Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

168 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

spirit of compromise. By exacerbating differences Bauer believed he could force

fundamental conflicts to become more sharply defined and force their propo-

nents to embrace their positions more consciously. In this way he believed his-

torical contradictions would more quickly reach a crisis point and be resolved.

His tone in the letter accompanying Die Judenfrage is at times apocalyptic; by

exacerbating oppositions and provoking and proliferating enemies, he hopes to

force history to its “all-deciding hour.”

In 1841 Bauer had already elaborated a theoretical rejection of compromise

in favor of strategic polarization.^82 It was first with his interventions on Jewish

civil rights, however, that he put his theory into practice and spoke out against

a concrete political demand that enjoyed almost universal support among pro-

gressives.^83 In so doing Bauer adopted an elitist posture that derealized—that is,

categorized as inessential, illusory, and misguided—liberal politics while claim-

ing for himself, as the voice of “pure critique,” a position in the vanguard of

world-historical agency.^84 Sass notes how Bauer collapses critique and praxis

and privileges the reality of pure critique over a politics of pragmatic “com-

promise”: “Because the model of pure critique in which theory, critique and

practice coincide brooks no compromise or pragmatic mediation with existing

conditions, the critic is personally thrust into the decisive battle in a completely

different manner than when the critique still could comprise [einkalkulieren]

possibilities for the theory to retreat and winter over [Rückzugs und Überwin-

terungsmöglichkeiten].... The substance of absolute critique is ultimately in-

carnated in the critic himself.”^85 The propositional content of pure critique, in

other words, becomes inseparable from the strategic performance of the critic,

Bauer, who articulates it. It is the predominance of the critic’s utterance over

the substance of his theoretical argument that renders it impossible to compro-

mise or wait for a more auspicious season. In a double gesture Bauer derealizes

his opponents—who are all beholden to “the old,” the superseded—and casts

the now of his own performative critical praxis as the cutting edge of world-

historical consciousness’s teleological advancement.

An integral part of Bauer’s evolving self-definition as a “pure” critic involved

denigrating as die Masse those he considered beneath his level of critical con-

sciousness. During the same transitional period, as we have seen, Marx was

moving away from his idealized conception of the Volk toward an alliance with

emphatic “massiness” in the form of the proletariat, understood as the embodi-

ment of revolutionary agency. These opposite trajectories away from (Bauer)

and toward (Marx) social materiality have a common point of departure in a ba-

sically shared conception of the Volk, one that became untenable for each thinker

with their divergent turns to postliberal radicalism. Moggach notes how Bauer’s