be sure, the religious view reinforces the state. But what state? What kind of state?” (p. 97).
At this point Bauer’s one-sided approach to the Jewish question becomes apparent.
It is by no means sufficient to ask: Who should emancipate and who should be emancipated? Criticism has to be concerned with a third question. It must ask: What kind of emancipation is involved and what are its underlying conditions? Criticism of political emancipation itself is primarily the final critique of the Jewish question and its true resolution into the “universal question of the age.”
Since Bauer does not raise the question to this level, he falls into contradictions. He presents conditions that are not based on the essence of political emancipation. He raises questions that are irrelevant to his problem and solves problems that leave his question untouched. Bauer says of the opponents of Jewish emancipation, “Their mistake simply lay in assuming the Christian state to be the only true state without subjecting it to the same criticism they applied to Judaism”(p. 3). Here we find Bauer’s mistake in subjecting only the “Christian state,” not the “state as such,” to criticism, in failing to examine the relation between political emancipation and human emancipation, and hence presenting conditions that are only explicable from his uncritical confusion of political emancipation with universal human emancipation. Bauer asks the Jews: Have you the right to demand political emancipation from your standpoint? We ask, on the contrary: Has the standpoint of political emancipation the right to demand from the Jews the abolition of Judaism and from man the abolition of religion?
The Jewish question has a different aspect according to the state in which the Jew finds himself. In Germany, where there is no political state and no state as such exists, the Jewish question is purely theological. The Jew finds himself in religious opposition to a state acknowledging Christianity as its foundation. This state is a theologian ex professo. Criticism is here criticism of theology, double-edged criticism of Christian and of Jewish theology. But however critical we might be, we are still moving in theology.
In France, a constitutional state, the Jewish question is a question of constitutionalism, a question of the incompleteness of political emancipation. As the semblance of a state religion is preserved there, if only by the meaningless and self-contradictory formula of a religion of the majority, the relation of the Jew to the state also retains the semblance of a religious or theological opposition.
Only in the free states of North America—or at least in some of them—does the Jewish question lose its theological significance and become a truly secular question. Only where the political state exists in its complete development can the relation of the Jew, and generally speaking the religious man, to the political state, that is, the relation of religion to state, appear in its characteristic and pure form. Criticism of this relation ceases to be theological once the state abandons a theological posture toward religion, once it relates itself to religion as a state, that is, politically. Criticism then becomes criticism of the political state. Where the question here ceases to be theological, Bauer’s criticism ceases to be critical. “In the United States there is neither a state religion, nor a religion declared to be that of the majority, nor a pre-eminence of one faith over another. The state is foreign to all faiths.” (Gustave de Beaumont, Marie ou l’esclavage aux Etats-Unis … [Brussels, 1835], p. 214.) There are even some states in North America where “the constitution imposes no religious beliefs or sectarian practice as the condition of political rights” (loc. cit., p. 225). Yet “no one in the United States believes that a man without religion can be an honest man” (loc. cit., p. 224). And North America is pre-eminently the land of religiosity as Beaumont, Tocqueville, and the Englishman Hamilton assure us unanimously. The North American states, however, serve only as an example. The question is: What is the relation of complete political emancipation to religion? If we find even in a country with full political emancipation that religion not only exists but is fresh and vital, we have proof that the existence of religion is not incompatible with the full development of the state. But since the existence of religion implies a defect, the source of this defect must be sought in the nature of the state itself. We no longer take religion to be the basis but only the manifestation of secular narrowness. Hence we explain religious restriction of free citizens on the basis of their secular restriction. We do not claim that they must transcend their religious restriction in order to transcend their secular limitations. We do claim that they will transcend their religious restriction once they have transcended their secular limitations. We do not convert secular questions into theological ones. We convert theological questions into secular questions. History has long enough been resolved into superstition, but now we can resolve superstition into history. The question of the relation of political emancipation to religion becomes for us a question of the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation. We criticize the religious weaknesses of the political state by criticizing the political state in its secular constitution apart from the religious defects. In human terms we resolve the contradiction between the state and a particular religion such as Judaism into the contradiction between the state and particular secular elements, the contradiction between the state and religion generally into the contradiction between the state and its presuppositions.
The political emancipation of the Jew, the Christian, or the religious man generally is the emancipation of the state from Judaism, from Christianity, from religion in general. In a form and manner corresponding to its nature, the state as such emancipates itself from religion by emancipating itself from the state religion, that is, by recognizing no religion and recognizing itself simply as the state. Political emancipation from religion is not complete and consistent emancipation from religion because political emancipation is not the complete and consistent form of human emancipation.
The limits of political emancipation are seen at once in the fact that the state can free itself from a limitation without man actually being free from it, in the fact that a state can be a free state without men becoming free men. Bauer himself tacitly admits this in setting the following condition of political emancipation: “Every religious privilege, including the monopoly of a privileged church, would have to be abolished. If a few or many or even the overwhelming majority still felt obliged to fulfill their religious duties, such a practice should be left to them as a purely private matter.” The state can thus emancipate itself from religion even though the overwhelming majority is still religious. And the overwhelming majority does not cease being religious by being religious in private.
