PART I
The Early Marx
Marx on the History of His Opinions
This is the preface to Marx's book A Contribution to the Critique of Po
litical Economy, first published in 1859 - The passage setting forth the ma-terialist conception of history-one of the few general statements of the
theory that Marx gave in his middle and later years-is the locus classicus of historical materialism. But the preface is also important as an account by Marx himself of the formative period of Marxism. As such it forms an appropriate introduction to the writings of 1837-1846 gathered here in Part I. The "criticism of post-Hegelian philosophy" which he mentions in the third-to-last paragraph is a reference to his work The German Ideology, written jointly with Engels.
I am omitting a general introduction which I had
jotted down because on closer reflection any anticipation of results
still to be proved appears to me to be disturbing, and the reader
who on the whole desires to follow me must be resolved to ascend
from the particular to the general. A few indications concerning the
course of my own politico-economic studies may, on the other hand,
appear in place here.
I was taking up law, which discipline, however, I only pursued as
a subordinate subject along with philosophy and history. In the
year 1842-44, as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung1, I experienced
for the first time the embarrassment of having to take part in dis-
cussions on so-called material interests. The proceedings of the
Rhenish Landtag on thefts of wood and parcelling of landed prop-
erty, the official polemic which Herr von Schaper, then Oberprasi-
dent of the Rhine Province, opened against the Rheinische Zeitung
on the conditions of the Moselle peasantry, and finally debates on
free trade and protective tariffs provided the first occasions 'for
occupying myself with economic questions. On the other hand, at
that time when the good will " to go further" greatly outweighed
knowledge of the subject, a philosophically weakly tinged echo of
French socialism and communism made itself audible in the Rhein-
ische Zeitung. I declared myself against this amateurism, but
frankly confessed at the same time in a controversy with the All
gemeine Augsburger Zeitung2 that my previous studies did not
permit me even to venture any judgement on the content of the
French tendencies. Instead, I eagerly seized on the illusion of the
managers of the Rheinische Zeitung, who thought that by a weaker
attitude on the part of the paper they could secure a remission of
the death sentence passed upon it, to withdraw from the public
stage into the study.
The first work which I undertook for a solution of the doubts
which assailed me was a critical review of the Hegelian philosophy
of right, a work the introduction to which appeared in 1844 in the
Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher3 published in Paris. My investi-
gation led to the result that legal relations as well as forms of state
are to be grasped neither from themselves nor from the so-called
general development of the human mind, but rather have their
roots in the material conditions of life, the sum total of which
Hegel, following the example of the Englishmen and Frenchmen of
the eighteenth century, combines under the name of "civil
society," that, however, the anatomy of civil society is to be sought
in political economy. The investigation of the latter, which I began
in Paris, I continued in Brussels, whither I had emigrated in conse-
quence of an expulsion order of M. Guizot. The general result at
which I arrived and which, once won, served as a guiding thread for
my studies, can be briefly formulated as follows : In the social pro
duction of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indis-
pensable and independent of their will, relations of production
which correspond to a definite stage of development of their mate-
rial productive forces.The sum total of these relations of produc-
tion constitutes the economic structure of society, the real founda-
tion, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to
which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode
of production of material life conditions the social, political and
intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of
men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social
being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of
their development, the material productive forces of society come
in conflict with the existing relations of production, or-what is
but a legal expression for the same thing-with the property rela-
tions within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of
development of the productive forces these relations turn into their
fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the
change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstruc-
ture is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such trans-
formations a distinction should always be made between the mate-
rial transformation of the economic conditions of production, which
can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the
legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic-in short, ideolog-
ical forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight
it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he
thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transfor-
mation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this conscious
ness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material
life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces
and the relations of production. No social order ever perishes
before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have
developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear
before the material conditions of their existence have matured in
the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets
itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter
more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only
when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at
least in the process of formation. In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient,
feudal, and modem bourgeois modes of production can be desig-
nated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society.
The bourgeois relations of production ar,e the last antagonistic form
of the social process of production-antagonistic not in the sense
of individual antagonism, but of one arising from the social condi-
tions of life of the individuals; at the same time the productive
forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the mate-
rial conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social for-
mation brings, therefore, the prehistory of human society to a close.
Frederick Engels, with whom, since the appearance of his bril-
liant sketch on the criticism of the economic categories ( in the
Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher), I maintained a constant ex-
change of ideas by correspondence, had by another road (com-
pare his The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844)
arrived at the same result as I, and when in the spring of 1845 he
also settled in Brussels, we resolved to work out in common the
opposition of our view to the ideological view of German philoso-
phy, in fact, to settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical
conscience. The resolve was carried out in the form of a criticism of
post-Hegelian philosophy. The manuscript, two large octavo vol-
umes, had long reached its place of publication in Westphalia
when we received the news that altered circumstances did not allow
of its being printed. We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing
criticism of the mice all the more willingly as we had achieved our
main purpose-self-clarification. Of the scattered works in which
we put our views before the public at that time, now from one
aspect, now from another, I will mention only the Manifesto of the
Communist Party, jointly written by Engels and myself, and Dis-
cours sur le libre échange published by me. The decisive points of
our view were first scientifically, although only polemically, indi-
cated in my work published in 1847 and directed against Proudhon :
Misere de la Philosophie, etc. A dissertation written in German on
Wage Labour, in which I put together my lectures on this subject
delivered in the Brussels German Workers' Society, was inter
rupted, while being printed, by the February Revolution and my
consequent forcible removal from Belgium.
The editing of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1848 and 1849,
and the subsequent events, interrupted my economic studies which
could only be resumed in the year 1850 in London. The enormous
material for the history of political economy which is accumulated
in the British Museum, the favourable vantage point afforded by
London for the observation of bourgeois society, and finally the
new stage of development upon which the latter appeared to have
entered with the discovery of gold in California and Australia,
determined me to begin afresh from the very beginning and to
work through the new material critically. These studies led partly
of themselves into apparently quite remote subjects on which I had
to dwell for a shorter or longer period. Especially, however, was the
time at my disposal curtailed by the imperative necessity of earning
my living. My contributions, during eight years now, to the first
English-American newspaper, the New York Tribune, compelled an
extraordinary scattering of my studies, since I occupy myself with
newspaper correspondence proper only in exceptional cases. How
ever, articles on striking economic events in England and on the
Continent constituted so considerable a part of my contributions
that I was compelled to make myself familiar with practical details
which lie outside the sphere of the actual science of political econ
omy.
This sketch of the course of my studies in the sphere of political
economy is intended only to show that my views, however they
may be judged and however little they coincide with the inter-
ested prejudices of the ruling classes, are the results of conscien-
tious investigation lasting many years. But at the entrance to sci-
ence, as at the entrance to hell, the demand must be posted:
Qui si convien lasciare ogni sospetto;
Ogni vilta convien che qui sia morta.4
Discovering Hegel
KARL MARX
On November 10, 1837, soon after becoming a student at the University of
Berlin, Marx wrote a long letter to his father. It shows that at nineteen he
had formed two relationships of great importance: a personal one with
Jenny von Westphalen of Trier and an intellectual one with the late philos-
opher Hegel. The love of Jenny led to marriage, the spell of Hegel to
Marxism.
Dear Father,
There are moments in one's life which are like frontier posts
marking the completion of a period but at the same time clearly
indicating a new direction.
After my arrival in Berlin, I broke off all hitherto existing connec-
tions, made visits rarely and unwillingly, and tried to immerse
myself in science and art.
In accordance with my state of mind at the time, lyrical poetry
was bound to be my first subject, at l east the most pleasant and
immediate one. But owing to my attitude and whole previous devel-
opment it was purely idealistic. My heaven, my art, became a world
beyond, as remote as my love. Everything real became hazy and
what is hazy has no definite outlines . All the poems of the first
three volumes I sent to Jenny are marked by attacks on our times,
diffuse and inchoate expressions of feeling, nothing natural, every-
thing built out of moonshine, complete opposition between what is
and what ought to be, rhetorical reflections instead of poetic
thoughts, but perhaps also a certain warmth of feeling and striving
for poetic fire.
Poetry, however, could be and had to be only an accompani-
ment; I had to study law and above all felt the urge to wrestle with
philosophy.
From the idealism which, by the way, I had compared and nour-
ished with the idealism of Kant and Fichte, I arrived at the point of
seeking the idea in reality itself. If previously the gods had dwelt
above the earth, now they became its centre.
I had read fragments of Hegel's philosophy, the grotesque craggy
melody of which did not appeal to me. Once more I wanted to dive
into the sea, but with the definite intention of establishing that the
nature of the mind is just as necessary, concrete and firmly based as
the nature of the body . My aim was no longer to practise tricks of
swordsmanship, but to bring genuine pearls into the light of day.
I wrote a dialogue of about 24 pages: "Cleanthes, or the Starting
Point and Necessary Continuation of Philosophy." Here art and sci-
ence, which had become completely divorced from each other, were
to some extent united, and like a vigorous traveller I set a bout
the task itself, a philosophical-dialectical account of divinity, as
it manifests itself as the idea-in-itself, as religion, as nature, and
as history. My last proposition was the beginning of the Hegelian
system.
For some days my vexation made me quite incapable of thinking;
I ran about madly in the garden by the dirty water of the Spree,
which "washes souls and dilutes the tea ."l I even joined my land-
lord in a hunting excursion, rushed off to Berlin and wanted to
embrace every street-corner loafer.
Owning to being upset over Jenny's illness and my vain, fruitless
intellectual labours, and as the result of nagging annoyance at
having had to make an idol of a view that I hated, I became ill, as I
have already written to you, dear Father. When I got better I burnt
all the poems and outlines of stories, etc., imagining that I could
give them up completely, of which so far at any rate I have not
given any proofs to the contrary.
While I was ill I got to know Hegel from beginning to end,
together with most of his disciples. Through a n umber of meetings
with friends in Stralow I came across a Doctors' Club,2 which
includes some university lecturers and my most intimate Berlin
friend, Dr. Rutenberg. In controversy h ere, many conflicting views
were expressed, and I became ever more firmly bound to the mod-
ern world philosophy from which I had thought to escape.
Your ever loving son,
Karl
Please, dear father, excuse my illegible handwriting and bad style;
it is almost 4 o'clock, the candle has burnt itself out, and my eyes
are dim; a real unrest has taken possession of me, I shall not be able
to calm the turbulent spectres until I am with you who are dear to
me.
Please give greetings from me to my sweet, wonderful Jenny. I
have read her letter twelve times already, and always discover new
delights in it. It is in every respect, including that of style, the most
beautiful letter I can imagine being written by a woman.
To Make the World Philosophical
KARL MARX
Marx's doctoral dissertation, "The Difference Between the Democritean and
Epicurean Philosophies of Nature," written between 1839 and 1841, is
chiefly of interest for the following excerpts arguing that after a great world
philosophy-Aristotle's in antiquity and Hegel's now-the system's disciples
feel an imperious urge to make the world "philosophical." What this would
mean Marx hinted in the dissertation's foreword, where he saluted Prome-
theus' revolt against the gods as a proclamation of "human self-conscious-
ness as the highest divinity." To transform the world in the image of
Hegelian philosophy would mean to make of man in existential reality the
divinity that, as Marx saw it, Hegel had a1ready made him in thought. "
The last two paragraphs of the selection are taken from Marx's prepara-
tory material for the dissertation, "Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy."
Also in relation to Hegel it is mere ignorance on the part of his
pupils, when they explain one or the other determination of his
system by his desire for accommodation and the like, hence, in one
word, explain it in terms of morality. They forget that only a short
time ago they were enthusiastic about all his idiosyncrasies
[Einseitigkeiten] , as can be clearly demonstrated from their writ-
ings.
If they were really so affected by the ready-made science they
acquired that they gave themselves up to it in naive uncritical trust,
then how unscrupulous is their attempt to reproach the Master for
a hidden intention behind his insight! The Master, to whom the
science was not something received, but something in the process of
becoming, to whose uttermost periphery his own intellectual heart's
blood was pulsating! On the contrary, they rendered themselves sus-
pect of not having been serious before. And now they oppose their
own former condition, and ascribe it to Hegel, forgetting however
that his relation to his system was immediate, substantial, while
theirs is only a reflected one.
It is a psychological law that the theoretical mind, once liberated
in itself, turns into practical energy, and, leaving the shadowy
empire of Amenthes as will, turns itself against the reality of the
world existing without it. ( From a philosophical point of view, how-
ever, it is important to specify these aspects better, since from the
specific manner of this turn we can reason back towards the imma-
nent determination and the universal historic character of a philoso-
phy. We see here, as it were, its curriculum vitae 1 narrowed down
to its subjective point.) But the practice of philosophy is itself theo
retical. It's the critique that measures the individual existence by
the essence, the particular reality by the Idea. But this immediate
realization of philosophy is in its deepest essence afflicted with con
tradictions, and this its essence takes form in the appearance and
imprints its seal upon it.
When philosophy turns itself as will against the world of appear-
ance, then the system is lowered to an abstract totality, that is, it
has become one aspect of the world which opposes another one. Its
relationship to the world is that of reflection. Inspired by the urge
to realise itself, it enters into tension against the other. The inner
self-contentment and completeness has been broken. What was
inner light has become consuming flame turning outwards. The
result is that as the world becomes philosophical, philosophy also
becomes worldly, that its realisation is also its loss, that what it
struggles against on the outside is its own inner deficiency, that in
the very struggle it falls precisely into those defects which it fights
as defects in the opposite camp, and that it can only overcome
these defects by falling into them. That which opposes it and that
which it fights is always the same as itself, only with factors
inverted.
This is the one side, when we consider this matter purely objec
tively as immediate realisation of philosophy. However, it has also a
subjective; aspect, which is merely another form of it. This is the
relationship of the philosophical system which is realised to its intel-
lectual carriers, to the individual self-consciousnesses in which its
progress appears. This relationship results in what confronts the
world in the realisation of philosophy itself, namely, in the fact that
these individual self-consciousnesses always carry a double-edged
demand, one edge turned against the world, the other against phi-
losophy itself. Indeed, what in the thing itself appears as a relation-
ship inverted in itself, appears in these self-consciousnesses as a
double one, a demand and an action contradicting each other.
Their liberation of the world from the philosophy that held them in
fetters as a particular system.
As in the history of philosophy there are nodal points which raise
philosophy in itself to concretion, apprehend abstract principles in a
totality, and thus break off the rectilinear process, so also there are
moments when philosophy turns its eyes to the external world, and
no longer apprehends it, but, as a practical person, weaves, as it
were, intrigues with the world, emerges from the transparent king-
dom of Amenthes and throws itself on the breast of the worldly
Siren. That is the carnival of philosophy, whether it disguises itself
as a dog like the Cynic, in priestly vestments like the Alexandrian,
or in fragrant spring array like the Epicurean. It is essential that
philosophy should then wear character masks. As Deucalion, accord-
ing to the legend, cast stones behind him in creating human beings,
so philosophy casts its regard behind it (the bones of its mother are
luminous eyes) when its heart is set on creating a world; but as Pro-
metheus, having stolen fire from heaven, begins to build houses and
to settle upon the earth, so philosophy, expanded to be the whole
world, turns against the world of appearance. The same now with
the philosophy of Hegel.
While philosophy has sealed itself off to form a consummate,
total world, the determination of this totality is conditioned by the
general development of philosophy, just as that development is the
condition of the form in which philosophy turns into a practical
relationship towards reality; thus the totality of the world in general
is divided within itself, and this division is carried to the extreme,
for spiritual existence has been freed, has been enriched to univer-
sality, the heart-beat has become in itself the differentiation in the
concrete form which is the whole organism. The division of the
world is total only when its aspects are totalities. The world con-
fronting a philosophy total in itself is therefore a world torn apart.
This philosophy's activity therefore also appears torn apart and con-
tradictory; its objective universality is turned back into the subjec-
tive forms of individual consciousness in which it has life. But one
must not let oneself be misled by this storm which follows a great
philosophy, a world philosophy. Ordinary harps play under any
fingers, Aeolian harps only when struck by the storm.
For a Ruthless Criticism
Of Everything Existing
KARL MARX
The watchword of the young Karl Marx, as of his Young Hegelian asso-
ciates generally, was Kritik-criticism. In this early article, printed in the
Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher in 1844 in the form of a letter to
Arnold Ruge, Marx elaborated the idea of criticism into a program of this
journal, of which he and Ruge were editors. His future strictures on uto-
pian socialist plans, in the Communist Manifesto and other later writings,
were prefigured in the dismissal here of the communist utopias of writers
like Etienne Cabet as a "dogmatic abstraction." The Deutsch-Franzosische
Jahrbucher (German-French Annals) came out in Paris in February, 1844,
in the German language. Only one double issue of the journal was pub-
lished.
The translation was made by Dr. Ronald Rogowski for this edition.
M. to R.
Kreuznach
September, 1843
I am delighted that you are resolved and turn your thoughts
from backward glances at the past toward a new undertaking. In
Paris, then, the old university of philosophy (absit omen!) and the
new capital of the new world. What is necessary will arrange itself.
I do not doubt, therefore, that all obstacles-whose importance I
do not fail to recognize-will be removed.
The undertaking may succeed, however, or not; in any case I
will be in Paris at the end of this month, since the air here makes
one servile and I see no room at all in Germany for free activity.
In Germany, everything is being forcibly repressed, a true anarchy
of the spirit has burst out, stupidity itself reigns supreme, and
Zurich obeys commands from Berlin; hence it becomes ever clearer
that a new' gathering point must be sought for the really thinking
and independent minds. I am convinced that our plan would meet
a real need, and real needs must surely also be able to find real ful-
fillment. I therefore have no doubts about the enterprise if only we
undertake it seriously.
The inner difficulties seem to be almost greater than the external
obstacles. For even if there is no doubt about the "whence;" all the
more confusion reigns about the "whither." Apart from the general
anarchy which has erupted among the reformers, each is compelled
to confess to himself that he has no clear conception of what the
future should be. That, however, is just the advantage of the new
trend: that we do not attempt dogmatically to prefigure the future,
but want to find the new world only through criticism of the old.
Up to now the philosophers had the solution of all riddles lying
in their lectern, and the stupid uninitiated world had only to open
its jaws to let the roast partridges of absolute science fly into its
mouth. Now philosophy has become worldly, and the most incon-
trovertible evidence of this is that the philosophical consciousness
has been drawn, not only externally but also internally, into the
stress of battle. But if the designing of the future and the procla[
mation of ready-made solutions for all time is not our affair, then
we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the
present-I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing,
ruthless in two senses : The criticism must not be afraid of its own
conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be.
I am therefore not in favor of setting up any dogmatic flag. On
the contrary, we must try to help the dogmatics to clarify to them
selves the meaning of their own positions. Thus communism, to be
specific, is a dogmatic abstraction. I do not have in mind here some
imaginary, possible communism, but actually existing communism
in the form preached by Cabet, Dezamy,1 Weitling,2 etc. This
communism is only a special manifestation of the humanistic princi-
ple which is still infected by its opposite-private being. Elimina
tion of private property is therefore by no means identical with this
communism, and it is not accidental but quite inevitable that com-
munism has seen other socialist teachings arise in opposition to it,
such as the teachings of Fourier, Proudhon, etc., because it is itself
only a special, one-sided realization of the socialist principle.
And the socialist principle itself represents, on the whole, only
one side, affecting the reality of the true human essence. We have
to concern ourselves just as much with the other side, the theoreti-
cal existence of man, in other words to make religion, science, etc.,
the objects of our criticism. Moreover, we want to have an effect on
our contemporaries, and specifically on our German contemporary-
ies. The question is, how is this to be approached? Two circum-
stances cannot be denied. First, religion, and second, politics,
arouse predominant interest in contemporary Germany. We must
take these two subjects, however they are, for a starting-point, and
not set up against them some ready-made system such as the
Voyage en Icarie.3
Reason has always existed, only not always in reasonable form .
The critic can therefore start out by taking any form of theoretical
and practical consciousness and develop from the unique forms of
existing reality the true reality as its norm and final goal. Now so
far as real life is concerned, precisely the political state in all its
modern forms contains, even where it is not yet consciously imbued
with socialist demands, the demands of reason. Nor does the state
stop at that. The state everywhere presupposes that reason has been
realized. But in just this way it everywhere comes into contradic-
tion between its ideal mission and its real preconditions.
çµOut of this conflict of the political state with itself, therefore,
one can develop social truth. Just as religion is the catalogue of the
theoretical struggles of mankind, so the political state is the cata-
logue of its practical struggles. The political state thus expresses,
within the confines of its form sub specie rei publicae,4 all social
struggles, needs, truths. Thus it is not at all beneath the hauteur
des principles to make the most specific political question-e.g., the
difference between the corporative5 and the representative
system-the object of criticism. For this question only expresses in
a political way the difference between the rule of man and the rule
of private property. The critic therefore not only can but must go
into these political questions (which the crass kind of socialists
consider beneath anyone's dignity) . By showing the superiority of
the representative system over the corporative system, the critic
affects the practical interests of a large party. By elevating the rep-
resentative system from its political form to its general form and by
bringing out the true significance underlying this system, the critic
at the same time forces this party to go beyond its own confines,
since its victory is at the same time its loss.
Nothing prevents us, then, from tying our criticism to the criti-
cism of politics and to a definite party position in politics, and
hence from identifying our criticism with real struggles. Then we
shall confront the world not as doctrinaires with a new principle:
"Here is the truth, bow down before it!" We develop new princi-
ples to the world out of its own principles. We do not say to the
world: "Stop fighting; your struggle is of no account. We want to
shout the true slogan of the struggle at you." We only show the
world what it is fighting for, and consciousness is something that
the world must acquire, like it or not.
The reform of consciousness consists only in enabling the world
to clarify its consciousness, in waking it from its dream about itself,
in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions. Our whole task
can consist only in putting religious and political questions into
self-conscious human form-as is also the case in Feuerbach's criti-
cism of religion.
Our motto must therefore be: Reform of consciousness not
through dogmas, but through analyzing the mystical consciousness,
the consciousness which is unclear to itself, whether it appears in
religious or political form. Then it will transpire that the world has
long been dreaming of something that it can acquire if only it
becomes conscious of it. It will transpire that it is not a matter of
drawing a great dividing line between past and future, but of car-
rying out the thoughts of the past. And finally, it will transpire that
mankind begins no new work, but consciously accomplishes its old
work.
So, we can express the trend of our journal in one word: the
work of our time to clarify to itself (critical philosophy) the mean-
ing of its own struggle and its own desires. This is work for the
world and for us. It can only be the work of joint forces. It is a
matter of confession, no more. To have its sins forgiven mankind
has only to declare them to be what they really are.
Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's
Philosophy of Right
KARL MARX
In line with his program of effecting "a ruthless criticism of everything
existing," Marx during 1843 took up the criticism of politics, He set a bout
this by working on a commentary on Hegel's treatise on the state, To the
Hegelian political philosophy (which he called, following Feuerbach, "spec-
ulative philosophy") he applied the method of "transformational criticism"
that Feuerbach had applied to the Hegelian philosophy of religion,
Although the work was left incomplete and unpublished, it was, as Marx
later said (see p. 4, above), a milestone on his road to historical material-
ism: it led him to the view that instead of the state being the basis of
"civil society," as Hegel held, civil or bourgeois society is the basis of the
state.
Despite its incompleteness-the extant part of the commentary starts
with paragraph 261 of Hegel's treatise and deals only with selected further
sections up to paragraph 308-this work remains of interest as Marx's most
extensive single piece of purely political writing, although his standpoint at
the time of writing was no more than proto-Marxist.
The State and Civil Society1
The idea is made the subject and the actual relation of family
and civil society to the state is conceived as its internal imaginary
activity. Family and civil society are the premises of the state; they
are the genuinely active elements, but in speculative philosophy
things are inverted. When the idea is made the subject, however,
the real subjects, namely, civil society, family, "circumstances, cap-
rice, etc.," become unreal objective elements of the idea with a
changed significance.
Rationally interpreted, Hegel's propositions would mean only
this : The family and civil society are parts of the state. The mate-
rial of the state is distributed amongst them "by circumstances, cap
rice and the individual's own choice of vocation." The citizens of
the state are members of families and members of civil society.
"The actual idea, mind, divides itself into the two ideal spheres
of its concept, family and civil society, that is, its finite phase"-
hence, the division of the state into family and civil society is ideal,
i.e., necessary as part of the essence of the state. Family and civil
society are actual components of the state, actual spiritual existences
of the will; they are modes of existence of the state. Family and
civil society constitute themselves as the state. They are the driving
force. According to Hegel, they are, on the contrary, produced by
the actual idea. It is not the course of their own life which unites
them in the state; on the contrary, it is the idea which in the course
of its life has separated them off from itself. Indeed, they are the
finiteness of this idea. They owe their presence to another mind
than their own. They are entities determined by a third party, not
self-determined entities. Accordingly, they are also defined as "fi-
niteness," as the "actual idea's" own finiteness. The purpose of
their being is not this being itself; rather, the idea separates these
presuppositions off from itself "so as to emerge from their ideality
as explicitly infinite actual mind." That is to say, there can be no
political state without the natural basis of the family and the artifi-
cial basis of civil society; they are for it a conditio sine qua non. But
the condition is postulated as the conditioned, the determinant as
the determined, the producing factor as the product of its product.
The actual idea only degrades itself into the "finiteness" of the
family and civil society so as by transcending them to enjoy and
bring forth its infinity. "Accordingly" (in order to achieve its pur-
pose), it "assigns to these spheres the material of this, its finite
actuality" (this? which? these spheres are indeed its "finite actual-
ity," its "material" ), "individuals as a multitude" ("the individuals,
the multitude" are here the material of the state; "the state consists
of them"; this composition of the state is here expressed as an act
of the idea, as an "allocation" which it undertakes with its own
material The fact is that the state issues from the multitude in
their existence as members of families and as members of civil
society. Speculative philosophy expresses this fact as the idea's deed,
not as the idea of the multitude, but as the deed of a subjective
idea different from the fact itself), "in such a way that with regard
to the individual this assignment" (previously the discussion was
only about the assignment of individuals to the spheres of the
family and civil society) "appears mediated by circumstances, cap-
rice, etc." Empirical actuality is thus accepted as it is. It is also
expressed as rational, but it is not rational on account of its own
reason, but because the empirical fact in its empirical existence has
a different significance from it itself. The fact which is taken as a
point of departure is not conceived as such, but as a mystical result.
