322 } Notes to Chapter 4
installment of Bauer’s “Die Judenfrage” in Deutsche Jahrbücher) alludes to Ruge’s and
Herwegh’s criticism of the Freien. It states in part: “Herwegh and Ruge found that the ‘Freien,’
through their political romanticism, obsession with genius [Geniesucht] and gasconade, com-
promised the cause and the party of freedom” (Marx and Engels, MEW, 27 : 665 , note 333 ).
73. Ruge, Briefwechsel und Tagebuchblätter, 290 – 91.
74. Moggach, PP, 165.
75. On Bauer’s vision of German republicanism in Die gute Sache, see ibid., 120 – 25.
76. Ibid., 145.
77. Bruno Bauer, Feldzüge der reinen Kritik, 271.
78. Quoted in Gustaaf A. van den Bergh van Eysinga, “Het Jodenvraagstuk,” 29 – 30.
79. See ibid., 30.
80. Quoted in ibid.
81. Bauer, Feldzüge der reinen Kritik, 255. Sass does not mention that this letter accompa-
nied Bauer’s Die Judenfrage.
82. In Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel: Den Atheisten und Antichristen. Ein
Ultimatum ( 1841 ); see Moggach, PP, chapter 5. Moggach notes that Bauer’s articles of sum-
mer 1842 were particularly devoted to critiquing reformism and exacerbating conflict (ibid.,
243 , note 72 ). Die Judenfrage was a major part of Bauer’s theoretical and tactical antiprag-
matic turn in this period.
83. Moggach, PP, 146.
84. In his meticulous study of Bauer’s Vormärz republicanism, Moggach refutes charges
that Bauer was interested only in political emancipation and not in social transformation,
and that Bauer believed ideas alone could transform the world and so did not theorize the
interaction between self-consciousness and objective reality, including social institutions.
Maggoch underscores how Bauer’s dialectic of infinite self-consciousness involves a rela-
tionship between the subjective and objective: from an analysis of the trajectory of history,
self-consciousness discerns the trajectory of human freedom and then acts on the world to
bring it more into harmony with the dictates of free human rationality. Since no positivity
can halt the movement of infinite free self-consciousness, this process is endless in principle
(see ibid., especially 112 – 13 ). Even in his consistently generous reading of Bauer, however,
Moggach acknowledges both the nebulousness of the connection Bauer posits between the
subjective and objective sides of his model and the arrogance of his writings of the period,
beginning with his works on the Jewish Question and continuing through at least his 1844
contributions to the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung. Bauer consistently conceives of real social
transformation as the realization of the agency of self-consciousness. Historical agency em-
bodied in social reality amounts, for Bauer, to heteronomy. Thus at the heart of his critique
of socialism (for example, in “Die Gattung und die Masse” of 1844 ) is the view that the prole-
tariat pursues not universal but particular, and therefore heteronymous, interests.
85. Hans-Martin Sass, “Nachwort,” in Bauer, Feldzüge der reinen Kritik, 255 – 56.
86. On Bauer’s oppositional bifurcation of the Volk into Volk and Masse (the brute em-
bodiment of positivity, particularity, materiality), see Moggach, PP, 136 and 151 – 54. On the
evolution of Bauer’s concept of “the masses,” “massiness,” and so forth, see ibid., 158 – 63.
87. See Bruno Bauer, review of Die Geschichte des Lebens Jesu. For Bauer’s equation of
the Volk and truth, see ibid., 185. For Marx’s comment that “Bauer on Ammon is exquisite,”
see his letter to Ruge of March 13 , 1843 (Marx and Engels, MEW, 27 : 417 ).