But the attitude of the state, particularly the free state, toward religion is still only the attitude of the men who make up the state. Hence it follows that man frees himself from a limitation politically, through the state, by overcoming the limitation in an abstract, limited, and partial manner, in contradiction with himself. Further, when man frees himself politically, he does so indirectly, through an intermediary, even if the intermediary is necessary. Finally, even when man proclaims himself an atheist through the medium of the state—that is, when he declares the state to be atheistic—he is still captive to religion since he only recognizes his atheism indirectly through an intermediary. Religion is merely the indirect recognition of man through a mediator. The state is the mediator between man and the freedom of man. As Christ is the mediator on whom man unburdens all his own divinity and all his religious ties, so is the state the mediator to which man transfers all his unholiness and all his human freedom.
The political elevation of man above religion shares all the defects and all the advantages of any political elevation. If the state as state, for example, abolishes private property, man proclaims private property is overcome politically once he abolishes the property qualification for active and passive voting as has been done in many North American states. Hamilton interprets this fact quite correctly in political terms: “The great majority of the people have gained a victory over property owners and financial wealth.”[1] Is not private property ideally abolished when the have-nots come to legislate for the haves? The property qualification is the last political form for recognizing private property.
Yet the political annulment of private property not only does not abolish it but even presupposes it. The state abolishes distinctions of birth, rank, education, and occupation in its fashion when it declares them to be non-political distinctions, when it proclaims that every member of the community equally participates in popular sovereignty without regard to these distinctions, and when it deals with all elements of the actual life of the nation from the standpoint of the state. Nevertheless the state permits private property, education, and occupation to act and manifest their particular nature as private property, education, and occupation in their own ways. Far from overcoming these factual distinctions, the state exists only by presupposing them; it is aware of itself as a political state and makes its universality effective only in opposition to these elements. Hegel, therefore, defines the relation of the political state to religion quite correctly in saying: “If the state is to have specific existence as the self-knowing ethical actuality of Spirit, it must be distinct from the form of authority and faith; this distinction emerges only as the ecclesiastical sphere is divided within itself; only thus has the state attained universality of thought, the principle of its form, above particular churches and only thus does it bring that universality into existence.” (Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, 1st ed., p. 346 [§270].) Exactly! Only thus above the particular elements is the state a universality.
By its nature the perfected political state is man’s species-life in opposition to his material life. All the presuppositions of this egoistic life remain in civil society outside the state, but as qualities of civil society. Where the political state has achieved its full development, man leads a double life, a heavenly and an earthly life, not only in thought or consciousness but in actuality. In the political community he regards himself as a communal being; but in civil society he is active as a private individual, treats other men as means, reduces himself to a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers. The political state is as spiritual in relation to civil society as heaven is in relation to earth. It stands in the same opposition to civil society and goes beyond it in the same way as religion goes beyond the limitation of the profane world, that is, by recognizing, reestablishing, and necessarily allowing itself to be dominated by it. In his innermost actuality, in civil society, man is a profane being. Here, where he counts as an actual individual to himself and others, he is an illusory phenomenon. In the state where he counts as a species-being, on the other hand, he is an imaginary member of an imagined sovereignty, divested of his actual individual life and endowed with an unactual universality.
The conflict in which man as believer in a particular religion finds himself—a conflict with his own citizenship and other men as members of the community—is reduced to the secular split between the political state and civil society. For man as bourgeois [or part of civil society], “life in the state is only a semblance or a momentary exception to the real nature of things, an exception to the rule.” Certainly the bourgeois, like the Jew, participates in the life of the state only in a sophistical way just as the citoyen is only sophistically a Jew or bourgeois; but this sophistry is not personal. It is the sophistry of the political state itself. The difference between the religious man and the citizen is the difference between the shopkeeper and the citizen, between the day laborer and the citizen, between the landowner and the citizen, between the living individual and the citizen. The contradiction between the religious and political man is the same as that between bourgeois and citoyen, between the member of civil society and his political lion skin.
This secular conflict to which the Jewish question ultimately is reduced—the relation between the political state and its presuppositions, whether the presuppositions be material elements such as private property or spiritual elements such as education and religion, the conflict between general and private interest, the split between the political state and civil society—these secular contradictions Bauer leaves untouched while attacking their religious expression. “It is precisely its foundation, need, which assures the maintenance of civil society and guarantees its necessity but exposes its maintenance to constant danger, sustains an element of uncertainty in civil society, and produces that constantly alternating mixture of poverty and wealth, of adversity and prosperity, and change in general” (p. 8).
Consider his entire section, “Civil Society” (pp. 8–9), which closely follows the main features of Hegel’s philosophy of law. Civil society in opposition to the political state is recognized as necessary since the political state is recognized as necessary.
Political emancipation is indeed a great step forward. It is not, to be sure, the final form of universal human emancipation, but it is the final form within the prevailing order of things. It is obvious that we are here talking about actual, practical emancipation.
Man emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing it from the sphere of public law into private right. It is no longer the spirit of the state where man—although in a limited way, under a particular form, and in a particular sphere—associates in community with other men as a species-being. It has become the spirit of civil society, of the sphere of egoism, of the bellum omnium contra omnes. It is no longer the essence of community but the essence of division. It has become what it was originally, an expression of the separation of man from his community, from himself and from other men. It is now only the abstract confession of particular peculiarity, of private whim, of caprice. The infinite splits of religion in North America, for example, already give it the external form of a purely individual matter. It has been tossed among numerous private interests and exiled from the community as a community. But one must not be deceived about the scope of political emancipation. The splitting of man into public and private, the displacement of religion from the state to civil society, is not just a step in political emancipation but its completion. It as little abolishes man’s actual religiosity as it seeks to abolish it.