The actual becomes a phenomenon, but the idea has no other con-
tent than this phenomenon. Nor has the idea any other pur-
pose than the logical one of being "explicitly infinite actual mind."
The entire mystery of the philosophy of law and of Hegel's philoso-
phy as a whole is set out in this paragraph.
If Hegel had set out from real subjects as the bases of the state
he would not have found it necessary to transform the state in a
mystical fashion into a subject. "In its truth, however," says Hegel,
"subjectivity exists only as subject, personality only as person." This
too is a piece of mystification. Subjectivity is a characteristic of the
subject, personality a characteristic of the person. Instead of con-
ceiving them as predicates of their subjects. Hegel gives the predi-
cates an independent existence and subsequently transforms them
in a mystical fashion into their subjects.
The existence of predicates is the subject, so that the subject is
the existence of subjectivity, etc.; Hegel transforms the predicates,
the objects, into independent entities, but divorced from their actual
independence, their subject. Subsequently the actual subject appears
as a result, whereas one must start from the actual subject and look
at its objectification. The mystical substance, therefore, becomes the
actual subject, and the real subject appears as something else, as an
element of the mystical substance. Precisely because Hegel starts
from the predicates of the general description instead of from the
real ens (lnr0XEtltn'ov, subject), and since, nevertheless, there has to
be a bearer of these qualities, the mystical idea becomes this bearer.
The dualism consists in the fact that Hegel does not look upon the
general as being the actual nature of the actual finite, i.e., of what
exists and is determinate, or upon the actual ens as the true subject
of the infinite.
Sovereignty
So in this case sovereignty, the essential feature of the state, is
treated to begin with as an independent entity, is objectified. Then,
of course, this objective entity has to become a subject again. This
subject then appears, however, as a self-incarnation of sovereignty;
whereas sovereignty is nothing but the objectifed mind of the sub-
jects of the state.
As if the actual state were not the people. The state is an abstrac-
tion. The people alone is what is concrete. And it is remarkable that
Hegel, who without hesitation attributes a living quality such as
sovereignty to the abstraction, attributes it only with hesitation and
reservations to something concrete. "The usual sense, however, in
which men have recently begun to speak of the sovereignty of the
people is in opposition to the sovereignty existing in the monarch.
In this antithesis the sovereignty of the people is one of those con-
fused notions which are rooted in the wild idea of the people."
The "confused notions" and the "wild idea" are here exclusively
Hegel's. To be sure, if sovereignty exists in the monarch, then it is
foolish to speak of an antithetical sovereignty in the people; for it
is implied in the concept of sovereignty that sovereignty can
not have a double existence, still less one which is contradictory.
However:
1) This is just the question: Is not that sovereignty which is
claimed by the monarch an illusion? Sovereignty of the monarch or
sovereignty of the people-that is the question.
2) One can also speak of a sovereignty of the people in opposi-
tion to the sovereignty existing in the monarch. But then it is not a
question of one and the same sovereignty which has arisen on two
sides, but two entirely contradictory concepts of sovereignty, the
one a sovereignty such as can come to exist in a monarch, the other
such as can come to exist only in a people. It is the same with the
question: "Is God sovereign, or is man?" One of the two is an
untruth, even if an existing untruth.
"Taken without its monarch and the articulation of the whole
which is necessarily and directly associated with the monarch, the
people .is that formless mass which is no longer a state. It no longer
possesses any of the atrributes which are to be found only in an
internally organized whole-sovereignty, government, courts of law,
the administration, estates of the realm, etc. With the appearance
in a nation of such factors, which relate to organisation, to the life
of the state, a people ceases to be that indeterminate abstraction,
which, as a purely general notion, is called the nation." All this is a
tautology. If a people has a monarch and the structure that neces-
sarily and directly goes with a monarch, i.e., if it is structured as a
monarchy, then indeed, taken out of this structure, it is a formless
mass and a purely general notion. "If by sovereignty of the people is
understood a republican form of government and, more specifically,
democracy...then...there can be no further discussion of such a
notion in face of the developed idea." That is indeed right, if one
has only "such a notion" and not a "developed idea" of democracy.
Democracy
Democracy is the truth of monarchy; monarchy is not the truth
of democracy. Monarchy is necessarily democracy inconsistent with
itself; the monarchical element is not an inconsistency in democ-
racy. Monarchy cannot be understood in its own terms; democracy
can. In democracy none of the elements attains a significance other
than what is proper to it. Each is in actual fact only an element of
the whole demos [people]. In monarchy one part determines the
character of the whole. The entire constitution has to adapt itself to
this fixed point. Democracy is the genus Constitution. Monarchy is
one species, and a poor one at that. Democracy is content and
form. Monarchy is supposed to be only a form, but it falsifies the
content.
In monarchy the whole, the people, is subsumed under one of its
particular modes of being, the political constitution. In democracy
the constitution itself appears only as one determination, that is,
the self-determination of the people. In monarchy we have the
people of the constitution; in democracy the constitution of the
people. Democracy is the solved riddle of all constitutions. Here,
not merely implicitly and in essence but existing in reality, the con-
stitution is constantly brought back to its actual basis, the actual
human being, the actual people, and established as the people's own
work. The constitution appears as what it is, a free product of man.
It could be said that in a certain respect this applies also to consti-
tutional monarchy; but the specific distinguishing feature of democ-
racy is that here the constitution as such forms only one element in
the life of the people-that it is not the political constitution by
itself which forms the state.
Hegel starts from the state and makes man the subjectified state;
democracy starts from man and makes the state objectified man.
Just as it is not religion which creates man but man who creates
religion, so it is not the constitution which creates the people but
the people which creates the constitution. In a certain respect the
relation of democracy to all other forms of state is like the relation
of Christianity to all other religions. Christianity is the religion XUT'
f�OX�v,2the essence of religion-deified man as a particular religion.
Similarly, democracy is the essence of all state constitutions-social-
ised man as a particular state constitution. Democracy stands to the
other constitutions as the genus stands to its species; except that
here the genus itself appears as an existent, and therefore as one
particular species over against the others whose existence does not
correspond to their essence. To democracy all other forms of state
stand as its Old Testament. Man does not exist for the law but the
law for man-it is a human manifestation; whereas in the other
forms of state man is a legal manifestation. That is the fundamental
distinction of democracy.
All other state forms are definite, distinct, particular forms of
state. In democracy the formal principle is at the same time the
material principle. Only democracy, therefore, is the true unity of
the general and the particular. In monarchy, for example, and in
the republic as a merely particular form of state, political man has
his particular mode of being alongside unpolitical man, man as a
private individual. Property, contract, marriage, civil society, all
appear here (as Hegel shows quite correctly with regard to these
abstract state forms, but he thinks that he is expounding the idea of
the state) as particular modes of existence alongside the political
state, as the content to which the political state is related as organ
ising form; properly speaking, the relation of the political state to
this content is merely that of reason, inherently without content,
which defines and delimits, which now affirms and now denies. In
democracy the political state, which stands alongside this content
and distinguishes itself from it, is itself merely a particular content
and particular form of existence of the people. In monarchy, for
example, this particular, the political constitution, has the signifi-
cance of the general that dominates and determines everything par-
ticular. In democracy the state as particular is merely particular; as
general, it is the truly general, i .e., not something determinate in
distinction from the other content. The French have recently inter-
preted this as meaning that in true democracy the political state is
annihilated. This is correct insofar as the political state qua political
state, as constitution, no longer passes for the whole.
In all states other than democratic ones the state, the law, the
constitution is what rules, without really ruling-i.e., without mate-
rially permeating the content of the remaining, non-political
spheres. In democracy the constitution, the law, the state itself,
insofar as it is a political constitution, is only the self-determination
of the people, and a particular content of the people.
Incidentally, it goes without saying that all forms of state have
democracy for their truth and that they are therefore untrue insofar
as they are not democracy.
Politics: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern
In the states of antiquity the political state makes up the content
of the state to the exclusion of the other spheres. The modern state
is a compromise between the political and the unpolitical state.
In democracy the abstract state has ceased to be the dominant
factor. The struggle between monarchy and republic is itself still a
struggle within the abstract state. The political republic is democ-
racy within the abstract state form. The abstract state form of
democracy is therefore the republic; but here it ceases to be the
merely political constitution.
Property, etc., in short, the entire content of the law and the
state, is the same in North America as in Prussia, with few modifi-
cations. The republic there is thus a mere state form, as is the mon-
archy here. The content of the state lies outside these constitutions.
Hegel is right, therefore, when he says: The political state is the
constitution, i.e., the material state is not political. What obtains
here is merely an external identity, a determination of changing
forms. Of the various elements of national life, the one most
difficult to evolve was the political state, the constitution. It devel-
oped as universal reason over against the other spheres, as ulterior to
them. The historical task then consisted in its [the constitution's]
reassertion, but the particular spheres do not realise that their pri-
vate nature coincides with the other-worldly nature of the constitu-
tion or of the political state, and that the other-worldly existence of
the political state is nothing but the affirmation of their own
estrangement. Up till now the political constitution has been the
religious sphere, the religion of national life, the heaven of its gener-
ality over against the earthy existence of its actuality. The political
sphere has been the only state sphere in the state, the only sphere
in which the content as well as the form has been species-content,
the truly general; but in such a way that at the same time, because
this sphere has confronted the others, its content has also become
formal and particular. Political life in the modern sense is the scho-
lasticism of national life. Monarchy is the perfect expression of this
estrangement. The republic is the negation of this estrangement
within its own sphere. It is obvious that the political constitution as
such is brought into being only where the private spheres have won
an independent existence. Where trade and landed property are not
free and have not yet become independent, the political constitu-
tion too does not yet exist. The Middle Ages were the democracy of
unfreedom.
The abstraction of the state as such belongs only to modern
times, because the abstraction of private life belongs only to modern
times. The abstraction of the political state is a modern product.
In the Middle Ages there were serfs, feudal estates, merchant and
trade guilds, corporations of scholars, etc.: that is to say, in the
Middle Ages property, trade, society, man are political; the material
content of the state is given by its form; every private sphere has a
political character or is a political sphere; that is, politics is a charac-
teristic of the private spheres too. In the Middle Ages the political
constitution is the constitution of private property, but only because
the constitution of private property is a political constitution. In the
Middle Ages the life of the nation and the life of the state are iden-
tical. Man is the actual principle of the state-but unfree man. It is
thus the democracy of unfreedom-estrangement carried to comple-
tion. The abstract reflected antithesis belongs only to the modern
world. The Middle Ages are the period of actual dualism; modern
times, one of abstract dualism.
"We have already noted the stage at which the division of consti-
tutions into democracy, aristocracy and monarchy has been made
the standpoint, that is, of that unity which is still substantial, which
still remains within itself, and has not yet come to its process of
infmite differentiation and inner deepening,: at that stage, the ele-
ment of the final self-determining resolution of the will does not
emerge explicitly into its own proper actuality as an immanent
organic factor in the state." In the spontaneously evolved mon-
archy, democracy and aristocracy there is as yet no political consti-
tution as distinct from the actual, material state or the other con-
tent of the life of the nation. The political state does not yet appear
as the form of the material state. Either, as in Greece, the res
publica 3 is the real private affair of the citizens, their real content,
and the private individual is a slave; the political state, qua political
state, being the true and only content of the life and will of the cit-
izens; or, as in an Asiatic despotism, the political state is nothing
but the personal caprice of a single individual; or the political state,
like the material state, is a slave. What distinguishes the modern
state from these states characterized by the substantial unity
between people and state is not, as Hegel would have it, that the
various elements of the constitution have been developed into par-
ticular actuality, but that the constitution itself has been developed
into a particular actuality alongside the actual life of the people-
that the political state has become the constitution of the rest of
the state.
Bureaucracy
The "state formalism" which bureaucracy is, is the "state as for-
malism"; and it is as a formalism of this kind that Hegel has
described bureaucracy. Since this "state formalism" constitutes itself
as an actual power and itself becomes its own material content, it
goes without saying that the "bureaucracy" is a web of practical
illusions, or the "illusion of the state." The bureaucratic spirit is a
jesuitical, theological spirit through and through. The bureaucrats
are the jesuits and theologians of the state. The bureaucracy is la
republique pretre.
Since by its very nature the bureaucracy is the "state as formal
ism," it is this also as regards its purpose. The actual purpose of the
state therefore appears to the bureaucracy as an objective hostile to
the state. The spirit of the bureaucracy is the "formal state spirit."
The bureaucracy therefore turns the "formal state spirit" or the
actual spiritless ness of the state into a categorical imperative. The
bureaucracy takes itself to be the ultimate purpose of the state.
Because the bureaucracy turns its "formal" objectives into its con
tent, it comes into conflict everywhere with "real" objectives. It is
therefore obliged to pass off the form for the content and the con
tent for the form. State objectives are transformed into objectives of
the department, and department objectives into objectives of the
state. The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its
hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge. The top entrusts the under
standing of detail to the lower levels, whilst the lower levels credit
the top with understanding of the general, and so all are mutually
deceived.
The bureaucracy is the imaginary state alongside the real state
the spiritualism of the state. Each thing has therefore a double
meaning, a real and a bureaucratic meaning, just as knowledge (and
also the will) is both real and bureaucratic. The really existing,
however, is treated in the light of its bureaucratic nature, its other
worldly, spiritual essence. The bureaucracy has the state, the spirit
ual essence of society, in its possession, as its private property. The
general spirit of the bureaucracy is the secret, the mystery, preserved
within itself by the hierarchy and against the outside world by
being a closed corporation. Avowed political spirit, as also political
mindedness, therefore appear to the bureaucracy as treason against
its mystery. Hence, authority is the basis of its knowledge, and the
deification of authority is its conviction. Within the bureaucracy
itself, however, spiritualism becomes crass materialism, the material-
ism of passive obedience, of faith in authority, of the mechanism of
fixed and formalistic behaviour, and of fixed principles, views and
traditions. In the case of the individual bureaucrat, the state objec
tive turns into his private objective, into a after higher
posts, the making of a career. In the first place, he looks on actual,
life as something material, for the spirit of this life has its distinctly
separate existence in the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy must there
fore proceed to make life as material as possible. Secondly, actual
life is material for the bureaucrat himself, i .e., so far as it becomes
an object of bureaucratic manipulation; for his spirit is prescribed
for him, his aim lies beyond him, and his existence is the existence
of the department. The state only continues to exist as various fixed
bureaucratic minds, bound together in subordination and passive
obedience. Actual knowledge seems devoid of content, just as actual
life seems dead; for this imaginary knowledge and this imaginary
life are taken for the real thing. The bureaucrat must therefore deal
with the actual state jesuitically, whether this jesuitry is conscious or
unconscious. However, once its antithesis is knowledge, this jesuitry
is like wise bound to achieve self-consciousness and then become
deliberate jesuitry.
Whilst the bureaucracy is on the one hand this crass materialism,
it manifests its crass spiritualism in the fact that it wants to do
everything, i.e., by making the will the causa prima. For it is purely
an active form of existence and receives its content from without
and can prove its existence, therefore, only by shaping and restrict-
ing this content. For the bureaucrat the world is a mere object to
be manipulated by him.
When Hegel calls the executive the objective aspect of the sover-
eignty dwelling in the monarch, that is right in the same sense in
which the Catholic Church was the real presence of the sovereignty,
substance and spirit of the Holy Trinity. In the bureaucracy the
identity of state interest and particular private aim is established in
such a way that the state interest becomes a particular private aim
over against other private aims.
The abolition of the bureaucracy is only possible by the general
interest actually-and not, as with Hegel, merely in thought, in
abstraction-becoming the particular interest, which in turn is onlv
possible as a result of the particular actually becoming the general
interest. Hegel starts from an unreal antithesis and therefore
achieves only an imaginary identity which is in truth again a contra-
dictory identity. The bureaucracy is just such an identity.
On the Jewish Question
KARL MARX
In this essay, written in the autumn of 1843 and published in the
Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher, Marx pursued his critical aims through a
review of two studies on the Jewish question by another Young Hegelian,
Bruno Bauer. The criticism of politics is developed in the first part, leading
to the conclusion that human emancipation requires the ending of the divi-
sion between man as an egoistic being in "civil society" and man as ab-
stract citizen in the state. In the second part, Marx proceeds to the criti-
cism of economics or commerce, which he equates with "Judaism." His
concluding call for "the emancipation of society from Judaism" (which has
been seen on occasion as a manifesto of anti-Semitism) is in fact a call for
the emancipation of society from what he here calls "huckstering," or from
what he was subsequently to call "capitalism." This, however, is not to
deny that Marx, although he himself was of Jewish origin, harbored anti-
Jewish attitudes, nor is it to deny that such attitudes found expression in
this essay.
1. Bruno Bauer, Die Judenfrage1
The German Jews seek emancipation. What kind of emancipa-
tion do they want? Civic, political emancipation.
Bruno Bauer replies to them: In Germany no one is politically
emancipated. We ourselves are not free. How then could we liber-
ate you? You Jews are egoists if you demand for yourselves, as Jews,
a special emancipation. You should work, as Germans, for the
political emancipation of Germany, and as men, for the emancipa-
tion of mankind. You should feel the particular kind of oppression
and shame which you suffer, not as an exception to the rule but
rather as a confirmation of the rule.
Or do the Jews want to be placed on a footing of equality with
the Christian subjects? If they recognize the Christian state as
legally established they also recognize the regime of general enslave-
ment. Why should their particular yoke be irksome when they
accept the general yoke? Why should the German be interested in
the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the libera-
tion of the German?
The Christian state recognizes nothing but privileges. The Jew
himself, in this state, has the privilege of being a Jew. As a Jew he
possesses rights which the Christians do not have. Why does he
want rights which he does not have but which the Christians
enjoy?
In demanding his emancipation from the Christian state he asks
the Christian state to abandon its religious prejudice. But does he,
the Jew, give up his religious prejudice? Has he then the right to
insist that someone else should forswear his religion?
The Christian state, by its very nature, is incapable of
emancipating the Jew. But, adds Bauer, the Jew, by his very nature,
cannot be emancipated. As long as the state remains Christian, and
as long as the Jew remains a Jew, they are equally incapable, the
one of conferring emancipation, the other of receiving it.
With respect to the Jews the Christian state can only adopt the
attitude of a Christian state. That is, it can permit the Jew, as a
matter of privilege, to isolate himself from its other subjects; but it
must then allow the pressures of all the other spheres of society to
bear upon the Jew, and all the more heavily since he is in religious
opposition to the dominant religion. But the Jew likewise can only
adopt a Jewish attitude, i.e. that of a foreigner, towards the state,
since he opposes his illusory nationality to actual nationality, his
illusory law to actual law. He considers it his right to separate him-
self from the rest of humanity; as a matter of principle he takes no
part in the historical movement and looks to a future which has
nothing in common with the future of mankind as a whole. He
regards himself as a member of the Jewish people, and the Jewish
people as the chosen people.
On what grounds, then, do you Jews demand emancipation? On
account of your religion? But it is the mortal enemy of the state
religion. As citizens? But there are no citizens in Germany. As
men? But you are not men any more than are those to whom you
appeal.
Bauer, after criticizing earlier approaches and solutions, formu-
lates the question of Jewish emancipation in a new way. What, he
asks, is the nature of the Jew who is to be emancipated, and the
nature of the Christian state which is to emancipate him? He
replies by a critique of the Jewish religion, analyses the religious
opposition between Judaism and Christianity, explains the essence
of the Christian state; and does all this with dash, clarity, wit and
profundity, in a style which is as precise as it is pithy and vigorous.
How then does Bauer resolve the Jewish question? What is the
result? To formulate a question is to resolve it. The critical study of
the Jewish question is the answer to the Jewish question. Here it is
in brief : we have to emancipate ourselves before we can emancipate
others.
The most stubborn form of the opposition between Jew and
Christian is the religious opposition. How is an opposition
resolved? By making it impossible. And how is religious opposition
made impossible? By abolishing religion. As soon as Jew and Chris-
tian come to see in their respective religions nothing more than
stages in the development of the human mind-snake skins which
have been cast off by history, and man as the snake who clothed
himself in them-they will no longer find themselves in religious
opposition, but in a purely critical, scientific and human relation-
ship. Science will then constitute their unity. But scientific opposi
tions are resolved by science itself.
The German Jew, in particular, suffers from the general lack of
political freedom and the pronounced Christianity of the state. But
in Bauer's sense the Jewish question has a general significance,
independent of the specifically German conditions. It is the ques
tion of the relations between religion and the state, of the con-
tradiction between religious prejudice and political emancipation.
Emancipation from religion is posited as a condition, both for the
Jew who wants political emancipation, and for the state which
should emancipate him and itself be emancipated.
"Very well, it may be said ( and the Jew himself says it) but the
Jew should not be emancipated because he is a Jew, because he has
such an excellent and universal moral creed; the Jew should take
second place to the citizen, and he will be a citizen although he is
and desires to remain a Jew. In other words, he is and remains a
Jew, even though he is a citizen and as such lives in a universal
human condition; his restricted Jewish nature always finally
triumphs over his human and political obligations. The bias persists
even though it is overcome by general principles. But if it persists,
it would be truer to say that it overcomes all the rest." "It is only
in a sophistical and superficial sense that the Jew could remain a
Jew in political life. Consequently, if he wanted to remain a Jew,
this would mean that the superficial became the essential and
thus triumphed. In other words, his life in the state would be only
a semblance, or a momentary exception to the essential and
normal. "2
Let us see also how Bauer establishes the role of the state.
"France," he says, "has provided us recently,3 in connexion with
the Jewish question ( and for that matter all other political ques-
tions ), with the spectacle of a life which is free but which revokes
its freedom by law and so declares it to be merely an appearance;
and which, on the other hand, denies its free laws by its acts."4
"In France, universal liberty is not yet established by law, nor is
the Jewish question as yet resolved, because legal liberty, i .e. the
equality of all citizens, is restricted in actual life, which is still
dominated and fragmented by religious privileges, and because the
lack of liberty in actual life influences law in its turn and obliges it
to sanction the division of citizens who are by nature free into
oppressors and oppressed."5
When, therefore, would the Jewish question be resolved in
France?
"The Jew would really have ceased to be Jewish, for example, if
he did not allow his religions code to prevent his fulfilment of his
duties towards the state and his fellow citizens; if he attended and
took part in the public business of the Chamber of Deputies on the
sabbath. It would be necessary, further, to abolish all religious priv
liege, including the monopoly of a privileged church. If, thereafter,
some or many or even the overwhelming majority felt obliged to
fulfil their religious duties, such practices should be left to them as
an absolutely private matter."6 "There is no longer any religion
when there is no longer a privileged religion. Take away from reli
gion its power to excommunicate and it will no longer exist."7
"Mr. Martin du Nord has seen, in the suggestion to omit any men-
tion of Sunday in the law, a proposal to declare that Christianity
has ceased to exist. With equal right ( and the right is well found-
ed ) the declaration that the law of the sabbath is no longer bind-
ing upon the Jew would amount to proclaiming the end of
Judaism."8
Thus Bauer demands, on the one hand, that the Jew should
renounce Judaism, and in general that man should renounce reli
gion, in order to be emancipated as a citizen. On the other hand,
he considers, and this follows logically, that the political abolition
of religion is the abolition of all religion. The state whic pre
supposes religion is not yet a true or actual state. "Clearly, the reli
gious idea gives some assurances to the state. But to what state? To
what kind of state?"9
At this point we see that the Jewish question is considered only
from one aspect.
It was by no means sufficient to ask : who should emancipate?
who should be emancipated? The critic should ask a third question:
what kind of emancipation is involved? What are the essential
conditions of the emancipation which is demanded? The criticism
of political emancipation itself was only the final criticism of the
Jewish question and its genuine resolution into the "general question
of the age."
Bauer, since he does not formulate the problem at this level, falls
into contradictions. He establishes conditions which are not based
upon the nature of political emancipation. He raises questions
which are irrelevant to his problem, and he resolves problems
which leave his question unanswered. When Bauer says of the
opponents of Jewish emancipation that "Their error was simply to
assume that the Christian state was the only true one, and not to
subject it to the same criticism as Judaism,"1 we see his own error
in the fact that he subjects only the "Christian state," and not the
"state as such" to criticism, that he does not examine the relation
between political emancipation and human emancipation, and that
he, therefore, poses conditions which are only explicable by his lack
of critical sense in confusing political emancipation and universal
human emancipation. Bauer asks the Jews : Have you, from your
standpoint, the right to demand political emancipation?.We ask
the converse question: from the standpoint of political emancipa-
tion can the Jew be required to abolish Judaism, or man be asked to
abolish religion?
The Jewish question presents itself differently according to the
state in which the Jew resides. In Germany, where there is no polit-
ical state, no state as such, the Jewish question is purely theologi-
cal. The Jew finds himself in religious opposition to the state,
which proclaims Christianity as its foundation. This state is a theo-
logian ex professo. Criticism here is criticism of theology; a dou-
ble-edged criticism, of Christian and of Jewish theology. And so we
move always in the domain of theology, however critically we may
move therein.
In France, which is a constitutional state, the Jewish question is
a question of constitutionalism, of the incompleteness of political
emancipation. Since the semblance of a state religion is maintained
here, if only in the insignificant and self-contradictory formula of a
religion of the majority, the relation of the Jews to the state also
retains a semblance of religious, theological opposition.
It is only in the free states of North America, or at least in some
of them, that the Jewish question loses its theological significance
and becomes a truly secular question. Only where the state exists in
its completely developed form can the relation of the Jew, and of
the religious man in general, to the political state appear in a pure
form, with its own characteristics. The criticism of this relation
ceases to be theological criticism when the state ceases to maintain
a theological attitude towards religion, that is, when it adopts the
attitude of a state, i .e. a political attitude. Criticism then becomes
criticism of the political state. And at this point, where the ques-
tion ceases to be theological, Bauer's criticism ceases to be critical.
