[This article was written towards the end of 1843 and first published in the Yearbooks. In it Marx criticizes the ideas of Bruno Bauer, who had argued against a campaign for religious freedom for Jews. Religious equality for Jews, Bauer said, would be nothing more than equality with slaves, for the Germans were the slaves of the Christian state. Why should freedom-loving Germans help Jews in the struggle for civil rights, he asks, if Jews are not ready to join in the general struggle for a ‘totally free state’?
Marx replies that it is possible to be emancipated politically without being emancipated from religion. He cites the cases of America and France, where religion is no longer the concern of the state but the private concern of each individual. Bauer, Marx continues, cannot see that religious ideas are not the product of the ‘Christian state’ (which he reviles) but of the free state’ (which he glorifies). Once again Marx cites America to establish his case. The citizen of the free state’, he says, leads a double life. In his real life in civil society, i.e. economic society, he is isolated and at war with everyone else in defence of his private interests. And in his imaginary life as a citizen of the state, he is integrated into and at one with the world in theory but not in practice. It is this situation which gives rise to religious feelings. Religion is the heart’s cry of alienated, atomized man, who overcomes the separation he experiences in everyday life, but only on the level of fantasy. Religious ideas will finally evaporate only when we have put an end to the atomism of society and chased away the fear and anxiety caused by the rule of money.
The ‘Jewish spirit’ (that is, commerce) is merely a reflection of the life of civil society. The Jew engaged in commerce is realizing the essence of civil society: the pursuit of money and self-interest. The Jew will not be socially emancipated until society is emancipated from the rule of money, and man achieves in reality (that is, in civil society) the integration and unity which in a ‘free state’ he experiences only in appearance.]
Bruno Bauer, The Jewish Question, Brunswick, 1843
The German Jews want emancipation. What sort of emancipation do they want? Civil, political emancipation.
Bruno Bauer answers them: No one in Germany is politically emancipated. We ourselves are not free. How are we to liberate you? You Jews are egoists if you demand a special emancipation for yourselves as Jews. You should work as Germans for the political emancipation of Germany and as men for the emancipation of mankind, and you should look upon the particular form of oppression and shame which you experience not as an exception to the rule but rather as a confirmation of it.
Or do the Jews want to be put on an equal footing with Christian subjects? If so, they are recognizing the Christian state as legitimate, they are recognizing the regime of general enslavement. Why should their particular yoke not please them when they are pleased to accept the general yoke? Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew when the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?
The Christian state only knows privileges. In it the Jew has the privilege of being a Jew. As a Jew he has rights which the Christian does not have. Why does he want rights he does not have and which Christians enjoy?
If the Jew wants to be emancipated from the Christian state, then he is demanding that the Christian state give up its religious prejudice. But does the Jew give up his religious prejudice? Does he have the right, then, to demand of someone else that he renounce his religion?
The Christian state is by its very nature incapable of emancipating the Jew; but, Bauer adds, the Jew by his very nature cannot be emancipated. As long as the state is Christian and the Jew Jewish, they are both equally incapable of either giving or receiving emancipation.
The Christian state can behave towards the Jew only in the manner of the Christian state, that is, by granting him as a privilege the right to separate himself off from the other subjects but subjecting him to the pressure of the other separate spheres. He experiences this pressure all the more intensely since as a Jew he is in religious opposition to the dominant religion. But the Jew himself can behave only like a Jew towards the state, i.e. treat it as something foreign, for he opposes his chimerical nationality to actual nationality, his illusory law to actual law, he considers himself entitled to separate himself from humanity, he refuses on principle to take any part in the movement of history, he looks forward to a future which has nothing in common with the future of mankind as a whole and he sees himself as a member of the Jewish people and the Jewish people as the chosen people.
On what grounds, then, do you Jews want emancipation? On account of your religion? It is the deadly enemy of the religion of the state. As citizens? There are no citizens in Germany. As men? You are not men, any more than those to whom you appeal.
After criticizing previous positions and solutions, Bauer poses the question of Jewish emancipation in a new way. What, he asks, is the nature of the Jew who is to be emancipated and the Christian state which is to emancipate him? He answers with a critique of the Jewish religion, he analyses the religious opposition between Judaism and Christianity and he explains the essence of the Christian state, all this with dash, perception, wit and thoroughness in a style as precise as it is pithy and trenchant.
How then does Bauer solve the Jewish question? What is the result? To formulate a question is to answer it. To make a critique of the Jewish question is to answer the Jewish question. We shall therefore sum up as follows:
We must emancipate ourselves before we can emancipate others.
The most rigid form of opposition between Jew and Christian is the religious opposition. How does one resolve an opposition? By making it impossible. How does one make a religious opposition impossible? By abolishing religion. Once Jew and Christian recognize their respective religions as nothing more than different stages in the development of the human spirit, as snake-skins cast off by history, and man as the snake which wore them, they will no longer be in religious opposition, but in a purely critical and scientific, a human relationship. Science will then be their unity. But oppositions in science are resolved by science itself.
The German Jew in particular suffers from the general lack of political emancipation and the pronounced Christianity of the state. For Bauer, however, the Jewish question has a universal significance which is independent of the specific German conditions. It is the question of the relationship of religion and state, of the contradiction between religious prejudice and political emancipation. Emancipation from religion is presented as a condition both for the Jew who wants to be politically emancipated and for the state which is to emancipate him and itself be emancipated.
‘Very well,’ you say, and the Jew himself says it, ‘the Jew should not be emancipated because he is a Jew, because he has such an admirable code of universally human ethical principles. Rather, the Jew will recede behind the citizen and be a citizen, in spite of the fact that he is a Jew and is to remain a Jew; i.e., he is and remains a Jew in spite of the fact that he is a citizen and lives in universal human conditions: his Jewish and restricted nature always triumphs in the long run over his human and political obligations. The prejudice remains, even though it is overtaken by universal principles. But if it remains, it is more likely to overtake everything else.’ ‘The Jew could only remain a Jew in political life in a sophistical sense, in appearance; if he wanted to remain a Jew, the mere appearance would therefore be the essential and would triumph, i.e. his life in the state would be nothing more than an appearance or a momentary exception to the essential nature of things and to the rule.’1
Now let us see how Bauer formulates the role of the state.
