Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 169

conception of the Volk as a unified revolutionary subject begins, in late 1843 , to

share the scene with and define itself against die Masse, a new category Bauer

would go on to deploy expansively to refer, chiefly, to the liberal bourgeoisie but

also to the working classes.^86 In an 1842 book review (which Marx found “ex-

quisite [köstlich]”), Bauer equated das Volk with Wahrheit.^87 In and apropos of

his writings on the Jewish Question, however, he begins to distinguish between

a more restricted authentic Volk and die Masse, a pliant category under which

he would come to subsume all the changing groups he deemed to be driven by

particular interest rather than universal self-consciousness. In Die Judenfrage

Bauer distinguishes between the universal Volk and particularistic Masse in the

context of his critique of the illegitimacy and socially corrosive effects of the

Christian state. His analysis of the pseudo-mediating instances in Hegel’s model

of the state has many parallels with Marx’s Kreuznach Kritik. Because the sov-

ereign powers are uncoupled from the authentic people, they require hordes of

intermediaries to represent them for what is thus a “nonpeople... inauthentic

people... minors [die Unmündigen] .”^88 The “estate of intermediaries” is a pre-

rogative awarded on the basis of birth or other arbitrary criteria having noth-

ing to do with the mediatory function. The internally compartmentalized and

segregated “inauthentic Volk,” represented by the arbitrary appointees of the

powers that be, “is precisely only the mass, which has no universal rights and is

not permitted to have any universal consciousness.”^89 Such “particular circles,

constructed and determined by chance, which distinguish themselves accord-

ing to their interests, particular passions and prejudices... receive, as a privi-

lege, the permission to close themselves off one from another. They have—can

and may have—no universal concern; so that they never so much as think about

having universal concerns, autonomy and a private authority is granted them

in the management of their particular affairs.”^90 Bauer blames the state for dis-

rupting the authentic Volk’s universal consciousness (allgemeines Bewußtsein)

and reducing it to a “mass of the inauthentic people” (Masse des uneigentlichen

Volks). By denying the authentic Volk universal rights and fracturing its universal

consciousness, the illegitimate, privilege-based state divides the authentic Volk

into a mass of particular interests.

Bauer here blames the Christian state for the diremption of the authentic Volk

into the “mass” of competing interest groups. In his first response (of December

1843 ) to critics of his interventions on the Jewish Question, however, he—in an

intentionally polarizing gesture—extends the category of the particularist Masse

to include the liberal bourgeoisie.^91 Bauer’s reply to critics of Die Judenfrage

was the lead essay of the first issue of the Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung, which

Bruno and Edgar Bauer launched and edited (and which Marx and Engels sav-