"There is not, in the United States, either a state religion or a
religion declared to be that of a majority, or a predominance of one
religion over another. The state remains aloof from all religions."2
There are even some states in North America in which "the consti-
tution does not impose any religious belief or practice as a condi-
tion of political rights."3 And yet, "no one in the United States
believes that a man without religion can be an honest man."4 And
North America is pre-eminently the country of religiosity, as Beau-
mont,"5 Tocqueville6 and the Englishman, Hami1ton,7 assure us in
unison. However, the states of North America only serve as an
example. The question is : what is the relation between complete
political emancipation and religion? If we find in the country
which has attained full political emancipation, that religion not
only continues to exist but is fresh and vigorous, this is proof that
the existence of religion is not at all opposed to the perfection of
the state. But since the existence of religion is the existence of a
defect, the source of this defect must be sought in the nature of
the state itself. Religion no longer appears as the basis, but as the
manifestation of secular narrowness. That is why we explain the
religious constraints upon the free citizens by the secular con
straints upon them. We do not claim that they must transcend
their religious narrowness in order to get rid of their secular limita
tions. We claim that they will transcend their religious narrowness
once they have overcome their secular limitations. We do not turn
secular questions into theological questions; we turn theological
questions into secular ones. History has for long enough been
resolved into superstition; but we now resolve superstition into his
tory. The question of the relation between political emancipation
and religion becomes for us a question of the relation between
political emancipation and human emancipation. We criticize the
religious failings of the political state by criticizing the political
state in its secular form, disregarding its religious failings. We
express in human terms the contradiction between the state and a
particular religion, for example Judaism, by showing the contradic-
tion between the state and particular secular elements, between the
state and religion in general and between the state and its general
presuppositions.
The political emancipation of the Jew or the Christian-of the
religious man in general-is the emancipation of the state from
Judaism, Christianity, and religion in general. The state emanci-
pates itself from religion in its own particular way, in the mode
which corresponds to its nature, by emancipating itself from the
state religion; that is to say, by giving recognition to no religion
and affirming itself purely and simply as a state. To be politically
emancipated from religion is not to be finally and completely
emancipated from religion, because political emancipation is not
the final and absolute form of human emancipation.
The limits of political emancipation appear at once in the fact
that the state can liberate itself from a constraint without man
himself being really liberated; that a state may be a free state with-
out man himself being a free man. Bauer himself tacitly admits this
when he makes political emancipation depend upon the following
condition-
"It would be necessary, moreover, to abolish all religious privi-
leges, including the monopoly of a privileged church. If some
people, or even the immense majority, still felt obliged to fulfil-
their religious duties, this practice should be left to them as a com-
pletely private matter." Thus the state may have emancipated itself
from religion, even though the immense majority of people con-
tinue to be religious . And the immense majority do not cease to be
religious by virtue of being religious in private.
The attitude of the state, especially the free state, towards reli-
gion is only the attitude towards religion of the individuals who
compose the state. It follows that man frees himself from a con-
straint in a political way, through the state, when he transcends his
limitations, in contradiction with himself, and in an abstract,
narrow and partial way. Furthermore, by emancipating himself po-
litically, man emancipates himself in a devious way, through an
intermediary, however necessary this intermediary may be. Finally,
even when he proclaims himself an atheist through the intermedi-
ary of the state, that is, when he declares the state to be an atheist,
he is still engrossed in religion, because he only recognizes himself
as an atheist in a roundabout way, through an intermediary. Reli
gion is simply the recognition of man in a roundabout fashion; that
is, through an intermediary. The state is the intermediary between
man and human liberty. Just as Christ is the intermediary to whom
man attributes all his own divinity and all his religious bonds, so
the state is the intermediary to which man confides all his non-
divinity and all his human freedom.
The political elevation of man above religion shares the weak-
nesses and merits of all such political measures . For example, the
state as a state abolishes private property (i .e. man decrees by polit-
ical means the abolition of private property) when it abolishes the
property qualification for electors and representatives, as has been
done in many of the North American States. Hamilton interprets
this phenomenon quite correctly from the political standpoint : The
masses have gained a victory over property owners and financial
wealth.8 Is not private property ideally abolished when the non-
owner comes to legislate for the owner of property? The property
qualification is the last political form in which private property is
recognized.
But the political suppression of private property not only does
not abolish private property; it actually presupposes its existence.
The state abolishes, after its fashion, the distinctions established by
birth, social rank, education, occupation, when it decrees that
birth, social rank, education, occupation are non-political distinc-
tions; when it proclaims, without regard to these distinctions, that
every member of society is an equal partner in popular sovereignty,
and treats all the elements which compose the real life of the
nation from the standpoint of the state. But the state, none the
less, allows private property, education, occupation, to act after
their own fashion, namely as private property, education, occupation,
and to manifest their particular nature. Far from abolishing these
effective differences, it only exists so far as they are presupposed; it
is conscious of being a political state and it manifests its universal-
ity only in opposition to these elements. Hegel, therefore, defines
the relation of the political state to religion quite correctly when he
says: "In order for the state to come in to existence as the self-
knowing ethical actuality of spirit, it is essential that it should be
distinct from the forms of authority and of faith. But this distinc-
tion emerges only in so far as divisions occur within the ecclesiasti-
cal sphere itself. It is only in this way that the state, above the par
ticular churches, has attained to the universality of thought-its
formal principle-and is bringing this universality into existence."9
To be sure! Only in this manner, above the particular elements,
can the state constitute itself as universality.
The perfected political state is, by its nature, the species-life l of
man as opposed to his material life. All the presuppositions of this
egoistic life continue to exist in civil society outside the political
sphere, as qualities of civil society. Where the political state has
attained to its full development, man leads, not only in thought, in
consciousness, but in reality, in life, a double existence-celestial
and terrestrial. He lives in the political community, where he
regards himself as a communal being, and in civil society where he
acts simply as a private individual, treats other men as means,
degrades himself to the role of a mere means, and becomes the
plaything of alien powers . The political state, in relation to civil
society, is just as spiritual as is heaven in relation to earth. It stands
in the same opposition to civil society, and overcomes it in the
same manner as religion overcomes the narrowness of the profane
world; i .e. it has always to acknowledge it again, re-establish it, and
allow itself to be dominated by it. Man, in his most intimate real-
ity, in civil society, is a profane being. Here, where he appears both
to himself and to others as a real individual he is an illusory phe-
nomenon. In the state, on the contrary, where he is regarded as a
species-being,2 man is the imaginary member of an imaginary sov-
ereignty, divested of his real, individual life, and infused with an
unreal universality.
The conflict in which the individual, as the professor of a partic-
ular religion, finds himself involved with his own quality of citi
zenship and with other men as members of the community, may be
resolved into the secular schism between the political state and civil
society. For man as a bourgeois 3 "life in the state is only an
appearance or a fleeting exception to the normal and essential." It
is true that the bourgeois, like the Jew, participates in political life
only in a sophistical way, just as the citoyen4 is a Jew or a bour-
geois only in a sophistical way. But this sophistry is not personal. It
is the sophistry of the political state itself. The difference between
the religious man and the citizen is the same as that between the
shopkeeper and the citizens, between the day-labourer and the citi-
zen, between the landed proprietor and the citizen, between the
living individual and the citizen. The contradiction in which the
religious man finds himself with the political man, is the same con-
tradiction in which the bourgeois finds himself with the citizen,
and the member of civil society with his political lion's skin.
This secular opposition, to which the Jewish question reduces
itself-the relation between the political state and its presupposi-
tions, whether the latter are material elements such as private prop-
erty, etc., or spiritual elements such as culture or religion, the con
flict between the general interest and private interest, the schism
between the political state and civil society-these profane contra-
dictions, Bauer leaves intact, while he directs his polemic against
their religious expression. "It is precisely this basis-that is, the
needs which assure the existence of civil society and guarantee its
necessity -which exposes its existence to continual danger, main-
tains an element of uncertainty in civil society, produces this con-
tinually changing compound of wealth and poverty, of prosperity
and distress, and above all generates change."5 Compare the whole
section entitled "Civil society,"6 which follows closely the distinc-
tive features of Hegel's philosophy of right. Civil society, in its
opposition to this political state, is recognized as necessary because
the political state is recognized as necessary.
Political emancipation certainly represents a great progress. It is
not, indeed, the final form of human emancipation, but it is the final
form of human emancipation within the framework of the prevail-
ing social order. It goes without saying that we are speaking here of
real, practical emancipation.
Man emancipates himself politically from religion by expelling it
from the sphere of public law to that of private law. Religion is no
longer the spirit of the state, in which man behaves, albeit in a spe
cific and limited way and in a particular sphere, as a species-being,
in community with other men. It has become the spirit of civil
society, of the sphere of egoism and of the bellum omnium contra
omnes. It is no longer the essence of community, but the essence
of differentiation. It has become what it was at the beginning, an
expression of the fact that man is separated from the community,
from himself and from other men. It is now only the abstract
avowal of an individual folly, a private whim or caprice. The
infinite fragmentation of religion in North America, for example;
already gives it the external form of a strictly private affair. It has
been relegated among the numerous private interests and exiled
from the life of the community as such. But one should have no
illusions about the scope of political emancipation. The division of
man into the public person and the private person, the displace-
ment of religion from the state to civil society-all this is not a
stage in political emancipation but its consummation. Thus politi-
cal emancipation does not abolish, and does not even strive to abol-
ish, man's real religiosity.
The decomposition of man into Jew and citizen, Protestant and
citizen, religious man and citizen, is not a deception practised
against the political system nor yet an evasion of political emancipa-
tion. It is political emancipation itself, the political mode of eman-
cipation from religion. Certainly, in periods when the political state
as such comes violently to birth in civil society, and when men
strive to liberate themselves through political emancipation, the
state can, and must, proceed to abolish and destroy religion; but
only in the same way as it proceeds to abolish private property, by
declaring a maximum, by confiscation, or by progressive taxation,
or in the same way as it proceeds to abolish life, by the guillotine.
At those times when the state is most aware of itself, political life
seeks to stifle its own prerequisites-civil society and its
elements-and to establish itself as the genuine and harmonious
species-life of man. But it can only achieve this end by setting itself
in violent contradiction with its own conditions of existence, by
declaring a permanent revolution. Thus the political drama ends
necessarily with the restoration of religion, of private property, of
all the elements of civil society, just as war ends with the conclu-
sion of peace.
In fact, the perfected Christian state is not the so-called Chris-
tian state which acknowledges Christianity as its basis, as the
state religion, and thus adopts an exclusive attitude towards other
religions; it is, rather, the atheistic state, the democratic state, the
state which relegates religion among the other elements of civil so
ciety. The state which is still theological, which still professes
officially the Christian creed, and which has not yet dared to declare
itself a state, has not yet succeeded in expressing in a human and
secular form, in its political reality, the human basis of which Chris-
tianity is the transcendental expression. The so-called Christian state
is simply a non-state; since it is not Christianity as a religion, but
only the human core of the Christian religion which can realize
itself in truly human creations.
The so-called Christian state is the Christian negation of the
state, but not at all the political realization of Christianity. The
state which professes Christianity as a religion does not yet profess
it in a political form, because it still has a religious attitude towards
religion. In other words, such a state is not the genuine realization
of the human basis of religion, because it still accepts the unreal,
imaginary form of this human core. The so-called Christian state is
an imperfect state, for which the Christian religion serves as the
supplement and sanctification of its imperfection. Thus religion
becomes necessarily one of its means; and so it is the hypocritical
state. There is a great difference between saying: (i) that the per-
fect state, owing to a deficiency in the general nature of the state,
counts religion as one of its prerequisites, or ( ii) that the imperfect
state, owing to a deficiency in its particular existence as an imper
fect state, declares that religion is its basis. In the latter, religion
becomes imperfect politics. In the former, the imperfection even of
perfected politics is revealed in religion. The so-called Christian
state needs the Christian religion in order to complete itself as a
state. The democratic state, the real state, does not need religion
for its political consummation. On the contrary, it can dispense
with religion, because in this case the human core of religion is
realized in a profane manner. The so-called Christian state, on the
other hand, has a political attitude towards religion, and a religious
attitude towards politics. It reduces political institutions and reli-
gion equally to mere appearances.
In order to make this contradiction clearer we shall examine
Bauer's model of the Christian state, a model which is derived
from his study of the German-Christian state.
"Quite recently," says Bauer, "in order to demonstrate the
impossibility or the non-existence of a Christian state, those pas-
sages in the Bible have been frequently quoted with which the
state does not conform and cannot conform unless it wishes to dis-
solve itself entirely."
"But the question is not so easily settled. What do these Biblical
passages demand? Supernatural renunciation, submission to the
authority of revelation, turning away from the state, the abolition
of profane conditions. But the Christian state proclaims and
accomplishes all these things. It has assimilated the spirit of the
Bible, and if it does not reproduce it exactly in the terms which the
Bible uses, that is simply because it expresses this spirit in political
forms, in forms which are borrowed from the political system of
this world but which, in the religious rebirth which they are
obliged to undergo, are reduced to simple appearances. Man turns
away from the state and by this means realizes and completes the
political institutions ."7
Bauer continues by showing that the members of a Christian
state no longer constitute a nation with a will of its own. The
nation has its true existence in the leader to whom it is subjected;
but this leader is, by his origin and nature, alien to it since he has
been imposed by God without the people having any part in the
matter. The laws of such a nation are not its own work, but are
direct revelations . The supreme leader, in his relations with the real
nation, the masses, requires privileged intermediaries; and the
nation itself disintegrates into a multitude of distinct spheres which
are formed and determined by chance, are differentiated from
each other by their interests and their specific passions and preju-
dices, and acquire as a privilege the permission to isolate themselves
from each other, etc.8
But Bauer himself says : "Politics, if it is to be nothing more
than religion, should not be politics; any more than the scouring of
pans, if it is treated as a religious matter, should be regarded as ordi-
nary housekeeping."9 But in the German-Christian state religion is
an "economic matter" just as "economic matters" are religion. In
the German-Christian state the power of religion is the religion of
power.
The separation of the "spirit of the Bible" from the "letter of
the Bible" is an irreligious act. The state which expresses the Bible
in the letter of politics, or in any letter other than that of the Holy
Ghost, commits sacrilege, if not in the eyes of men at least in the
eyes of its own religion. The state which acknowledges the Bible as
its charter and Christianity as its supreme rule must be assessed
according to the words of the Bible; for even the language of the
Bible is sacred. Such a state, as well as the human rubbish upon
which it is based, finds itself involved in a painful contradiction,
which is insoluble from the standpoint of religious consciousness,
when it is referred to those words of the Bible "with which it does
not conform and cannot conform unless it wishes to dissolve itself
entirely." And why does it not wish to dissolve itself entirely? The
state itself cannot answer either itself or others. In its own con-
sciousness the official Christian state is an "ought" whose realiza-
tion is imposible. It cannot affirm the reality of its own existence
without lying to itself, and so it remains always in its own eyes an
object of doubt, an uncertain and problematic object. Criticism is,
therefore, entirely within its rights in forcing the state, which
supports itself upon the Bible, into a total disorder of thought in
which it no longer knows whether it is illusion or reality; and in
which the infamy of its profane ends ( for which religion serves as a
cloak) enter into an insoluble conflict with the probity of its reli-
gious consciousness ( for which religion appears as the goal of the
world ). Such a state can only escape its inner torment by becoming
the myrmidon of the Catholic Church. In the face of this Church,
which asserts that secular power is entirely subordinate to its com-
mands, the state is powerless; powerless the secular power which
claims to be the rule of the religious spirit.
What prevails in the so-called Christian state is not man but
alienation. The only man who counts-the King-is specifically dif-
ferentiated from other men and is still a religious being associated
directly with heaven and with God. The relations which exist here
are relations still based upon faith. The religious spirit is still not
really secularized.
But the religious spirit cannot be really secularized. For what is
it but the non-secular form of a stage in the development of the
human spirit? The religious spirit can only be realized if the stage of
development of the human spirit which it expresses in religious
form, manifests and constitutes itself in its secular form. This is
what happens in the democratic state. The basis of this state is not
Christianity but the human basis of Christianity. Religion remains
the ideal, non-secular consciousness of its members, because it is
the ideal form of the stage of human development which has been
attained.
The members of the political state are religious because of the
dualism between individual life and species-life, between the life
of civil society and political life. They are religious in the sense that
man treats political life, which is remote from his own individual
existence, as if it were his true life; and in the sense that religion is
here the spirit of civil society, and expresses the separation and
withdrawal of man from man. Political democracy is Christian in
the sense that man, not merely one man but every man, is there
considered a sovereign being, a supreme being; but it is unedu-
cated, unsocial man, man just as he is in his fortuitous existence,
man as he has been corrupted, lost to himself, alienated, subjected
to the rule of inhuman conditions and elements, by the whole
organization of our society-in short man who is not yet a real spe-
cies-being. Creations of fantasy, dreams, the postulates of Christian-
ity, the sovereignty of man-but of man as an alien being distin-
guished from the real man-all these become, in democracy, the
tangible and present reality, secular maxims.
In the perfected democracy, the religious and theological con-
sciousness appears to itself all the more religious and theological in
that it is apparently without any political significance or terrestrial
aims, is an affair of the heart withdrawn from the world, an expres-
sion of the limitations of reason, a product of arbitrariness and fan-
tasy, a veritable life in the beyond. Christianity here attains the
practical expression of its universal religious significance, because
the most varied views are brought together in the form of Chris-
tianity, and still more because Christianity does not ask that
anyone should profess Christianity, but simply that he should have
some kind of religion (see Beaumont, op. cit.) . The religious con-
sciousness runs riot in a wealth of contradictions and diversity.
We have shown, therefore, that political emancipation from reli-
gion leaves religion in existence, although this is no longer a privi-
leged religion. The contradiction in which the adherent of a particu-
lar religion finds himself in relation to his citizenship is only one
aspect of the universal secular contradiction between the political
state and civil society. The consummation of the Christian state is
a state which acknowledges itself simply as a state and ignores the
religion of its members. The emancipation of the state from reli-
gion is not the emancipation of the real man from religion.
We do not say to the Jews, therefore, as does Bauer: you cannot
be emancipated politically without emancipating yourselves com-
pletely from Judaism. We say rather: it is because you can be
emancipated politically, without renouncing Judaism completely
and absolutely, that political emancipation itself is not human
emancipation. If you want to be politically emancipated, without
emancipating yourselves humanly, the inadequacy and the contra-
diction is not entirely in yourselves but in the nature and the cate-
gory of political emancipation. If you are preoccupied with this cat-
egory you share the general prejudice. Just as the state evangelizes
when, although it is a state, it adopts a Christian attitude towards
the Jews, the Jew acts politically when, though a Jew, he demands
civil rights.
But if a man, though a Jew, can be emancipated politically and
acquire civil rights, can he claim and acquire what are called the
rights of man? Bauer denies it. "The question is whether the Jew
as such, that is, the Jew who himself avows that he is constrained
by his true nature to live eternally separate from men, is able to
acquire and to concede to others the universal rights of man."
"The idea of the rights of man was only discovered in the Chris-
tian world, in the last century. It is not an innate idea; on the con-
trary, 'it is acquired in a struggle against the historical traditions in
which man has been educated up to the present time. The rights of
man are not, therefore, a gift of nature, nor a legacy from past his-
tory, but the reward of a struggle against the accident of birth and
against the privileges which history has hitherto transmitted from
generation to generation. They are the results of culture, and only
he can possess them who has merited and earned them."
"But can the Jew really take possession of them? As long as he
remains Jewish the limited nature which makes him a Jew must
prevail over the human nature which should associate him, as a
man, with other men; and it will isolate him from everyone who is
not a Jew. He declares, by this separation, that the particular
nature which makes him Jewish is his true and supreme nature,
before which human nature has to efface itself."
"Similarly, the Christian as such cannot grant the rights of
man."1
According to Bauer man has to sacrifice the "privilege of faith"
in order to acquire the general rights of man. Let us consider for a
moment the so-called rights of man; let us examine them in their
most authentic form, that which they have among those who dis-
covered them, the North Americans and the French! These rights
of man are, in part, political rights, which can only be exercised if
one is a member of a community. Their content is participation in
the community life, in the political life of the community, the life
of the state. They fall in the category of political liberty, of civil
rights, which as we have seen do not at all presuppose the consist-
ent and positive abolition of religion; nor consequently, of Judaism.
It remains to consider the other part, namely the rights of man as
distinct from the rights of the citizen.
Among them is to be found the freedom of conscience, the right
to practise a chosen religion. The privilege of faith is expressly
recognized, either as a right of man or as a consequence of a right
of man, namely liberty. Declaration of the Rights of Man and of
the Citizen, 1791, Article 10: "No one is to be disturbed on
account of his opinions, even religious opinions." There is guaran-
teed, as one of the rights of man, "the liberty of every man to prac-
tise the religion to which he adheres."
The Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc. 1793, enumerates
among the rights of man (Article 7 ) : "The liberty of religious
observance." Moreover, it is even stated, with respect to the right
to express ideas and opinions, to hold meetings, to practise a reli
gion, that: "The necessity of enunciating these rights presupposes
either the existence or the recent memory of despotism." Compare
the Constitution of 1795, Section XII, Article 354.
Constitution of Pennsylvania, Article 9, 3: "All men have
received from nature the imprescriptible right to worship the
Almighty according to the dictates of their conscience, and no one
can be legally compelled to follow, establish or support against his
will any religion or religious ministry. No human authority can, in
any circumstances, intervene in a matter of conscience or control
the forces of the soul."
Constitution of New Hampshire, Articles 5 and 6: "Among
these natural rights some are by nature inalienable since nothing
can replace them. The rights of conscience are among them."2
The incompatibility between religion and the rights of man is so
little manifest in the concept of the rights of man that the right to
be religious, in one's own fashion, and to practise one's own partic
ular religion, is expressly included among the rights of man. The
privilege of faith is a universal right of man.
A distinction is made between the rights of man and the rights
of the citizen. Who is this man distinct from the citizen? No one
but the member of civil society. Why is the member of civil society
called "man," simply man, and why are his rights called the "rights
of man"? How is this fact to be explained? By the relation between
the political state and civil society, and by the nature of political
emancipation.
Let us notice first of all that the so-called rights of man, as dis-
tinct from the rights of the citizen, are simply the rights of a
member of civil society, that is, of egoistic man, of man separated
from other men and from the community. The most radical consti-
tution, that of 1 793, says : Declaration of the Rights of Man and of
the Citizen: Article 2. "These righ ts, etc. ( the natural and impre-
scriptible rights ) are : equality, liberty,security, property.
What constitutes liberty?
Article 6. "Liberty is the power which man has to do everything
which does not harm the rights of others . "
Liberty is, therefore, the right to do everything which does not
harm others. The limits within which each individual can act with
out harming others are determined by law, just as the boundary
between two fields is marked by a stake. It is a question of the lib
erty of man regarded as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself.
Why, according to Bauer, is the Jew not fitted to acquire the rights
of man? "As long as he remains Jewish the limited nature which
makes him a Jew must prevail over the human nature which should
associate him, as a man, with other men; and it will isolate him
from everyone who is not a Jew." But liberty as a right of man is
not founded upon the relations between man and man, but rather
upon the separation. of man from man. It is the right of such separ-
ation. The right of the circumscribed individual, withdrawn into
himself.
The practical application of the right of liberty is the right of
private property. What constitutes the right of private property?
Article 16 ( Constitution of 1793 ) "The right of property is that
which belongs to every citizen of enjoying and disposing as he will
of his goods and revenues, of the fruits of his work and industry . "
The right of property is, therefore, the right to enjoy one's for-
tune and to dispose of it as one will; without regard for other men
and independently of society. It is the right of self-interest. This
individual liberty, and its application, form the basis of civil
society. It leads every man to see in other men, not the realization,
but rather the limitation of his own liberty. It declares above all
the right "to enjoy and to dispose as one will, one's goods and
revenues, the fruits of one's work and industry."
There remain the other rights of man, equality and security.
The term "equality" has here no political significance. It is only
the equal right to liberty as defined above; namely that every man
is equally regarded as a self-sufficient monad. The Constitution of
1795, defines the concept of liberty in this sense.
Article 5 ( Constitution of 1 795 ) ' "Equality consists in the fact
that the law is the same for all, whether it protects or punishes ."
And security?
Article 8 (Constitution of 1793) "Security consists in the pro
tection afforded by society to each of its members for the preserva
tion of his person, his rights, and his property."
Security is the supreme social concept of civil society; the con
cept of the police. The whole society exists only in order to guaran
tee for each of its members the preservation of his person, his
rights and his property. It is in this sense that Hegel calls civil
society "the state of need and of reason."
The concept of security is not enough to raise civil society above
its egoism. Security is, rather, the assurance of its egoism.
None of the supposed rights of man, therefore, go beyond the
egoistic man, man as he is, as a member of civil society; that is, an
individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself,
wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accord
ance with his private caprice. Man is far from being considered, in
the rights of man, as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life
itself-society-appears as a system which is external to the indi
vidual and as a limitation of his original independence. The only
bond between men is natural necessity, need and private interest,
the presentation of their property and their egoistic persons.
It is difficult enough to understand that a nation which has just
begun to liberate itself, to tear down all the barriers between differ
ent sections of the people and to establish a political community,
should solemnly proclaim (Declaration of 1791) the rights of the
egoistic man, separated from his fellow men and from the commu
nity, and should renew this proclamation at a moment when only
the most heroic devotion can save the nation ( and is, therefore,
urgently called for ), and when the sacrifice of all the interests of
civil society is in question and egoism should be punished as a
crime. (Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc. 1793 ). The matter
becomes still more incomprehensible when we observe that the
political liberators reduce citizenship, the political community, to a
mere means for preserving these so-called rights of man; and conse
quently, that the citizen is declared to be the servant of egoistic
"man," that the sphere in which man functions as a species-being
is degraded to a level below the sphere where he functions as a par
tial being, and finally that it is man as a bourgeois and not man as
a citizen who is considered the true and authentic man.
"The end of every political association is the preservation of the
natural and imprescriptible rights of man." ( Declaration of the
Rights of Man, etc. 1791, Article 2.) "Government is instituted in
order to guarantee man's enjoyment of his natural and imprescripti
ble rights." (Declaration, etc. 1793, Article 1 .) Thus, even in the
period of its youthful enthusiasm, which is raised to fever pitch by
the force of circumstances, political life declares itself to be only a
means, whose end is the life of civil society. It is true that its revo
lutionary practice is in flagrant contradiction with its theory.
While, for instance, security is declared to be one of the rights of
man, the violation of the privacy of correspondence is openly con
sidered. W,hile the "unlimited freedom of the Press" ( Constitution
of 1793, Article 122 ) , as a corollary of the right of individual lib
erty, is guaranteed, the freedom of the Press is completely
destroyed, since "the freedom of the Press should not be permitted
when it endangers public liberty."3 This amounts to saying: the
right to liberty ceases to be a right as soon as it comes into conflict
with political life, whereas in theory political life is no more than
the guarantee of the rights of man-the rights of the individual
man-and should, therefore, be suspended as soon as it comes into
contradiction with its end, these rights of man. But practice is only
the exception, while theory is the rule. Even if one decided to
regard revolutionary practice as the correct expression of this rela
tion, the problem would remain as to why it is that in the minds of
political liberators the relation is inverted, so that the end appears
as the means and the means as the end? This optical illusion of
their consciousness would always remain a problem, though a psy
chological and theoretical one.