‘France,’ he says, ‘recently2 provided us, in connection with the Jewish question (as she constantly does in all other political questions), with the glimpse of a life which is free but which revokes its freedom by law, thus declaring it to be a mere appearance, and on the other hand denies its free law through its actions.’3
‘Universal freedom is not yet law in France and the Jewish question is not yet settled because legal freedom – the equality of all citizens – is restricted in actual life, which continues to be dominated and fragmented by religious privileges, and because the lack of freedom in actual life reacts on the law and forces it to sanction the division of what are intrinsically free citizens into oppressed and oppressors.’4
So when would the Jewish question be settled in France?
‘The Jew, for example, would have stopped being a Jew if he did not allow his [religious] laws to prevent him from fulfilling his duties to the state and to his fellow citizens, for example, if he went to the Chamber of Deputies on the Sabbath and took part in the public proceedings. All religious privileges, including the monopoly of a privileged church, would have to be abolished and if some or many or even the overwhelming majority still considered themselves obliged to fulfil their religious duties, then this should be left to them as a purely private affair.’5 ‘There is no longer any religion when there is no longer any privileged religion. Deprive religion of its powers of excommunication and it ceases to exist.’6 ‘Just as M. Martin du Nord saw the proposal to omit all mention of Sunday in the law as a declaration that Christianity has ceased to exist, with the same right (and this right is well founded) the declaration that the law of the Sabbath is no longer binding on the Jew would be a proclamation of the dissolution of Judaism.’7
So Bauer demands on the one hand that the Jew give up Judaism and that man in general give up religion in order to be emancipated as a citizen. On the other hand, it logically follows that for him the political abolition of religion amounts to the abolition of religion as a whole. The state which presupposes religion is not yet a true, a real state.
‘Admittedly the idea of religion gives the state some guarantees. But what state? What sort of state?’8
It is at this point that the one-sidedness of Bauer’s treatment of the Jewish question emerges.
It was in no way sufficient to ask who should emancipate and who be emancipated. It was necessary for the critique to ask a third question: What kind of emancipation is involved? What are the essential conditions of the emancipation which is required? Only the critique of political emancipation itself would constitute a definitive critique of the Jewish question itself and its true resolution into the ‘general question of the age’.
Because Bauer fails to raise the question to this level, he falls into contradictions. He poses conditions which are not essential to political emancipation itself. He raises questions which are not contained within the problem and he solves problems which leave his question unanswered. When Bauer says of the opponents of Jewish emancipation: ‘Their only mistake was to presuppose that the Christian state was the only true one and not to subject it to the same criticism as Judaism,’ his own mistake lies clearly in the fact that he subjects only the ‘Christian state’ to criticism, and not the ‘state as such’, that he fails to examine the relationship between political emancipation and human emancipation and that he therefore poses conditions which can be explained only by his uncritical confusion of political emancipation and universally human emancipation. Bauer asks the Jews: Do you from your standpoint have the right to demand political emancipation? We pose the question the other way round: Does the standpoint of political emancipation have the right to demand from the Jews the abolition of Judaism and from man the abolition of religion?
The form in which the Jewish question is posed differs according to the state in which the Jew finds himself. In Germany, where there is no political state, no state as such, the Jewish question is a purely theological question. The Jew is in religious opposition to the state, which acknowledges Christianity as its foundation. This state is a theologian ex professo. Criticism is here criticism of theology, double-edged criticism, criticism of Christian and of Jewish theology. But we are still moving in the province of theology, however critically we may be moving in it.
In France, in the constitutional state, the Jewish question is a question of constitutionalism, a question of the incompleteness of political emancipation. Since the appearance of a state religion is preserved here in the formula – albeit an insignificant and self-contradictory one – of a religion of the majority, the relationship of the Jew to the state also retains the appearance of a religious, 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 fully developed form can the relationship of the Jew and of religious man in general to the political state, i.e., the relationship of religion and state, appear in its characteristic and pure form. The criticism of this relationship ceases to be a theological criticism as soon as the state ceases to relate itself in a theological way to religion, as soon as the state relates to religion as a state, i.e., politically. Criticism then becomes criticism of the political state. At this point, where the question ceases to be theological, Bauer’s criticism ceases to be critical.
‘In the United States there is neither a state religion nor an officially proclaimed religion of the majority, nor the predominance of one faith over another. The state is foreign to all faiths.’9 There are even some states in North America where ‘the constitution does not impose religious beliefs or practice as a condition of political privileges’.10 Nevertheless, ‘people in the United States do not believe that a man without religion can be an honest man’.11
And yet North America is the land of religiosity par excellence, as Beaumont, Tocqueville and the Englishman Hamilton all assure us. However, we are using the North American states only as an example. The question is: What is the relationship between complete political emancipation and religion? If in the land of complete political emancipation we find not only that religion exists but that it exists in a fresh and vigorous form, that proves that the existence of religion does not contradict the perfection of the state. But since the existence of religion is the existence of a defect, the source of this defect must be looked for in the nature of the state itself. We no longer see religion as the basis but simply as a phenomenon of secular narrowness. We therefore explain the religious restriction on the free citizens from the secular restriction they experience. We do not mean to say that they must do away with their religious restriction in order to transcend their secular limitations. We do not turn secular questions into theological questions. We turn theological questions into secular questions. History has been resolved into superstition for long enough. We are now resolving superstition into history. The question of the relationship of political emancipation to religion becomes for us the question of the relationship of political emancipation to human emancipation. We criticize the religious weakness of the political state by criticizing the political state in its secular construction, regardless of its religious weaknesses. We humanize the contradiction between the state and a particular religion, for example Judaism, by resolving it into the contradiction between the state and particular secular elements, and we humanize the contradiction between the state and religion in general by resolving it into the contradiction between the state and its own general presuppositions.
The political emancipation of the Jew, the Christian, the religious man in general, is the emancipation of the state from Judaism, from Christianity, from religion in general. The state emancipates itself from religion in a form and manner peculiar to its nature as state by emancipating itself from the state religion, i.e., by acknowledging no religion, by instead acknowledging itself as 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 limitations of political emancipation are immediately apparent from the fact that the state can liberate itself from a restriction without man himself being truly free of it, that a state can be a free state without man himself being a free man. Bauer himself tacitly admits this when he poses the following condition for political emancipation:
‘All religious privileges, including the monopoly of a privileged church, would have to be abolished and if some or many or even the overwhelming majority still considered themselves obliged to fulfil their religious duties, then this should be left to them as a purely private affair.’
Therefore the state can have emancipated itself from religion even if the overwhelming majority is still religious. And the overwhelming majority does not cease to be religious by being religious in private.