The disintegration of man into Jew and citizen, Protestant and citizen, religious man and citizen does not belie citizenship or circumvent political emancipation. It is political emancipation itself, the political mode of emancipation from religion. To be sure, in periods when the political state as such is forcibly born from civil society, when men strive to liberate themselves under the form of political self-liberation, the state can and must go as far as to abolish and destroy religion, but only in the way it abolishes private property by setting a maximum, confiscation, and progressive taxation or only in the way it abolishes life by the guillotine. In moments of special concern for itself political life seeks to repress its presupposition, civil society and its elements, and to constitute itself the actual, harmonious species-life of man. But it can do this only in violent contradiction with its own conditions of existence by declaring the revolution to be permanent, and thus the political drama is bound to end with the restoration of religion, private property, and all the elements of civil society just as war ends with peace.
Indeed, the perfected Christian state is not the so-called Christian state acknowledging Christianity as its foundation in the state religion and excluding all others. It is, rather, the atheistic state, the democratic state, the state that relegates religion to the level of other elements of civil society. The state that is still theological and still officially prescribes belief in Christianity has not yet dared to declare itself to be a state and has not yet succeeded in expressing in secular and human form, in its actuality as a state, those human foundations of which Christianity is the sublime expression. The so-called Christian state is simply a non-state, for it is only the human foundation of Christianity, not Christianity as a religion, which can realize itself in actual human creations.
The so-called Christian state is a Christian denial of the state, not in any way the political actualization of Christianity. The state that still professes Christianity in the form of religion does not profess it in political form because it still behaves religiously toward religion—that is, it is not the actual expression of the human basis of religion since it still deals with the unreality and imaginary form of this human core. The so-called Christian state is an imperfect one, which treats Christianity as the supplement and sanctification of its imperfection. Hence religion necessarily becomes a means to an end, and the state is a hypocrite. There is a great difference between a perfected state that counts religion as one of its prerequisites because of a lack in the general nature of the state and an imperfect state that proclaims religion as its foundation because of a lack in its particular existence as an imperfect state. In the latter, religion becomes imperfect politics. In the former, the inadequacy of even perfected politics is apparent in religion. The so-called Christian state needs the Christian religion to complete itself as a state. The democratic state, the real state, needs no religion for its political fulfillment. It can, rather, do without religion because it fulfills the human basis of religion in a secular way. The so-called Christian state, on the other hand, behaves toward religion in a political way and toward politics in a religious way. As it reduces political forms to mere appearance, it equally reduces religion to a mere appearance.
To express this contradiction clearly let us consider Bauer’s construct of the Christian state, a construct derived from this perception of the Christian-Germanic state.
“To prove the impossibility or non-existence of a Christian state,” says Bauer, “we have recently and more frequently been referred to those passages in the Gospel which the [present] state not only does not follow but also cannot unless it wants to dissolve itself completely.” “But the matter is not so easily settled. What do those Gospel passages demand? Supernatural self-renunciation and submission to the authority of revelation, turning away from the state, the abolition of secular relationships. But the Christian state demands and achieves all these things. It has made the spirit of the Gospel its own, and if it does not reproduce it in exactly the same words as the Gospel, that is because it expresses that spirit in political forms borrowed from the political system of this world but reduced to mere appearance by the religious rebirth they must undergo. This withdrawal from the state is realized through the forms of the state” (p. 55).
Bauer goes on to show how the people of a Christian state do not constitute a nation with a will of its own but have their true existence in the ruler to whom they are subject but who is alien to them by origin and nature since he was given to them by God without their consent. Further, the laws of this nation are not its own doing but are positive revelations. The supreme ruler requires privileged intermediaries in his relations with his own people, the masses, themselves split into a multitude of distinct spheres formed and determined by chance and differentiated from each other by their interests and particular passions and prejudices but permitted as a privilege to isolate themselves from each other, etc. (p. 56).
But Bauer himself says: “If politics is to be nothing more than religion, it cannot be politics any more than cleaning cooking pans can be regarded as an economic matter if it is to be treated religiously” (p. 108). But in the Christian-Germanic state, religion is an “economic matter” just as “economic matters” are religion. In the Christian-Germanic state, the dominance of religion is the religion of domination.
The separation of the “spirit of the Gospel” from the “letter of the Gospel” is an irreligious act. The state that permits the Gospel to speak in the letter of politics or in any other letter than that of the Holy Spirit commits a sacrilege if not in the eyes of men at least in the eyes of its own religion. The state that acknowledges Christianity as its highest rule and the Bible as its charter must be confronted with the words of Holy Writ, for the Writ is holy in every word. This state as well as the human rubbish on which it is based finds itself involved in a painful contradiction, a contradiction insoluble from the standpoint of religious consciousness based on the teaching of the Gospel, which it “not only does not follow but also cannot unless it wants to dissolve itself completely as a state.” And why does it not want to dissolve itself completely? It cannot answer this question either for itself or others. In its own consciousness the official Christian state is an ought whose realization is impossible. It knows it can affirm the actuality of its own existence only by lying to itself and hence remains dubious, unreliable, and problematic. Criticism is thus completely right in forcing the state that appeals to the Bible into a mental derangement in which it no longer knows whether it is an illusion or a reality, in which the infamy of its secular purposes cloaked by religion irreconcilably conflicts with the integrity of its religious consciousness viewing religion as the world’s purpose. Such a state can only free itself of inner torment by becoming the constable of the Catholic Church. In relation to that church, which claims secular power as its servant, the state, the secular power claiming to dominate the religious spirit, is impotent.
