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Chapter Four

Marx’s “Real Jews” between Volk and Proletariat

Productivizing Social Abjection and

Grounding Radical Social Critique

A War on Abstraction

Karl Marx ( 1818 – 83 ) famously lampooned Bruno Bauer’s abstraction in “Zur

Judenfrage” (On the Jewish Question; 1843 – 44 ), a two-part review essay of

works by Bauer, and the first (though far from the last) occasion on which Marx

publicly criticized his erstwhile friend and teacher. By the time he took aim at

Bauer’s abstraction, Marx was varying a theme already well established in Young

Hegelian discourse. The critique of abstraction indeed reaches back to Hegel

himself. The complex mediations that Hegel theorized in Philosophy of Right

between the individual and the universal were aimed precisely at overcoming

subjective abstraction. For Hegel, the ethical life of the state constituted realized

freedom. Yet Hegel’s critical followers on the Left saw in the master thinker—

and, as the Young Hegelian movement unraveled in the 1840 s into a polemi-

cal free-for-all, increasingly in each other—an inadmissible degree of lingering

abstraction. August von Cieszkowski, Ludwig Feuerbach, Moses Hess, Arnold

Ruge, and Marx, among others, would articulate visions of how philosophy

should turn from abstraction to reality and deeds, variously conceived.^1 Much

of Marx’s early work responds to the perceived need to discover a more satis-

fying basis for the connections between concept and reality than one finds in

Hegel’s “abstractions,” whether about world history consciously comprehend-

ing itself in the apotheosis of speculative thought, or freedom realizing itself in

the rational state.^2

It was the wish to reconcile ideas and reality that first brought Marx to

Hegel’s philosophy and later animated his criticism of Hegel. As Marx related

in a long letter to his father of November 1837 , he had abandoned the idealism

of Kant and Fichte and, malgré lui, embraced Hegel’s philosophy when he “ar-

rived at the point of seeking the idea in reality itself.”^3 Warren Breckman has

demonstrated that Marx’s disillusionment with Hegel’s ability to reconcile the

real and the ideal was already at the heart of his doctoral dissertation (written