Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 1 89

The form of Kritik Bauer touts as free human activity par excellence remains,

in Marx’s assessment, within the logic of confession (Bekenntnis): “For the Jew

it is still a matter of a profession of faith [Bekenntnis], though no longer faith in

Christianity but rather in Christianity in dissolution.”^146

Marx prepares his shift toward social reality with his dismissal, at the end of

ZJ 1 , of the political act (Ta t). In the course of his critique of the illusory universal-

ity of the French Revolution—the great political revolution—Marx comments:

“The rights of man appear to be natural rights because self-conscious activity is

concentrated on the political act.”^147 The political act had undergone a process

of derealization in Marx’s eyes since he wrote his Kreuznach Kritik only a few

months previously. The orientation of self-conscious activity toward the politi-

cal act does not liberate human beings but only installs as human rights what are

in fact the rights of egoistic private persons. As heaven naturalizes unjust earthly

social conditions while promising a fictitious ultimate refuge from them, politi-

cal heaven also lends the inhuman conditions of egoistic civil society the appear-

ance of a natural condition. Since the political state and egoistic civil society in

this way produce each other mutually and carry the structure of Christian dual-

ism into secular modernity, political emancipation offers no solution. Instead,

it is fragmented, egoistic society—the pseudo-natural ground above which the

abstractly universal political sphere hovers—that must be “revolutionized.”^148

Marx intensifies his critique of Bauer’s model of historical agency in ZJ 2.

Near the beginning of it he charges Bauer with transforming the emancipation

of the Jews into “a philosophical-theological act.”^149 Marx states his goal in this

essay to be to displace emancipatory agency from the plane of theological, philo-

sophical, and political pseudo-action into real social practice: “We are trying

to break with the theological formulation of the question. For us, the question

of the Jew’s capacity for emancipation becomes the question: What particular

social element has to be overcome in order to abolish Judaism?”^150

In late 1843 , however, Marx still lacked the tools for socioeconomic analysis

that this ambitious project demanded. He developed a compelling theory of

production through intensive reading in economics in 1844 ; his friendship with

Engels, whose firsthand knowledge of factory conditions in England pushed

Marx in a more empirical direction; and a series of increasingly vituperative

polemics against erstwhile Young Hegelian colleagues, culminating in The Ger-

man Ideology, the first articulation of the principles of dialectical materialism.

Marx’s relative ignorance of economics and inchoate conception of production

in “Zur Judenfrage” only increase the burden his rhetoric of the real had to bear

at this moment. Marx has a polemical and theoretical need to anchor his critique

in social reality, yet he can access that reality only by conjuring it in gritty rhetoric.