In the so-called Christian state what counts is indeed alienation but not man. The only man who does count, the king, is still religious, specifically distinguished from others and directly connected with heaven, with God. The relations prevailing here are still relations of faith. The religious spirit is still not actually secularized.
But the religious spirit cannot actually be secularized, for what is it, in fact, but the unsecular form of a stage in the development of the human spirit? The religious spirit can only be actualized if the stage of development of the human spirit it expresses religiously emerges into and assumes its secular form. This is what happens in the democratic state. The basis of the democratic state is not Christianity but the human ground of Christianity. Religion remains the ideal, unsecular consciousness of its members because it is the ideal form of the stage of human development attained in the democratic state.
The members of the political state are religious by virtue of the dualism between individual life and species-life, between the life of civil society and political life. They are religious inasmuch as man regards as his true life the political life remote from his actual individuality, inasmuch as religion is here the spirit of civil society expressing the generation and withdrawal of man from man. Political democracy is Christian in that it regards man—not merely one but every man—as sovereign and supreme. But this means man in his uncivilized and unsocial aspect, in his fortuitous existence and just as he is, corrupted by the entire organization of our society, lost and alienated from himself, oppressed by inhuman relations and elements—in a word, man who is not yet an actual species-being. The sovereignty of man—though as alien and distinct from actual men—which is the chimera, dream, and postulate of Christianity, is a tangible and present actuality, a secular maxim, in democracy.
In the perfected democracy the religious and theological consciousness appears to itself all the more religious and theological for being apparently without political significance or mundane purposes—for being a spiritual affair eschewing the world, an expression of reason’s limitation, a product of whim and fantasy, an actual life in the beyond. Christianity here achieves the practical expression of its universal religious meaning in that the most varied views are grouped together in the form of Christianity and, what is more, others are not asked to profess Christianity but only religion in general, any kind of religion (cf. Beaumont, op. cit.). The religious consciousness revels in the wealth of religious contradictions and multiplicity.
We have thus shown: Political emancipation from religion permits religion, though not privileged religion, to continue. The contradiction in which the adherent of a specific religion finds himself in relation to his citizenship is only one aspect of the universal secular contradiction between the political state and civil society. The fulfillment of the Christian state is a state that acknowledges itself as a state and ignores the religion of its members. The emancipation of the state from religion is not the emancipation of actual man from religion.
We thus do not say with Bauer to the Jews: You cannot be politically emancipated without radically emancipating yourselves from Judaism. Rather we tell them: Because you can be emancipated politically without completely and fully renouncing Judaism, political emancipation by itself is not human emancipation. If you Jews want to be politically emancipated without emancipating yourselves humanly, the incompleteness and contradiction lies not only in you but in the essence and category of political emancipation. If you are engrossed in this category, you share a general bias. Just as the state evangelizes when, in spite of being a state, it behaves toward the Jew in a Christian way, the Jew acts politically when, in spite of being a Jew, he demands civil rights.
But if man can be emancipated politically and acquire civil rights even though he is a Jew, can he claim and acquire the so-called rights of man? Bauer denies it.
“The question is whether the Jew as such—i.e. the Jew who avows that his true nature compels him to live in eternal separation from others—is able to acquire the universal rights of man and grant them to others.”
“The idea of the rights of man was discovered in the Christian world only in the last century. It is not an innate idea but rather is acquired in struggle against historical traditions in which man has hitherto been educated. Thus the rights of man are neither a gift of nature nor a legacy from past history but the reward of struggle against the accident of birth and privileges transmitted by history from generation to generation up to the present. They are the result of culture, and only he can possess them who has earned and deserved them.”
“But can the Jew actually take possession of them? As long as he remains a Jew the limited nature which makes him a Jew must triumph over the human nature which should link him as a man with others and must separate him from non-Jews. By this separation he proclaims that the special nature which makes him a Jew is his true and highest nature to which his human nature must yield.”
“In the same way, the Christian as Christian cannot grant the rights of man.” (Pp. 19, 20.)
According to Bauer man must sacrifice the “privilege of faith” to be able to acquire the universal rights of man. Let us consider for a moment these so-called rights and indeed in their most authentic form, the form they have among their discoverers, the North Americans and the French. In part these rights are political rights that can be exercised only in community with others. Participation in the community, indeed the political community or state, constitutes their substance. They belong in the category of political freedom, of civil rights, which by no means presupposes the consistent and positive transcendence of religion and thus of Judaism, as we have seen. There is left for consideration the other part, the rights of man as distinct from the rights of the citizen.
Among these is freedom of conscience, the right to practice one’s chosen religion. The privilege of faith is expressly recognized either as a right of man or as a consequence of a right of man, freedom.
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 1791, Art. 10: “No one is to be disturbed on account of his beliefs, even religious beliefs.” In Title I of the Constitution of 1791 there is guaranteed as a human right: “The liberty of every man to practice the religious worship to which he is attached.”
The Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc., 1793, includes among human rights, Art. 7: “Freedom of worship.” Moreover, it even maintains in regard to the right to express views and opinions, to assemble, and to worship: “The need to proclaim these rights assumes either the presence or recent memory of despotism.” Compare the Constitution of 1795, Title XIV, Art. 354.
