Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 159

as a sphere apart. The true state would permeate all aspects of reality.^54 None-

theless, in this letter the elusive Volk—which will, eventually, express itself in a

true state—remains the idealized embodiment of rational principles and not the

actual Volk existing in the real world of German slime.^55

Marx goes on to portray German dehumanization as the flip side of the

monarchical principle: “The monarchical principle in general is the despised,

the despicable, the dehumnised man.”^56 The subjects of the Prussian king are

deprived of their humanity because “in Prussia the king is the system. He is

the sole political person. In one way or another, his personality determines the

system.”^57 This dehumanizing principle is inherent in the monarchical system,

no matter what the king’s personal aspirations might be. Marx champions radi-

cal republicanism, the “consequences” [Folgen] of the political revolution in

France, as the “idealists’” antidote to the monarchical system that monopolizes

political personality in the person of the king and reduces all others to subhu-

man status.^58

Critics have seen an anticipation of Marx’s later understanding of the prole-

tariat in the way out of the German impasse that Marx envisions at the end of

this letter. This reading is valid to an extent (not least because Marx’s first con-

ception of the proletariat modifies, without radically rethinking, Hegel’s idealist

dialectic), but it is also indicative of a wish, in hindsight, to read the evolution

of Marx’s thought as the progressive distillation of later Marxian ideas.^59 Marx

explains to Ruge that “if, nevertheless, I do not despair of [the present time],

that is only because it is precisely the desperate situation which fills me with

hope.”^60 Whence will come this reversal? From a convergence between thinking

and suffering humanity—“enemies of philistinism,” a “new type of humanity”—

that the industrial age is producing with unprecedented speed:

The system of industry and trade, of ownership and exploitation of people

... leads... to a rupture within present-day society.... But the existence of

suffering human beings, who think, and thinking human beings, who are op-

pressed, must inevitably become unpalatable and indigestible for the pas-

sively and thoughtlessly consuming animal world of philistinism.

For our part, we must expose the old world to the full light of day and

shape the new one in a positive way. The longer the time that events allow to

thinking humanity for taking stock of its position, and to suffering mankind

for mobilising its forces, the more perfect on entering the world will be the

product that the present time bears in its womb.^61

The “product” Marx here envisions is republican democracy, the “conse-

quence” of the French Revolution. Although Marx’s theorization of the alliance