But the attitude of the state, especially the free state, to religion is still only the attitude to religion of the men who make up the state. It therefore follows that man liberates himself from a restriction through the medium of the state, in a political way, by transcending this restriction in an abstract and restricted manner, in a partial manner, in contradiction with himself. It also follows that when man liberates himself politically he does so in a devious way, through a medium, even though the medium is a necessary one. Finally it follows that even when man proclaims himself an atheist through the mediation of the state, i.e., when he proclaims the state an atheist, he still remains under the constraints of religion because he acknowledges his atheism only deviously, through a medium. Religion is precisely that: the devious acknowledgement of man, through an intermediary. The state is the intermediary between man and man’s freedom. Just as Christ is the intermediary to whom man attributes all his divinity, all his religious constraints, so the state is the intermediary to which man transfers all his non-divinity, all his human unconstraint.
The political elevation of man above religion shares all the shortcomings and all the advantages of political elevation in general. For example, the state as state annuls private property, man declares in a political way that private property is abolished, immediately the property qualification is abolished for active and passive election rights, as has happened in many North American states. Hamilton interprets this fact quite correctly from the political standpoint: ‘The masses have gained a victory over the property owners and financial wealth.’12 Is not private property abolished in an ideal sense when the propertyless come to legislate for the propertied? The property qualification is the last political form to recognize private property.
And yet the political annulment of private property does not mean the abolition of private property; on the contrary, it even presupposes it. The state in its own way abolishes distinctions based on birth, rank, education and occupation when it declares birth, rank, education and occupation to be non-political distinctions, when it proclaims that every member of the people is an equal participant in popular sovereignty regardless of these distinctions, when it treats all those elements which go to make up the actual life of the people from the standpoint of the state. Nevertheless the state allows private property, education and occupation to act and assert their particular nature in their own way, i.e., as private property, as education and as occupation. Far from abolishing these factual distinctions, the state presupposes them in order to exist, it only experiences itself as political state and asserts its universality in opposition to these elements. Hegel therefore defines the relationship of the political state to religion quite correctly when he says:
In order for the state to come into existence as the self-knowing ethical actuality of spirit, it is essential that it should be distinct from the form of authority and of faith. But this distinction emerges only in so far as divisions occur in the ecclesiastical sphere itself. It is only in this way that the state, above the particular churches, has attained to the universality of thought – its formal principle – and is bringing this universality into existence.13
Of course! It is only in this way, above the particular elements, that the state constitutes itself as universality.
The perfected political state is by its nature the species-life of man in opposition to his material life. All the presuppositions of this egoistic life continue to exist outside the sphere of the state in civil society, but as qualities of civil society. Where the political state has attained its full degree of development man leads a double life, a life in heaven and a life on earth, not only in his mind, in his consciousness, but in reality. He lives in the political community, where he regards himself as a communal being, and in civil society, where he is active as a private individual, regards other men as means, debases himself to a means and becomes a plaything of alien powers. The relationship of the political state to civil society is just as spiritual as the relationship of heaven to earth. The state stands in the same opposition to civil society and overcomes it in the same way as religion overcomes the restrictions of the profane world, i.e. it has to acknowledge it again, reinstate it and allow itself to be dominated by it. Man in his immediate reality, in civil society, is a profane being. Here, where he regards himself and is regarded by others as a real individual, he is an illusory phenomenon. In the state, on the other hand, where he is considered to be a species-being, he is the imaginary member of a fictitious sovereignty, he is divested of his real individual life and filled with an unreal universality.
The conflict in which the individual believer in a particular religion finds himself with his own citizenship and with other men as members of the community is reduced to the secular division between the political state and civil society. For man as bourgeois14 ‘life in the state is nothing more than an appearance or a momentary exception to the essential nature of things and to the rule’. Of course the bourgeois, like the Jew, only takes part in the life of the state in a sophistical way, just as the citoyen only remains a Jew or a bourgeois in a sophistical way; 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 tradesman and the citizen, between the day-labourer and the citizen, between the landowner and the citizen, between the living individual and the citizen. The contradiction which exists between religious man and political man is the same as exists between the bourgeois and the citoyen, between the member of civil society and his political lion’s skin.
This secular conflict to which the Jewish question ultimately reduces itself – the relationship of the political state to its presuppositions, whether they be material elements, like private property, etc., or spiritual ones, like education, religion, the conflict between the general interest and the private interest, the split between the political state and civil society – these secular oppositions Bauer does not touch, but polemicizes instead against their religious expression.
It is precisely its foundation – the need that assures civil society its existence and guarantees its necessity – that exposes it to constant dangers, maintains an element of uncertainty in it and brings forth that restless alternation of wealth and poverty, need and prosperity which constitutes change in general.15
Compare the whole section ‘Civil Society’,16 which broadly follows the main features of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Civil society in its opposition to the political state is recognized as necessary because the political state is recognized as necessary.
Political emancipation is certainly a big step forward. It may not be the last form of general human emancipation, but it is the last form of human emancipation within the prevailing scheme of things. Needless to say, we are here speaking of real, practical emancipation.
Man emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing it from the province of public law to that of private law. It is no longer the spirit of the state where man behaves – although in a limited way, in a particular form and a particular sphere – as a species-being, in community with other men. It has become the spirit of civil society, the sphere of egoism and of the bellum omnium contra omnes. It is no longer the essence of community but the essence of difference. It has become the expression of the separation of man from his community, from himself and from other men, which is what it was originally. It is now only the abstract confession of an individual oddity, of a private whim, a caprice. The continual splintering of religion in North America, for example, already gives it the external form of a purely individual affair. It has been relegated to the level of a private interest and exiled from the real community. But it is important to understand where the limit of political emancipation lies. The splitting of man into his public and his private self and the displacement of religion from the state to civil society is not one step in the process of political emancipation but its completion. Hence political emancipation neither abolishes nor tries to abolish man’s real religiosity.