Constitution of Pennsylvania, Art. 9, §3: “All men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences; no man can of right be compelled to attend, erect, or support any place of worship, or to maintain any ministry against his consent; no human authority can, in any case whatever, interfere with the rights of conscience and control the prerogatives of the soul.”
Constitution of New Hampshire, Arts. 5 and 6: “Among the natural rights, some are in their very nature unalienable, because no equivalent can be conceived for them. Of this kind are the rights of conscience.” (Beaumont, loc. cit., pp. 213, 214.)
The incompatibility between a religion and the rights of man is so little implied in the concept of the rights of man that the right to be religious according to one’s liking and to practice a particular religion is explicitly included among the rights of man. The privilege of faith is a universal human right.
The rights of man as such are distinguished from the rights of the citizen. Who is this man distinguished from the citizen? None other than the member of civil society. Why is the member of the civil society called “man,” man without qualification, and why are his rights called the rights of man? How can we explain this? By the relation of the political state to civil society and by the nature of political emancipation.
Let us note first of all that the so-called rights of man as distinguished from the rights of the citizen are only the rights of the member of civil society, that is, of egoistic man, man separated from other men and from the community. The most radical constitution, the Constitution of 1793, may be quoted:
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
Art. 2. “These rights (the natural and imprescriptible rights) are: equality, liberty, security, property.”
What is this liberty?
Art. 6. “Liberty is the power belonging to each man to do anything which does not impair the rights of others,” or according to the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1791: “Liberty is the power to do anything which does not harm others.”
Liberty is thus the right to do and perform anything that does not harm others. The limits within which each can act without harming others is determined by law just as the boundary between two fields is marked by a stake. This is the liberty of man viewed as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself. Why, according to Bauer, is the Jew not capable of acquiring human rights? “As long as he remains a Jew the limited nature which makes him a Jew must triumph over the human nature which should link him as a man with others and must separate him from non-Jews.” But liberty as a right of man is not based on the association of man with man but rather on the separation of man from man. It is the right of this separation, the right of the limited individual limited to himself.
The practical application of the right of liberty is the right of private property.
What is property as one of the rights of man?
Art. 16 (Constitution of 1793): “The right of property is that belonging to every citizen to enjoy and dispose of his goods, his revenues, the fruits of his labor and of his industry as he wills.”
The right of property is thus the right to enjoy and dispose of one’s possessions as one wills, without regard for other men and independently of society. It is the right of self-interest. This individual freedom and its application as well constitutes the basis of civil society. It lets every man find in other men not the realization but rather the limitation of his own freedom. It proclaims above all the right of man “to enjoy and dispose of his goods, his revenues, the fruits of his labor and of his industry as he wills.”
There still remain the other rights of man, equality and security.
“Equality”—here used in its non-political sense—is only the equal right to liberty as described above, viz., that every man is equally viewed as a self-sufficient monad. The Constitution of 1705 defines the concept of equality with this significance:
Art. 3 (Constitution of 1795): “Equality consists in the fact that the law is the same for all, whether it protects or whether it punishes.”
And security?
Art. 8 (Constitution of 1793): “Security consists in the protection accorded by society to each of its members for the preservation of his person, his rights and his property.”
Security is the supreme social concept of civil society, the concept of the police, the concept that the whole society exists only to guarantee to each of its members the preservation of his person, his rights, and his property. In this sense Hegel calls civil society “the state as necessity and rationality.”
Civil society does not raise itself above its egoism through the concept of security. Rather, security is the guarantee of the egoism.
Thus none of the so-called rights of men goes beyond the egoistic man, the man withdrawn into himself, his private interest and his private choice, and separated from the community as a member of civil society. Far from viewing man here in his species-being, his species-life itself—society—rather appears to be an external framework for the individual, limiting his original independence. The only bond between men is natural necessity, need and private interest, the maintenance of their property and egoistic persons.
It is somewhat curious that a nation just beginning to free itself, tearing down all the barriers between different sections of the people and founding a political community, should solemnly proclaim (Declaration of 1791) the justification of the egoistic man, man separated from his fellow men and from the community, and should even repeat this proclamation at a moment when only the most heroic sacrifice can save the nation and hence is urgently required, when the sacrifice of all the interests of civil society is highly imperative and egoism must be punished as crime (Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1793). This becomes even more curious when we observe that the political liberators reduce citizenship, the political community, to a mere means for preserving these so-called rights of man and that the citizen thus is proclaimed to be the servant of the egoistic man, the sphere in which man acts as a member of the community is degraded below that in which he acts as a fractional being, and finally man as bourgeois rather than man as citizen is considered to be the proper and authentic man.
“The goal of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man.” (Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc., of 1791, Art. 2.) “Government is instituted to guarantee man’s enjoyment of his natural and imprescriptible rights.” (Declaration, etc., of 1793, Art. 1.) Thus even at the time of its youthful enthusiasm fired by the urgency of circumstances political life is proclaimed to be a mere means whose end is life in civil society. To be sure, revolutionary practice flagrantly contradicts its theory. While security, for example, is proclaimed to be one of the rights of man, the violation of the privacy of correspondence is publicly established as the order of the day. While the “unlimited freedom of the press” (Constitution of 1793, Art. 122) as a consequence of the rights of man and individual freedom is guaranteed, freedom of the press is completely abolished because “freedom of the press should not be permitted to compromise public liberty.” (“Robespierre jeune,” Parliamentary History of the French Revolution, by Buchez and Roux, Vol. 28, p. 159.) This means that the human right of liberty ceases to be a right when it comes into conflict with political life while theoretically political life is only the guarantee of the rights of man, the rights of individual man, and should be abandoned once it contradicts its end, these rights of man. But the practice is only the exception, the theory is the rule. Even if we choose to regard revolutionary practice as the correct expression of this relationship, the problem still remains unsettled as to why the relationship is inverted in the consciousness of the political liberators so that the end appears as means and the means as the end. This optical illusion of their consciousness would always be the same problem, though a psychological, a theoretical problem.
