Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

170 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

age in Die heilige Familie). The text—and with it the new journal—opens with

a broadside against the historical irrelevance of the German liberal bourgeoi-

sie, whom Bruno Bauer now subsumes under the derogatory label “die Masse,”

and then addresses specific non-Jewish and Jewish critics of his provocative

positions. Bauer now deems the German liberal bourgeoisie to be complicitous

with the state for making compromises with, rather than radically opposing, its

principle of privilege—notably, in the bourgeoisie’s support of Jewish emanci-

pation.^92

Bauer proceeded via a critique of the purported pure particularity of the

Jews to a notion of “massiness” that redefined and displaced his earlier un-

derstanding of the Volk. In contrast, Marx deployed the Jews as a middle term

between the Volk and the proletariat. Bauer’s conceptual realignment renders

explicit the ideal quality of the Volk as he—and Marx—had been using it. This

was not a problem for Bauer, since his turn to postliberal radicalism proceeded

via a supercilious and self-aggrandizing posture that set his own critical practice

(characterized by true reality and revolutionary agency) emphatically against

the only apparent reality of the institutions and opponents he subsumed under

the protean category of massiness. For Marx, who was striving to overcome the

sort of abstraction and theoretical solipsism he saw Bauer embracing and to

position his analysis on a solid basis in social reality, the loss of the Volk as a

viable theoretical and political protagonist was more problematic. Although

Bauer set himself apart from the mass, Marx needed a massy social counterpart

to legitimize his antiphilosophy. It was on the way to the massy protagonist—the

proletariat—that Marx had his brief encounter with the massy antagonist, real

Jews.

Bauer’s Secular Salvation History

A full account of Bauer’s writings on Jewish rights exceeds the scope of this

chapter. Since these are the texts to which Marx responds in “Zur Judenfrage,”

however, and because they provide much of the very language Marx uses by

both direct and indirect citation, some familiarity with Bauer’s argument is

indispensable for understanding how Marx uses Bauer’s discourse as a con-

ceptual and performative foil. Bauer insists that meaningful liberation requires

overcoming particularistic identity—the logic of monopoly and privilege that

divides and enslaves humanity. In demanding emancipation, Jews make a partic-

ularistic appeal (they appeal as Jews) for rights, a universal category. Bauer thus

sees any Jewish appeal to rights as caught in a self-disqualifying enunciatory

paradox.^93 In appealing to the Christian state, moreover, Jews make demands