Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

154 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

Marx seeks to expose the qualities Hegel admired in the landed gentry as

but the triumph of brute private property itself, devoid of human subjectivity and

will.^37 Where Hegel appreciated the role of birth in the institution of primogeni-

ture as a bulwark against the “hazards of election,” Marx contrasts the mere physi-

cal fact of birth with elections as the expression of human will.^38 Here Marx

emphatically contrasts true idealism with Hegel’s unacknowledged brute mate-

rialism: “At every point Hegel’s political spiritualism can be seen to degenerate

into the crassest materialism.... The highest political offices coincide with

individuals by way of their birth the same way that an animal’s place, its charac-

ter and mode of life, etc., is something it is immediately born with. The highest

offices of the state thus acquire an animal reality. Nature takes revenge on Hegel

for the contempt he has shown her. If matter is to be shorn of its reality in favor

of human will then here human will is left with no reality but that of matter.”^39

In these various examples, Marx sees Hegel’s arbitrary (allegorical or mystical)

abstraction as a philosophical-political legitimation of brute materialism. Of

course, Marx continued to decry base, stupid materiality even after he arrived

at the basic tenets of historical materialism—for example, in his contempt for

German parochialism in The German Ideology and in the memorable comment

in The Communist Manifesto that in creating great cities, the bourgeoisie had

“rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.”^40

Yet the salient distinction in these texts is between backward ways of life and

the materialist dialectical world historical process from which they remain in-

sulated. In the Kreuznach Kritik, in contrast, the active agent defined over against

base materialism (animal existence or zoology) remains, essentially, human con-

sciousness. Indeed, Marx virtually equates people’s “real participation” in the

state—something that in true democracy would be equivalent to their “social

existence” itself—with consciousness:

Deliberation and decision are the means by which the state becomes effective

as a real concern. It therefore appears to be self-evident that all the members

of the state have a relation to the state: it is a mater of real concern to them.

... However, if they are a part of the state, it is obvious that their very social

existence already constitutes their real participation in it. Not only do they

share in the state, but the state is their share. To be a conscious part of a thing

means to take part of it and to take part in it consciously. Without this con-

sciousness the member of the state would be an animal.^41

Reality (“real concern,” “real participation”) and consciousness are here nearly

synonymous. “Deliberation and decision” are the means by which the state can

be effectively realized on the plane of “social existence.” What distinguishes