The problem is easily settled.
Political emancipation is also the dissolution of the old society on which rests the sovereign power, the character of the state as alienated from the people. The political revolution is the revolution of civil society. What was the character of the old society? It can be described in one word. Feudalism. The old civil society had a directly political character, that is, the elements of civil life such as property, the family, the mode and manner of work, for example, were raised into elements of political life in the form of landlordism, estates, and corporations. In this form they determined the relation of the particular individual to the state as a whole, that is, his political relation, his separation and exclusion from other parts of society. For the feudal organization of national life did not elevate property or labor to the level of social elements but rather completed their separation from the state as a whole and established them as separate societies within society. Thus the vital functions and conditions of civil society always remained political, but political in the feudal sense. That is, they excluded the individual from the state as a whole and transformed the special relation between his corporation and the state into his own general relation to national life, just as they transformed his specific civil activity and situation into a general activity and situation. As a consequence of this organization, there necessarily appears the unity of the state as well as its consciousness, will, and activity—the general political power—likewise the special business of the ruler and his servants, separated from the people.
The political revolution, which overthrew this domination, turned the business of the state into the people’s business, and made the political state the business of all, that is, an actual state—this revolution inevitably destroyed all estates, corporations, guilds, and privileges variously expressing the separation of the people from their community. The political revolution thereby abolished the political character of civil society. It shattered civil society into its constituent elements—on the one hand individuals and on the other the material and spiritual elements constituting the vital content and civil situation of these individuals. It released the political spirit, which had been broken, fragmented, and lost, as it were, in the various cul-de-sacs of feudal society. It gathered up this scattered spirit, liberated it from its entanglement with civil life, and turned it into the sphere of the community, the general concern of the people ideally independent of these particular elements of civil life. A particular activity and situation in life sank into a merely individual significance, no longer forming the general relation of the individual to the state as a whole. Public business as such rather became the general business of every individual and the political function became his general function.
But the fulfillment of the idealism of the state was at the same time the fulfillment of the materialism of civil society. The throwing off of the political yoke was at the same time the throwing off of the bond that had fettered the egoistic spirit of civil society. Political emancipation was at the same time the emancipation of civil society from politics, from the appearance of a general content.
Feudal society was dissolved into its foundation, into man. But into man as he actually was the foundation of that society, into egoistical man.
This man, the member of civil society, is now the basis and presupposition of the political state. He is recognized as such by the state in the rights of man.
But the freedom of egoistic man and the recognition of this freedom is rather the recognition of the unbridled movement of the spiritual and material elements forming the content of his life.
Thus man was not freed from religion; he received religious freedom. He was not freed from property. He received freedom of property. He was not freed from the egoism of trade but received freedom to trade.
The constitution of the political state and the dissolution of civil society into independent individuals—whose relation is law just as the relation of estates and guilds was privilege—is accomplished in one and the same act. As a member of civil society man is the non-political man but necessarily appears to be natural man. The rights of man appear to be natural rights because self-conscious activity is concentrated on the political act. The egoistic man is the passive and given result of the dissolved society, an object of immediate certainty and thus a natural object. The political revolution dissolves civil life into its constituent elements without revolutionizing these elements themselves and subjecting them to criticism. It regards civil society—the realm of needs, labor, private interests, and private right—as the basis of its existence, as a presupposition needing no ground, and thus as its natural basis. Finally, man as a member of civil society is regarded as authentic man, man as distinct from citizen, since he is man in his sensuous, individual, and most intimate existence while political man is only the abstract and artificial man, man as an allegorical, moral person. Actual man is recognized only in the form of an egoistic individual, authentic man, only in the form of abstract citizen.
The abstraction of the political man was correctly depicted by Rousseau:
“Whoever dares to undertake the founding of a nation must feel himself capable of changing,[2] so to speak, human nature and transforming each individual who is in himself a complete but isolated whole, into a part of something greater than himself from which he somehow derives his life and existence, substituting a limited and moral existence for physical and independent existence. Man must be deprived of his own powers and given alien powers which he cannot use without the aid of others.” (Social Contract, Bk. II, London, 1782, p. 67.)
All emancipation is restoration of the human world and the relationships of men themselves.
Political emancipation is a reduction of man to a member of civil society, to an egoistic independent individual on the one hand and to a citizen, a moral person, on the other.
Only when the actual, individual man has taken back into himself the abstract citizen and in his everyday life, his individual work, and his individual relationships has become a species-being, only when he has recognized and organized his own powers as social powers so that social force is no longer separated from him as political power, only then is human emancipation complete.
Bruno Bauer, “The Capacity of Present-day Jews and Christians to Become Free,” Twenty-one Sheets [from Switzerland (ed. Georg Herwegh), Zurich and Winterthur, 1843], pp. 56–71.
