328 } Notes to Chapter 4
state; mere appearance, if he wished to remain a Jew, would thus be the essential thing and
carry away the victory, that is, his life in the state would only be appearance or a temporary
exception to the essential and the rule” (“Die Fähigkeit,” 57 ). When he quotes Bauer’s text,
Marx reframes it so that the criticism Bauer directs at Jews specifically illuminates the struc-
tural predicament in which Marx sees “man as bourgeois” caught generally. In Bauer’s text
it is specifically the Jew’s “life in the state” that would be “only appearance or a temporary
exception to the essential and the rule,” the Jews’ essence being inveterate egoism. In Marx’s
appropriation of Bauer’s formulation, it is “man as a bourgeois” who for structural, not per-
sonal, reasons can maintain only a “sophistical” relation to the state. “Sophistry” is inherent
in the dualistic structure of the political state itself. For Marx, there is nothing particularly
Jewish about Jewish particularism.
134. Marx and Engels, MECW, 3 : 154 ; and MEW, 1 : 355.
135. Shlomo Na’aman notes that Marx’s title “Zur Judenfrage” is accidental, determined
only by the title of Bauer’s Die Judenfrage, and that a title reflecting any of the topics Marx
treats—the relationship between state and society, political and human emancipation, or the
inherent egoism of human rights—would have been more apt (Marxismus und Zionismus, 51 ).
136. Marx and Engels, MECW, 3 : 157 ; and MEW, 1 : 359. Marx’s paraphrase of Bauer (the
sentence beginning “Bauer declares”) implies that Bauer equates the “Masse” with the “ei-
gentlichen Volk” (“mit dem eigentlichen Volke, mit der Masse”). On the contrary, however,
Bauer uses the term “Masse” to describe the uneigentliche Volk, the Nicht-Volk, the Volk that
has been atomized by the sovereign’s illegitimate Vermittler, who falsely claim to represent
it but in fact only fracture and divide it. At least three widely used English translations mis-
translate “mit dem eigentlichen Volke” in Marx’s faulty paraphrase of Bauer as “with his own
people”: KMSW, 12 ; Marx, Marx: Early Political Writings (hereafter EPW), 40 ; and Karl
Marx: Early Texts, 98. (In the last of these three, McLellan adds an ‘and’ [“with his own
people and the masses”] to distinguish “people” from “the masses,” which is precisely the
distinction that Marx collapses.) Gregor Benton and Rodney Livingstone translate the pas-
sage correctly (KMEW, 224 ). The translation in Marx and Engels, MECW, which I quote
from here, makes the point possibly too emphatically (“with the people in the strict sense,
with the masses”) but correctly preserves Marx’s error.
137. Marx and Engels, MECW, 3 : 157 – 58 ; and MEW, 1 : 359.
138. Bauer, JF, 108.
139. Marx and Engels, MECW, 3 : 158 ; and MEW, 1 : 359.
140. Marx acknowledges that Jacobin practice frequently required the sacrifice of the per-
sonal to the communal, but he submits that such practice was the exception and the articulated
theoretical formulation of human rights was the rule. And even if one takes the practice as the
rule, Marx adds, the question remains why the framers of human rights discourse nonethe-
less conceived and theorized man to be the egoistic individual (Marx and Engels, MECW,
3 : 165 ; and MEW, 1 : 367 ).
141. Marx and Engels, MECW, 3 : 164 ; and MEW, 1 : 366.
142. Moses Hess’s critique of the limitations of the paradigm of rights to emerge from
the French Revolution—in “Philosophie der Tat” and “Socialismus und Communismus”
(in Hess, Philosophische und sozialistische Schriften 1837 – 1850 [hereafter PSS], 210 – 26 and
197 – 209 , respectively), both published in Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz ( 1843 )—was
almost certainly an inspiration for Marx.