The dissolution of man into Jew and citizen, Protestant and citizen, religious man and citizen, is not a denial of citizenship or an avoidance of political emancipation: it is political emancipation itself, it is the political way of emancipating oneself from religion. Of course, in periods when the political state as political state comes violently into being out of civil society and when human self-liberation attempts to realize itself in the form of political self-liberation, the state can and must proceed to the abolition of religion, to the destruction of religion; but only in the same way as it proceeds to the abolition of private property (by imposing a maximum, by confiscation, by progressive taxation) and the abolition of life (by the guillotine). At those times when it is particularly self-confident, political life attempts to suppress its presupposition, civil society and its elements, and to constitute itself as the real, harmonious species-life of man. But it only manages to do this in violent contradiction to the conditions of its own existence, by declaring the revolution permanent, and for that reason the political drama necessarily ends up 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 which recognizes Christianity as its foundation, as the state religion, and which therefore excludes other religions. The perfected Christian state is rather the atheist state, the democratic state, the state which relegates religion to the level of the other elements of civil society. The state which is still theological, which still officially professes the Christian faith, which still does not dare to declare itself a state, has not yet succeeded in expressing in secular, human form, in its reality as state, the human basis of which Christianity is the exaggerated expression. The so-called Christian state is simply the non-state, since it is only the human basis of the Christian religion, and not Christianity as a religion, which can realize itself in real human creations.
The so-called Christian state is the Christian negation of the state, but is certainly not the political realization of Christianity. The state which still professes Christianity in the form of religion does not yet profess it in a political form, for it still behaves towards religion in a religious manner, i.e. it is not the true realization of the human foundation of religion because it continues to accept the unreality and the imaginary form of this human core. The so-called Christian state is the imperfect state and Christianity serves as supplement and sanctification of this imperfection. Therefore religion necessarily becomes a means for the state, which is a hypocritical state. A perfected state which counts religion as one of its presuppositions on account of the deficiency which exists in the general nature of the state is not at all the same thing as an imperfect state which declares religion its foundation on account of the deficiency which lies in its particular existence as a deficient state. In the latter case religion becomes imperfect politics. In the former, the imperfection even of perfected politics manifests itself in religion. The so-called Christian state needs the Christian religion to complete itself as a state. The democratic state, the true state, does not need religion for its political completion. On the contrary, it can discard religion, because in it the human foundation of religion is realized in a secular way. The so-called Christian state, on the other hand, behaves in a political way towards religion and in a religious way towards politics. In the same way as it demeans political forms to mere appearances, it demeans religion to a mere appearance.
In order to make this opposition clearer let us consider Bauer’s construction of the Christian state, a construction which derives from his study of the Christian-Germanic state.
Bauer says:
In order to prove the impossibility or the non-existence of the Christian state, people have recently been making frequent references to those passages in the Gospel which the [present] state not only does not observe but also cannot observe unless it wishes to dissolve itself entirely [as a state].
But the matter is not settled so easily. What do those passages in the Gospel demand? Supernatural self-denial, submission to the authority of revelation, turning away from the state and the abolition of secular relationships. But the Christian state demands and accomplishes all these things. It has made the spirit of the Gospel its own, and if it does not reproduce it in the same words that the Gospel uses, this is because it is expressing that spirit in political forms, that is, in forms which are borrowed from the political system of this world but are reduced to mere appearances in the religious rebirth they are forced to undergo. This turning away from the state realizes itself through political forms.17
Bauer goes on to show how the people in a Christian state are in fact a non-people with no will of their own and how their true existence resides in the ruler to whom they are subjected and who is, by origin and by nature, alien to them, i.e. given to them by God without their agreement. He also shows how the laws of this people are not their own creation but actual revelations; how the supreme ruler needs privileged intermediaries in his relations with the real people, with the masses; how the masses themselves disintegrate into a multitude of distinct spheres formed and determined by chance, differentiated by their interests, their particular passions and prejudices, and allowed as a privilege to seclude themselves from one another, etc.18
But Bauer himself says:
Politics, if it is to be nothing more than religion, can no longer be called politics, just as washing dishes, if it is to take on a religious significance, can no longer be called housework.19
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 dominance.
The separation of the ‘spirit of the Gospel’ from the ‘letter of the Gospel’ is an irreligious act. The state which allows the Gospel to speak in the language of politics or in any other language than the language of the Holy Ghost commits a sacrilegious act, if not in human eyes, then at least in its own religious eyes. The state which acknowledges Christianity as its supreme law and the Bible as its charter must be measured against the words of the Holy Scripture, for the Scripture is holy even in its words. This state, like the human debris upon which it is based, becomes involved in a painful contradiction, a contradiction which from the standpoint of religious consciousness is insuperable, when we refer it to those passages in the Gospel which it ‘not only does not observe but also cannot observe unless it wishes to dissolve itself entirely as a state’. And why does it not want to dissolve itself entirely? It is not capable of answering either others or itself on this point. In its own consciousness the official Christian state is an ought whose realization is impossible; it cannot convince itself of the reality of its own existence except through lies and therefore remains in its own eyes a perpetual object of doubt, an unreliable and problematic object. Criticism therefore has every justification in forcing the state which bases itself on the Bible into intellectual disarray in which it no longer knows whether it is illusion or reality and in which the infamy of its secular ends – for which religion serves as a cover – comes into irreconcilable conflict with the integrity of its religious consciousness, which sees religion as the aim of the world. This state can free itself from its inner torment only by becoming the bailiff of the Catholic Church. In the face of this Church, which declares the secular power to be its servant, the state – the secular power which claims to rule over the religious spirit – is powerless.
In the so-called Christian state it is estrangement [Entfremdung] which carries weight, and not man himself. The only man who carries weight, the king, is specifically distinct from other men: he is still religious and is in direct communion with Heaven, with God. The relationships which prevail here are still relationships of faith. This means that the religious spirit is not yet truly secularized.
But the religious spirit can never be truly secularized, for what is it but the unsecular form of a stage in the development of the human spirit? The religious spirit can be realized only in so far as that stage in the development of the human spirit of which it is the religious expression emerges and constitutes itself in its secular form. This happens in the democratic state. Not Christianity but the human foundation of Christianity is the foundation of this state. Religion remains the ideal, unsecular consciousness of its members because it is the ideal form of the stage of human development which has been reached in this state.
The members of the political state are religious because of the dualism between individual life and species-life, between the life of civil society and political life. They are religious inasmuch as man considers political life, which is far removed from his actual individuality, to be his true life and inasmuch as religion is here the spirit of civil society arid the expression of the separation and distance of man from man. Political democracy is Christian inasmuch as it regards man – not just one man but all men – as a sovereign and supreme being; but man in his uncultivated, unsocial aspect, man in his contingent existence, man just as he is, man as he has been corrupted, lost to himself, sold, and exposed to the rule of inhuman conditions and elements by the entire organization of our society – in a word, man who is not yet a true species-being. The sovereignty of man – but of man as an alien being distinct from actual man – is the fantasy, the dream, the postulate of Christianity, whereas in democracy it is a present and material reality, a secular maxim.