But the problem is easily solved.
Political emancipation is at the same time the dissolution of the
old society, upon which the sovereign power, the alienated political
life of the people, rests. Political revolution is a revolution of civil
society. What was the nature of the old society? It can be charac
terized in one word: feudalism. The old civil society had a directly
political character; that is, the elements of civil life such as prop
erty, the family, and types of occupation had been raised, in the
form of lordship, caste and guilds, to elements of political life.
They determined, in this form, the relation of the individual to the
state as a whole; that is, his political situation, or in other words, his
separation and exclusion from the other elements of society. For
this organization of national life did not constitute property and
labour as social elements; it rather succeeded in separating them
from the body of the state, and made them distinct societies within
society. Nevertheless, at least in the feudal sense, the vital func
tions and conditions of civil society remained political. They
excluded the individual from the body of the state, and trans
formed the particular relation which existed between his corpora-
tion and the state into a general relation between the individual
and social life, j ust as they transformed his specific civil activity and
situation into a general activity and situation. As a result of this
organization, the state as a whole and its consciousness, will and
activity-the general political power-also necessarily appeared as
the private affair of a ruler and his servants, separated from the
people.
The political revolution which overthrew this power of the ruler,
which made state affairs the affairs of the people, and the political
state a matter of general concern, i.e. a real state, necessarily shat
tered everything-estates, corporations, guilds, privileges-which
expressed the separation of the people from community life. The
political revolution therefore abolished the political character of
civil society. It dissolved civil society into its basic elements, on the
one hand individuals, and on the other hand the material and cul
tural elements which formed the life experience and the civil situa
tion of these individuals. It set free the political spirit which had,
so to speak, been dissolved, fragmented and lost in the various
culs-de-sac of feudal society; it reassembled these scattered frag
ments, liberated the political spirit from its connexion with civil
life and made of it the community sphere, the general concern of
the people, in principle independent of these particular elements of
civil life. A specific activity and situation in life no longer had any
but an individual significance. They no longer constituted the gen
eral relation between the individual and the state as a whole.
Public affairs as such became the general affair of each individual,
and political functions became general functions.
But the consummation of the idealism of the state was at the
same time the consummation of the materialism of civil society.
The bonds which had restrained the egoistic spirit of civil society
were removed along with the political yoke. Political emancipation
was at the same time an emancipation of civil society from politics
and from even the semblance of a general content.
Feudal society was dissolved into its basic element, man; but into
egoistic man who was its real foundation.
Man in this aspect, the member of civil society, is now the foun
dation and presupposition of the political state. He is recognized as
such in the rights of man.
But the liberty of egoistic man, and the recognition of this lib-
erty, is rather the recognition of the frenzied movement of the cul-
tural and material elements which form the content of his life.
Thus man was not liberated from religion; he received religious
liberty. He was not liberated from property; he received the liberty
to own property. He was not liberated from the egoism of business;
he received the liberty to engage in business .
The formation of the political state, and the dissolution of civil
society into independent individuals whose relations are regulated
by law, as the relations between men in the corporations and guilds
were regulated by privilege, are accomplished by one and the same
act. Man as a member of civil society-non-political man
necessarily appears as the natural man. The rights of man appear as
natural rights because conscious activity is concentrated upon polit
ical action. Egoistic man is the passive, given result of the dissolu-.
tion of society, an object of direct apprehension and consequently a
natural object. The political revolution dissolves civil society into
its elements without revolutionizing these elements themselves or
subjecting them to criticism. This revolution regards civil society,
the sphere of human needs, labour, private interests and civil law,
as the basis of its own existence, as a self-subsistent precondition,
and thus as its natural basis. Finally, man as a member of civil
society is identified with authentic man, man as distinct from citi
zen, because he is man in his sensuous, individual and immediate
existence, whereas political man is only abstract, artificial man, man
as an allegorical, moral person. Thus man as he really is, is seen
only in the form of egoistic man, and man in his true nature only
in the form of the abstract citizen.
The abstract notion of political man is well formulated by Rous-
seau: "Whoever dares undertake to establish a people's institutions
must feel himself capable of changing, as it were, human nature
itself, of transforming each individual who, in isolation, is a com-
plete but solitary whole, into a part of something greater than him-
self, from which in a sense, he derives his life and his being; [of
changing man's nature in order to strengthen it;] of substituting a
limited and moral existence for the physical and independent life
[with which all of us are endowed by nature]. His task, in short, is
to take from a man his own powers, and to give him in exchange
alien powers which he can only employ with the help of other
men."4
Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of
human relationships to man himself.
Political emancipation is a reduction of man, on the one hand to
a member of civil society, an independent and egoistic individual,
and on the other hand, to a citizen, to a moral person.
Human emancipation will only be complete when the real, indi
vidual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as
an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his rela-
tionships, he has become a species-being; and when he has recog-
nized and organized his own powers (forces propres) as social
powers so that he no longer separates this social power from him
self as political power.
2. Bruno Bauer, "Die Fahigkeit der heutigen
Juden und Christen frei zu werden"5
It is in this form that Bauer studies the relation between the
Jewish and Christian religions, and also their relation with modern
criticism. This latter relation is their relation with "the capacity to
become free."
He reaches this conclusion: "The Christian has only to raise
himself one degree, to rise above his religion, in order to abolish
religion in general," and thus to become free; but "the Jew, on the
contrary, has to break not only with his Jewish nature, but also
with the process towards the consummation of his religion, a proc-
ess which has remained alien to him."6
Thus Bauer here transforms the question of Jewish emancipation
into a purely religious question. The theological doubt about
whether the Jew or the Christian has the better chance of attaining
salvation is reproduced here in the more enlightened form : which
of the two is more capable of emancipation? It is indeed no longer
asked: which makes free-Judaism or Christianity? On the con
trary, it is now asked: which makes free-the negation of Judaism
or the negation of Christianity?
"If they wish to become free the Jews should not embrace Chris
tianity as such, but Christianity in dissolution, religion in dissolu
tion; that is to say, the Enlightenment, criticism, and its outcome, a
free humanity."7
It is still a matter, therefore, of the Jews professing some kind of
faith; no longer Christianity as such, but Christianity in dissolu-
tion.
Bauer asks the Jews to break with the essence of the Christian
religion, but this demand does not follow, as he himself admits,
from the development of the Jewish nature.
From the moment when Bauer, at the end of his Judenfrage,
saw in Judaism only a crude religious criticism of Christianity, and;
therefore, attributed to it only a religious significance, it was to b.e
expected that he would transform the emancipation of the Jews
into a philosophico-theological act.
Bauer regards the ideal and abstract essence of the Jew-his reli
gion-as the whole of his nature. He, therefore, concludes rightly
that "The Jew contributes nothing to mankind when he disregards
his own limited law," when he renounces all his Judaism.8
The relation between Jews and Christians thus becomes the fol
lowing: the only interest which the emancipation of the Jew pre
sents for the Christian is a general human and theoretical interest.
Judaism is a phenomenon which offends the religious eye of the
Christian. As soon as the Christian's eye ceases to be religious the
phenomenon ceases to offend it. The emancipation of the Jew is
not in itself, therefore, a task which falls to the Christian to per-
form.
The Jew, on the other hand, if he wants to emancipate himself
has to undertake, besides his own work, the work of the
Christian-the "criticism of the gospels," of the "life of Jesus,"
etc.9
"It is for them to arrange matters; they will decide their own
destiny. But history does not allow itself to be mocked."l
We will attempt to escape from the theological formulation of
the question. For us, the question concerning the capacity of thc
Jew for emancipation is transformed into another question: what
specific social element is it necessary to overcome in order to abol
ish Judaism? For the capacity of the present-day Jew to emancipate
himself expresses the relation of Judaism to the emancipation of
the contemporary world. The relation results necessarily from the
particular situation of Judaism in the present enslaved world.
Let us consider the real Jew: not the sabbath Jew, whom Bauer
considers, but the everyday Jew.
Let us not seek the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us
seek the secret of the religion in the real Jew.
What is the profane basis of Judaism? Practical need, self
interest. What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is
his worldly god? Money.
Very well: then in emancipating itself from huckstering and
money, and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would
emancipate itself.
An organization of society which would abolish the pre
conditions and thus the very possibility of huckstering, would make
the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would evaporate like
some insipid vapour in the real, life-giving air of society. On the
other hand, when the Jew recognizes his practical nature as invalid
and endeavours to abolish it, he begins to deviate from his former
path of development, works for general human emancipation and
turns against the supreme practical expression of human self
estrangement.
We discern in Judaism, therefore, a universal antisocial element
of the present time, whose historical development, zealously aided
in its harmful aspects by the Jews, has now attained its culminating
point, a point at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate.
In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emanci
pation of mankind from Judaism.
The Jew has already emancipated himself in a Jewish fashion.
"The Jew, who is merely tolerated in Vienna for example, deter-
mines the fate of the whole Empire by his financial power. The
Jew, who may be entirely without rights in the smallest German
state, decides the destiny of Europe. While the corporations and
guilds exclude the Jew, or at least look on him with disfavour, the
audacity of industry mocks the obstinacy of medieval institu-
tions."2
This is not an isolated instance. The Jew has emancipated him
self in a Jewish manner, not only by acquiring the power of money,
but also because money has become, through him and also apart
from him, a world power, while the practical Jewish spirit has
become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have
emancipated themselves in so far as the Christians have become
Jews.
Thus, for example, Captain Hamilton reports that the devout
and politically free inhabitant of New England is a kind of Lao
coon who makes not the least effort to escape from the serpents
which are crushing him. Mammon is his idol which he adores not
only with his lips but with the whole force of his body and mind.
In his view the world is no more than a Stock Exchange, and he is
convinced that he has no other destiny here below than to become
richer than his neighbour. Trade has seized upon all his thoughts,
and he has no other recreation than to exchange objects. When he
travels he carries, so to speak, his goods and h is counter on his back
and talks only of interest and profit. If he loses sight of his own
business for an instant it is only in order to pry into the business of
his competitors.3
In North America, indeed, the effective domination of the Chris
tian world by Judaism has come to be manifested in a common and
unambiguous form; the preaching of the Gospel itself, Christian
preaching, has become an article of commerce, and the bankrupt
trader in the church behaves like the prosperous clergyman in busi-
ness. "This man whom you see at the head of a respectable congre
gation began as a trader; his business having failed he has become a
minister. This other began as a priest, but as soon as he had accu-
mulated some money he abandoned the priesthood for trade. In
the eyes of many people the religious ministry is a veritable indus-
trial career. "4
According to Bauer, it is "a hypocritical situation when, in
theory, the Jew is deprived of political rights, while in practice he
wields tremendous power and exercises on a wholesale scale the
political influence which is denied him in minor matters ."5
The contradiction which exists between the effective political
power of the Jew and his political rights, is the contradiction
between politics and the power of money in general. Politics is in
principle superior to the power of money, but in practice it has
become its bondsman.
Judaism has maintained itself alongside Christianity, not only
because it constituted the religious criticism of Christianity and
embodied the doubt concerning the religious origins of Christian
ity, but equally because the practical Jewish spirit-Judaism or
commerce6-has perpetuated itself in Christian society and has
even attained its highest development there. The Jew, who occu
pies a distinctive place in civil society, only manifests in a distinc-
tive way the Judaism of civil society.
Judaism has been preserved, not in spite of history, but by his
tory.
It is from its own entrails that civil society ceaselessly engenders
the Jew.
What was, in itself, the basis of the Jewish religion? Practical
need, egoism.
The monotheism of the Jews is, therefore, in reality, a
polytheism of the numerous needs of man, a polytheism which
makes even the lavatory an object of divine regulation. Practical
need, egoism, is the principle of civil society, and is revealed as
such in its pure form as soon as civil society has fully engendered
the political state. The god of practical need and self-interest is
money.
Money is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god
may exist. Money abases all the gods of mankind and changes them
into commodities. Money is the universal and self-sufficient value
of all things. It has, therefore, deprived the whole world, both the
human world and nature, of their own proper value. Money is the
alienated essence of man's work and existence; this essence domi
nates him and he worships it.
The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the
god of this world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew.
His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.
The mode of perceiving nature, under the rule of private prop
erty and money, is a real contempt for, and a practical degradation
of. nature, which does indeed exist in the Jewish religion but only
as a creature of the imagination.
It is in this sense that Thomas Munzer declares it intolerable
"that every creature should be transformed into property-the
fishes in the water, the birds of the air, the plants of the earth: the
creature too should become free."7
That which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish reli
gion-contempt for theory, for art, for history, and for man as an
end in himself-is the real, conscious standpoint and the virtue of
the man of money. Even the species-relation itself, the relation
between man and woman, becomes an object of commerce.
Woman is bartered away.
The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the
trader, and above all of the financier.
The law, without basis or reason, of the Jew, is only the religious
caricature of morality and right in general, without basis or reason;
the purely formal rites with which the world of self-interest encir
cles itself.
Here again the supreme condition of man is his legal status, his
relationship to laws which are valid for him, not because they are
the laws of his own will and nature, but because they are
dominant and any infraction of them will be avenged.
Jewish Jesuitism, the same practical Jesuitism which Bauer dis
covers in the Talmud, is the relationship of the world of self
interest to the laws which govern this world, laws which the world
devotes its principal arts to circumventing.
Indeed, the operation of this world within its framework of laws
is impossible without the continual supersession of law.
Judaism could not develop further as a religion, in a theoretical
form, because the world view of practical need is, by its very
nature, circumscribed, and the delineation of its characteristics soon
completed.
The religion of practical need could not, by its very nature, find
its consummation in theory, but only in practice, just because prac
tice is its truth.
Judaism could not create a new world. It could only bring the
new creations and conditions af the world within its own sphere of
activity, because practical need, the spirit of which is self-interest, is
always passive, cannot expand at will, but finds itself extended as a
result of the continued development of society.
Judaism attains its apogee with the perfection of civil society; but
civil society only reaches perfection in the Christian world. Only
under the sway of Christianity, which objectifies all national, natu-
ral, moral and theoretical relationships, could civil society separate
itself completely from the life of the state, sever all the species
bonds of man, establish egoism and selfish need in their place, and
dissolve the human world into a world of atomistic, antagonistic
individuals.
Christianity issued from Judaism. It has now been re-absorbed
into Judaism.
From the beginning, the Christian was the theorizing Jew; conse-
quently, the Jew is the practical Christian. And the practical Chris
tian has become a Jew again.
It was only in appearance that Christianity overcame real
Judaism. It was too refinedtheoretical fashion, the alienation
of man from himself and from nature.
It was only then that Judaism could attain universal domination
and could turn alienated man and alienated nature into alienable,
saleable objects, in thrall to egoistic need and huckstering.
Objectification is the practice of alienation. Just as man, so long
as he is engrossed in religion, can only objectify his essence by an
alien and fantastic being; so under the sway of egoistic need, he can
only affirm himself and produce objects in practice by subordinat-
ing his products and his own activity to the domination of an
alien entity, and by attributing to them the significance of an alien
entity, namely money.
In its perfected. practice the spiritual egoism of Christianity nec
essarily becomes the material egoism of the Jew, celestial need is
transmuted into terrestrial need, subjectivism into self-interest. The
tenacity of the Jew is to be explained, not by his religion, but
rather by the human basis of his religion-practical need and
egoism.
It is because the essence of the Jew was universally realized and
secularized in civil society, that civil society could not convince the
Jew of the unreality of his religious essence, which is precisely the
ideal representation of practical need. It is not only, therdore, in
the Pentateuch and the Talmud, but also in contemporary society,
that we find the essence of the present-day Jew; not as an abstract
essence, but as one which is supremely empirical, not only as a lim
itation of the Jew, but as the Jewish narrowness of society.
As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of
Judaism-huckstering and its conditions-the Jew becomes impos
sible, because his consciousness no longer has an object. The sub-
jective basis of Judaism-practical need-assumes a human form,
and the conflict between the inaividual, sensuous existence of man
and his species-existence, is abolished.
The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of
society from Judaism.
Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's
Philosophy of Right: Introduction
KARL MARX
Written at the close of 1843 and published in the Deutsch-Franzosische
Jahrbuche in 1844, this essay is a consummate expression of the radical
mind. It proclaims the need for a "radical revolution" as the way to man's
self-realization. Germany is taken as the focal point of this revolution, and
the proletariat-the concept of which makes its first appearance in Marx's
writings here-as its class vehicle. In August 1844 Marx sent a copy of the
essay to Ludwig Feuerbach along with a long letter expressing love and
respect for that thinker, whose writing had provided, he wrote, a "philo-
sophical foundation for socialism" by bringing the idea of the human
species from "the heaven of abstraction to the real earth." Feuerbach's in-
fluence, along with that of Hegel, is clearly visible in the essay.
For Germany, the cristicism of religion has been largely com
pleted; and the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.
The profane existence of error is compromised once its celestial
oratio pro aris et focis has been refuted. Man, who has found in
the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a supernatural
being, only his own reflection, will no longer be tempted to find
only the semblance of himself-a non-human being-where he
seeks and must seek his true reality.
The basis of irreligious criticism is this: man makes religion;
religion does not make man. Religion is indeed man's self
consciousness and self-awareness so long as he has not found him
self or has lost himself again. But man is not an abstract being,
squatting outside the world. Man is the human world, the state,
society. This state, this society, produce religion which is an
inverted world consciousness, because they are an inverted world.
Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic com
pendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its
enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its general
basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization
of the human being inasmuch as the human being possesses no
true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly a
struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real
suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of
the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the
soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of men, is a
demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions
about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which
requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, the
embryonic criticism of this vale of tears of which religion is the I
halo.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not
in order that man shall bear the chain without caprice or consola
tion but so that he shall cast off the chain and pluck the living
flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man so that he will
think, act and fashion his reality as a man who has lost his illusions
and regained his reason; so that he will revolve about himself as his
own true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun about which man
revolves so long as he does not revolve about himself.
It is the task of history, therefore, once the other-world of truth
has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. The immediate
task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, is to unmask
human self-alienation in its secular form now that it has been
unmasked in its sacred form. Thus the criticism of heaven is trans-
formed into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the
criticism of law and the criticism of theology into the criticism of
politics.
The following exposition1-which is a contribution to this
undertaking-does not deal directly with the original but with a
copy, the German philosophy of the state and of right, for the
simple reason that it deals with Germany.
If one were to begin with the status quo itself in Germany, even
in the most appropriate way, i .e. negatively, the result would still
be an anachronism. Even the negation of our political present is
already a dusty fact in the historical lumber room of modern
nations. I may negate powdered wigs, but I am still left with
unpowdered wigs. If I negate the German situation of 1843 I have,
according to French chronology, hardly reached the year 1789, and
still less the vital centre of the present day.
German history, indeed, prides itself upon a development which
no other nation had previously accomplished, or will ever imitate in
the historical sphere. We have shared in the restorations of modern
nations without ever sharing in their revolutions . We have been
restored, first because other nations have dared to make revolutions,
and secondly because other nations have suffered counter
revolutions; in the first case because our masters were afraid, and in
the second case because they were not afraid. Led by our shep
herds, we have only once kept company with liberty and that was
on the day of its internment.
A school of thought, which justifies the infamy of today by that
of yesterday, which regards every cry from the serf under the knout
as a cry of rebellion once the knout has become time-honoured,
ancestral and historical, a school for which history shows
only its a posteriori as the God of Israel did for his servant
Moses-the Historical school of law2-might be supposed to have
invented German history, if it were not in fact itself an invention
of German history, A Shylock, but a servile Shylock, it swears upon
its bond, its historical, Christian-Germanic bond, for every pound
of flesh cut from the heart of the people.
On the other hand, good-natured enthusiasts, German chauvin
ists by temperament and enlightened liberals by reflection, seek our
history of liberty beyond our history, in the primeval Teutonic
forests. But how does the history of our liberty differ from the his
tory of the wild boar's liberty, if it is only to be found in the
forests? And as the proverb has it: what is shouted into the forest,
the forest echoes back. So peace upon the primeval Teutonic
forests!
But war upon the state of affairs in Germany! By all means ! This
state of affairs is beneath the level of history, beneath all criticism;
nevertheless it remains an object of criticism just as the criminal
who is beneath h umanity remains an object of the executioner. In
its struggle against this state of affairs criticism is not a passion of
the head, but the head of passion. It is not a lancet but a weapon.
Its object is an enemy which it aims not to refute but to destroy.
For the spirit of this state of affairs has already been refuted. It is
not, in itself, an object worthy of our thought; it is an existence as
contemptible as it is despised. Criticism itself has no need of any
further elucidation of this object, for it has already understood it.
Criticism is no longer an end in itself, but simply a means; indigna
tion is its essential mode of feeling, and denunciation its principal
task.
It is a matter of depicting the stifling pressure which the differ
ent social spheres exert upon other, the universal but passive
ill-humour, the complacent but self-deluding narrowness of spirit;
all this incorporated in a system of government which lives by con
serving this paltriness, and is itself paltriness in government.
What a spectacle! Society is infinitely divided into the most
diverse races, which confront each other with their petty antipa
thies, bad conscience and coarse mediocrity; and which, precisely
because of their ambiguous and mistrustful situation, are treated
without exception, though in different ways, as merely tolerated
existences by their masters. And they are forced to recognize and
acknowledge this fact of being dominated, governed and possessed,
as a concession from heaven! On the other side are the rulers them
selves, whose greatness is in inverse proportion to their number.
The criticism which deals with this subject-matter is criticism in
a hand-to-hand fight; and in such a fight it is of no interest to know
whether the adversary is of the same rank, is noble or interest
ing-all that matters is to strike him. It is a question of denying
the Germans an instant of illusion or resignation. The burden must
be made still more irksome by awakening a consciousness of it, and
shame must be made more shameful still by rendering it public.
Every sphere of German society must be depicted as the partie
Honteuse of German society; and these petrified social conditions
must be made to dance by singing their own melody to them. The
nation must be taught to be terrified of itself, in order to give it
courage. In this way an imperious need of the German nation will
be satisfied, and the needs of nations are themselves the final causes
of their satisfaction.
Even for the modern nations this struggle against the limited
character of the German status quo does not lack interest; for the
German status quo is the open consummation of the ancien
régime, and the ancien régime is the hidden defect of the modern
Footnotes:
1. For further particulars on the publishing history, see the Note on Texts and Terminology, below.
2. The notion that Marxism has its foundation in "dialectical materialism," a general world-view of which historical materialism is the application to human history, is a later growth particularly associated with Russian and subsequently Communist Marxism, and is not the classical Marxist position. For Marx the prime subject of Marx ism was human history, hence historical materialism was the foundation of the teaching. Moreover, historical materialism was itself dialectical in that the human historical process showed a revolutionary pattern of development through opposition and conflict. To this it must be added that Engels, who more than Marx was interested in the progress of natural science in the nineteenth century, did give an initial impetus to the later emergence of a Marxist "dialectical materialism" by his speculations on the presence of dialectical laws in natural processes. He began but never completed a book on this subject, the manuscript of which was first published in the twentieth century under the title Dialectics of Nature. The term "dialectical materialism" was put into currency by the Russian Marxist GeorgiPlekhanov in one of his writings of the late nineteenth century. For a long while the authoritative version of the viewpoint of Communist Marxism on this subject was the essay by. Joseph Stalin, "Dialectical and Historical Materialism," published as a part of Chapter Four of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks). Short Course (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, many editions).
3. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works,2 vol. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), vol.II, p.387.
4. From a review, written in 1859, of Marx's A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Italics added.
5. On this see Marx's own testimony in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, p 4, below. For the commentary itself, see pp. 16-25, 53-65, below.
6. This is a main theme of the important section of the 1844 manuscripts on estranged labor. See below. pp. 70-81.
7. The account given here of the origin and development of Marx's thought
follows the lines of the interpretation presented in greater length and detail, with supporting evidence, in Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (New York : Cambridge University Press, 1961 ; 2nd ed., 1972).
8. I am referring to Erich Fromm's Man for Himself (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1 947). See also his autobiographical study, Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962 ). For a discussion of Marx from an existentialist viewpoint, see F. H. Heinemann,.Existentialism and the Modern Predicament (New York: Harper & Row, 1958).
9. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, edited by Dirk J. Struik (New York: Inter national Publishers, 1 964), pp. 197,226. Engels' "Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy" appears here as an appendix.
1. See in this connection the selection included here under the title "Working-Class Manchester" (pp. 579-585, below ) .
2. Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Okonomie (Moscow, 1939-41). The full text in English is available in Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, translated by Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage Books, 1973). ( See below, pp.221-293, for selections. )
3. See the selection en titled "Alienation and Social Classes," below
4. On Marx's use of the terms "mode of production" and "relations of production," see Robert C. Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea (New York: W.W.Norton, 1969) , chapter 1.
5. Dirk J.Struik has pointed out that Marx does not completely renounce the Term "alienation" in his later economic writings. It makes a reappearance in the Grundrisse and in the following passage from Capital, Vol. III, Part I, chapter 5, section 1: "The relations of capital conceal indeed the inner connection.(of the facts) in the complete indifference, exteriorization and alienation in which it places the worker in relation to the conditions of the realization of his own labour (The Economic and Philosophic 111 manuscripts of 1844, p. 235).
6. For Marx's scorn of the distributive orientation in socialist thought, see particularly his comments in The Critique of the Gotha Program, pp. 528- 532, below. On the problem of dis tributive justice in Marx, see Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea, chapter 2.
7. What Is to Be Done?, in The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), p.19. By "movement" in this context Lenin meant an organized political movement led by a political party
8. "The work of Marx on the Civil War of 1871 has an extraordinary historical significance: for by this bold step Marx annexed the memory of the Commune. It is only since then that Marxism has possessed a revolutionary tradition in the eyes of mankind. By 1870 Marx had already acquired a reputation as an outstanding theoretician of the labour motivement, but the general public knew nothing of the political and revolutionary activity of the Marxists .... It is only since 1871 that Marxism has been clearly associated with the labour revolution .... In this manner Marx provided an important tradition for the future movements of the working class. and he placed his own doctrines in the centre of these movements" (Arthur Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism [Boston : Beacon Press. 1965]. pp. 204-205).
