Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

(^75) KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
whole organization of our society, lost to himself, sold, subjected to
domination by inhuman conditions and elements - in a word, man who
is no longer a real species-being. The fantasy, dream and postulate of
Christianity, the sovereignty of man - but of man as an alien being
separate from actual man, is present in democracy as a tangible reality
and is its secular motto.^47
Having shown that religion was more than compatible with civil rights,
Marx now contested Bauer's refusal to acknowledge the Jewish claim to
human rights, the rights of man. Bauer had said that neither the Jew nor
the Christian could claim universal human rights because their particular
and exclusive religions necessarily invalidated any such claims. Marx
refuted Bauer's view by referring to the French and American Consti-
tutions. Firstly, he discussed the distinction between the rights of the
citizen and the rights of man. The rights of the citizen were of a political
order; they were expressed in man's participation in the universality of
the state and, as had been shown, by no means presupposed the abolition
of religion. These rights reflected the social essence of man - though in
a totally abstract form - and the reclaiming of this essence would give
rise to human emancipation. Not so the rights of man in general: being
expressions of the division of bourgeois society they had nothing social
about them. As exemplified in the French Constitutions of 1791 and 1793
and in the Constitutions of New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, the rights
of man did not deny the right to practise religion; on the contrary, they
expressly recognised it, and Marx quoted chapter and verse to prove it.
Marx then asked: Why are these rights called the rights of man}
Because they were the rights of man regarded as a member of civil society.
And why was the member of civil society identified with man? Because
the rights of man were egoistic and anti-social. This was the case with
all the constitutions in question, even the most radical; none succeeded
in subordinating 'man' to the 'citizen'. All the rights of man that they
proclaimed had the same character. Liberty, for example, 'the right to do
and perform what does not harm others', was, according to Marx, 'not
based on the union of man with man but on the separation of man from
man. It is the right to this separation, the right of the limited individual
who is limited to himself.'^48 Property, the right to dispose of one's
possessions as one wills without regard to others, was 'the right of
selfishness... it leads man to see in other men not the realisation, but
the limitation of his own freedom'.^49 Equality was no more than the equal
right to the liberty described above, and security was the guarantee of
egoism.
Thus none of the so-called rights of man went beyond the egoistic
man separated from the community as a member of civil society. Summa-