Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 163

cal agent, the Volk. Here, in contrast, Marx recuperates all of the theoretical force

with which he obliterates the proletariat’s human integrity, for it is their abjec-

tion that constitutes their universality, on a material plane beneath civil society

rather than in the abstraction of a political heaven above it.^64

Marx’s theorization of, and self-positioning as a theoretician of, social abjection

are fundamentally different, and basically incompatible, in his May 1843 letter to

Ruge and in “Einleitung,” but they are not internally ambivalent. “Zur Judenfrage,”

published together with these texts in the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher, falls

chronologically and conceptually between them and marks a highly ambivalent

theoretical crossroad in Marx’s evolving theory of social reality.

Marx, Bauer, and the Position of the Radical Critic

Marx’s two-part “Zur Judenfrage” appeared in the guise of a review of two

works by Bauer. The history of the relationship between Marx and Bauer is

a crucial component of the complex nexus at which Marx’s essay is situated.

Marx heard lectures by Bauer in Berlin, and the two maintained a correspon-

dence and friendship between 1838 and late 1842. Marx hoped through Bauer’s

influence to obtain a position in Bonn. This hope was dashed, however, when

Bauer was dismissed from his position there in March 1842 by the new min-

ister of culture, Johann Albrecht Friedrich von Eichhorn, a conservative anti-

Hegelian appointed by Friedrich Wilhelm IV. In 1842 Bauer returned to Berlin

and became the central figure of the Freien or freethinkers, a group of bohemian

radical Young Hegelian intellectuals. Marx assumed the editorship of the Rhei-

nische Zeitung on October 15 , 1842 , a position he held for five months before

resigning, on March 17 , 1843 , in protest over the interference of the censor. As

editor of the Rheinische Zeitung Marx quickly lost patience with his erstwhile

colleagues in Berlin, in whose contributions he saw conceptual vacuity wedded

to a self-indulgent extremism that was anything but helpful to Marx in his capac-

ity as the editor of a liberal paper with pragmatic political aims.^65

Remarks by Marx regarding the Freien in two letters from this period—one

written some six weeks before, the other some six weeks after, he assumed the

editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung—illuminate the nature of his understand-

ing of Bauer’s abstraction. In a letter from around August 25 , 1842 , to Oppen-

heim, Marx opines that the paper had erred in recently publishing a potentially

highly controversial article by Edgar Bauer, Bruno Bauer’s brother, on “The

Juste-Milieu.” Marx finds the real risks to the paper of increased censure or

complete suppression far too great to warrant running an article whose call for

criticism would at any rate have no effect on the powers that be, and would