Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 187

ciety must be the order of the day, and egoism must be punished as a crime.

(Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc., of 1793 .) This fact becomes still more

puzzling when we see that the political emancipators go so far as to reduce

citizenship, and the political community, to a mere means for maintaining

these so-called rights of man, that therefore the citoyen is declared to be the

servant of egoistic homme, that the sphere in which man acts as a communal

being is degraded to a level below the sphere in which he acts as a partial

being, and that, finally, it is not man as citoyen, but man as bourgeois who is

considered to be the essential and true man.^141

Marx solves this enigma with the argument that, in establishing the political

state as a realm apart, the French Revolution removed political significance from

actual, lived experience and thereby naturalized egoistic civil society, the only

palpable reality left.^142 He substantiates this claim by contrasting the Volk-state

relationship in feudalism with that in political modernity. In feudal society one

could claim no universal political status apart from, or above, one’s particular

social station, or corporation. The relationship of one’s particular corporation

to the state also determined one’s general relationship to the life of the people

[allgemeines Verhältnis zum Volksleben]. Marx echoes elements of his critique of

the monarch in the Kreuznach Kritik of spring 1843 when he concludes that the

feudal dispersal of political status gave rise to the false perception that political

unity could only reside with the sovereign and his servants.^143 In the Kreuznach

Kritik, however, Marx still retained faith in the true Volk’s capacity to embody

the consciousness, unity, and active will of the state, which had been illegiti-

mately appropriated by the monarch. In contrast, the Volk has now lost its status

as the agent of emancipation. Marx no longer invests hope in the demos implied

in his earlier notion of true democracy and focuses solely on the Volk’s paradoxi-

cal, self-canceling function in the process of political emancipation:

The political revolution which overthrew this sovereign power and raised

state affairs to become affairs of the people [Volksangelegenheiten], which

constituted the political state as a matter of general concern, that is, as a real

state, necessarily smashed all estates, corporations, guilds, and privileges,

since they were all manifestations of the separation of the people from the

community [Trennung des Volkes von seinem Gemeinwesen]. The political

revolution thereby abolished the political character of civil society. It broke

up civil society into its simple component parts; on the one hand, the indi-

viduals; on the other hand, the material and spiritual elements constituting

the content of the life and social position of these individuals. It set free the

political spirit, which had been, as it were, split up, partitioned and dispersed