9. See Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism, pp. 2 02-205, for further particulars and a discussion of this issue.
1. When informed in 1864 that the newspaper of the General German Workers' Society would be called The Social Democrat, Engels wrote to Marx: "What a disgusting title-The Social Democrat! Why don't those fellows frankly call the thin g : The Proletarian?" Marx answered: "Social Democrat is a bad title. Yet one shouldn't immediately use the best title for something which may turn out to be a failure" (Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism, p. 162). A Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party came into existence in 1 898. In 1917, out of disgust with the behavior of the Social Democratic leaders of various countries who had supported their governments in World War I in contravention of Marxist internationalism, Lenin persuaded his Bolshevik branch of the Russian Social Democratic Party to change its name to "Communist Party."
2. See the text of this speech. below .
3.For Lenin's argument see The State and Revolution in The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton. 1975), p. 337. For Kautsky's position and the Lenin-Kaut-sky conflict, see Karl Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,196 4), and Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea, chapter 3. Soviet Marxism's espousal of the concept of a peaceful path is analyzed in chapter 6 of the latter work.
4. Engels, "The Tactics of Social Democracy," below.
5. Engels, Ludwig Feuerback and the End of Classical German Philosophy. p.386.
6. Selections from this work appear below.
7. See below.
1. For one of Marx's versions of the grand project, see the Grundrisse, below p.244. The successive versions are discussed by Joseph J. O'Malley in "Marx's 'Economics' and Hegel's Philosophy of Right: An Essay on Marx's Hegelianism," Political Studies, vol. XXIV, no. 1 (March 1976),pp. 48 ff.
2. For this and other particulars about the Institute I have drawn upon E.A.Stepanova, "O sobirianii i nauchnoi publikatsii v SSSR literaturnogo
nasledstva osnovopolozhnikov marksizma," in Iz istorii marksizma (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1961), pp.6-59.
3. I am indebted to Professor Joseph J.O'Malley for this information.
4. See below, pp.291-292, and Martin Nicolaus' discussion of the point in his Foreword to the full translation ( Karl Marx, Grundrisse : Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy [New York: Vintage Books, 1 9731. p. 32).
5. The meaning of Aufhebung in the context of Hegel's philosophy of spirit is explicated in Robert C.Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (New York: 1972), pp. 51-52, 59-60.
1. Rheinische Zeitung (Rhenish Gazette) : A daily radical newspaper published in Cologne in 1842-43 ; from October 15, 1842, to March 18, 1843, its editor was Marx.
2. Marx has in mind his article, "Der Kommunismus und die Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung" ( Communism and the Augsburg General Journal) , Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe, Abt. I, B. I, Halbband I, Frankfurt am Main, 1927, S. 260-65.
3. Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher (German-French Annals) : Organ of revolutionary and communist propaganda, published by Marx in Paris in 1844
4. Here all mistrust must be abandoned And here must perish every craven thought.(Dante. The Divine Comedy)
1. Heine.
2. The Doctors' Club was founded by representatives of the radical wing of the Hegelian school in Berlin in 1837.Among its members were lecturer on theology of Berlin University Bruno Bauer. gymnasium history teacher Karl Friedrich Koppen, and geography teacher Adolf Rutenberg. The usual meeting place was the small Hippel cafe. The Club, of which Marx was also an active member, played an important part in the Young Hegelian movement.
For a fuller statement of this interpretation, see Robert C. Tucker. Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx", pp. 75-80.
1. Course of life.
1. Theodore Dezamy, author of Code de la nature (1842). [R.T.]
2. Wilhelm Weitling, a German journeyman tailor whose Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom (1842) advocated communism. [R.T.]
3. This is the title of Cabet's utopian noyel published in Paris in 1840. At that time Cabet's followers were called "communists." [R.T.]
4. From the political point of view.[R.T.]
5. The system of representation by estates (classes) as opposed to the system of representation by individuals. [R.T.]
The treatise is available in English as Hegel's Philosophy of Right, translated with notes by T.M.Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942). The complete text of Marx's commentary is available in Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, translated and edited by Joseph J, O'Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
For more on transformational criticism and Marx's application of it in this commentary, see the Introduction, pp. xxiii-xxiv, above.
l. Subheadings supplied by R.C.T.
2. Par excellence -i.e., "Christianity is the pre-eminent religion."
3. I.e., state, republic; etymologically, "public affairs."
1. The Jewish question. [Braunschweig, 1843.-Marx]
2. Bauer, "Die Fahigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen, frei zu werden," Einundzwanzig Bogen, p. 57. [Marx] Emphases added by Marx.
3. Chamber of Deputies. Debate of 26th December, 1840. [Marx]
4. Bauer, Die Judenfrage, p. 64. [Marx]
S. Ibid., p. 65. [Marx]
6. Loc. cit. [Marx]
7. Ibid., p. 71. [Marx]
8. Bauer, Die Judenfrage, p. 66.[Marx]
9. Ibid., p. 97. [Marx]
1. Bauer, Die judenfrage, p. 3. [Marx]
2. Gustave de Belaumont, Marie ou l'esclavage aux Etats-Unis, Bruxelles, 1835, 2 vols., II, p. 207. [Marx] Marx refers to another edition, Paris, 1835.
3. Ibid., p. 216. Beaumont actually refers to all the States of North America.
4. Ibid., p. 217. [Marx]
5. G. de Beaumont, op. cit. [Marx]
6. A. de Tocqueville, De la democratie en Amerique. [Marx]
7. Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in North America, Edinburgh, 1833, 2 vols. [Marx] Marx quotes from the German translation, Mannheim.1834
8. Hamilton, op. cit., I, pp. 2 88, 306,309. [Marx]
9. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophiedes Rechts, Ier Aufgabe, 1821, p. 346. [Marx] See the English translation by T. M. Knox, Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Oxford, 1942, p.173.
1. The terms "species-life" (Gattungsleben) and "species-being" (Gattungswesen) are derived from Feuerbach. In the first chapter of Das Wesen des Christentums [The Essence oj Christianity], Leipzig, 1841, Feuerbach discusses the nature of man, and argues that man is to be distinguished from animals not by "consciousness" as such, but by a particular kind of consciousness. Man is not only conscious of himself as an individual ; he is also conscious of himself as a member of the human species, and so he apprehends a "human essence" which is the same in himself and in other men. According to Feuerbach this ability to conceive of "species" is the fundamental element in the human power of reasoning: "Science is the consciousness of species." Marx, while not departing from this meaning of the terms, employs them in other contexts : and he consciousness" defines the nature of man, man is only living and acting authentically (i.e. in accordance with his nature) when he lives and acts deliberately as a "species-being," that is, as a social being.
2. See previous note.
3. I.e. as a member of civil society.
4. I.e. the individual with political rights.
5. Bauer, Die Judenfrage, p.8. [Marx]
6. Ibid., pp. 8-9. [Marx]
7. Bauer, Die ludenfrage, p.55. [Marx]
8. Ibid., p.56. [Marx]
9. Ibid., p.108. [Marx]
1. Bauer, Die ludenfrage, pp. 19-20. [Marx]
2. Beaumont, op.cit., II, pp. 2 06-7. [Marx]
3. Buchez et Roux, "Robes pierrejeune," Histoire parlementaire de la Revolution francaise, Tome XXVIIIp. 1 59. [Marx]
4. J.J. Rousseau, Du contrat social, Book II. Chapter VII, "The Legislator." Marx quoted this passage in French, and added the emphases; he omitted the portions enclosed in square brackets.
5. The capacity of the present-day Jews and Christians to become free. [In Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz (Ed. G. Herwegh ) , pp. 5 6-71 .-Marx]
6. Loc. cit., p. 71. [Marx]
7. Ibid., p. 70. [Marx]
8. Loc. cit., p. 65. [Marx]
9. Marx alludes here to Bruno Bauer, Kritik der e'llangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker, Vols. I-II, Leipzig, 1 841; Vol. III, Braunschweig, 1842,and David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, 2 vols. Tubingen, 1835-6 An English translation of Strauss' book by Marian Evans (George Eliot) was published in 1846 under the title Life of Jesus Critically Examined.
1. Bauer, "Die Fahigkeit ... etc. ," p.71. [Marx]
2. Bauer, Die Judenfrage, p. 14. [Marx]
3. Hamilton, op. cit., I, p. 2 1 3. [Marx] Marx paraphrases this passage.
4. Beaumont, op. cit., II, p. 1 79. [Marx]
5. Bauer, Die judenfrage, p. 14. [Marx]
6. The German word judentum had, in the language of the time, the secondary meaning of "commerce," and in this and other passages Marx exploits the two senses of the word.
7. Quoted from Thomas Munzer's pamphlet against Luther, "Hochverrusachte
Schutzrede und Antwort wider das geistlose, sanftlebende Fleisch zu Wittenberg, welches mit verkehrter Weise durch den Diebstahl der heiligen Schrift die erbarmliche Christenheit also ganz jammerlich besudelt hat." (p.B iii. 1 524.) [Marx]
1. Marx refers to his intention to publish a critical study of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, to which this essay was an introduction, One of Marx's preliminary manuscripts for such a study has been published entitled "Aus der Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts" (MEGA I,11, pp. 403-553).
2. The principal representative of the Historical school was F. K. von Savigny (1779-1861) who outlined its programme in his book Vom BeTuf unserer Zeit fur Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft (On the Vocation of our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence) .Heidelberg, 1814. Marx attended Savigny's lectures at the University of Berlin in 1836-7 ; but he was more attracted by the lectures of Eduard Gans (1798- 1839), a liberal Hegelian influenced by Saint-Simon, who emphasized in his teaching and writings the part played by reason in the development of law, and who was Savigny's principal opponent in Berlin.
3. In German, listigen; Marx is punning upon the name of Friedrich List
( 1789-1846 ), the apostle of industrial capitalism in a nationalist and protectionist form, who published in 1 840 his influential book, Das nationale System de,. politischen Okkonomie.
4. Anacharsis.
5, The laws of September, 1835, which increased the financial guarantees required from the publishers of news papers and introduced heavier penalties for "subversive" publications.
6. Aufhebung [R. T.]
7. I.e., the future German revolution will be sparked by revolutionary developments in France. (This last paragraph does not appear in the original Bottomore translation used here) [R.T]
The cross-outs are indicated by pointed brackets in the complete text
of the 1844 manuscripts as published in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
Collected Works, vol. 3 (Marx and Engels: 1843-44) (London: Lawrence Wishart, 1975), pp. 249-346. I am indebted to Thomas Ferguson for bringing the crossed-out material to my attention.
1. Particularly.
2. Marx refers here to the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer, who had published
in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung two long reviews dealing with books, articles and pamphlets on the Jewish question. Most of the quoted phrases are taken from these reviews in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, vol.1, December, 1843; vol. 4, March, 1844. The expressions "utopian phrase" and "compact mass" can be found in Bauer's article "Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand del' Kritik?" published in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, vol. 8, July, 1844. Allgemeine Literatuf-Zeitung (General Literary Gazette), a German monthly, was published by Bauer in Charlottenburg from December, 1843,to October, 1844.
3. Passages enclosed in brackets were crossed out by Marx in his manuscript.
4. The full title of this collection of articles is Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz (Twenty-One Sheets from Switzerland), Erster Teil, Ziirich and Winterthur, 1843.
5. Engels' "Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy."
6. Ludwig Feuerbach, Grundsatze der Philosophie der Zukunft (Principles of the Philosophy of the Future), Zurich and Winterthur, 1843.
7. Ludwig Feuerbach, Vorliiufige Thesen zur Reformation der Philosophie (Preliminary Theses on the Reformation of Philosophy) published in Anekdota, vol. II.
8. Marx's abbreviation for Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publicistik (Unpublished Materials Related to Modern German Philosophy and Writing), a two-volume collection published by Arnold Ruge in 'Switzerland. It included Marx's Notes on the Latest Prussian Instruction to Censors and Luther-the Arbiter Between Strauss and Feuerbach, and articles by Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, Friedrich Koppen, Arnold Ruge, etc.
9. Marx has in mind Hauer and his followers, who were associated with the
Allgemeine Lite,atur-Zeitung.
1. "Moment" is a technical term in Hegelian philosophy meaning a vital element of thought. The term is used to stress that thought is a process, and thus that elements in a system of thought are also phases in a movement.
2. In Hegel, "feeling" (Empfindung) denotes a relatively low form of mental life in which the subjective and the objective are still confused together "Consciousness" (Bewusstein)-the name given by Hegel to the first major section of his Phenomenology of Mind-denotes those forms of mental activity where a subject first seeks to comprehend an object. "Self-consciousness" and "mind" denote subsequent, higher phases in the evolution of "absolute knowledge" or "the absolute."
3. Die Entjremdete Arbeit. See the Note on Texts and Terminology. p. xli. above. for a discussion of this term. [R.T.]
4. "Alienation"- EntiiusseTung
5. "Species nature" (and, earlier, "species being")- Gattungswesen; "man's essential nature"- menschlichen Wesen.
6. At this point the first manuscript breaks off unfinished.
7. Prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer, and since it is a relationship in which falls not the prostitute alone, but also the one who prostitutes-and the latter's abomination is still greater-the capitalist, etc., also comes under this head. [Marx]
8. For this reason it is just as highly
priced as the determinations of human
essence and activities. [Marx]
9. In practice I can relate myself to a thing humanly only if the thing relates itself to the human being humanly. [Marx]
1. "Essential powers"-Wesenskrcijte: i.e., powers belonging to me as part of my essential nature, my very being.
2. Spontaneous generation.
3. Forces of human nature: menschlichen Wesenkraft; human nature: menschlichell Wesens.
4. James Mill, Elements of Political Economy.
5. In the manuscript the lower left corner of the page is torn off. Just the right-hand endings of the last six lines remain, making restorations of the text impossible. It is possible to surmise, however, that Marx here criticizes Hegel's idealistic "transcending" of estrangement ( the words that have survived are cited in the next footnote ) .
6. In "transcending" estrangement "in the old German manner-the manner
of the Hegelian phenomenology," i.e., in transcending it exclusively in the "consciousness" of the subject.
7. The bottom of the page is torn. Three or four lines are missing.
8. This word is illegible.
9. Goethe, Faust, ( Part I-Faust's (Penguin, 1949 ) , p.91. Study, III), translated by Philip Wayne
1. Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, Act 4, Scene 3. Marx quotes the Schlegel-Tieck German translation. ( Marx's emphasis .)
2. Ibid.
3. An end of the page is torn out of the manuscript.
The Early Marx
Marx on the History of His Opinions
This is the preface to Marx's book A Contribution to the Critique of Po
litical Economy, first published in 1859 - The passage setting forth the ma-terialist conception of history-one of the few general statements of the
theory that Marx gave in his middle and later years-is the locus classicus of historical materialism. But the preface is also important as an account by Marx himself of the formative period of Marxism. As such it forms an appropriate introduction to the writings of 1837-1846 gathered here in Part I. The "criticism of post-Hegelian philosophy" which he mentions in the third-to-last paragraph is a reference to his work The German Ideology, written jointly with Engels.
I am omitting a general introduction which I had
jotted down because on closer reflection any anticipation of results
still to be proved appears to me to be disturbing, and the reader
who on the whole desires to follow me must be resolved to ascend
from the particular to the general. A few indications concerning the
course of my own politico-economic studies may, on the other hand,
appear in place here.
I was taking up law, which discipline, however, I only pursued as
a subordinate subject along with philosophy and history. In the
year 1842-44, as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung1, I experienced
for the first time the embarrassment of having to take part in dis-
cussions on so-called material interests. The proceedings of the
Rhenish Landtag on thefts of wood and parcelling of landed prop-
erty, the official polemic which Herr von Schaper, then Oberprasi-
dent of the Rhine Province, opened against the Rheinische Zeitung
on the conditions of the Moselle peasantry, and finally debates on
free trade and protective tariffs provided the first occasions 'for
occupying myself with economic questions. On the other hand, at
that time when the good will " to go further" greatly outweighed
knowledge of the subject, a philosophically weakly tinged echo of
French socialism and communism made itself audible in the Rhein-
ische Zeitung. I declared myself against this amateurism, but
frankly confessed at the same time in a controversy with the All
gemeine Augsburger Zeitung2 that my previous studies did not
permit me even to venture any judgement on the content of the
French tendencies. Instead, I eagerly seized on the illusion of the
managers of the Rheinische Zeitung, who thought that by a weaker
attitude on the part of the paper they could secure a remission of
the death sentence passed upon it, to withdraw from the public
stage into the study.
The first work which I undertook for a solution of the doubts
which assailed me was a critical review of the Hegelian philosophy
of right, a work the introduction to which appeared in 1844 in the
Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher3 published in Paris. My investi-
gation led to the result that legal relations as well as forms of state
are to be grasped neither from themselves nor from the so-called
general development of the human mind, but rather have their
roots in the material conditions of life, the sum total of which
Hegel, following the example of the Englishmen and Frenchmen of
the eighteenth century, combines under the name of "civil
society," that, however, the anatomy of civil society is to be sought
in political economy. The investigation of the latter, which I began
in Paris, I continued in Brussels, whither I had emigrated in conse-
quence of an expulsion order of M. Guizot. The general result at
which I arrived and which, once won, served as a guiding thread for
my studies, can be briefly formulated as follows : In the social pro
duction of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indis-
pensable and independent of their will, relations of production
which correspond to a definite stage of development of their mate-
rial productive forces.The sum total of these relations of produc-
tion constitutes the economic structure of society, the real founda-
tion, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to
which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode
of production of material life conditions the social, political and
intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of
men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social
being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of
their development, the material productive forces of society come
in conflict with the existing relations of production, or-what is
but a legal expression for the same thing-with the property rela-
tions within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of
development of the productive forces these relations turn into their
fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the
change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstruc-
ture is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such trans-
formations a distinction should always be made between the mate-
rial transformation of the economic conditions of production, which
can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the
legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic-in short, ideolog-
ical forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight
it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he
thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transfor-
mation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this conscious
ness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material
life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces
and the relations of production. No social order ever perishes
before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have
developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear
before the material conditions of their existence have matured in
the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets
itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter
more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only
when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at
least in the process of formation. In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient,
feudal, and modem bourgeois modes of production can be desig-
nated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society.
The bourgeois relations of production ar,e the last antagonistic form
of the social process of production-antagonistic not in the sense
of individual antagonism, but of one arising from the social condi-
tions of life of the individuals; at the same time the productive
forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the mate-
rial conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social for-
mation brings, therefore, the prehistory of human society to a close.
Frederick Engels, with whom, since the appearance of his bril-
liant sketch on the criticism of the economic categories ( in the
Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher), I maintained a constant ex-
change of ideas by correspondence, had by another road (com-
pare his The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844)
arrived at the same result as I, and when in the spring of 1845 he
also settled in Brussels, we resolved to work out in common the
opposition of our view to the ideological view of German philoso-
phy, in fact, to settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical
conscience. The resolve was carried out in the form of a criticism of
post-Hegelian philosophy. The manuscript, two large octavo vol-
umes, had long reached its place of publication in Westphalia
when we received the news that altered circumstances did not allow
of its being printed. We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing
criticism of the mice all the more willingly as we had achieved our
main purpose-self-clarification. Of the scattered works in which
we put our views before the public at that time, now from one
aspect, now from another, I will mention only the Manifesto of the
Communist Party, jointly written by Engels and myself, and Dis-
cours sur le libre échange published by me. The decisive points of
our view were first scientifically, although only polemically, indi-
cated in my work published in 1847 and directed against Proudhon :
Misere de la Philosophie, etc. A dissertation written in German on
Wage Labour, in which I put together my lectures on this subject
delivered in the Brussels German Workers' Society, was inter
rupted, while being printed, by the February Revolution and my
consequent forcible removal from Belgium.
The editing of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1848 and 1849,
and the subsequent events, interrupted my economic studies which
could only be resumed in the year 1850 in London. The enormous
material for the history of political economy which is accumulated
in the British Museum, the favourable vantage point afforded by
London for the observation of bourgeois society, and finally the
new stage of development upon which the latter appeared to have
entered with the discovery of gold in California and Australia,
determined me to begin afresh from the very beginning and to
work through the new material critically. These studies led partly
of themselves into apparently quite remote subjects on which I had
to dwell for a shorter or longer period. Especially, however, was the
time at my disposal curtailed by the imperative necessity of earning
my living. My contributions, during eight years now, to the first
English-American newspaper, the New York Tribune, compelled an
extraordinary scattering of my studies, since I occupy myself with
newspaper correspondence proper only in exceptional cases. How
ever, articles on striking economic events in England and on the
Continent constituted so considerable a part of my contributions
that I was compelled to make myself familiar with practical details
which lie outside the sphere of the actual science of political econ
omy.
This sketch of the course of my studies in the sphere of political
economy is intended only to show that my views, however they
may be judged and however little they coincide with the inter-
ested prejudices of the ruling classes, are the results of conscien-
tious investigation lasting many years. But at the entrance to sci-
ence, as at the entrance to hell, the demand must be posted:
Qui si convien lasciare ogni sospetto;
Ogni vilta convien che qui sia morta.4
Discovering Hegel
KARL MARX
On November 10, 1837, soon after becoming a student at the University of
Berlin, Marx wrote a long letter to his father. It shows that at nineteen he
had formed two relationships of great importance: a personal one with
Jenny von Westphalen of Trier and an intellectual one with the late philos-
opher Hegel. The love of Jenny led to marriage, the spell of Hegel to
Marxism.
Dear Father,
There are moments in one's life which are like frontier posts
marking the completion of a period but at the same time clearly
indicating a new direction.
After my arrival in Berlin, I broke off all hitherto existing connec-
tions, made visits rarely and unwillingly, and tried to immerse
myself in science and art.
In accordance with my state of mind at the time, lyrical poetry
was bound to be my first subject, at l east the most pleasant and
immediate one. But owing to my attitude and whole previous devel-
opment it was purely idealistic. My heaven, my art, became a world
beyond, as remote as my love. Everything real became hazy and
what is hazy has no definite outlines . All the poems of the first
three volumes I sent to Jenny are marked by attacks on our times,
diffuse and inchoate expressions of feeling, nothing natural, every-
thing built out of moonshine, complete opposition between what is
and what ought to be, rhetorical reflections instead of poetic
thoughts, but perhaps also a certain warmth of feeling and striving
for poetic fire.
Poetry, however, could be and had to be only an accompani-
ment; I had to study law and above all felt the urge to wrestle with
philosophy.
From the idealism which, by the way, I had compared and nour-
ished with the idealism of Kant and Fichte, I arrived at the point of
seeking the idea in reality itself. If previously the gods had dwelt
above the earth, now they became its centre.
I had read fragments of Hegel's philosophy, the grotesque craggy
melody of which did not appeal to me. Once more I wanted to dive
into the sea, but with the definite intention of establishing that the
nature of the mind is just as necessary, concrete and firmly based as
the nature of the body . My aim was no longer to practise tricks of
swordsmanship, but to bring genuine pearls into the light of day.
I wrote a dialogue of about 24 pages: "Cleanthes, or the Starting
Point and Necessary Continuation of Philosophy." Here art and sci-
ence, which had become completely divorced from each other, were
to some extent united, and like a vigorous traveller I set a bout
the task itself, a philosophical-dialectical account of divinity, as
it manifests itself as the idea-in-itself, as religion, as nature, and
as history. My last proposition was the beginning of the Hegelian
system.
For some days my vexation made me quite incapable of thinking;
I ran about madly in the garden by the dirty water of the Spree,
which "washes souls and dilutes the tea ."l I even joined my land-
lord in a hunting excursion, rushed off to Berlin and wanted to
embrace every street-corner loafer.
Owning to being upset over Jenny's illness and my vain, fruitless
intellectual labours, and as the result of nagging annoyance at
having had to make an idol of a view that I hated, I became ill, as I
have already written to you, dear Father. When I got better I burnt
all the poems and outlines of stories, etc., imagining that I could
give them up completely, of which so far at any rate I have not
given any proofs to the contrary.
While I was ill I got to know Hegel from beginning to end,
together with most of his disciples. Through a n umber of meetings
with friends in Stralow I came across a Doctors' Club,2 which
includes some university lecturers and my most intimate Berlin
friend, Dr. Rutenberg. In controversy h ere, many conflicting views
were expressed, and I became ever more firmly bound to the mod-
ern world philosophy from which I had thought to escape.
Your ever loving son,
Karl
Please, dear father, excuse my illegible handwriting and bad style;
it is almost 4 o'clock, the candle has burnt itself out, and my eyes
are dim; a real unrest has taken possession of me, I shall not be able
to calm the turbulent spectres until I am with you who are dear to
me.
Please give greetings from me to my sweet, wonderful Jenny. I
have read her letter twelve times already, and always discover new
delights in it. It is in every respect, including that of style, the most
beautiful letter I can imagine being written by a woman.
To Make the World Philosophical
KARL MARX
Marx's doctoral dissertation, "The Difference Between the Democritean and
Epicurean Philosophies of Nature," written between 1839 and 1841, is
chiefly of interest for the following excerpts arguing that after a great world
philosophy-Aristotle's in antiquity and Hegel's now-the system's disciples
feel an imperious urge to make the world "philosophical." What this would
mean Marx hinted in the dissertation's foreword, where he saluted Prome-
theus' revolt against the gods as a proclamation of "human self-conscious-
ness as the highest divinity." To transform the world in the image of
Hegelian philosophy would mean to make of man in existential reality the
divinity that, as Marx saw it, Hegel had a1ready made him in thought. "
The last two paragraphs of the selection are taken from Marx's prepara-
tory material for the dissertation, "Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy."
Also in relation to Hegel it is mere ignorance on the part of his
pupils, when they explain one or the other determination of his
system by his desire for accommodation and the like, hence, in one
word, explain it in terms of morality. They forget that only a short
time ago they were enthusiastic about all his idiosyncrasies
[Einseitigkeiten] , as can be clearly demonstrated from their writ-
ings.
If they were really so affected by the ready-made science they
acquired that they gave themselves up to it in naive uncritical trust,
then how unscrupulous is their attempt to reproach the Master for
a hidden intention behind his insight! The Master, to whom the
science was not something received, but something in the process of
becoming, to whose uttermost periphery his own intellectual heart's
blood was pulsating! On the contrary, they rendered themselves sus-
pect of not having been serious before. And now they oppose their
own former condition, and ascribe it to Hegel, forgetting however
that his relation to his system was immediate, substantial, while
theirs is only a reflected one.
