Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

152 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

and shape what is otherwise merely animal reality. While Marx attacks Hegel’s

abstract spirit, then, what Marx offers as an alternative at this point remains less

a form of material social practice than a vaguely socialized version of Feuerba-

chian human consciousness.

The result of what Marx sees as Hegel’s merely allegorical actualization of ab-

stract categories in real persons is that human rationality leaves, brute material

circumstances untransformed. In Marx’s reading, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

becomes a political-philosophical allegory arbitrarily superimposed on animal

nature. In an appropriation of Feuerbach’s transformative method, Marx coun-

ters Hegel’s abstraction with a “real” social agent, the Volk. It is Marx’s Feuerba-

chian critique of Hegelian hypostatization, however, that most effectively reveals

how Marx defines the reality of this social agent in opposition to base material-

ity. Working through a few of the most important examples of Marx’s critique of

the collusion between abstraction and brute materiality in Hegel’s political theory

will illustrate the complexity of the relationships between the ideal and the mate-

rial as Marx deploys them in Kritik and prepare us to appreciate the changes in

Marx’s conception of these relationships that occur in “Zur Judenfrage.”

Marx quotes Hegel’s defense of the monarchy as “something not deduced

but purely self-originating” and retorts: “In a certain sense, every necessary

being is ‘purely self-originating’; in this respect the monarch’s louse is as good as

the monarch.”^28 In a similar vein, he savages the political importance that Hegel

assigns to the estates and landed gentry as exaltation of an essentially animal

principle. The constitution based on the estates does not so much transcend the

principle of social exclusion and atomization as exemplify it by making “the in-

dividual function... into a society for itself.” “Estate is based,” Marx continues,

“on the supreme law of the division of society, but, in addition, it separates man

from his universal essence, it transforms him into an animal that is identical with

its own immediate determinate nature. The Middle Ages is the animal history

of mankind, its zoology.”^29 In “modernizing” the medieval estates Hegel fails

to transcend their basic “zoological” principle of “natural” division; he merely

adapts it, through metaphysical sleight of hand, to the modern political context.

Whereas Hegel makes much of the nominal continuity between social class and

political class (both Stand in German), Marx charges that by assigning “the”

estates (Stände) different meanings in the (real) civil and (abstract) political

spheres, Hegel achieves an only apparent synthesis that in fact exemplifies his

arbitrary (allegorical) hypostatization:

The same subject is given different meanings, but the meaning is not that

of self-determination, but of an allegory foisted onto it. The same meaning