Here Bauer deals with the relation between the Jewish and Christian religion and their relation to criticism. Their relation to criticism is their bearing “on the capacity to become free.”
Accordingly: “The Christian has only one stage to surpass—namely, his religion—in order to abandon religion in general” and thus become free. “The Jew, on the other hand, has to break not only with his Jewish nature but also with the development, the completion, of his religion, a development which has remained alien to him” (p. 71).
Thus Bauer here transforms the question of Jewish emancipation into a purely religious one. The theological difficulty as to whether the Jew or the Christian has the better prospect of salvation is here reproduced in the enlightened form: Which of the two is more capable of emancipation? It is thus no longer the question: Does Judaism or Christianity emancipate? but rather, on the contrary: Which emancipates more, the negation of Judaism or the negation of Christianity?
“If they want to be free, the Jews should not embrace Christianity but Christianity in dissolution, religion generally in dissolution—enlightenment, criticism and its results, free humanity” (p. 70).
For the Jew it is still a matter of professing faith, not Christianity but rather Christianity in dissolution.
Bauer requires the Jew to break with the essence of the Christian religion, a requirement which does not follow, as he says himself, from the development of the Jewish nature.
When Bauer, at the end of his Jewish Question, interpreted Judaism merely as a crude religious criticism of Christianity and hence gave it “only” a religious significance, it was to be expected that he would also transform the emancipation of the Jews into a philosophico-theological act.
Bauer views the ideal and abstract essence of the Jew, his religion, as his whole nature. Hence he correctly infers: “The Jew contributes nothing to mankind if he disregards his narrow law,” if he cancels all his Judaism (p. 65).
The relation of Jews to Christian thus becomes the following: the sole interest of the Christian in the emancipation of the Jew is a general human interest, a theoretical interest. Judaism is an offensive fact to the religious eye of the Christian. As soon as the Christian’s eye ceases to be religious, this fact ceases to offend it. In and for itself the emancipation of the Jew is not a task for the Christian.
The Jew, on the other hand, not only has to finish his own task but also the task of the Christian—[Bruno Bauer’s] Critique of the [Gospel History of the] Synoptics and [Strauss’] Life of Jesus, etc.—if he wants to emancipate himself.
“They can look after themselves: they will determine their own destiny; but history does not allow itself to be mocked” (p. 71).
We will try to break with the theological formulation of the issue. The question concerning the Jew’s capacity for emancipation becomes for us the question: What specific social element is to be overcome in order to abolish Judaism? For the modern Jew’s capacity for emancipation is the relation of Judaism to the emancipation of the modern world. This relation follows necessarily from the particular position of Judaism in the modern subjugated world.
Let us consider the actual, secular Jew—not the sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew.
Let us look for the secret of the Jew not in his religion but rather for the secret of the religion in the actual Jew.
What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest.
What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Bargaining. What is his worldly god? Money.
Very well! Emancipation from bargaining and money, and thus from practical and real Judaism would be the self-emancipation of our era.
An organization of society that would abolish the pre-conditions of bargaining and thus its possibility would render the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would dissolve like a dull mist in the actual life-giving air of society. On the other hand, when the Jew recognizes this practical nature of his as futile and strives to eliminate it, he works away from his previous development toward general human emancipation and opposes the supreme practical expression of human self-alienation.
Thus we perceive in Judaism a general and contemporary anti-social element, which has been carried to its present high point by a historical development in which the Jews have contributed to this element, a point at which it must necessarily dissolve itself.
The emancipation of the Jews, in the final analysis, is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.
The Jew has already emancipated himself in a Jewish way, “The Jew who is only tolerated in Vienna, for example, determines the fate of the whole empire through his financial power. The Jew who may be without rights in the smallest German state decides the destiny of Europe. While corporations and guilds exclude the Jew or are unfavorable to him, audacity in industry mocks the obstinacy of the medieval institutions.” (B. Bauer, The Jewish Question, p. 114.)
This is no isolated fact. The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish way not only by acquiring financial power but also because, with and without him, money has become a world power, and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christian have become Jews.
For example, the pious and politically free inhabitant of New England, Captain Hamilton reports, is a kind of Laocoön who does not make the slightest effort to free himself from the serpents strangling him. Mammon is his idol to whom he prays not only with his lips but with all the power of his body and soul. In his eyes the world is nothing but a stock exchange, and he is convinced that here below he has no other destiny than to become richer than his neighbor. Bargaining dominates his every thought, exchange in things constitutes his only recreation. When he travels, he carries his shop or office on his back, as it were, and talks of nothing but interest and profit. If he loses sight of his own business for a moment, it is only in order to poke his nose into that of others.
Indeed, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world in North America has achieved such clear and common expression that the very preaching of the Gospel, the Christian ministry, has become an article of commerce and the bankrupt merchant takes to the Gospel while the minister who has become rich goes into business. “That man whom you see at the head of a respectable congregation began as a merchant; his business having failed, he became a minister; the other started with the ministry, but as soon as he had acquired a sum of money, he left the pulpit for business. In the eyes of many, the religious ministry is a veritable commercial career.” (Beaumont, loc. cit., pp. 185, 186.)
According to Bauer it is a hypocritical situation when the Jew is deprived of political rights in theory while he wields enormous power in practice, when he exercises the political influence wholesale denied to him in retail (The Jewish Question, p. 114).
