Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848
amelia
(Amelia)
#1
Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 151
bear on his reading of Hegel’s Philosophie des Rechts, which he charges with a
twofold process of mystification:^24 Hegel both reverses subject and predicate
by assuming the agency of the Idea and arbitrarily embodies abstract logical
categories in specific persons or groups.^25 The most important of these persons
is the monarch—whom, as Marx contends, “Hegel is concerned to present...
as the real ‘God-man,’ as the real embodiment of the Idea.”^26 However, Marx
sees the same dynamic at work in the status Hegel assigns to the estates, the
landed gentry, and the bureaucracy. Hegel invests each of these groups with a
universality it does not, Marx argues at length, truly embody.
Even as he leaned on Feuerbach to critique Hegel, Marx became preoccu-
pied in 1843 and early 1844 with how to rethink Feuerbach’s anthropological
conception of human intersubjective ontology (species-being) in more specif-
ically social terms.^27 We can chart the trajectory of Marx’s social inflection of
species-being by the changing protagonists he privileges as figures of social
agency, from das Volk of the unpublished 1843 Kreuznach Kritik and the letters
to Ruge published in the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher to the “real Jews” of
“Zur Judenfrage” and then to the proletariat of the “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen
Rechtsphilosophie, Einleitung.” These texts are intricately related. The second
of Marx’s letters to Ruge published in the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher
dates from May 1843 , some two months after he began work on his Kreuznach
manuscript on Hegel. He turned to “Zur Judenfrage” immediately after com-
pleting the Kreuznach Kritik in late summer 1843 ; and the next essay he wrote
was the “Einleitung,” which was intended to serve as an introduction to a longer
work on Hegel’s political philosophy (a reworking of the Kreuznach Kritik).
Marx’s thought was evolving so rapidly in this period, however, that by the time
he wrote the “Einleitung” it was no longer compatible with much of the analysis
in the Kritik (one reason, presumably, that Marx never produced the planned
work that the “Einleitung” was to introduce). Any understanding of the role that
the Jews of “Zur Judenfrage” play in the evolution of Marx’s thought must take
into account this broader context of the protagonists that successively advanced
Marx’s attempts to rethink species-being in social terms. The Volk, the Jews, and
the proletariat each embody a different theorization of society and of the inter-
relationships between consciousness and social materiality as these pertain to
revolutionary agency or praxis.
In his 1842 journalism as well as the May 1843 letter to Ruge, Marx repeatedly
critiques a brute order. This line of Marx’s early thought opposes human ideal-
ism (a term he frequently uses affirmatively) with animal materialism. Marx’s
strategy in this idealist period is not to try to ground abstraction in real, empiri-
cal conditions but to insist that human rationality and freedom must permeate