In a perfected democracy the religious and theological consciousness regards itself as all the more religious and all the more theological since it is apparently without any political significance or earthly aims, an unworldly and spiritual affair, an expression of the inadequacy of reason, the product of caprice and fantasy, an actualization of the life to come. Christianity here achieves the practical expression of its universal religious significance in that the most disparate outlooks come together in one group in the form of Christianity. Moreover, it demands of no one that he accept Christianity, but simply that he accept religion in general, any religion (cf. the book we mentioned earlier by Beaumont20). The religious consciousness revels in a wealth of religious opposition and religious diversity.
We have therefore shown that political emancipation from religion allows religion – but not privileged religion – to continue in existence. The contradiction in which the adherent of a particular religion finds him`self in relation to his citizenship is only one aspect of the general secular contradiction between the political state and civil society. The final form of the Christian state is one which recognizes itself as state and disregards the religion of its members. The emancipation of the state from religion is not the emancipation of actual man from religion.
Therefore we do not tell the Jews that they cannot be emancipated politically without radically emancipating themselves from Judaism, which is what Bauer tells them. We say instead: the fact that you can be politically emancipated without completely and absolutely renouncing Judaism shows that political emancipation by itself is not human emancipation. If you Jews want to be politically emancipated without emancipating yourselves as humans, the incompleteness and the contradiction lies not only in you but in the nature and the category of political emancipation. If you are ensnared within this category, then your experience is a universal one. In the same way as the state evangelizes when, although a state, it adopts the attitude of a Christian towards the Jew, the Jew acts politically when, although a Jew, he demands civil rights.
But if man, although a Jew, can be politically emancipated and acquire civil rights, can he claim and acquire the rights of man? In Bauer’s view he cannot.
The question is whether the Jew as such, i.e. the Jew who himself admits that he is compelled by his true nature to live in eternal separation from others, is capable of acquiring and granting to others the universal rights of man.
The idea of the rights of man was not discovered in the Christian world until the last century. It is not innate in man. On the contrary, it can only be won in a struggle against the historical traditions in which man has up to now been educated. Therefore the rights of man are not a gift of nature or a legacy of previous history, but the prize of the struggle against the accident of birth and the privileges which history has handed down from generation to generation. They are the product of culture, and only he can possess them who has earned them and deserved them.
But can the Jew really take possession of them? As long as he is a Jew the restricted nature that makes him a Jew will inevitably gain the ascendancy over the human nature which should join him as a man to other men; the effect will be to separate him from non-Jews. He declares through this separation that the particular nature which makes him a Jew is his true and highest nature in the face of which human nature is forced to yield.
In the same way the Christian as Christian cannot grant the rights of man.21
According to Bauer man must sacrifice the ‘privilege of faith’ in order to be in a position to receive the universal rights of man. Let us consider for one moment these so-called rights of man. Let us consider them in their most authentic form – the form they have among those who discovered them, the North Americans and the French! These rights of man are partly political rights, rights which are only exercised in community with others. What constitutes their content is participation in the community, in the political community or state. They come under the category of political freedom, of civil rights, which as we have seen by no means presupposes the consistent and positive abolition of religion and therefore of Judaism. It remains for us to consider the other aspect, the droits de l’homme22 as distinct from the droits du citoyen.23
Among them we find freedom of conscience, the right to practise one’s chosen religion. The privilege of faith is expressly recognized, either as one of the rights of man or as a consequence of one of these rights, namely freedom.
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 1791, Article 10: ‘No one is to be molested on account of his convictions, even his religious convictions.’ In Title 1 of the Constitution of 1791 the following is guaranteed as one of the rights of man: ‘the liberty of every man to practise the religion he professes’.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man etc, 1793, counts among the rights of man, Article 7: ‘Liberty of worship’. What is more, it even says, in connection with the right to publish views and opinions, to assemble and to practise religion, that ‘the need to enunciate these rights supposes either the presence or the recent memory of despotism’. Compare the Constitution of 1795, Title XIV, Article 354.
Constitution of Pennsylvania, Article 9, §3: ‘All men have received from nature the imprescriptible right to worship the Almighty according to the dictates of their consciences and no one can of right be compelled to follow, to institute or to support against his will any religion or religious ministry. No human authority can under any circumstances whatsoever intervene in questions of conscience and control the powers of the soul.’
Constitution of New Hampshire, Articles 5 and 6: ‘Among the natural rights, some are by their very nature inalienable because they cannot be replaced by anything equivalent. The rights of conscience are of this sort.’24
The incompatibility of religion with the rights of man is so alien to the concept of the rights of man that the right to be religious – to be religious in whatever way one chooses and to practise one’s chosen religion – is expressly enumerated among the rights of man. The privilege of faith is a universal right of man.
The rights of man as such are distinguished from the rights of the citizen. Who is this man who is distinct from the citizen? None other than the member of civil society. Why is the member of civil society simply called ‘man’ and why are his rights called the rights of man? How can we explain this fact? By the relationship of the political state to civil society, by the nature of political emancipation.
The first point we should note is that the so-called rights of man, as distinct from the rights of the citizen, are quite simply the rights of the member of civil society, i.e. of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community. Consider the most radical constitution, the Constitution of 1793:
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
Article 2. ‘These rights, etc. (the natural and imprescriptible rights) are: equality, liberty, security, property.’
What is liberty?
Article 6. ‘Liberty is the power which belongs to man to do anything that does not harm the rights of others’, or according to the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1791: ‘Liberty consists in being able to do anything which does not harm others.’
Liberty is therefore the right to do and perform everything which does not harm others. The limits within which each individual can move without harming others are determined by law, just as the boundary between two fields is determined by a stake. The liberty we are here dealing with is that of man as an isolated monad who is withdrawn into himself. Why does Bauer say that the Jew is incapable of acquiring the rights of man?
‘As long as he is a Jew the restricted nature which makes him a Jew will inevitably gain the ascendancy over the human nature which should join him as a man to other men; the effect will be to separate him from non-Jews.’
But the right of man to freedom 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 restricted individual, restricted to himself.
The practical application of the right of man to freedom is the right of man to private property.
What is the right of man to private property?
