Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

268 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

munismus” (“Socialism and Communism”) and at times only implicit or even

conceptually faint, as in his more Feuerbachian “Über das Geldwesen” (“On the

Essence of Money”; 1843 ). In his major socialist essays Hess certainly became

more reticent about presenting Spinoza as the quintessential articulation of a

specifically Jewish idea of unity, or suggesting, as he had in The Holy History,

that the fulfillment of human freedom would involve a renewal of a unified mode

of existence first achieved by the Jews in their ancient state.

Both of these themes—the Jews as the ultimate redeemers of humanity and

Spinoza as the ultimate articulation of the Jewish tradition—return to promi-

nence in Hess’s meditation on Jewish nationalism, Rome and Jerusalem ( 1862 ).

Hess’s embrace of nations as humanity’s vital organic units, and thus as crucial

if humanitarian socialism is to have real existence, marks a major departure from

his earlier socialistic thought as well as from contemporary socialist trends. Yet

there are also strong continuities between his Spinozan socialism of the 1840 s

and his vision of Jewish nationalism two decades later.

Throughout the different phases of his intellectual evolution, Hess relent-

lessly identified Christianity and its secular outgrowths as responsible for the

apotheosis of the sovereign individual and modern society’s associated and

widely ramified ills. Even as Hess moved away from holding up the resources

of the Jewish tradition as the necessary corrective to the problem of modern

egoism, and even as he occasionally implicated Jews in it—as in “Über das

Geldwesen”—his identification of Christian dualism as the force inhibiting the

realization of ethical communal existence was sustained and fierce. In “Die letz-

ten Philosophen” (The latest philosophers; 1845 ), for example, Hess charac-

terizes Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner as thoroughly Christian “philosophers”

(now a term of abuse signifying ineffectual abstraction), in spite of their strident

atheism, because they celebrate the conscious and the material self, respectively.

Here and in general in this period, Hess faults Christian dualism for the socially

atomizing thrust of religious, political, commercial, and philosophical institu-

tions and structures. Like Marx in “Zur Judenfrage” (who, in fairness to Hess,

had cribbed a good deal from Hess in that essay), Hess sees the citizens of the

modern secular state as secularized Christian souls. Unlike Marx, however,

Hess also sees the base materialism of civil society as a thoroughly Christian,

not a Jewish, product. Alongside the bodiless spirits of the Christian heaven

and the post-Christian state there also exists “the spiritless materialism of the

Christian world; it exists in civil society.”^90 Hess also uses a distinctly Christian

metaphorics to evoke the harmful role that money plays in secular society: “The

money-hungry possessive animal consumes not only its alienated theoretical

essence—its God—but above all it consumes its estranged practical essence: