Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

PARIS^103

rising some of the more detailed analyses of his Critique of Hegel's Philo-
sophy of Right, Marx showed that political emancipation involved the
dissolution of the old feudal society. But the transition from feudal to
bourgeois society had not brought human emancipation: 'Man was not
freed from religion; he was given religious freedom'. Marx finished his
review by declaring:
The actual individual man must take back into himself the abstract
citizen and, as an individual man in his empirical life, in his individual
work and individual relationships become a species-being; man must
recognise his own forces as social forces, organize them and thus no
longer separate social forces from himself in the form of political
forces. Only when this has been achieved will human emancipation be
completed.^50

In the same article Marx included a much shorter review of an essay

by Bauer entitled 'The Capacity of Present-Day Jews and Christians to

Become Free' which was published in Herwegh's Twenty-one Sheets from

Switzerland. Bauer's theme was that the Jew was further removed from

emancipation than the Christian: whereas the Christian had only to break

with his own religion, the Jew had also to break with the completion of

his religion, that is, Christianity: the Christian had only one step to make,

the Jew two. Taking issue again with Bauer's theological formulation

of the problem, Marx developed a theme that he had already touched on

in the first part of his article: religion as the spiritual facade of a sordid

and egoistic world. For Marx, the question of Jewish emancipation had

become the question of what specific social element needs to be overcome

in order to abolish Judaism. He defined the secular basis of Judaism as

practical need and self-interest, the Jew's worldly cult as barter, and his

worldly god as money. He stated in conclusion:

An organisation of society that abolished the presupposition of haggling

and thus its possibility, would have made the Jew impossible. His

religious consciousness would dissolve like an insipid vapour into the

real live air of society. On the other hand: if the Jew recognises this

practical essence of his as void and works for its abolition, he is working

for human emancipation with his previous development as a basis, and

turning himself against the highest practical expression of human self-

alienation.^51

The Jew had, however, already emancipated himself in a Jewish way. This

had been possible because the Christian world had become impregnated

with the practical Jewish spirit. Their deprivation of nominal political

rights mattered little to Jews, who in practice wielded great financial

power. 'The contradiction between the Jew's lack of political rights and