It is a psychological law that the theoretical mind, once liberated
in itself, turns into practical energy, and, leaving the shadowy
empire of Amenthes as will, turns itself against the reality of the
world existing without it. ( From a philosophical point of view, how-
ever, it is important to specify these aspects better, since from the
specific manner of this turn we can reason back towards the imma-
nent determination and the universal historic character of a philoso-
phy. We see here, as it were, its curriculum vitae 1 narrowed down
to its subjective point.) But the practice of philosophy is itself theo
retical. It's the critique that measures the individual existence by
the essence, the particular reality by the Idea. But this immediate
realization of philosophy is in its deepest essence afflicted with con
tradictions, and this its essence takes form in the appearance and
imprints its seal upon it.
When philosophy turns itself as will against the world of appear-
ance, then the system is lowered to an abstract totality, that is, it
has become one aspect of the world which opposes another one. Its
relationship to the world is that of reflection. Inspired by the urge
to realise itself, it enters into tension against the other. The inner
self-contentment and completeness has been broken. What was
inner light has become consuming flame turning outwards. The
result is that as the world becomes philosophical, philosophy also
becomes worldly, that its realisation is also its loss, that what it
struggles against on the outside is its own inner deficiency, that in
the very struggle it falls precisely into those defects which it fights
as defects in the opposite camp, and that it can only overcome
these defects by falling into them. That which opposes it and that
which it fights is always the same as itself, only with factors
inverted.
This is the one side, when we consider this matter purely objec
tively as immediate realisation of philosophy. However, it has also a
subjective; aspect, which is merely another form of it. This is the
relationship of the philosophical system which is realised to its intel-
lectual carriers, to the individual self-consciousnesses in which its
progress appears. This relationship results in what confronts the
world in the realisation of philosophy itself, namely, in the fact that
these individual self-consciousnesses always carry a double-edged
demand, one edge turned against the world, the other against phi-
losophy itself. Indeed, what in the thing itself appears as a relation-
ship inverted in itself, appears in these self-consciousnesses as a
double one, a demand and an action contradicting each other.
Their liberation of the world from the philosophy that held them in
fetters as a particular system.
As in the history of philosophy there are nodal points which raise
philosophy in itself to concretion, apprehend abstract principles in a
totality, and thus break off the rectilinear process, so also there are
moments when philosophy turns its eyes to the external world, and
no longer apprehends it, but, as a practical person, weaves, as it
were, intrigues with the world, emerges from the transparent king-
dom of Amenthes and throws itself on the breast of the worldly
Siren. That is the carnival of philosophy, whether it disguises itself
as a dog like the Cynic, in priestly vestments like the Alexandrian,
or in fragrant spring array like the Epicurean. It is essential that
philosophy should then wear character masks. As Deucalion, accord-
ing to the legend, cast stones behind him in creating human beings,
so philosophy casts its regard behind it (the bones of its mother are
luminous eyes) when its heart is set on creating a world; but as Pro-
metheus, having stolen fire from heaven, begins to build houses and
to settle upon the earth, so philosophy, expanded to be the whole
world, turns against the world of appearance. The same now with
the philosophy of Hegel.
While philosophy has sealed itself off to form a consummate,
total world, the determination of this totality is conditioned by the
general development of philosophy, just as that development is the
condition of the form in which philosophy turns into a practical
relationship towards reality; thus the totality of the world in general
is divided within itself, and this division is carried to the extreme,
for spiritual existence has been freed, has been enriched to univer-
sality, the heart-beat has become in itself the differentiation in the
concrete form which is the whole organism. The division of the
world is total only when its aspects are totalities. The world con-
fronting a philosophy total in itself is therefore a world torn apart.
This philosophy's activity therefore also appears torn apart and con-
tradictory; its objective universality is turned back into the subjec-
tive forms of individual consciousness in which it has life. But one
must not let oneself be misled by this storm which follows a great
philosophy, a world philosophy. Ordinary harps play under any
fingers, Aeolian harps only when struck by the storm.
For a Ruthless Criticism
Of Everything Existing
KARL MARX
The watchword of the young Karl Marx, as of his Young Hegelian asso-
ciates generally, was Kritik-criticism. In this early article, printed in the
Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher in 1844 in the form of a letter to
Arnold Ruge, Marx elaborated the idea of criticism into a program of this
journal, of which he and Ruge were editors. His future strictures on uto-
pian socialist plans, in the Communist Manifesto and other later writings,
were prefigured in the dismissal here of the communist utopias of writers
like Etienne Cabet as a "dogmatic abstraction." The Deutsch-Franzosische
Jahrbucher (German-French Annals) came out in Paris in February, 1844,
in the German language. Only one double issue of the journal was pub-
lished.
The translation was made by Dr. Ronald Rogowski for this edition.
M. to R.
Kreuznach
September, 1843
I am delighted that you are resolved and turn your thoughts
from backward glances at the past toward a new undertaking. In
Paris, then, the old university of philosophy (absit omen!) and the
new capital of the new world. What is necessary will arrange itself.
I do not doubt, therefore, that all obstacles-whose importance I
do not fail to recognize-will be removed.
The undertaking may succeed, however, or not; in any case I
will be in Paris at the end of this month, since the air here makes
one servile and I see no room at all in Germany for free activity.
In Germany, everything is being forcibly repressed, a true anarchy
of the spirit has burst out, stupidity itself reigns supreme, and
Zurich obeys commands from Berlin; hence it becomes ever clearer
that a new' gathering point must be sought for the really thinking
and independent minds. I am convinced that our plan would meet
a real need, and real needs must surely also be able to find real ful-
fillment. I therefore have no doubts about the enterprise if only we
undertake it seriously.
The inner difficulties seem to be almost greater than the external
obstacles. For even if there is no doubt about the "whence;" all the
more confusion reigns about the "whither." Apart from the general
anarchy which has erupted among the reformers, each is compelled
to confess to himself that he has no clear conception of what the
future should be. That, however, is just the advantage of the new
trend: that we do not attempt dogmatically to prefigure the future,
but want to find the new world only through criticism of the old.
Up to now the philosophers had the solution of all riddles lying
in their lectern, and the stupid uninitiated world had only to open
its jaws to let the roast partridges of absolute science fly into its
mouth. Now philosophy has become worldly, and the most incon-
trovertible evidence of this is that the philosophical consciousness
has been drawn, not only externally but also internally, into the
stress of battle. But if the designing of the future and the procla[
mation of ready-made solutions for all time is not our affair, then
we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the
present-I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing,
ruthless in two senses : The criticism must not be afraid of its own
conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be.
I am therefore not in favor of setting up any dogmatic flag. On
the contrary, we must try to help the dogmatics to clarify to them
selves the meaning of their own positions. Thus communism, to be
specific, is a dogmatic abstraction. I do not have in mind here some
imaginary, possible communism, but actually existing communism
in the form preached by Cabet, Dezamy,1 Weitling,2 etc. This
communism is only a special manifestation of the humanistic princi-
ple which is still infected by its opposite-private being. Elimina
tion of private property is therefore by no means identical with this
communism, and it is not accidental but quite inevitable that com-
munism has seen other socialist teachings arise in opposition to it,
such as the teachings of Fourier, Proudhon, etc., because it is itself
only a special, one-sided realization of the socialist principle.
And the socialist principle itself represents, on the whole, only
one side, affecting the reality of the true human essence. We have
to concern ourselves just as much with the other side, the theoreti-
cal existence of man, in other words to make religion, science, etc.,
the objects of our criticism. Moreover, we want to have an effect on
our contemporaries, and specifically on our German contemporary-
ies. The question is, how is this to be approached? Two circum-
stances cannot be denied. First, religion, and second, politics,
arouse predominant interest in contemporary Germany. We must
take these two subjects, however they are, for a starting-point, and
not set up against them some ready-made system such as the
Voyage en Icarie.3
Reason has always existed, only not always in reasonable form .
The critic can therefore start out by taking any form of theoretical
and practical consciousness and develop from the unique forms of
existing reality the true reality as its norm and final goal. Now so
far as real life is concerned, precisely the political state in all its
modern forms contains, even where it is not yet consciously imbued
with socialist demands, the demands of reason. Nor does the state
stop at that. The state everywhere presupposes that reason has been
realized. But in just this way it everywhere comes into contradic-
tion between its ideal mission and its real preconditions.
çµOut of this conflict of the political state with itself, therefore,
one can develop social truth. Just as religion is the catalogue of the
theoretical struggles of mankind, so the political state is the cata-
logue of its practical struggles. The political state thus expresses,
within the confines of its form sub specie rei publicae,4 all social
struggles, needs, truths. Thus it is not at all beneath the hauteur
des principles to make the most specific political question-e.g., the
difference between the corporative5 and the representative
system-the object of criticism. For this question only expresses in
a political way the difference between the rule of man and the rule
of private property. The critic therefore not only can but must go
into these political questions (which the crass kind of socialists
consider beneath anyone's dignity) . By showing the superiority of
the representative system over the corporative system, the critic
affects the practical interests of a large party. By elevating the rep-
resentative system from its political form to its general form and by
bringing out the true significance underlying this system, the critic
at the same time forces this party to go beyond its own confines,
since its victory is at the same time its loss.
Nothing prevents us, then, from tying our criticism to the criti-
cism of politics and to a definite party position in politics, and
hence from identifying our criticism with real struggles. Then we
shall confront the world not as doctrinaires with a new principle:
"Here is the truth, bow down before it!" We develop new princi-
ples to the world out of its own principles. We do not say to the
world: "Stop fighting; your struggle is of no account. We want to
shout the true slogan of the struggle at you." We only show the
world what it is fighting for, and consciousness is something that
the world must acquire, like it or not.
The reform of consciousness consists only in enabling the world
to clarify its consciousness, in waking it from its dream about itself,
in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions. Our whole task
can consist only in putting religious and political questions into
self-conscious human form-as is also the case in Feuerbach's criti-
cism of religion.
Our motto must therefore be: Reform of consciousness not
through dogmas, but through analyzing the mystical consciousness,
the consciousness which is unclear to itself, whether it appears in
religious or political form. Then it will transpire that the world has
long been dreaming of something that it can acquire if only it
becomes conscious of it. It will transpire that it is not a matter of
drawing a great dividing line between past and future, but of car-
rying out the thoughts of the past. And finally, it will transpire that
mankind begins no new work, but consciously accomplishes its old
work.
So, we can express the trend of our journal in one word: the
work of our time to clarify to itself (critical philosophy) the mean-
ing of its own struggle and its own desires. This is work for the
world and for us. It can only be the work of joint forces. It is a
matter of confession, no more. To have its sins forgiven mankind
has only to declare them to be what they really are.
Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's
Philosophy of Right
KARL MARX
In line with his program of effecting "a ruthless criticism of everything
existing," Marx during 1843 took up the criticism of politics, He set a bout
this by working on a commentary on Hegel's treatise on the state, To the
Hegelian political philosophy (which he called, following Feuerbach, "spec-
ulative philosophy") he applied the method of "transformational criticism"
that Feuerbach had applied to the Hegelian philosophy of religion,
Although the work was left incomplete and unpublished, it was, as Marx
later said (see p. 4, above), a milestone on his road to historical material-
ism: it led him to the view that instead of the state being the basis of
"civil society," as Hegel held, civil or bourgeois society is the basis of the
state.
Despite its incompleteness-the extant part of the commentary starts
with paragraph 261 of Hegel's treatise and deals only with selected further
sections up to paragraph 308-this work remains of interest as Marx's most
extensive single piece of purely political writing, although his standpoint at
the time of writing was no more than proto-Marxist.
The State and Civil Society1
The idea is made the subject and the actual relation of family
and civil society to the state is conceived as its internal imaginary
activity. Family and civil society are the premises of the state; they
are the genuinely active elements, but in speculative philosophy
things are inverted. When the idea is made the subject, however,
the real subjects, namely, civil society, family, "circumstances, cap-
rice, etc.," become unreal objective elements of the idea with a
changed significance.
Rationally interpreted, Hegel's propositions would mean only
this : The family and civil society are parts of the state. The mate-
rial of the state is distributed amongst them "by circumstances, cap
rice and the individual's own choice of vocation." The citizens of
the state are members of families and members of civil society.
"The actual idea, mind, divides itself into the two ideal spheres
of its concept, family and civil society, that is, its finite phase"-
hence, the division of the state into family and civil society is ideal,
i.e., necessary as part of the essence of the state. Family and civil
society are actual components of the state, actual spiritual existences
of the will; they are modes of existence of the state. Family and
civil society constitute themselves as the state. They are the driving
force. According to Hegel, they are, on the contrary, produced by
the actual idea. It is not the course of their own life which unites
them in the state; on the contrary, it is the idea which in the course
of its life has separated them off from itself. Indeed, they are the
finiteness of this idea. They owe their presence to another mind
than their own. They are entities determined by a third party, not
self-determined entities. Accordingly, they are also defined as "fi-
niteness," as the "actual idea's" own finiteness. The purpose of
their being is not this being itself; rather, the idea separates these
presuppositions off from itself "so as to emerge from their ideality
as explicitly infinite actual mind." That is to say, there can be no
political state without the natural basis of the family and the artifi-
cial basis of civil society; they are for it a conditio sine qua non. But
the condition is postulated as the conditioned, the determinant as
the determined, the producing factor as the product of its product.
The actual idea only degrades itself into the "finiteness" of the
family and civil society so as by transcending them to enjoy and
bring forth its infinity. "Accordingly" (in order to achieve its pur-
pose), it "assigns to these spheres the material of this, its finite
actuality" (this? which? these spheres are indeed its "finite actual-
ity," its "material" ), "individuals as a multitude" ("the individuals,
the multitude" are here the material of the state; "the state consists
of them"; this composition of the state is here expressed as an act
of the idea, as an "allocation" which it undertakes with its own
material The fact is that the state issues from the multitude in
their existence as members of families and as members of civil
society. Speculative philosophy expresses this fact as the idea's deed,
not as the idea of the multitude, but as the deed of a subjective
idea different from the fact itself), "in such a way that with regard
to the individual this assignment" (previously the discussion was
only about the assignment of individuals to the spheres of the
family and civil society) "appears mediated by circumstances, cap-
rice, etc." Empirical actuality is thus accepted as it is. It is also
expressed as rational, but it is not rational on account of its own
reason, but because the empirical fact in its empirical existence has
a different significance from it itself. The fact which is taken as a
point of departure is not conceived as such, but as a mystical result.
The actual becomes a phenomenon, but the idea has no other con-
tent than this phenomenon. Nor has the idea any other pur-
pose than the logical one of being "explicitly infinite actual mind."
The entire mystery of the philosophy of law and of Hegel's philoso-
phy as a whole is set out in this paragraph.
If Hegel had set out from real subjects as the bases of the state
he would not have found it necessary to transform the state in a
mystical fashion into a subject. "In its truth, however," says Hegel,
"subjectivity exists only as subject, personality only as person." This
too is a piece of mystification. Subjectivity is a characteristic of the
subject, personality a characteristic of the person. Instead of con-
ceiving them as predicates of their subjects. Hegel gives the predi-
cates an independent existence and subsequently transforms them
in a mystical fashion into their subjects.
The existence of predicates is the subject, so that the subject is
the existence of subjectivity, etc.; Hegel transforms the predicates,
the objects, into independent entities, but divorced from their actual
independence, their subject. Subsequently the actual subject appears
as a result, whereas one must start from the actual subject and look
at its objectification. The mystical substance, therefore, becomes the
actual subject, and the real subject appears as something else, as an
element of the mystical substance. Precisely because Hegel starts
from the predicates of the general description instead of from the
real ens (lnr0XEtltn'ov, subject), and since, nevertheless, there has to
be a bearer of these qualities, the mystical idea becomes this bearer.
The dualism consists in the fact that Hegel does not look upon the
general as being the actual nature of the actual finite, i.e., of what
exists and is determinate, or upon the actual ens as the true subject
of the infinite.
Sovereignty
So in this case sovereignty, the essential feature of the state, is
treated to begin with as an independent entity, is objectified. Then,
of course, this objective entity has to become a subject again. This
subject then appears, however, as a self-incarnation of sovereignty;
whereas sovereignty is nothing but the objectifed mind of the sub-
jects of the state.
As if the actual state were not the people. The state is an abstrac-
tion. The people alone is what is concrete. And it is remarkable that
Hegel, who without hesitation attributes a living quality such as
sovereignty to the abstraction, attributes it only with hesitation and
reservations to something concrete. "The usual sense, however, in
which men have recently begun to speak of the sovereignty of the
people is in opposition to the sovereignty existing in the monarch.
In this antithesis the sovereignty of the people is one of those con-
fused notions which are rooted in the wild idea of the people."
The "confused notions" and the "wild idea" are here exclusively
Hegel's. To be sure, if sovereignty exists in the monarch, then it is
foolish to speak of an antithetical sovereignty in the people; for it
is implied in the concept of sovereignty that sovereignty can
not have a double existence, still less one which is contradictory.
However:
1) This is just the question: Is not that sovereignty which is
claimed by the monarch an illusion? Sovereignty of the monarch or
sovereignty of the people-that is the question.
2) One can also speak of a sovereignty of the people in opposi-
tion to the sovereignty existing in the monarch. But then it is not a
question of one and the same sovereignty which has arisen on two
sides, but two entirely contradictory concepts of sovereignty, the
one a sovereignty such as can come to exist in a monarch, the other
such as can come to exist only in a people. It is the same with the
question: "Is God sovereign, or is man?" One of the two is an
untruth, even if an existing untruth.
"Taken without its monarch and the articulation of the whole
which is necessarily and directly associated with the monarch, the
people .is that formless mass which is no longer a state. It no longer
possesses any of the atrributes which are to be found only in an
internally organized whole-sovereignty, government, courts of law,
the administration, estates of the realm, etc. With the appearance
in a nation of such factors, which relate to organisation, to the life
of the state, a people ceases to be that indeterminate abstraction,
which, as a purely general notion, is called the nation." All this is a
tautology. If a people has a monarch and the structure that neces-
sarily and directly goes with a monarch, i.e., if it is structured as a
monarchy, then indeed, taken out of this structure, it is a formless
mass and a purely general notion. "If by sovereignty of the people is
understood a republican form of government and, more specifically,
democracy...then...there can be no further discussion of such a
notion in face of the developed idea." That is indeed right, if one
has only "such a notion" and not a "developed idea" of democracy.
Democracy
Democracy is the truth of monarchy; monarchy is not the truth
of democracy. Monarchy is necessarily democracy inconsistent with
itself; the monarchical element is not an inconsistency in democ-
racy. Monarchy cannot be understood in its own terms; democracy
can. In democracy none of the elements attains a significance other
than what is proper to it. Each is in actual fact only an element of
the whole demos [people]. In monarchy one part determines the
character of the whole. The entire constitution has to adapt itself to
this fixed point. Democracy is the genus Constitution. Monarchy is
one species, and a poor one at that. Democracy is content and
form. Monarchy is supposed to be only a form, but it falsifies the
content.
In monarchy the whole, the people, is subsumed under one of its
particular modes of being, the political constitution. In democracy
the constitution itself appears only as one determination, that is,
the self-determination of the people. In monarchy we have the
people of the constitution; in democracy the constitution of the
people. Democracy is the solved riddle of all constitutions. Here,
not merely implicitly and in essence but existing in reality, the con-
stitution is constantly brought back to its actual basis, the actual
human being, the actual people, and established as the people's own
work. The constitution appears as what it is, a free product of man.
It could be said that in a certain respect this applies also to consti-
tutional monarchy; but the specific distinguishing feature of democ-
racy is that here the constitution as such forms only one element in
the life of the people-that it is not the political constitution by
itself which forms the state.
Hegel starts from the state and makes man the subjectified state;
democracy starts from man and makes the state objectified man.
Just as it is not religion which creates man but man who creates
religion, so it is not the constitution which creates the people but
the people which creates the constitution. In a certain respect the
relation of democracy to all other forms of state is like the relation
of Christianity to all other religions. Christianity is the religion XUT'
f�OX�v,2the essence of religion-deified man as a particular religion.
Similarly, democracy is the essence of all state constitutions-social-
ised man as a particular state constitution. Democracy stands to the
other constitutions as the genus stands to its species; except that
here the genus itself appears as an existent, and therefore as one
particular species over against the others whose existence does not
correspond to their essence. To democracy all other forms of state
stand as its Old Testament. Man does not exist for the law but the
law for man-it is a human manifestation; whereas in the other
forms of state man is a legal manifestation. That is the fundamental
distinction of democracy.
All other state forms are definite, distinct, particular forms of
state. In democracy the formal principle is at the same time the
material principle. Only democracy, therefore, is the true unity of
the general and the particular. In monarchy, for example, and in
the republic as a merely particular form of state, political man has
his particular mode of being alongside unpolitical man, man as a
private individual. Property, contract, marriage, civil society, all
appear here (as Hegel shows quite correctly with regard to these
abstract state forms, but he thinks that he is expounding the idea of
the state) as particular modes of existence alongside the political
state, as the content to which the political state is related as organ
ising form; properly speaking, the relation of the political state to
this content is merely that of reason, inherently without content,
which defines and delimits, which now affirms and now denies. In
democracy the political state, which stands alongside this content
and distinguishes itself from it, is itself merely a particular content
and particular form of existence of the people. In monarchy, for
example, this particular, the political constitution, has the signifi-
cance of the general that dominates and determines everything par-
ticular. In democracy the state as particular is merely particular; as
general, it is the truly general, i .e., not something determinate in
distinction from the other content. The French have recently inter-
preted this as meaning that in true democracy the political state is
annihilated. This is correct insofar as the political state qua political
state, as constitution, no longer passes for the whole.
In all states other than democratic ones the state, the law, the
constitution is what rules, without really ruling-i.e., without mate-
rially permeating the content of the remaining, non-political
spheres. In democracy the constitution, the law, the state itself,
insofar as it is a political constitution, is only the self-determination
of the people, and a particular content of the people.
Incidentally, it goes without saying that all forms of state have
democracy for their truth and that they are therefore untrue insofar
as they are not democracy.
Politics: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern
In the states of antiquity the political state makes up the content
of the state to the exclusion of the other spheres. The modern state
is a compromise between the political and the unpolitical state.
In democracy the abstract state has ceased to be the dominant
factor. The struggle between monarchy and republic is itself still a
struggle within the abstract state. The political republic is democ-
racy within the abstract state form. The abstract state form of
democracy is therefore the republic; but here it ceases to be the
merely political constitution.
Property, etc., in short, the entire content of the law and the
state, is the same in North America as in Prussia, with few modifi-
cations. The republic there is thus a mere state form, as is the mon-
archy here. The content of the state lies outside these constitutions.
Hegel is right, therefore, when he says: The political state is the
constitution, i.e., the material state is not political. What obtains
here is merely an external identity, a determination of changing
forms. Of the various elements of national life, the one most
difficult to evolve was the political state, the constitution. It devel-
oped as universal reason over against the other spheres, as ulterior to
them. The historical task then consisted in its [the constitution's]
reassertion, but the particular spheres do not realise that their pri-
vate nature coincides with the other-worldly nature of the constitu-
tion or of the political state, and that the other-worldly existence of
the political state is nothing but the affirmation of their own
estrangement. Up till now the political constitution has been the
religious sphere, the religion of national life, the heaven of its gener-
ality over against the earthy existence of its actuality. The political
sphere has been the only state sphere in the state, the only sphere
in which the content as well as the form has been species-content,
the truly general; but in such a way that at the same time, because
this sphere has confronted the others, its content has also become
formal and particular. Political life in the modern sense is the scho-
lasticism of national life. Monarchy is the perfect expression of this
estrangement. The republic is the negation of this estrangement
within its own sphere. It is obvious that the political constitution as
such is brought into being only where the private spheres have won
an independent existence. Where trade and landed property are not
free and have not yet become independent, the political constitu-
tion too does not yet exist. The Middle Ages were the democracy of
unfreedom.
The abstraction of the state as such belongs only to modern
times, because the abstraction of private life belongs only to modern
times. The abstraction of the political state is a modern product.
In the Middle Ages there were serfs, feudal estates, merchant and
trade guilds, corporations of scholars, etc.: that is to say, in the
Middle Ages property, trade, society, man are political; the material
content of the state is given by its form; every private sphere has a
political character or is a political sphere; that is, politics is a charac-
teristic of the private spheres too. In the Middle Ages the political
constitution is the constitution of private property, but only because
the constitution of private property is a political constitution. In the
Middle Ages the life of the nation and the life of the state are iden-
tical. Man is the actual principle of the state-but unfree man. It is
thus the democracy of unfreedom-estrangement carried to comple-
tion. The abstract reflected antithesis belongs only to the modern
world. The Middle Ages are the period of actual dualism; modern
times, one of abstract dualism.
"We have already noted the stage at which the division of consti-
tutions into democracy, aristocracy and monarchy has been made
the standpoint, that is, of that unity which is still substantial, which
still remains within itself, and has not yet come to its process of
infmite differentiation and inner deepening,: at that stage, the ele-
ment of the final self-determining resolution of the will does not
emerge explicitly into its own proper actuality as an immanent
organic factor in the state." In the spontaneously evolved mon-
archy, democracy and aristocracy there is as yet no political consti-
tution as distinct from the actual, material state or the other con-
tent of the life of the nation. The political state does not yet appear
as the form of the material state. Either, as in Greece, the res
publica 3 is the real private affair of the citizens, their real content,
and the private individual is a slave; the political state, qua political
state, being the true and only content of the life and will of the cit-
izens; or, as in an Asiatic despotism, the political state is nothing
but the personal caprice of a single individual; or the political state,
like the material state, is a slave. What distinguishes the modern
state from these states characterized by the substantial unity
between people and state is not, as Hegel would have it, that the
various elements of the constitution have been developed into par-
ticular actuality, but that the constitution itself has been developed
into a particular actuality alongside the actual life of the people-
that the political state has become the constitution of the rest of
the state.
Bureaucracy
The "state formalism" which bureaucracy is, is the "state as for-
malism"; and it is as a formalism of this kind that Hegel has
described bureaucracy. Since this "state formalism" constitutes itself
as an actual power and itself becomes its own material content, it
goes without saying that the "bureaucracy" is a web of practical
illusions, or the "illusion of the state." The bureaucratic spirit is a
jesuitical, theological spirit through and through. The bureaucrats
are the jesuits and theologians of the state. The bureaucracy is la
republique pretre.
