Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 155

human beings from brute animal existence is (quintessentially Feuerbachian)

consciousness.^42

Even as he reconceives of Feuerbachian species-being in terms of social exis-

tence, Marx defines the agency of the Volk—the real social protagonist beneath

Hegel’s mystifications—in terms of a collective (or species) consciousness, op-

posed to abstraction and base materialism equally:

In monarchy the whole, the people, is subsumed under one of its forms of

existence, the political constitution; in democracy the constitution itself ap-

pears only as one determining characteristic of the people, and indeed as its

self-determination. In monarchy we have the people of the constitution, in

democracy the constitution of the people. Democracy is the solution to the

riddle of every constitution. In it we find the constitution founded on its true

ground: real human beings and the real people; not merely implicitly and in

essence, but in existence and in reality. The constitution is thus posited as the

people’s own creation. The constitution is in appearance what it is in reality:

the free creation of man.^43

For all its rhetoric of the real, in Marx’s claim that in true democracy the con-

stitution is “founded on its true ground: real human beings and the real people

... in existence and in reality,” what is most “real” about “das wirkliche Volk”

remains a form of consciousness. Andrew Chitty maintains that Marx’s concep-

tion of the essence of the state in his 1842 journalism remains close to Hegel’s,

even if Marx has a decidedly republican orientation and “suggests that it is the

will of the people as a whole that should be the highest authority in the state.”^44

As Chitty argues, Marx’s various statements to this effect “remain compatible

with the underlying Hegelian conception of the state and its essence... as long

as the will of the people is not defined as whatever majority opinion on a mat-

ter is, but as a will that expresses and demands the institutionalisation of the

freedom, reason, and equality realised in the people’s spirit, and everything

Marx says on the subject is consonant with such an ‘idealising’ conception of

the people’s will.”^45 Chitty’s point holds for much of Marx’s critique of Hegel’s

conception of the state in the Kreuznach Kritik as well.^46 If Marx charged Hegel

with assigning an allegorical status to specific real persons and groups, Marx

himself assigns a real status to what remains an idealized group, das Volk.^47 Marx

follows Feuerbach in conceiving of true humanity in terms of species conscious-

ness. Humanity—or, in political terms, the Volk—is little more than a hyposta-

tized substrate of such free consciousness. Despite Marx’s assault on Hegel’s

abstraction, the will of Marx’s people remains essentially synonymous with the

rational essence of the state.