Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 177

Bauer’s argument, which is precisely that citizens must—in reality and not just

formally—overcome their religious attitudes and all other forms of particularist

privilege and consciousness as a prerequisite for meaningfully realizing a uni-

versal state.^115 Only with this prerequisite would political emancipation have a

chance to become true human emancipation, to paraphrase Bauer’s position in

Marx’s idiom.

At the heart of Marx’s emerging polemic against his erstwhile friend and col-

league, however, is Marx’s inchoate attempt to theorize historical agency in so-

cial and material terms. Marx could so closely associate Bauer’s methodology

with the limitations he perceived in political emancipation, I argue, not because

Bauer collapses political and human freedom but because Marx now sees in

politics the sort of problematic abstraction he had long objected to in Bauer.

Marx now sees Bauerian self-consciousness, political liberation, and religious

salvation as structurally analogous and as far too abstract agents of transforma-

tion. Yet although Marx contended—against the overvaluation of human con-

sciousness in various guises (theological, political, critical)—that the motor of

human liberation must be grounded in social reality, his grounding of his social

critique could be little more than rhetorical until he developed the materialist

theory of labor and production that offered a satisfying alternative to the idealist

theory of agency he was struggling to overcome.^116

Even as Bauer’s and Marx’s changing assessments of politics—and the social

critic’s self-definition in relation to politics—are at the heart of Marx’s emerging

disagreement with Bauer, the fact that each thinker, albeit differently, dereal-

izes politics renders the terms of Marx’s polemic against Bauer unstable. Bauer

derealizes pragmatic political causes with Die Judenfrage and begins megoma-

niacally to consolidate “real” historical agency in his own pure critical activity.

In “Zur Judenfrage,” Marx sharpens the diagnosis he had begun in his 1843

Kreuznach Kritik of politics as an ineffectual, essentially theological abstraction.

Marx’s disparagement of the substance of politics gives him a new tool to attack

Bauer’s abstraction from a locus purportedly more grounded in reality than is

Bauer’s mode of criticism (which Marx now closely associates with the limi-

tations—or abstraction—of political emancipation), yet it also ambiguates this

very “reality.” In his jab at Bauer’s position as “too abstract” in his letter to Ruge

of March 13 , 1843 , Marx, as a political journalist, had aligned himself with the

liberal task of punching holes in the authoritarian Christian state. Even as Marx

in “Zur Judenfrage” continues to recognize “actual, practical” political eman-

cipation as “a great step forward,” he could no longer appeal to a pragmatic

political agenda as a counterweight to Bauer’s abstraction.^117 Politics becomes

at this moment a slippery category for Marx; although he defines his own criti-