Article 16 (Constitution of 1793): ‘The right of property is that right which belongs to each citizen to enjoy and dispose at will of his goods, his revenues and the fruit of his work and industry.’
The right to private property is therefore the right to enjoy and dispose of one’s resources as one wills, without regard for other men and independently of society: the right of self-interest. The individual freedom mentioned above, together with this application of it, forms the foundation of civil society. It leads each man to see in other men not the realization but the limitation of his own freedom. But above all it proclaims the right of man ‘to enjoy and dispose at will of his goods, his revenues and the fruit of his work and industry’.
There remain the other rights of man, equality and security.
Equality, here in its non-political sense, simply means equal access to liberty as described above, namely that each man is equally considered to be a self-sufficient monad. The Constitution of 1795 defines the concept of this equality, in keeping with this meaning, as follows:
Article 3 (Constitution of 1795): ‘Equality consists in the fact that the law is the same for everyone, whether it protects or whether it punishes.’
And security?
Article 8 (Constitution of 1793): ‘Security consists in the protection accorded by society to each of its members for the conservation of his person, his rights and his property.’
Security is the supreme social concept of civil society, the concept of police, the concept that the whole of society is there only to guarantee each of its members the conservation of his person, his rights and his property. In this sense Hegel calls civil society ‘the state of need and of reason’.
The concept of security does not enable civil society to rise above its egoism. On the contrary, security is the guarantee of its egoism.
Therefore not one of the so-called rights of man goes beyond egoistic man, man as a member of civil society, namely an individual withdrawn into himself, his private interest and his private desires and separated from the community. In the rights of man it is not man who appears as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself, society, appears as a framework extraneous to the individuals, as a limitation of their original independence. The only bond which holds them together is natural necessity, need and private interest, the conservation of their property and their egoistic persons.
It is a curious thing that a people which is just beginning to free itself, to tear down all the barriers between the different sections of the people and to found a political community, that such a people should solemnly proclaim the rights of egoistic man, separated from his fellow men and from the community (Declaration of 1791), and even repeat this proclamation at a time when only the most heroic devotion can save the nation and is for that reason pressingly required, at a time when the sacrifice of all the interests of civil society becomes the order of the day and egoism must be punished as a crime. (Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc., 1793.) This fact appears even more curious when we observe that citizenship, the political community, is reduced by the political emancipators to a mere means for the conservation of these so-called rights of man and that the citizen is therefore proclaimed the servant of egoistic man; that the sphere in which man behaves as a communal being [Gemeinwesen] is degraded to a level below the sphere in which he behaves as a partial being, and finally that it is man as bourgeois, i.e. as a member of civil society, and not man as citizen who is taken as the real and authentic man.
‘The goal of all political association is the conservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man’ (Declaration of the Rights of Man etc., 1791, Article 2). ‘Government is instituted in order to guarantee man the enjoyment of his natural and imprescriptible rights’ (Declaration etc., 1793, Article 1).
Thus even during the ardour of its youth, urged on to new heights by the pressure of circumstances, political life declares itself to be a mere means whose goal is the life of civil society. True, revolutionary practice is in flagrant contradiction with its theory. While, for example, security is declared to be one of the rights of man, the violation of the privacy of letters openly becomes the order of the day. While the ‘unlimited freedom of the press’ (Constitution of 1793, Article 122) is guaranteed as a consequence of the right to individual freedom, the freedom of the press is completely destroyed, for ‘the freedom of the press should not be permitted when it compromises public freedom’.25 This therefore means that the right to freedom ceases to be a right as soon as it comes into conflict with political life, whereas in theory political life is simply the guarantee of the rights of man, the rights of individual man, and should be abandoned as soon as it contradicts its goal, these rights of man. But practice is only the exception and theory is the rule. Even if we were to assume that the relationship is properly expressed in revolutionary practice, the problem still remains to be solved as to why the relationship is set upon its head in the minds of the political emancipators so that the end appears as the means and the means as the end. This optical illusion present in their minds would continue to pose the same problem, though in a psychological and theoretical form.
But there is a straightforward solution.
Political emancipation is at the same time the dissolution of the old society on which there rested the power of the sovereign, the political system [Staatswesen] as estranged from the people. The political revolution is the revolution of civil society. What was the character of the old society? It can be characterized in one word: feudalism. The old civil society had a directly political character, i.e. the elements of civil life such as property, family and the mode and manner of work were elevated in the form of seignory, estate and guild to the level of elements of political life. In this form they defined the relationship of the single individual to the state as a whole, i.e. his political relationship, his relationship of separation and exclusion from the other components of society. For the feudal organization of the life of the people did not elevate property or labour to the level of social elements but rather completed their separation from the state as a whole and constituted them as separate societies within society. But the functions and conditions of life in civil society were still political, even though political in the feudal sense, i.e. they excluded the individual from the state as a whole, they transformed the particular relationship of his guild to the whole state into his own general relationship to the life of the people, just as they transformed his specific civil activity and situation into his general activity and situation. As a consequence of this organization, the unity of the state, together with the consciousness, the will and the activity of the unity of the state, the universal political power, likewise inevitably appears as the special concern of a ruler and his servants, separated from the people.
The political revolution which overthrew this rule and turned the affairs of the state into the affairs of the people, which constituted the political state as a concern of the whole people, i.e. as a real state, inevitably destroyed all the estates, corporations, guilds and privileges which expressed the separation of the people from its community. The political revolution thereby abolished the political character of civil society. It shattered civil society into its simple components – on the one hand individuals and on the other the material and spiritual elements which constitute the vital content and civil situation of these individuals. It unleashed the political spirit which had, as it were, been dissolved, dissected and dispersed in the various cul-de-sacs of feudal society; it gathered together this spirit from its state of dispersion, liberated it from the adulteration of civil life and constituted it as the sphere of the community, the universal concern of the people ideally independent of those particular elements of civil life. A person’s particular activity and situation in life sank to the level of a purely individual significance. They no longer constituted the relationship of the individual to the state as a whole. Public affairs as such became the universal affair of each individual and the political function his universal function.
But the perfection of the idealism of the state was at the same time the perfection of the materialism of civil society. The shaking-off of the political yoke was at the same time the shaking-off of the bonds which had held in check the egoistic spirit of civil society. Political emancipation was at the same time the emancipation of civil society from politics, from even the appearance of a universal content.
Feudal society was dissolved into its foundation [Grund], into man. But into man as he really was its foundation – into egoistic man.
