Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

158 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

(my addition)] this animal kingdom and ruling over it, for here, as every-

where, ruling and exploiting [Benutzung (my addition)] are a single concept.

And when they have homage paid to themselves and survey the swarming

mass of these brainless beings, what is more likely to occur to them than the

thought that Napoleon had at the Berezina? It is said of him that he pointed

to the crowd of drowning people below and exclaimed to his companion:

“Voyez ces crapauds!” This is probably a fabrication, but it is true nonethe-

less. Despotism’s only thought is contempt for humanity, the dehumanized

human being, and this thought has the advantage over many others of at the

same time being a fact. The despot always sees people as degraded. They

drown before his eyes and for his sake in the slime of vulgar life, from which,

like toads, they continually reemerge. If such a view obtrudes even upon men

who were capable of great aims, such as Napoleon before his dynastic mad-

ness, how can a completely ordinary king in such a reality [in einer solchen

Realität (my addition)] be an idealist?^52

In labeling the Germans “realists” Marx is not paying them a compliment, but

rather assailing their failure to achieve what we could call the “good idealism”

of politics. If politics is the Aristotelian measure of man, the Germans remain

animals, reduced to the prepolitical concerns of “bare life” (das kahle Leben).

The collective German failure to achieve political consciousness attenuates

(without, to be sure, erasing) the distinction between the ruled and their rul-

ers. Marx’s idealist conception of human rationality leads him to focus, above

all, on German rulers’ incapacity to think of their subjects as human beings. In-

stead, they regard them with a self-fulfilling dehumanizing contempt. The Ger-

man toads die and are continuously reborn out of the German muck, and neither

these brainless, abjectly dehumanized beings nor “even” the mediocre despots

who lord it over them are capable of transcending German animal Realität

and achieving the consciousness of homo politicus. Although Marx refuses to

give up on the Volk as the collective subject that will eventually realize itself in

a democratic republic, real existing Germans remain a sub-Volk, a primordial

political animal kingdom outside the narrative of modern political history. Marx

makes no attempt here to ground his theoretical discourse in, or ally it with,

Germany’s materiality or “reality.” On the contrary, abject German reality is the

emphatic Other of democracy and humanity and of “idealists” like Marx and

his dissident colleagues “who have the audacity to want to turn men into human

beings.”^53

It bears underscoring that even in his “idealist” conception of politics and

the state as the realization of human rationality, Marx did not champion the state