Since by its very nature the bureaucracy is the "state as formal
ism," it is this also as regards its purpose. The actual purpose of the
state therefore appears to the bureaucracy as an objective hostile to
the state. The spirit of the bureaucracy is the "formal state spirit."
The bureaucracy therefore turns the "formal state spirit" or the
actual spiritless ness of the state into a categorical imperative. The
bureaucracy takes itself to be the ultimate purpose of the state.
Because the bureaucracy turns its "formal" objectives into its con
tent, it comes into conflict everywhere with "real" objectives. It is
therefore obliged to pass off the form for the content and the con
tent for the form. State objectives are transformed into objectives of
the department, and department objectives into objectives of the
state. The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its
hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge. The top entrusts the under
standing of detail to the lower levels, whilst the lower levels credit
the top with understanding of the general, and so all are mutually
deceived.
The bureaucracy is the imaginary state alongside the real state
the spiritualism of the state. Each thing has therefore a double
meaning, a real and a bureaucratic meaning, just as knowledge (and
also the will) is both real and bureaucratic. The really existing,
however, is treated in the light of its bureaucratic nature, its other
worldly, spiritual essence. The bureaucracy has the state, the spirit
ual essence of society, in its possession, as its private property. The
general spirit of the bureaucracy is the secret, the mystery, preserved
within itself by the hierarchy and against the outside world by
being a closed corporation. Avowed political spirit, as also political
mindedness, therefore appear to the bureaucracy as treason against
its mystery. Hence, authority is the basis of its knowledge, and the
deification of authority is its conviction. Within the bureaucracy
itself, however, spiritualism becomes crass materialism, the material-
ism of passive obedience, of faith in authority, of the mechanism of
fixed and formalistic behaviour, and of fixed principles, views and
traditions. In the case of the individual bureaucrat, the state objec
tive turns into his private objective, into a after higher
posts, the making of a career. In the first place, he looks on actual,
life as something material, for the spirit of this life has its distinctly
separate existence in the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy must there
fore proceed to make life as material as possible. Secondly, actual
life is material for the bureaucrat himself, i .e., so far as it becomes
an object of bureaucratic manipulation; for his spirit is prescribed
for him, his aim lies beyond him, and his existence is the existence
of the department. The state only continues to exist as various fixed
bureaucratic minds, bound together in subordination and passive
obedience. Actual knowledge seems devoid of content, just as actual
life seems dead; for this imaginary knowledge and this imaginary
life are taken for the real thing. The bureaucrat must therefore deal
with the actual state jesuitically, whether this jesuitry is conscious or
unconscious. However, once its antithesis is knowledge, this jesuitry
is like wise bound to achieve self-consciousness and then become
deliberate jesuitry.
Whilst the bureaucracy is on the one hand this crass materialism,
it manifests its crass spiritualism in the fact that it wants to do
everything, i.e., by making the will the causa prima. For it is purely
an active form of existence and receives its content from without
and can prove its existence, therefore, only by shaping and restrict-
ing this content. For the bureaucrat the world is a mere object to
be manipulated by him.
When Hegel calls the executive the objective aspect of the sover-
eignty dwelling in the monarch, that is right in the same sense in
which the Catholic Church was the real presence of the sovereignty,
substance and spirit of the Holy Trinity. In the bureaucracy the
identity of state interest and particular private aim is established in
such a way that the state interest becomes a particular private aim
over against other private aims.
The abolition of the bureaucracy is only possible by the general
interest actually-and not, as with Hegel, merely in thought, in
abstraction-becoming the particular interest, which in turn is onlv
possible as a result of the particular actually becoming the general
interest. Hegel starts from an unreal antithesis and therefore
achieves only an imaginary identity which is in truth again a contra-
dictory identity. The bureaucracy is just such an identity.
On the Jewish Question
KARL MARX
In this essay, written in the autumn of 1843 and published in the
Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher, Marx pursued his critical aims through a
review of two studies on the Jewish question by another Young Hegelian,
Bruno Bauer. The criticism of politics is developed in the first part, leading
to the conclusion that human emancipation requires the ending of the divi-
sion between man as an egoistic being in "civil society" and man as ab-
stract citizen in the state. In the second part, Marx proceeds to the criti-
cism of economics or commerce, which he equates with "Judaism." His
concluding call for "the emancipation of society from Judaism" (which has
been seen on occasion as a manifesto of anti-Semitism) is in fact a call for
the emancipation of society from what he here calls "huckstering," or from
what he was subsequently to call "capitalism." This, however, is not to
deny that Marx, although he himself was of Jewish origin, harbored anti-
Jewish attitudes, nor is it to deny that such attitudes found expression in
this essay.
1. Bruno Bauer, Die Judenfrage1
The German Jews seek emancipation. What kind of emancipa-
tion do they want? Civic, political emancipation.
Bruno Bauer replies to them: In Germany no one is politically
emancipated. We ourselves are not free. How then could we liber-
ate you? You Jews are egoists if you demand for yourselves, as Jews,
a special emancipation. You should work, as Germans, for the
political emancipation of Germany, and as men, for the emancipa-
tion of mankind. You should feel the particular kind of oppression
and shame which you suffer, not as an exception to the rule but
rather as a confirmation of the rule.
Or do the Jews want to be placed on a footing of equality with
the Christian subjects? If they recognize the Christian state as
legally established they also recognize the regime of general enslave-
ment. Why should their particular yoke be irksome when they
accept the general yoke? Why should the German be interested in
the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the libera-
tion of the German?
The Christian state recognizes nothing but privileges. The Jew
himself, in this state, has the privilege of being a Jew. As a Jew he
possesses rights which the Christians do not have. Why does he
want rights which he does not have but which the Christians
enjoy?
In demanding his emancipation from the Christian state he asks
the Christian state to abandon its religious prejudice. But does he,
the Jew, give up his religious prejudice? Has he then the right to
insist that someone else should forswear his religion?
The Christian state, by its very nature, is incapable of
emancipating the Jew. But, adds Bauer, the Jew, by his very nature,
cannot be emancipated. As long as the state remains Christian, and
as long as the Jew remains a Jew, they are equally incapable, the
one of conferring emancipation, the other of receiving it.
With respect to the Jews the Christian state can only adopt the
attitude of a Christian state. That is, it can permit the Jew, as a
matter of privilege, to isolate himself from its other subjects; but it
must then allow the pressures of all the other spheres of society to
bear upon the Jew, and all the more heavily since he is in religious
opposition to the dominant religion. But the Jew likewise can only
adopt a Jewish attitude, i.e. that of a foreigner, towards the state,
since he opposes his illusory nationality to actual nationality, his
illusory law to actual law. He considers it his right to separate him-
self from the rest of humanity; as a matter of principle he takes no
part in the historical movement and looks to a future which has
nothing in common with the future of mankind as a whole. He
regards himself as a member of the Jewish people, and the Jewish
people as the chosen people.
On what grounds, then, do you Jews demand emancipation? On
account of your religion? But it is the mortal enemy of the state
religion. As citizens? But there are no citizens in Germany. As
men? But you are not men any more than are those to whom you
appeal.
Bauer, after criticizing earlier approaches and solutions, formu-
lates the question of Jewish emancipation in a new way. What, he
asks, is the nature of the Jew who is to be emancipated, and the
nature of the Christian state which is to emancipate him? He
replies by a critique of the Jewish religion, analyses the religious
opposition between Judaism and Christianity, explains the essence
of the Christian state; and does all this with dash, clarity, wit and
profundity, in a style which is as precise as it is pithy and vigorous.
How then does Bauer resolve the Jewish question? What is the
result? To formulate a question is to resolve it. The critical study of
the Jewish question is the answer to the Jewish question. Here it is
in brief : we have to emancipate ourselves before we can emancipate
others.
The most stubborn form of the opposition between Jew and
Christian is the religious opposition. How is an opposition
resolved? By making it impossible. And how is religious opposition
made impossible? By abolishing religion. As soon as Jew and Chris-
tian come to see in their respective religions nothing more than
stages in the development of the human mind-snake skins which
have been cast off by history, and man as the snake who clothed
himself in them-they will no longer find themselves in religious
opposition, but in a purely critical, scientific and human relation-
ship. Science will then constitute their unity. But scientific opposi
tions are resolved by science itself.
The German Jew, in particular, suffers from the general lack of
political freedom and the pronounced Christianity of the state. But
in Bauer's sense the Jewish question has a general significance,
independent of the specifically German conditions. It is the ques
tion of the relations between religion and the state, of the con-
tradiction between religious prejudice and political emancipation.
Emancipation from religion is posited as a condition, both for the
Jew who wants political emancipation, and for the state which
should emancipate him and itself be emancipated.
"Very well, it may be said ( and the Jew himself says it) but the
Jew should not be emancipated because he is a Jew, because he has
such an excellent and universal moral creed; the Jew should take
second place to the citizen, and he will be a citizen although he is
and desires to remain a Jew. In other words, he is and remains a
Jew, even though he is a citizen and as such lives in a universal
human condition; his restricted Jewish nature always finally
triumphs over his human and political obligations. The bias persists
even though it is overcome by general principles. But if it persists,
it would be truer to say that it overcomes all the rest." "It is only
in a sophistical and superficial sense that the Jew could remain a
Jew in political life. Consequently, if he wanted to remain a Jew,
this would mean that the superficial became the essential and
thus triumphed. In other words, his life in the state would be only
a semblance, or a momentary exception to the essential and
normal. "2
Let us see also how Bauer establishes the role of the state.
"France," he says, "has provided us recently,3 in connexion with
the Jewish question ( and for that matter all other political ques-
tions ), with the spectacle of a life which is free but which revokes
its freedom by law and so declares it to be merely an appearance;
and which, on the other hand, denies its free laws by its acts."4
"In France, universal liberty is not yet established by law, nor is
the Jewish question as yet resolved, because legal liberty, i .e. the
equality of all citizens, is restricted in actual life, which is still
dominated and fragmented by religious privileges, and because the
lack of liberty in actual life influences law in its turn and obliges it
to sanction the division of citizens who are by nature free into
oppressors and oppressed."5
When, therefore, would the Jewish question be resolved in
France?
"The Jew would really have ceased to be Jewish, for example, if
he did not allow his religions code to prevent his fulfilment of his
duties towards the state and his fellow citizens; if he attended and
took part in the public business of the Chamber of Deputies on the
sabbath. It would be necessary, further, to abolish all religious priv
liege, including the monopoly of a privileged church. If, thereafter,
some or many or even the overwhelming majority felt obliged to
fulfil their religious duties, such practices should be left to them as
an absolutely private matter."6 "There is no longer any religion
when there is no longer a privileged religion. Take away from reli
gion its power to excommunicate and it will no longer exist."7
"Mr. Martin du Nord has seen, in the suggestion to omit any men-
tion of Sunday in the law, a proposal to declare that Christianity
has ceased to exist. With equal right ( and the right is well found-
ed ) the declaration that the law of the sabbath is no longer bind-
ing upon the Jew would amount to proclaiming the end of
Judaism."8
Thus Bauer demands, on the one hand, that the Jew should
renounce Judaism, and in general that man should renounce reli
gion, in order to be emancipated as a citizen. On the other hand,
he considers, and this follows logically, that the political abolition
of religion is the abolition of all religion. The state whic pre
supposes religion is not yet a true or actual state. "Clearly, the reli
gious idea gives some assurances to the state. But to what state? To
what kind of state?"9
At this point we see that the Jewish question is considered only
from one aspect.
It was by no means sufficient to ask : who should emancipate?
who should be emancipated? The critic should ask a third question:
what kind of emancipation is involved? What are the essential
conditions of the emancipation which is demanded? The criticism
of political emancipation itself was only the final criticism of the
Jewish question and its genuine resolution into the "general question
of the age."
Bauer, since he does not formulate the problem at this level, falls
into contradictions. He establishes conditions which are not based
upon the nature of political emancipation. He raises questions
which are irrelevant to his problem, and he resolves problems
which leave his question unanswered. When Bauer says of the
opponents of Jewish emancipation that "Their error was simply to
assume that the Christian state was the only true one, and not to
subject it to the same criticism as Judaism,"1 we see his own error
in the fact that he subjects only the "Christian state," and not the
"state as such" to criticism, that he does not examine the relation
between political emancipation and human emancipation, and that
he, therefore, poses conditions which are only explicable by his lack
of critical sense in confusing political emancipation and universal
human emancipation. Bauer asks the Jews : Have you, from your
standpoint, the right to demand political emancipation?.We ask
the converse question: from the standpoint of political emancipa-
tion can the Jew be required to abolish Judaism, or man be asked to
abolish religion?
The Jewish question presents itself differently according to the
state in which the Jew resides. In Germany, where there is no polit-
ical state, no state as such, the Jewish question is purely theologi-
cal. The Jew finds himself in religious opposition to the state,
which proclaims Christianity as its foundation. This state is a theo-
logian ex professo. Criticism here is criticism of theology; a dou-
ble-edged criticism, of Christian and of Jewish theology. And so we
move always in the domain of theology, however critically we may
move therein.
In France, which is a constitutional state, the Jewish question is
a question of constitutionalism, of the incompleteness of political
emancipation. Since the semblance of a state religion is maintained
here, if only in the insignificant and self-contradictory formula of a
religion of the majority, the relation of the Jews to the state also
retains a semblance of religious, theological opposition.
It is only in the free states of North America, or at least in some
of them, that the Jewish question loses its theological significance
and becomes a truly secular question. Only where the state exists in
its completely developed form can the relation of the Jew, and of
the religious man in general, to the political state appear in a pure
form, with its own characteristics. The criticism of this relation
ceases to be theological criticism when the state ceases to maintain
a theological attitude towards religion, that is, when it adopts the
attitude of a state, i .e. a political attitude. Criticism then becomes
criticism of the political state. And at this point, where the ques-
tion ceases to be theological, Bauer's criticism ceases to be critical.
"There is not, in the United States, either a state religion or a
religion declared to be that of a majority, or a predominance of one
religion over another. The state remains aloof from all religions."2
There are even some states in North America in which "the consti-
tution does not impose any religious belief or practice as a condi-
tion of political rights."3 And yet, "no one in the United States
believes that a man without religion can be an honest man."4 And
North America is pre-eminently the country of religiosity, as Beau-
mont,"5 Tocqueville6 and the Englishman, Hami1ton,7 assure us in
unison. However, the states of North America only serve as an
example. The question is : what is the relation between complete
political emancipation and religion? If we find in the country
which has attained full political emancipation, that religion not
only continues to exist but is fresh and vigorous, this is proof that
the existence of religion is not at all opposed to the perfection of
the state. But since the existence of religion is the existence of a
defect, the source of this defect must be sought in the nature of
the state itself. Religion no longer appears as the basis, but as the
manifestation of secular narrowness. That is why we explain the
religious constraints upon the free citizens by the secular con
straints upon them. We do not claim that they must transcend
their religious narrowness in order to get rid of their secular limita
tions. We claim that they will transcend their religious narrowness
once they have overcome their secular limitations. We do not turn
secular questions into theological questions; we turn theological
questions into secular ones. History has for long enough been
resolved into superstition; but we now resolve superstition into his
tory. The question of the relation between political emancipation
and religion becomes for us a question of the relation between
political emancipation and human emancipation. We criticize the
religious failings of the political state by criticizing the political
state in its secular form, disregarding its religious failings. We
express in human terms the contradiction between the state and a
particular religion, for example Judaism, by showing the contradic-
tion between the state and particular secular elements, between the
state and religion in general and between the state and its general
presuppositions.
The political emancipation of the Jew or the Christian-of the
religious man in general-is the emancipation of the state from
Judaism, Christianity, and religion in general. The state emanci-
pates itself from religion in its own particular way, in the mode
which corresponds to its nature, by emancipating itself from the
state religion; that is to say, by giving recognition to no religion
and affirming itself purely and simply as a state. To be politically
emancipated from religion is not to be finally and completely
emancipated from religion, because political emancipation is not
the final and absolute form of human emancipation.
The limits of political emancipation appear at once in the fact
that the state can liberate itself from a constraint without man
himself being really liberated; that a state may be a free state with-
out man himself being a free man. Bauer himself tacitly admits this
when he makes political emancipation depend upon the following
condition-
"It would be necessary, moreover, to abolish all religious privi-
leges, including the monopoly of a privileged church. If some
people, or even the immense majority, still felt obliged to fulfil-
their religious duties, this practice should be left to them as a com-
pletely private matter." Thus the state may have emancipated itself
from religion, even though the immense majority of people con-
tinue to be religious . And the immense majority do not cease to be
religious by virtue of being religious in private.
The attitude of the state, especially the free state, towards reli-
gion is only the attitude towards religion of the individuals who
compose the state. It follows that man frees himself from a con-
straint in a political way, through the state, when he transcends his
limitations, in contradiction with himself, and in an abstract,
narrow and partial way. Furthermore, by emancipating himself po-
litically, man emancipates himself in a devious way, through an
intermediary, however necessary this intermediary may be. Finally,
even when he proclaims himself an atheist through the intermedi-
ary of the state, that is, when he declares the state to be an atheist,
he is still engrossed in religion, because he only recognizes himself
as an atheist in a roundabout way, through an intermediary. Reli
gion is simply the recognition of man in a roundabout fashion; that
is, through an intermediary. The state is the intermediary between
man and human liberty. Just as Christ is the intermediary to whom
man attributes all his own divinity and all his religious bonds, so
the state is the intermediary to which man confides all his non-
divinity and all his human freedom.
The political elevation of man above religion shares the weak-
nesses and merits of all such political measures . For example, the
state as a state abolishes private property (i .e. man decrees by polit-
ical means the abolition of private property) when it abolishes the
property qualification for electors and representatives, as has been
done in many of the North American States. Hamilton interprets
this phenomenon quite correctly from the political standpoint : The
masses have gained a victory over property owners and financial
wealth.8 Is not private property ideally abolished when the non-
owner comes to legislate for the owner of property? The property
qualification is the last political form in which private property is
recognized.
But the political suppression of private property not only does
not abolish private property; it actually presupposes its existence.
The state abolishes, after its fashion, the distinctions established by
birth, social rank, education, occupation, when it decrees that
birth, social rank, education, occupation are non-political distinc-
tions; when it proclaims, without regard to these distinctions, that
every member of society is an equal partner in popular sovereignty,
and treats all the elements which compose the real life of the
nation from the standpoint of the state. But the state, none the
less, allows private property, education, occupation, to act after
their own fashion, namely as private property, education, occupation,
and to manifest their particular nature. Far from abolishing these
effective differences, it only exists so far as they are presupposed; it
is conscious of being a political state and it manifests its universal-
ity only in opposition to these elements. Hegel, therefore, defines
the relation of the political state to religion quite correctly when he
says: "In order for the state to come in to existence as the self-
knowing ethical actuality of spirit, it is essential that it should be
distinct from the forms of authority and of faith. But this distinc-
tion emerges only in so far as divisions occur within the ecclesiasti-
cal sphere itself. It is only in this way that the state, above the par
ticular churches, has attained to the universality of thought-its
formal principle-and is bringing this universality into existence."9
To be sure! Only in this manner, above the particular elements,
can the state constitute itself as universality.
The perfected political state is, by its nature, the species-life l of
man as opposed to his material life. All the presuppositions of this
egoistic life continue to exist in civil society outside the political
sphere, as qualities of civil society. Where the political state has
attained to its full development, man leads, not only in thought, in
consciousness, but in reality, in life, a double existence-celestial
and terrestrial. He lives in the political community, where he
regards himself as a communal being, and in civil society where he
acts simply as a private individual, treats other men as means,
degrades himself to the role of a mere means, and becomes the
plaything of alien powers . The political state, in relation to civil
society, is just as spiritual as is heaven in relation to earth. It stands
in the same opposition to civil society, and overcomes it in the
same manner as religion overcomes the narrowness of the profane
world; i .e. it has always to acknowledge it again, re-establish it, and
allow itself to be dominated by it. Man, in his most intimate real-
ity, in civil society, is a profane being. Here, where he appears both
to himself and to others as a real individual he is an illusory phe-
nomenon. In the state, on the contrary, where he is regarded as a
species-being,2 man is the imaginary member of an imaginary sov-
ereignty, divested of his real, individual life, and infused with an
unreal universality.
The conflict in which the individual, as the professor of a partic-
ular religion, finds himself involved with his own quality of citi
zenship and with other men as members of the community, may be
resolved into the secular schism between the political state and civil
society. For man as a bourgeois 3 "life in the state is only an
appearance or a fleeting exception to the normal and essential." It
is true that the bourgeois, like the Jew, participates in political life
only in a sophistical way, just as the citoyen4 is a Jew or a bour-
geois only in a sophistical way. But this sophistry is not personal. It
is the sophistry of the political state itself. The difference between
the religious man and the citizen is the same as that between the
shopkeeper and the citizens, between the day-labourer and the citi-
zen, between the landed proprietor and the citizen, between the
living individual and the citizen. The contradiction in which the
religious man finds himself with the political man, is the same con-
tradiction in which the bourgeois finds himself with the citizen,
and the member of civil society with his political lion's skin.
This secular opposition, to which the Jewish question reduces
itself-the relation between the political state and its presupposi-
tions, whether the latter are material elements such as private prop-
erty, etc., or spiritual elements such as culture or religion, the con
flict between the general interest and private interest, the schism
between the political state and civil society-these profane contra-
dictions, Bauer leaves intact, while he directs his polemic against
their religious expression. "It is precisely this basis-that is, the
needs which assure the existence of civil society and guarantee its
necessity -which exposes its existence to continual danger, main-
tains an element of uncertainty in civil society, produces this con-
tinually changing compound of wealth and poverty, of prosperity
and distress, and above all generates change."5 Compare the whole
section entitled "Civil society,"6 which follows closely the distinc-
tive features of Hegel's philosophy of right. Civil society, in its
opposition to this political state, is recognized as necessary because
the political state is recognized as necessary.
Political emancipation certainly represents a great progress. It is
not, indeed, the final form of human emancipation, but it is the final
form of human emancipation within the framework of the prevail-
ing social order. It goes without saying that we are speaking here of
real, practical emancipation.
Man emancipates himself politically from religion by expelling it
from the sphere of public law to that of private law. Religion is no
longer the spirit of the state, in which man behaves, albeit in a spe
cific and limited way and in a particular sphere, as a species-being,
in community with other men. It has become the spirit of civil
society, of the sphere of egoism and of the bellum omnium contra
omnes. It is no longer the essence of community, but the essence
of differentiation. It has become what it was at the beginning, an
expression of the fact that man is separated from the community,
from himself and from other men. It is now only the abstract
avowal of an individual folly, a private whim or caprice. The
infinite fragmentation of religion in North America, for example;
already gives it the external form of a strictly private affair. It has
been relegated among the numerous private interests and exiled
from the life of the community as such. But one should have no
illusions about the scope of political emancipation. The division of
man into the public person and the private person, the displace-
ment of religion from the state to civil society-all this is not a
stage in political emancipation but its consummation. Thus politi-
cal emancipation does not abolish, and does not even strive to abol-
ish, man's real religiosity.
The decomposition of man into Jew and citizen, Protestant and
citizen, religious man and citizen, is not a deception practised
against the political system nor yet an evasion of political emancipa-
tion. It is political emancipation itself, the political mode of eman-
cipation from religion. Certainly, in periods when the political state
as such comes violently to birth in civil society, and when men
strive to liberate themselves through political emancipation, the
state can, and must, proceed to abolish and destroy religion; but
only in the same way as it proceeds to abolish private property, by
declaring a maximum, by confiscation, or by progressive taxation,
or in the same way as it proceeds to abolish life, by the guillotine.
At those times when the state is most aware of itself, political life
seeks to stifle its own prerequisites-civil society and its
elements-and to establish itself as the genuine and harmonious
species-life of man. But it can only achieve this end by setting itself
in violent contradiction with its own conditions of existence, by
declaring a permanent revolution. Thus the political drama ends
necessarily with the restoration of religion, of private property, of
all the elements of civil society, just as war ends with the conclu-
sion of peace.
In fact, the perfected Christian state is not the so-called Chris-
tian state which acknowledges Christianity as its basis, as the
state religion, and thus adopts an exclusive attitude towards other
religions; it is, rather, the atheistic state, the democratic state, the
state which relegates religion among the other elements of civil so
ciety. The state which is still theological, which still professes
officially the Christian creed, and which has not yet dared to declare
itself a state, has not yet succeeded in expressing in a human and
secular form, in its political reality, the human basis of which Chris-
tianity is the transcendental expression. The so-called Christian state
is simply a non-state; since it is not Christianity as a religion, but
only the human core of the Christian religion which can realize
itself in truly human creations.
The so-called Christian state is the Christian negation of the
state, but not at all the political realization of Christianity. The
state which professes Christianity as a religion does not yet profess
it in a political form, because it still has a religious attitude towards
religion. In other words, such a state is not the genuine realization
of the human basis of religion, because it still accepts the unreal,
imaginary form of this human core. The so-called Christian state is
an imperfect state, for which the Christian religion serves as the
supplement and sanctification of its imperfection. Thus religion
becomes necessarily one of its means; and so it is the hypocritical
state. There is a great difference between saying: (i) that the per-
fect state, owing to a deficiency in the general nature of the state,
counts religion as one of its prerequisites, or ( ii) that the imperfect
state, owing to a deficiency in its particular existence as an imper
fect state, declares that religion is its basis. In the latter, religion
becomes imperfect politics. In the former, the imperfection even of
perfected politics is revealed in religion. The so-called Christian
state needs the Christian religion in order to complete itself as a
state. The democratic state, the real state, does not need religion
for its political consummation. On the contrary, it can dispense
with religion, because in this case the human core of religion is
realized in a profane manner. The so-called Christian state, on the
other hand, has a political attitude towards religion, and a religious
attitude towards politics. It reduces political institutions and reli-
gion equally to mere appearances.
In order to make this contradiction clearer we shall examine
Bauer's model of the Christian state, a model which is derived
from his study of the German-Christian state.
"Quite recently," says Bauer, "in order to demonstrate the
impossibility or the non-existence of a Christian state, those pas-
sages in the Bible have been frequently quoted with which the
state does not conform and cannot conform unless it wishes to dis-
solve itself entirely."
