Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 153

could be given a different subject. The meaning of civil class distinctions

in the political sphere is not their own meaning, but one derived from the

political sphere itself.... This is the uncritical, mystical way in which to

interpret an old view of the world in terms of a new one.... This uncriti-

cal mysticism is the key both to the riddle of modern constitutions (espe-

cially constitutions based on Estates) and also to the mystery of the Hege-

lian philosophy, above all the Philosophy of Right and the Philosophy of

Religion.^30

Instead of realizing the universal human essence, Hegel’s “uncritical mysticism”

legitimates the brute divisions of the status quo by providing it with a meta-

physical political alibi.

Marx takes fuller aim at how Hegel’s idealism collapses into base material-

ism in his lengthy analysis of Hegel’s assessment of primogeniture, the system

whereby property is passed on in full to the eldest son. Where Hegel saw the

landed nobility as particularly suited to state service due to the relative security

and independence that the institution of primogeniture afforded it, Marx re-

peatedly contrasts humanity and true idealism with the brute stupidity of the

soil. He points up a contradiction in the status Hegel assigns private property

in civil versus constitutional law. In the sphere of civil law Hegel sees the ability

to alienate property as the measure of one’s fullest possession of it, of its having

become fully infused with one’s will.^31 Regarding primogeniture in the life of the

state, however, Hegel extols the virtues of the inalienability of the land, the noble

owner’s inability to divide his estate even among equally loved children.^32 This

Hegel interprets as an admirable reversal of the principle of the family, to which

the landed gentry submits for the good of the state in keeping with their “hard

sacrifices made for political ends.”^33

Marx views Hegel’s interpretation of primogeniture and the role of the landed

gentry in civic life as one of the most egregious examples of Hegel’s forced inter-

pretations of the status quo to fit a preestablished abstract schema. He argues

that primogeniture, far from humanizing private property by submitting it to the

higher principle of the state, only installs the principle of private property as the

sovereign subject determining human will.^34 In primogeniture private property

cannot be alienated because it is not possessed by, but rather possesses, human

will: “My will does not possess, it is possessed.”^35 Marx frames the contradic-

tion he discerns in Hegel’s different assessments of the relation of will to prop-

erty in civil versus constitutional law as a conflict between (good) idealism and

(bad) materialism. “What sort of state is it,” Marx asks, “that cannot even toler-

ate the idealism of its own civil law?”^36