Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

164 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

only alienate “the greatest part of freethinking practical men, who have taken on

the arduous role of fighting for freedom step by step, within the constitutional

frameworks, while we, from our comfortable armchair of abstraction, point out

to them their contradictions.”^66 Newspapers, Marx argues, are the proper forum

for practical questions, which are part of the “real State” (Fragen des wirklichen

Staats, praktische Fragen).^67 Marx mocks the armchair critic’s self-aggrandizing

conception of the efficacy of pure critique, which he opposes to practical work,

such as the practice of journalism, and he urges Oppenheim to take a clearer

editorial stand against contributions like Edgar Bauer’s.

As editor of the Rheinische Zeitung Marx would eventually stop accepting

contributions from the Freien altogether. In a letter to Ruge of November 30 ,

1842 , he related demands he had recently made to the Freien regarding their

submissions. He faulted the group for locating freedom in a cheaply shocking

but finally comfortable form (in einer lizentiösen, sanskülottischen und dabei be-

quemen Form) rather than in substantive content.^68 Marx already viewed the

critique of religion per se as an idle task and had demanded of the Freien that

they incorporate the critique of religion into an analysis of secular political con-

ditions, “because this approach fits better the nature of a newspaper and the

education of the public, for religion has no content of its own and does not

live from heaven but from earth and falls automatically with dissolution of the

inverted reality whose theory it is.”^69 From Marx’s vantage point, the Freien—

abstract and comfortably disengaged—mistook cheap scandal for true freedom

and radical critique.^70

Marx anticipated other aspects of his debate with Bauer in further corre-

spondence with Ruge, most explicitly in a letter of March 13 , 1843 : “Just now

the president of the Israelites here came to see me and asked for my support for

a petition to the provincial parliament on behalf of the Jews, and I will give it.

Although I find the Israelite faith repugnant, Bauer’s opinions still seem to me

to be too abstract. The point is to punch as many holes in the Christian state as

possible and to smuggle in the rational as far as we can.”^71

Ruge would have been sympathetic to Marx’s complaint about Bauer’s hos-

tility to pragmatism (“punching as many holes in the Christian state as pos-

sible,” in Marx’s pugnacious phrase). Ruge had mocked Bauer and the Freien in

a letter of December 12 , 1842 , to his friend Moritz Fleischer.^72 After visiting them

in a Berlin Kneipe (pub) that they frequented, Ruge was left with the impression

that the group was ludicrously self-important and uncoupled from reality:

[Bauer] wanted to defend all the both theoretical and practical extrava-

gances, which are decidedly as arbitrary as Romanticism itself, and laid the