The contradiction existing between the practical political power of the Jew and his political rights is the contradiction between politics and financial power in general. While politics ideally is superior to financial power, in actual fact it has become its serf.
Judaism has persisted alongside Christianity not only as the religious critique of Christianity, not only as the concrete doubt concerning the religious descent of Christianity, but equally because the practical Jewish spirit, Judaism, has perpetuated itself in Christian society and there even attained its highest development. The Jew, who exists as a special member of civil society, is only the special manifestation of civil society’s Judaism.
Judaism has survived not in spite of but by means of history.
Out of its own entrails, civil society ceaselessly produces the Jew.
What actually was the foundation of the Jewish religion? Practical need, egoism.
Hence, the Jew’s monotheism is actually the polytheism of many needs, a polytheism that makes even the toilet an object of divine law. Practical need, egoism is the principle of civil society and appears purely as such as soon as civil society has fully delivered itself to the political state. The god of practical need and self-interest is money.
Money is the jealous god of Israel before whom no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of mankind—and converts them into commodities. Money is the general, self-sufficient value of everything. Hence it has robbed the whole world, the human world as well as nature, of its proper worth. Money is the alienated essence of man’s labor and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it.
The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of the world. The bill of exchange is the Jew’s actual god. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.
The view of nature achieved under the rule of private property and money is an actual contempt for and practical degradation of nature which does, to be sure, exist in the Jewish religion, but only in imagination.
In this sense Thomas Münzer declared it to be intolerable “that every creature should be turned into property, the fish in the water, the birds in the air, the plants of the earth—the creature must also become free.”
That which is contained abstractly in the Jewish religion—contempt for theory, for art, for history, for man as an end in himself—is the actual conscious standpoint and virtue of the monied man. The species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes an object of commerce! The woman is bought and sold.
The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, particularly of the monied man.
The Jew’s unfounded, superficial law is only the religious caricature of unfounded, superficial morality and law in general, the caricature of merely formal ceremonies encompassing the world of self-interest.
Here also the highest relation of man is the legal relation, the relation to laws which apply to him not because they are laws of his own will and nature but because they dominate him and because defection from them will be avenged.
Jewish Jesuitism, the same practical Jesuitism Bauer finds in the Talmud, is the relationship of the world of self-interest to the laws governing it, and the cunning circumvention of these laws is that world’s main art.
Indeed, the movement of that world within its law is necessarily a continuous abrogation of the law.
Judaism could not develop further as religion, could not develop further theoretically, because the perspective of practical need is limited by its very nature and soon exhausted.
By its very nature, the religion of practical need could not find fulfillment in theory but only in practice [Praxis], simply because practice is its truth.
Judaism could create no new world; it could only draw the new creations and conditions of the world into the compass of its own activity because practical need, whose rationale is self-interest, remains passive, never willfully extending itself but only finding itself extended with the continuous development of social conditions.
Judaism reaches its height with the perfection of civil society, but civil society achieves perfection only in the Christian world. Only under the reign of Christianity, which makes all national, natural, moral, and theoretical relationships external to man, was civil society able to separate itself completely from political life, sever all man’s species-ties, substitute egoism and selfish need for those ties, and dissolve the human world into a world of atomistic, mutually hostile individuals.
Christianity arose out of Judaism. It has again dissolved itself into Judaism.
From the outset the Christian was the theorizing Jew. Hence, the Jew is the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has again become a Jew.
Christianity overcame real Judaism only in appearance. It was too noble, too spiritual, to eliminate the crudeness of practical need except by elevating it into the blue.
Christianity is the sublime thought of Judaism, and Judaism is the common practical application of Christianity. But this application could only become universal after Christianity as religion par excellence had theoretically completed the alienation of man from himself and from nature.
Only then could Judaism attain universal dominion and convert externalized man and nature into alienable and saleable objects subservient to egoistic need, dependent on bargaining.
Selling is the practice of externalization. As long as man is captivated in religion, knows his nature only as objectified, and thereby converts his nature into an alien illusory being, so under the dominion of egoistic need he can only act practically, only practically produce objects, by subordinating both his products and this activity to the domination of an alien being, bestowing upon them the significance of an alien entity—of money.
The Christian egoism of eternal bliss in its practical fulfillment necessarily becomes the material egoism of the Jew, heavenly need is converted into earthly need, and subjectivism becomes selfishness. We do not explain the Jew’s tenacity from his religion but rather from the human basis of his religion, from practical need, from egoism.
Since the Jew’s real nature have been generally actualized and secularized in civil society, civil society could not convince the Jew of the unreality of his religious nature which is precisely the ideal representation of practical need. Thus not only in the Pentateuch or Talmud but also in present society we find the nature of the contemporary Jew, not as an abstract nature but a supremely empirical nature, not only as the Jew’s narrowness but as the Jewish narrowness of society.
When society succeeds in transcending the empirical essence of Judaism—bargaining and all its conditions—the Jew becomes impossible because his consciousness no longer has an object, the subjective basis of Judaism—practical need—is humanized, and the conflict between the individual sensuous existence of man and his species-existence is transcended.
The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.
Translated by Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat. Reprinted by permission of Loyd D. Easton and Mrs. Kurt H. Guddat.
1. [Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in America (2 vols.; Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1833). Marx quotes from the German translation, Die Menschen und die Sitten in den Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika (Mannheim: Hoff, 1834), Vol I, p. 146.]
2. [Boldface type identified Marx’s emphasis in the quotation.]