Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

PARIS 103

questions into theological ones: we change theological questions into

secular ones. History has for long enough been resolved into super-

stition: we now resolve superstition into history. The question of the

relationship of political emancipation to religion becomes for us a

question of the relationship of political emancipation to human emanci-

pation. We criticize the religious weakness of the political state by

criticising the secular construction of the political state without regard

to its religious weaknesses.^43

Thus political emancipation from religion did not free men from
religious conceptions, for political emancipation was not the same as
human emancipation. For example, citizens might still be constrained by
a religion from which a state itself had broken free. What Bauer had not
realised was that the political emancipation he advocated embodied an
alienation similar to the religious alienation he had just criticised. Man's
emancipation, because it passed through the intermediary of the state,
was still abstract, indirect and partial. 'Even when man proclaims himself
an atheist through the intermediary of the state - i.e. when he proclaims
the state to be atheistic - he still retains his religious prejudice, just
because he recognises himself only indirectly - through the medium of
something else. Religion is precisely man's indirect recognition of himself
through an intermediary. The state is the intermediary between man and
his freedom.'^44

Similarly with private property: in America it had been abolished as
far as the constitution was concerned by declaring that no property
qualification was necessary for voting. But this, far from really abolishing
private property, actually presupposed it. The result was that man's being
was profoundly divided:

When the political state has achieved its true completion, man leads a

double life, a heavenly one and an earthly one, not only in thought

and consciousness but in reality, in life. He has a life both in the

political community, where he is valued as a communal being, and in

civil society where he is active as a private individual, treats other men

as means, degrades himself to a means and becomes a tool of forces

outside himself.^45

Political democracy was not, however, to be decried. For it was a great
step forward and 'the final form of human emancipation inside the present
world order'.^46 Political democracy could be called Christian in that it
had man as its principle and regarded him as sovereign and supreme. But
unfortunately this meant

man as he appears uncultivated and unsocial, man in his accidental

existence, man as he comes and goes, man as he is corrupted by the