This man, the member of civil society, is now the foundation, the presupposition of the political state. In the rights of man the state acknowledges him as such.
But the freedom of egoistic man and the acknowledgement of this freedom is rather the acknowledgement of the unbridled movement of the spiritual and material elements which form the content of his life.
Hence man was not freed from religion – he received the freedom of religion. He was not freed from property – he received the freedom of property. He was not freed from the egoism of trade – he received the freedom to engage in trade.
The constitution of the political state and the dissolution of civil society into independent individuals – who are related by law just as men in the estates and guilds were related by privilege – are achieved in one and the same act. But man, as member of civil society, inevitably appears as unpolitical man, as natural man. The rights of man appear as natural rights, for self-conscious activity is concentrated upon the political act. Egoistic man is the passive and merely given result of the society which has been dissolved, an object of immediate certainty, and for that reason a natural object. The political revolution dissolves civil society into its component parts without revolutionizing these parts and subjecting them to criticism. It regards civil society, the world of needs, of labour, of private interests and of civil law, as the foundation of its existence, as a presupposition which needs no further grounding, and therefore as its natural basis. Finally, man as he is a member of civil society is taken to be the real man, man as distinct from citizen, since he is man in his sensuous, individual and immediate existence, whereas political man is simply abstract, artificial man, man as an allegorical, moral person. Actual man is acknowledged only in the form of the egoistic individual and true man only in the form of the abstract citizen.
Rousseau’s description of the abstraction of the political man is a good one:
Whoever dares to undertake the founding of a people’s institutions must feel himself capable of changing, so to speak, human nature, of transforming each individual, who in himself is a complete and solitary whole, into a part of a greater whole from which he somehow receives his life and his being, of substituting a partial and moral existence for physical and independent existence. He must take man’s own powers away from him and substitute for them alien ones which he can only use with the assistance of others.26
All emancipation is reduction of the human world and of relationships to man himself
Political emancipation is the reduction of man on the one hand to the member of civil society, the egoistic, independent individual, and on the other to the citizen, the moral person.
Only when real, individual man resumes the abstract citizen into himself and as an individual man has become a species-being in his empirical life, his individual work and his individual relationships, only when man has recognized and organized his forces propres27 as social forces so that social force is no longer separated from him in the form of political force, only then will human emancipation be completed.
Bruno Bauer, ‘The Capacity of Present-day Jews and Christians to Become Free’, Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz, pp. 56–71.
Bauer deals in this form with the relation between the Jewish and Christian religions, as well as their relation to criticism. Their relation to criticism is their relation ‘to the capacity to become free’.
His conclusion is:
The Christian has only one hurdle to overcome, namely, his religion, in order to dispense with religion altogether, and hence to become free. The Jew, on the other hand, does not only have to break with his Jewish nature; he also has to break with the development towards the completion of his religion, a development which has remained alien to him.28
Thus Bauer here transforms the question of Jewish emancipation into a purely religious question. The theological problem as to who has the better chance of gaining salvation – Jew or Christian – is here repeated in a more enlightened form: who is the more capable of emancipation! The question is no longer: which gives freedom, Judaism or Christianity? Rather it is the reverse: which gives more freedom, the negation of Judaism or the negation of Christianity?
If they wish to become free, the Jews should not embrace Christianity but Christianity in dissolution and more generally religion in dissolution, i.e. enlightenment, criticism and its product – free humanity.29
It is still a matter of embracing a religion for the Jew. It is no longer a question of Christianity, but of Christianity in dissolution.
Bauer demands of the Jew that he break with the essence of the Christian religion – a demand which, as he himself says, does not proceed from the development of the Jewish nature.
Since Bauer, at the end of his Jewish Question, represented Judaism as nothing more than a crude religious criticism of Christianity, and therefore gave it ‘only’ a religious significance, it was clear in advance that he would also transform the emancipation of the Jews into a philosophico-theological act.
Bauer sees the ideal and abstract essence of the Jew, his religion, as his whole essence. He is therefore right to conclude: ‘The Jew gives nothing to humanity when he lays aside his limited law,’ when he abolishes all his Judaism.30
According to this the relationship of Jews and Christians is as follows: the only interest Christians have in the emancipation of the Jews is a general human and theoretical interest. Judaism is an offensive fact for the religious eye of the Christian. As soon as his eye ceases to be religious, this fact ceases to be offensive. The emancipation of the Jews is in and for itself not the task of the Christian.
However, if the Jew wants to liberate himself, he has to complete not only his own task but also the task of the Christian – the Critique of the Evangelical History of the Synoptics and the Life of Jesus, etc.31
‘They must see to it themselves: they will determine their own destiny; but history does not allow itself to be mocked.’32
We will try to avoid looking at the problem in a theological way. For us the question of the Jews’ capacity for emancipation is transformed into the question: what specific social element must be overcome in order to abolish Judaism? For the capacity of the present-day Jew for emancipation is the relation of Judaism to the emancipation of the present-day world. This relation flows inevitably from the special position of Judaism in the enslaved world of today.
Let us consider the real secular Jew – not the sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew.
Let us not look for the Jew’s secret in his religion: rather let us look for the secret of religion in the real Jew.
What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest.
What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his secular God? Money.
Well then! Emancipation from haggling and from money, i.e. from practical, real Judaism, would be the same as the selfemancipation of our age.
An organization of society that abolished the basis upon which haggling exists, i.e. the possibility of haggling, would have made the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would vanish like an insipid haze in the vital air of society. On the other hand, when the Jew recognizes this his practical nature as null and works to abolish it, he is working outwards from his previous course of development in the direction of general human emancipation and turning against the supreme practical expression of human self-estrangement.
We therefore recognize in Judaism the presence of a universal and contemporary anti-social element whose historical evolution – eagerly nurtured by the Jews in its harmful aspects – has arrived at its present peak, a peak at which it will inevitably disintegrate.
The emancipation of the Jews is, in the last analysis, the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.
The Jew has already emancipated himself in a Jewish way.
The Jew, who is merely tolerated in Vienna, for example, determines the fate of the whole empire through the financial power he possesses. The Jew, who can be without rights in the smallest of the German states, decides the fate of Europe. While the corporations and the guilds exclude him or are not yet willing to look upon him with favour, the audacity of his industry mocks the obstinacy of medieval institutions.33
This is not an isolated fact. The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish way not only by acquiring financial power but also because through him and apart from him money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian peoples. The Jews have emancipated themselves in so far as the Christians have become Jews.
