Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

188 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

in the various blind alleys of feudal society. It gathered the dispersed parts

of the political spirit, freed it from its intermixture with civil life, and estab-

lished it as the sphere of the community, the general concern of the nation

[der allgemeinen Volksangelegenheit], ideally independent of those particular

elements of civil life.^144

The paradox of the Volk as Marx theorizes it is that its consolidation in the mod-

ern political sense is coextensive with its alienation and derealization. The mod-

ern state finally unifies feudalism’s fractured and disrupted Volksleben—it con-

solidates the political spirit that had been scattered across so many feudal “blind

alleys” into a “general concern of the nation”—but only as a sphere apart, inde-

pendent of the concrete particulars of social existence. The Volk seems to harbor

potential only so long as illegitimate authority proscribes its consolidation, yet

it becomes derealized through the very process of its political self-constitution.

Although Marx does not explicitly discount the Volk as a potential emancipa-

tory agent, he theorizes the (political) Volk as so implicated in the process of

political self-estrangement that it loses all viability as an agent for overcoming

that estrangement. In relegating all communality to the new political heaven, the

“enigmatic” revolution in modern politics bestows on the dog-eat-dog world

of civil society the status of a natural foundation (Naturbasis). The abstractly

constituted Volk could not be called upon to revolutionize that naturalized social

foundation.

Real Jews as the Abjection of Christian Spirit

In ZJ 2 Marx responds chiefly to Bauer’s “Die Fähigkeit,” in which Bauer locates

Christians, in their theological universalism, at one remove from free, secular,

universal human consciousness and Jews, in their theological particularism, at

two removes. Marx conspicuously shifts the style and thrust of his argument

from ZJ 1 and more pugnaciously challenges Bauer’s ladder-of-consciousness

model (in which consciousness successively transcends its particularist limits in

a triumphalist upward trajectory to unfettered self-realization) with an emphatic

downward descent from the lofty illusions of secular Christian spirit into the

materiality of “Jewish” civil society. The opening sentences of ZJ 2 attack Bauer

for using proximity or distance from Bauer’s brand of Kritik as the measure of

Judaism’s and Christianity’s capacity to become free. For Marx, Bauer’s histori-

cal teleology merely secularizes salvation history: “The theological problem as

to who has the better chance of gaining salvation—Jew or Christian—is here re-

peated in a more enlightened form: who is the more capable of emancipation.”^145