Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 181

Feuerbach’s analysis. The democratic state declares the sovereignty of each in-

dividual, with the twofold Feuerbachian effect of alienating collective species-

being from itself (it is projected into political heaven) and atomizing it into so

many monads (the political analogue of Christian souls). This hypostatization

of the individual as sovereign is so socially corrosive because it allows egoistic

individuals fictitiously to transcend their limitations without providing a frame-

work for true social transformation, true realization of species-being. Modern

politics merely declares the sovereignty of individuals in all their brute, untrans-

formed positivity: “Political democracy is Christian since in it man, not merely

one man but every man, ranks as sovereign, as the highest being, but it is man in

his uncivilised, unsocial form, man in his fortuitous existence, man just as he is,

man as he has been corrupted by the whole organisation of our society, who has

lost himself, been alienated, and handed over to the rule of inhuman conditions

and elements—in short, man who is not yet a real species-being.”^125 Although

Feuerbach’s critique of projection and hypostatization provided a key model

for Marx’s analysis of liberal democracy, aspects of “Zur Judenfrage,” possibly

despite Marx’s intentions, also mirror typically Bauerian perspectives. Though

polemical, “Zur Judenfrage” is not the sort of broadside against Bauer that Marx

would elaborate in Die heilige Familie and The German Ideology. More impor-

tant than whether or not Marx in “Zur Judenfrage” wanted to go for Bauer’s

jugular, however, is the fact that he lacked the theoretical wherewithal to do

so.^126 However tendentiously, Marx misidentifies Bauer’s fundamental theoreti-

cal flaw as the assumption that achieving a secular state beyond narrow theologi-

cal interests would in itself constitute true emancipation.^127 Marx faults Bauer

for directing criticism only at theological limitations and not at the limitations of

the secular political state.^128 Marx clearly wishes to be more grounded in reality

than Bauer, but since he defines secular political reality in analogy to theology

he does not so much offer an alternative to Bauer’s mode of critique as extend

it to the secular state, in which Marx now sees the completion of Christianity.

After passing swiftly over the incompletely secularized Christian-German

state, Marx describes the completely secularized democratic state in ways that

point up the circularity of his manner of grounding his critique in secular phe-

nomena, and his continuing proximity malgré lui to Bauer.

But... the religious spirit cannot be really secularised, for what is it in itself

but the non-secular form of a stage in the development of the human mind?

The religious spirit can only be secularised insofar as the stage of develop-

ment of the human mind of which it is the religious expression makes its ap-

pearance and becomes constituted in its secular form. This takes place in the