For example, Captain Hamilton informs us34 that the pious and politically free inhabitant of New England is a kind of Laocoön who does not make even the slightest effort to free himself from the snakes that are choking him. Mammon is his idol and he prays to him not only with his lips but with all the power of his body and his soul. For him the world is nothing but a Stock Exchange and he is convinced that his sole vocation here on earth is to get richer than his neighbours. He is possessed by the spirit of bargaining and the only way he can relax is by exchanging objects. When he travels it is as if he carried his shop and office on his back and spoke of nothing but interest and profit. If he takes his eyes off his own business for a moment, it is simply so that he can poke his nose into someone else’s.
Indeed, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world is expressed in such an unambiguous and natural fashion in North America that the very proclamation of the Gospel, Christian teaching, has become a commercial object and the bankrupt businessman is just as likely to go into evangelizing as the successful evangelist into business.
‘The man you see at the head of a respectable congregation started out as a businessman; his business failed so he became a minister; the other started out as a priest, but as soon as he had saved some money he left the pulpit for business. In many people’s eyes the religious ministry is a veritable industrial career.’35
In Bauer’s view it is ‘a dishonest state of affairs when in theory the Jew is deprived of political rights while in practice he possesses enormous power and exercises a political influence in the larger sphere that is denied him as an individual’.36
The contradiction between the practical political power of the Jew and his political rights is the contradiction between politics and financial power in general. Ideally speaking the former is superior to the latter, but in actual fact it is in thrall to it.
Judaism has kept going alongside Christianity not simply as a religious critique of Christianity and an embodiment of doubts about the religious origins of Christianity but also because the practical Jewish spirit, Judaism, has managed to survive in Christian society and has even reached its highest level of development there.37 The Jew, who is a particular member of civil society, is only the particular manifestation of the Judaism of civil society.
Judaism has managed to survive not despite history but through it.
Civil society ceaselessly begets the Jew from its own entrails.
What was the essential basis of the Jewish religion? Practical need, egoism.
The monotheism of the Jew is therefore in reality the polytheism of the many needs, a polytheism that makes even the lavatory an object of divine law. Practical need, egoism, is the principle of civil society and appears as such in all its purity as soon as civil society has fully brought forth 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 stand. Money debases all the gods of mankind and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-constituted value of all things. It has therefore deprived the entire world – both the world of man and of nature – of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and existence; this alien essence dominates him and he worships it.
The god of the Jews has been secularized and become the god of the world. Exchange is the true god of the Jew. His god is nothing more than illusory exchange.
The view of nature which has grown up under the regime of private property and of money is an actual contempt for and practical degradation of nature which does exist in the Jewish religion but only in an imaginary form.
In this sense Thomas Münzer declares it intolerable that ‘all creatures have been made into property, the fish in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth – all living things must also become free’.38
What is present in an abstract form in the Jewish religion – contempt for theory, for art, for history, for man as an end in himself – is the actual and conscious standpoint, the virtue, of the man of money. The species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes a commercial object! Woman is put on the market.
The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.
The ungrounded and unfounded law of the Jew is only the religious caricature of ungrounded and unfounded morality and law in general, of the purely formal rites with which the world of self-interest surrounds itself.
Here too the supreme relation of man is the legal relation, the relation to laws which apply to him not because they are the laws of his own will and nature but because they dominate him and because breaches of them would be avenged.
Jewish Jesuitry, the same practical Jesuitry that Bauer finds in the Talmud, is the relationship of the world of self-interest to the laws that dominate it; the wily circumvention of those laws constitutes the principal skill of that world.
Indeed, the motion of that world within its laws is necessarily a continual supersession [Aufhebung] of the law.
Judaism could not develop further as a religion, could not develop further theoretically, because the world-view of practical need is by nature narrow-minded and rapidly exhausted.
The religion of practical need could not by its very nature find its completion in theory but only in practice, precisely because its truth is practice.
Judaism could not create a new world; it could only draw the new creations and conditions of the world into the province of its own activity, since practical need, whose understanding is only at the level of self-interest, is passive and incapable of extending itself in directions of its own choosing; instead, it finds itself extended in line with the development of social conditions themselves.
Judaism reaches its peak with the completion of civil society; but civil society first reaches its completion in the Christian world. Only under the rule of Christianity, which makes all national, natural, moral and theoretical relationships external to man, could civil society separate itself completely from political life, tear apart all the species-bonds of man, substitute egoism and selfish need for those bonds and dissolve the human world into a world of atomistic individuals confronting each other in enmity.
Christianity sprang from Judaism. It has now dissolved back into Judaism.
The Christian was from the very beginning the theorizing Jew. The Jew is therefore the practical Christian and the practical Christian has once again become a Jew.
Christianity overcame real Judaism only in appearance. It was too refined, too spiritual, to do away with the crudeness of practical need except by raising it into celestial space.
Christianity is the sublime thought of Judaism and Judaism is the vulgar application of Christianity. But this application could not become universal until Christianity as perfected religion had theoretically completed the self-estrangement of man from himself and from nature.
Only then could Judaism attain universal domination and turn alienated man and alienated nature into alienable, saleable objects subject to the slavery of egoistic need and to the market.
Selling is the practice of alienation [Die Veräusserung ist die Praxis der Entäusserung]. As long as man is restrained by religion he can objectify his essence only by making it into an alien, fantastic being. In the same way, when under the sway of egoistic need he can act practically and practically produce objects only by making his products and his activity subordinate to an alien substance and giving them the significance of an alien substance – money.
Translated into practice, the Christian egoism of eternal happiness inevitably becomes the material egoism of the Jew, celestial need becomes terrestrial need and subjectivism becomes self-interest. We can explain the tenacity of the Jew not from his religion but from the human foundation of his religion, from practical need and egoism.
Since the real essence of the Jew is universally realized and secularized in civil society, civil society could not convince the Jew of the unreality of his religious essence, which is nothing more than the ideal expression of practical need. Therefore not only in the Pentateuch and the Talmud but also in present-day society we find the essence of the modern Jew not in an abstract but in a supremely empirical form, not only as the narrowness of the Jew but as the Jewish narrowness of society.
As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism – the market and the conditions which give rise to it – the Jew will have become impossible, for his consciousness will no longer have an object, the subjective basis of Judaism – practical need – will have become humanized and the conflict between man’s individual sensuous existence and his species-existence will have been superseded.
The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.