Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

186 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

cleaning of saucepans, if it is to be accepted as a religious matter, ought not to

be regarded as a matter of domestic economy.’ (P. 108 .) In the Christian-German

state, however, religion is an ‘economic matter’ just as ‘economic matters’ belong

to the sphere of religion. The domination of religion in the Christian-German

state is the religion of domination.”^137 In the passage Marx quotes, Bauer pur-

ports to refute, through Kritik, what he belittles as the Parisian Sanhedrin’s

merely apologetic assertion of compatibility between Judaism and French citi-

zenship. Jewish claims of being able to participate in public life ring hypocritical

to Bauer, for whom in Judaism everything is religion and religion everything.

Since it is really religion (egoism, privilege), Jewish “politics” should not be

considered politics at all, and Jews should not receive political rights until they

cease being Jews.^138 Marx turns Bauer’s point against him to vitiate his critique

of the Christian-German state: since that state remains rooted in religion it does

not embody secular politics, and Bauer’s critique of it does not constitute true

political analysis. Even so, Marx could still—but emphatically and revealingly

does not—follow or redirect to his own ends Bauer’s distinction between the

“authentic Volk” and the Masse into which the Christian-German state has di-

vided this Volk. Instead, Marx, in keeping with his second Deutsch-französische

Jahrbücher letter to Ruge, refers to the basis of the Christian state simply as

“human rubbish [Menschenkehricht] .”^139 The concept of the Volk—at least in the

German context—had evidently lost all analytical validity for Marx.

Marx refuses to speak in the name of an authentic German Volk (even a la-

tent one) and instead points up Germany’s abject human refuse. He effectively

dismisses the republican Volk as a viable agent of social revolution without,

significantly, appealing to the demos of “true democracy” as a corrective. To-

ward the end of ZJ 1 Marx underscores how “enigmatic” [rätselhaft] it is that

the French people, even in the vital stages of constituting itself in the modern

political sense, and while emphasizing devotion to the nation as paramount,

nonetheless equated “the human being” with the atomized, “egoistic” member

of civil society rather than with the intersubjectively constituted member of the

wider community:^140

It is puzzling enough that a people which is just beginning to liberate itself,

to tear down all the barriers between its various sections, and to establish a

political community, that such a people solemnly proclaims (Declaration of

1791 ) the rights of egoistic man separated from his fellow men and from the

community, and that indeed it repeats this proclamation at a moment when

only the most heroic devotion can save the nation, and is therefore impera-

tively called for, at a moment when the sacrifice of all the interests of civil so-