"But the question is not so easily settled. What do these Biblical
passages demand? Supernatural renunciation, submission to the
authority of revelation, turning away from the state, the abolition
of profane conditions. But the Christian state proclaims and
accomplishes all these things. It has assimilated the spirit of the
Bible, and if it does not reproduce it exactly in the terms which the
Bible uses, that is simply because it expresses this spirit in political
forms, in forms which are borrowed from the political system of
this world but which, in the religious rebirth which they are
obliged to undergo, are reduced to simple appearances. Man turns
away from the state and by this means realizes and completes the
political institutions ."7
Bauer continues by showing that the members of a Christian
state no longer constitute a nation with a will of its own. The
nation has its true existence in the leader to whom it is subjected;
but this leader is, by his origin and nature, alien to it since he has
been imposed by God without the people having any part in the
matter. The laws of such a nation are not its own work, but are
direct revelations . The supreme leader, in his relations with the real
nation, the masses, requires privileged intermediaries; and the
nation itself disintegrates into a multitude of distinct spheres which
are formed and determined by chance, are differentiated from
each other by their interests and their specific passions and preju-
dices, and acquire as a privilege the permission to isolate themselves
from each other, etc.8
But Bauer himself says : "Politics, if it is to be nothing more
than religion, should not be politics; any more than the scouring of
pans, if it is treated as a religious matter, should be regarded as ordi-
nary housekeeping."9 But in the German-Christian state religion is
an "economic matter" just as "economic matters" are religion. In
the German-Christian state the power of religion is the religion of
power.
The separation of the "spirit of the Bible" from the "letter of
the Bible" is an irreligious act. The state which expresses the Bible
in the letter of politics, or in any letter other than that of the Holy
Ghost, commits sacrilege, if not in the eyes of men at least in the
eyes of its own religion. The state which acknowledges the Bible as
its charter and Christianity as its supreme rule must be assessed
according to the words of the Bible; for even the language of the
Bible is sacred. Such a state, as well as the human rubbish upon
which it is based, finds itself involved in a painful contradiction,
which is insoluble from the standpoint of religious consciousness,
when it is referred to those words of the Bible "with which it does
not conform and cannot conform unless it wishes to dissolve itself
entirely." And why does it not wish to dissolve itself entirely? The
state itself cannot answer either itself or others. In its own con-
sciousness the official Christian state is an "ought" whose realiza-
tion is imposible. It cannot affirm the reality of its own existence
without lying to itself, and so it remains always in its own eyes an
object of doubt, an uncertain and problematic object. Criticism is,
therefore, entirely within its rights in forcing the state, which
supports itself upon the Bible, into a total disorder of thought in
which it no longer knows whether it is illusion or reality; and in
which the infamy of its profane ends ( for which religion serves as a
cloak) enter into an insoluble conflict with the probity of its reli-
gious consciousness ( for which religion appears as the goal of the
world ). Such a state can only escape its inner torment by becoming
the myrmidon of the Catholic Church. In the face of this Church,
which asserts that secular power is entirely subordinate to its com-
mands, the state is powerless; powerless the secular power which
claims to be the rule of the religious spirit.
What prevails in the so-called Christian state is not man but
alienation. The only man who counts-the King-is specifically dif-
ferentiated from other men and is still a religious being associated
directly with heaven and with God. The relations which exist here
are relations still based upon faith. The religious spirit is still not
really secularized.
But the religious spirit cannot be really secularized. For what is
it but the non-secular form of a stage in the development of the
human spirit? The religious spirit can only be realized if the stage of
development of the human spirit which it expresses in religious
form, manifests and constitutes itself in its secular form. This is
what happens in the democratic state. The basis of this state is not
Christianity but the human basis of Christianity. Religion remains
the ideal, non-secular consciousness of its members, because it is
the ideal form of the stage of human development which has been
attained.
The members of the political state are religious because of the
dualism between individual life and species-life, between the life
of civil society and political life. They are religious in the sense that
man treats political life, which is remote from his own individual
existence, as if it were his true life; and in the sense that religion is
here the spirit of civil society, and expresses the separation and
withdrawal of man from man. Political democracy is Christian in
the sense that man, not merely one man but every man, is there
considered a sovereign being, a supreme being; but it is unedu-
cated, unsocial man, man just as he is in his fortuitous existence,
man as he has been corrupted, lost to himself, alienated, subjected
to the rule of inhuman conditions and elements, by the whole
organization of our society-in short man who is not yet a real spe-
cies-being. Creations of fantasy, dreams, the postulates of Christian-
ity, the sovereignty of man-but of man as an alien being distin-
guished from the real man-all these become, in democracy, the
tangible and present reality, secular maxims.
In the perfected democracy, the religious and theological con-
sciousness appears to itself all the more religious and theological in
that it is apparently without any political significance or terrestrial
aims, is an affair of the heart withdrawn from the world, an expres-
sion of the limitations of reason, a product of arbitrariness and fan-
tasy, a veritable life in the beyond. Christianity here attains the
practical expression of its universal religious significance, because
the most varied views are brought together in the form of Chris-
tianity, and still more because Christianity does not ask that
anyone should profess Christianity, but simply that he should have
some kind of religion (see Beaumont, op. cit.) . The religious con-
sciousness runs riot in a wealth of contradictions and diversity.
We have shown, therefore, that political emancipation from reli-
gion leaves religion in existence, although this is no longer a privi-
leged religion. The contradiction in which the adherent of a particu-
lar religion finds himself in relation to his citizenship is only one
aspect of the universal secular contradiction between the political
state and civil society. The consummation of the Christian state is
a state which acknowledges itself simply as a state and ignores the
religion of its members. The emancipation of the state from reli-
gion is not the emancipation of the real man from religion.
We do not say to the Jews, therefore, as does Bauer: you cannot
be emancipated politically without emancipating yourselves com-
pletely from Judaism. We say rather: it is because you can be
emancipated politically, without renouncing Judaism completely
and absolutely, that political emancipation itself is not human
emancipation. If you want to be politically emancipated, without
emancipating yourselves humanly, the inadequacy and the contra-
diction is not entirely in yourselves but in the nature and the cate-
gory of political emancipation. If you are preoccupied with this cat-
egory you share the general prejudice. Just as the state evangelizes
when, although it is a state, it adopts a Christian attitude towards
the Jews, the Jew acts politically when, though a Jew, he demands
civil rights.
But if a man, though a Jew, can be emancipated politically and
acquire civil rights, can he claim and acquire what are called the
rights of man? Bauer denies it. "The question is whether the Jew
as such, that is, the Jew who himself avows that he is constrained
by his true nature to live eternally separate from men, is able to
acquire and to concede to others the universal rights of man."
"The idea of the rights of man was only discovered in the Chris-
tian world, in the last century. It is not an innate idea; on the con-
trary, 'it is acquired in a struggle against the historical traditions in
which man has been educated up to the present time. The rights of
man are not, therefore, a gift of nature, nor a legacy from past his-
tory, but the reward of a struggle against the accident of birth and
against the privileges which history has hitherto transmitted from
generation to generation. They are the results of culture, and only
he can possess them who has merited and earned them."
"But can the Jew really take possession of them? As long as he
remains Jewish the limited nature which makes him a Jew must
prevail over the human nature which should associate him, as a
man, with other men; and it will isolate him from everyone who is
not a Jew. He declares, by this separation, that the particular
nature which makes him Jewish is his true and supreme nature,
before which human nature has to efface itself."
"Similarly, the Christian as such cannot grant the rights of
man."1
According to Bauer man has to sacrifice the "privilege of faith"
in order to acquire the general rights of man. Let us consider for a
moment the so-called rights of man; let us examine them in their
most authentic form, that which they have among those who dis-
covered them, the North Americans and the French! These rights
of man are, in part, political rights, which can only be exercised if
one is a member of a community. Their content is participation in
the community life, in the political life of the community, the life
of the state. They fall in the category of political liberty, of civil
rights, which as we have seen do not at all presuppose the consist-
ent and positive abolition of religion; nor consequently, of Judaism.
It remains to consider the other part, namely the rights of man as
distinct from the rights of the citizen.
Among them is to be found the freedom of conscience, the right
to practise a chosen religion. The privilege of faith is expressly
recognized, either as a right of man or as a consequence of a right
of man, namely liberty. Declaration of the Rights of Man and of
the Citizen, 1791, Article 10: "No one is to be disturbed on
account of his opinions, even religious opinions." There is guaran-
teed, as one of the rights of man, "the liberty of every man to prac-
tise the religion to which he adheres."
The Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc. 1793, enumerates
among the rights of man (Article 7 ) : "The liberty of religious
observance." Moreover, it is even stated, with respect to the right
to express ideas and opinions, to hold meetings, to practise a reli
gion, that: "The necessity of enunciating these rights presupposes
either the existence or the recent memory of despotism." Compare
the Constitution of 1795, Section XII, Article 354.
Constitution of Pennsylvania, Article 9, 3: "All men have
received from nature the imprescriptible right to worship the
Almighty according to the dictates of their conscience, and no one
can be legally compelled to follow, establish or support against his
will any religion or religious ministry. No human authority can, in
any circumstances, intervene in a matter of conscience or control
the forces of the soul."
Constitution of New Hampshire, Articles 5 and 6: "Among
these natural rights some are by nature inalienable since nothing
can replace them. The rights of conscience are among them."2
The incompatibility between religion and the rights of man is so
little manifest in the concept of the rights of man that the right to
be religious, in one's own fashion, and to practise one's own partic
ular religion, is expressly included among the rights of man. The
privilege of faith is a universal right of man.
A distinction is made between the rights of man and the rights
of the citizen. Who is this man distinct from the citizen? No one
but the member of civil society. Why is the member of civil society
called "man," simply man, and why are his rights called the "rights
of man"? How is this fact to be explained? By the relation between
the political state and civil society, and by the nature of political
emancipation.
Let us notice first of all that the so-called rights of man, as dis-
tinct from the rights of the citizen, are simply the rights of a
member of civil society, that is, of egoistic man, of man separated
from other men and from the community. The most radical consti-
tution, that of 1 793, says : Declaration of the Rights of Man and of
the Citizen: Article 2. "These righ ts, etc. ( the natural and impre-
scriptible rights ) are : equality, liberty,security, property.
What constitutes liberty?
Article 6. "Liberty is the power which man has to do everything
which does not harm the rights of others . "
Liberty is, therefore, the right to do everything which does not
harm others. The limits within which each individual can act with
out harming others are determined by law, just as the boundary
between two fields is marked by a stake. It is a question of the lib
erty of man regarded as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself.
Why, according to Bauer, is the Jew not fitted to acquire the rights
of man? "As long as he remains Jewish the limited nature which
makes him a Jew must prevail over the human nature which should
associate him, as a man, with other men; and it will isolate him
from everyone who is not a Jew." But liberty as a right of man is
not founded upon the relations between man and man, but rather
upon the separation. of man from man. It is the right of such separ-
ation. The right of the circumscribed individual, withdrawn into
himself.
The practical application of the right of liberty is the right of
private property. What constitutes the right of private property?
Article 16 ( Constitution of 1793 ) "The right of property is that
which belongs to every citizen of enjoying and disposing as he will
of his goods and revenues, of the fruits of his work and industry . "
The right of property is, therefore, the right to enjoy one's for-
tune and to dispose of it as one will; without regard for other men
and independently of society. It is the right of self-interest. This
individual liberty, and its application, form the basis of civil
society. It leads every man to see in other men, not the realization,
but rather the limitation of his own liberty. It declares above all
the right "to enjoy and to dispose as one will, one's goods and
revenues, the fruits of one's work and industry."
There remain the other rights of man, equality and security.
The term "equality" has here no political significance. It is only
the equal right to liberty as defined above; namely that every man
is equally regarded as a self-sufficient monad. The Constitution of
1795, defines the concept of liberty in this sense.
Article 5 ( Constitution of 1 795 ) ' "Equality consists in the fact
that the law is the same for all, whether it protects or punishes ."
And security?
Article 8 (Constitution of 1793) "Security consists in the pro
tection afforded by society to each of its members for the preserva
tion of his person, his rights, and his property."
Security is the supreme social concept of civil society; the con
cept of the police. The whole society exists only in order to guaran
tee for each of its members the preservation of his person, his
rights and his property. It is in this sense that Hegel calls civil
society "the state of need and of reason."
The concept of security is not enough to raise civil society above
its egoism. Security is, rather, the assurance of its egoism.
None of the supposed rights of man, therefore, go beyond the
egoistic man, man as he is, as a member of civil society; that is, an
individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself,
wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accord
ance with his private caprice. Man is far from being considered, in
the rights of man, as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life
itself-society-appears as a system which is external to the indi
vidual and as a limitation of his original independence. The only
bond between men is natural necessity, need and private interest,
the presentation of their property and their egoistic persons.
It is difficult enough to understand that a nation which has just
begun to liberate itself, to tear down all the barriers between differ
ent sections of the people and to establish a political community,
should solemnly proclaim (Declaration of 1791) the rights of the
egoistic man, separated from his fellow men and from the commu
nity, and should renew this proclamation at a moment when only
the most heroic devotion can save the nation ( and is, therefore,
urgently called for ), and when the sacrifice of all the interests of
civil society is in question and egoism should be punished as a
crime. (Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc. 1793 ). The matter
becomes still more incomprehensible when we observe that the
political liberators reduce citizenship, the political community, to a
mere means for preserving these so-called rights of man; and conse
quently, that the citizen is declared to be the servant of egoistic
"man," that the sphere in which man functions as a species-being
is degraded to a level below the sphere where he functions as a par
tial being, and finally that it is man as a bourgeois and not man as
a citizen who is considered the true and authentic man.
"The end of every political association is the preservation of the
natural and imprescriptible rights of man." ( Declaration of the
Rights of Man, etc. 1791, Article 2.) "Government is instituted in
order to guarantee man's enjoyment of his natural and imprescripti
ble rights." (Declaration, etc. 1793, Article 1 .) Thus, even in the
period of its youthful enthusiasm, which is raised to fever pitch by
the force of circumstances, political life declares itself to be only a
means, whose end is the life of civil society. It is true that its revo
lutionary practice is in flagrant contradiction with its theory.
While, for instance, security is declared to be one of the rights of
man, the violation of the privacy of correspondence is openly con
sidered. W,hile the "unlimited freedom of the Press" ( Constitution
of 1793, Article 122 ) , as a corollary of the right of individual lib
erty, is guaranteed, the freedom of the Press is completely
destroyed, since "the freedom of the Press should not be permitted
when it endangers public liberty."3 This amounts to saying: the
right to liberty ceases to be a right as soon as it comes into conflict
with political life, whereas in theory political life is no more than
the guarantee of the rights of man-the rights of the individual
man-and should, therefore, be suspended as soon as it comes into
contradiction with its end, these rights of man. But practice is only
the exception, while theory is the rule. Even if one decided to
regard revolutionary practice as the correct expression of this rela
tion, the problem would remain as to why it is that in the minds of
political liberators the relation is inverted, so that the end appears
as the means and the means as the end? This optical illusion of
their consciousness would always remain a problem, though a psy
chological and theoretical one.
But the problem is easily solved.
Political emancipation is at the same time the dissolution of the
old society, upon which the sovereign power, the alienated political
life of the people, rests. Political revolution is a revolution of civil
society. What was the nature of the old society? It can be charac
terized in one word: feudalism. The old civil society had a directly
political character; that is, the elements of civil life such as prop
erty, the family, and types of occupation had been raised, in the
form of lordship, caste and guilds, to elements of political life.
They determined, in this form, the relation of the individual to the
state as a whole; that is, his political situation, or in other words, his
separation and exclusion from the other elements of society. For
this organization of national life did not constitute property and
labour as social elements; it rather succeeded in separating them
from the body of the state, and made them distinct societies within
society. Nevertheless, at least in the feudal sense, the vital func
tions and conditions of civil society remained political. They
excluded the individual from the body of the state, and trans
formed the particular relation which existed between his corpora-
tion and the state into a general relation between the individual
and social life, j ust as they transformed his specific civil activity and
situation into a general activity and situation. As a result of this
organization, the state as a whole and its consciousness, will and
activity-the general political power-also necessarily appeared as
the private affair of a ruler and his servants, separated from the
people.
The political revolution which overthrew this power of the ruler,
which made state affairs the affairs of the people, and the political
state a matter of general concern, i.e. a real state, necessarily shat
tered everything-estates, corporations, guilds, privileges-which
expressed the separation of the people from community life. The
political revolution therefore abolished the political character of
civil society. It dissolved civil society into its basic elements, on the
one hand individuals, and on the other hand the material and cul
tural elements which formed the life experience and the civil situa
tion of these individuals. It set free the political spirit which had,
so to speak, been dissolved, fragmented and lost in the various
culs-de-sac of feudal society; it reassembled these scattered frag
ments, liberated the political spirit from its connexion with civil
life and made of it the community sphere, the general concern of
the people, in principle independent of these particular elements of
civil life. A specific activity and situation in life no longer had any
but an individual significance. They no longer constituted the gen
eral relation between the individual and the state as a whole.
Public affairs as such became the general affair of each individual,
and political functions became general functions.
But the consummation of the idealism of the state was at the
same time the consummation of the materialism of civil society.
The bonds which had restrained the egoistic spirit of civil society
were removed along with the political yoke. Political emancipation
was at the same time an emancipation of civil society from politics
and from even the semblance of a general content.
Feudal society was dissolved into its basic element, man; but into
egoistic man who was its real foundation.
Man in this aspect, the member of civil society, is now the foun
dation and presupposition of the political state. He is recognized as
such in the rights of man.
But the liberty of egoistic man, and the recognition of this lib-
erty, is rather the recognition of the frenzied movement of the cul-
tural and material elements which form the content of his life.
Thus man was not liberated from religion; he received religious
liberty. He was not liberated from property; he received the liberty
to own property. He was not liberated from the egoism of business;
he received the liberty to engage in business .
The formation of the political state, and the dissolution of civil
society into independent individuals whose relations are regulated
by law, as the relations between men in the corporations and guilds
were regulated by privilege, are accomplished by one and the same
act. Man as a member of civil society-non-political man
necessarily appears as the natural man. The rights of man appear as
natural rights because conscious activity is concentrated upon polit
ical action. Egoistic man is the passive, given result of the dissolu-.
tion of society, an object of direct apprehension and consequently a
natural object. The political revolution dissolves civil society into
its elements without revolutionizing these elements themselves or
subjecting them to criticism. This revolution regards civil society,
the sphere of human needs, labour, private interests and civil law,
as the basis of its own existence, as a self-subsistent precondition,
and thus as its natural basis. Finally, man as a member of civil
society is identified with authentic man, man as distinct from citi
zen, because he is man in his sensuous, individual and immediate
existence, whereas political man is only abstract, artificial man, man
as an allegorical, moral person. Thus man as he really is, is seen
only in the form of egoistic man, and man in his true nature only
in the form of the abstract citizen.
The abstract notion of political man is well formulated by Rous-
seau: "Whoever dares undertake to establish a people's institutions
must feel himself capable of changing, as it were, human nature
itself, of transforming each individual who, in isolation, is a com-
plete but solitary whole, into a part of something greater than him-
self, from which in a sense, he derives his life and his being; [of
changing man's nature in order to strengthen it;] of substituting a
limited and moral existence for the physical and independent life
[with which all of us are endowed by nature]. His task, in short, is
to take from a man his own powers, and to give him in exchange
alien powers which he can only employ with the help of other
men."4
Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of
human relationships to man himself.
Political emancipation is a reduction of man, on the one hand to
a member of civil society, an independent and egoistic individual,
and on the other hand, to a citizen, to a moral person.
Human emancipation will only be complete when the real, indi
vidual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as
an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his rela-
tionships, he has become a species-being; and when he has recog-
nized and organized his own powers (forces propres) as social
powers so that he no longer separates this social power from him
self as political power.
2. Bruno Bauer, "Die Fahigkeit der heutigen
Juden und Christen frei zu werden"5
It is in this form that Bauer studies the relation between the
Jewish and Christian religions, and also their relation with modern
criticism. This latter relation is their relation with "the capacity to
become free."
He reaches this conclusion: "The Christian has only to raise
himself one degree, to rise above his religion, in order to abolish
religion in general," and thus to become free; but "the Jew, on the
contrary, has to break not only with his Jewish nature, but also
with the process towards the consummation of his religion, a proc-
ess which has remained alien to him."6
Thus Bauer here transforms the question of Jewish emancipation
into a purely religious question. The theological doubt about
whether the Jew or the Christian has the better chance of attaining
salvation is reproduced here in the more enlightened form : which
of the two is more capable of emancipation? It is indeed no longer
asked: which makes free-Judaism or Christianity? On the con
trary, it is now asked: which makes free-the negation of Judaism
or the negation of Christianity?
"If they wish to become free the Jews should not embrace Chris
tianity as such, but Christianity in dissolution, religion in dissolu
tion; that is to say, the Enlightenment, criticism, and its outcome, a
free humanity."7
It is still a matter, therefore, of the Jews professing some kind of
faith; no longer Christianity as such, but Christianity in dissolu-
tion.
Bauer asks the Jews to break with the essence of the Christian
religion, but this demand does not follow, as he himself admits,
from the development of the Jewish nature.
From the moment when Bauer, at the end of his Judenfrage,
saw in Judaism only a crude religious criticism of Christianity, and;
therefore, attributed to it only a religious significance, it was to b.e
expected that he would transform the emancipation of the Jews
into a philosophico-theological act.
Bauer regards the ideal and abstract essence of the Jew-his reli
gion-as the whole of his nature. He, therefore, concludes rightly
that "The Jew contributes nothing to mankind when he disregards
his own limited law," when he renounces all his Judaism.8
The relation between Jews and Christians thus becomes the fol
lowing: the only interest which the emancipation of the Jew pre
sents for the Christian is a general human and theoretical interest.
Judaism is a phenomenon which offends the religious eye of the
Christian. As soon as the Christian's eye ceases to be religious the
phenomenon ceases to offend it. The emancipation of the Jew is
not in itself, therefore, a task which falls to the Christian to per-
form.
The Jew, on the other hand, if he wants to emancipate himself
has to undertake, besides his own work, the work of the
Christian-the "criticism of the gospels," of the "life of Jesus,"
etc.9
"It is for them to arrange matters; they will decide their own
destiny. But history does not allow itself to be mocked."l
We will attempt to escape from the theological formulation of
the question. For us, the question concerning the capacity of thc
Jew for emancipation is transformed into another question: what
specific social element is it necessary to overcome in order to abol
ish Judaism? For the capacity of the present-day Jew to emancipate
himself expresses the relation of Judaism to the emancipation of
the contemporary world. The relation results necessarily from the
particular situation of Judaism in the present enslaved world.
Let us consider the real Jew: not the sabbath Jew, whom Bauer
considers, but the everyday Jew.
Let us not seek the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us
seek the secret of the religion in the real Jew.
What is the profane basis of Judaism? Practical need, self
interest. What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is
his worldly god? Money.
Very well: then in emancipating itself from huckstering and
money, and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would
emancipate itself.
An organization of society which would abolish the pre
conditions and thus the very possibility of huckstering, would make
the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would evaporate like
some insipid vapour in the real, life-giving air of society. On the
other hand, when the Jew recognizes his practical nature as invalid
and endeavours to abolish it, he begins to deviate from his former
path of development, works for general human emancipation and
turns against the supreme practical expression of human self
estrangement.
We discern in Judaism, therefore, a universal antisocial element
of the present time, whose historical development, zealously aided
in its harmful aspects by the Jews, has now attained its culminating
point, a point at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate.
In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emanci
pation of mankind from Judaism.
The Jew has already emancipated himself in a Jewish fashion.
"The Jew, who is merely tolerated in Vienna for example, deter-
mines the fate of the whole Empire by his financial power. The
Jew, who may be entirely without rights in the smallest German
state, decides the destiny of Europe. While the corporations and
guilds exclude the Jew, or at least look on him with disfavour, the
audacity of industry mocks the obstinacy of medieval institu-
tions."2
This is not an isolated instance. The Jew has emancipated him
self in a Jewish manner, not only by acquiring the power of money,
but also because money has become, through him and also apart
from him, a world power, while the practical Jewish spirit has
become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have
emancipated themselves in so far as the Christians have become
Jews.
Thus, for example, Captain Hamilton reports that the devout
and politically free inhabitant of New England is a kind of Lao
coon who makes not the least effort to escape from the serpents
which are crushing him. Mammon is his idol which he adores not
only with his lips but with the whole force of his body and mind.
In his view the world is no more than a Stock Exchange, and he is
convinced that he has no other destiny here below than to become
richer than his neighbour. Trade has seized upon all his thoughts,
and he has no other recreation than to exchange objects. When he
travels he carries, so to speak, his goods and h is counter on his back
and talks only of interest and profit. If he loses sight of his own
business for an instant it is only in order to pry into the business of
his competitors.3
In North America, indeed, the effective domination of the Chris
tian world by Judaism has come to be manifested in a common and
unambiguous form; the preaching of the Gospel itself, Christian
preaching, has become an article of commerce, and the bankrupt
trader in the church behaves like the prosperous clergyman in busi-
ness. "This man whom you see at the head of a respectable congre
gation began as a trader; his business having failed he has become a
minister. This other began as a priest, but as soon as he had accu-
mulated some money he abandoned the priesthood for trade. In
the eyes of many people the religious ministry is a veritable indus-
trial career. "4
According to Bauer, it is "a hypocritical situation when, in
theory, the Jew is deprived of political rights, while in practice he
wields tremendous power and exercises on a wholesale scale the
political influence which is denied him in minor matters ."5
The contradiction which exists between the effective political
power of the Jew and his political rights, is the contradiction
between politics and the power of money in general. Politics is in
principle superior to the power of money, but in practice it has
become its bondsman.
Judaism has maintained itself alongside Christianity, not only
because it constituted the religious criticism of Christianity and
embodied the doubt concerning the religious origins of Christian
ity, but equally because the practical Jewish spirit-Judaism or
commerce6-has perpetuated itself in Christian society and has
even attained its highest development there. The Jew, who occu
pies a distinctive place in civil society, only manifests in a distinc-
tive way the Judaism of civil society.
Judaism has been preserved, not in spite of history, but by his
tory.
It is from its own entrails that civil society ceaselessly engenders
the Jew.
What was, in itself, the basis of the Jewish religion? Practical
need, egoism.
The monotheism of the Jews is, therefore, in reality, a
polytheism of the numerous needs of man, a polytheism which
makes even the lavatory an object of divine regulation. Practical
need, egoism, is the principle of civil society, and is revealed as
such in its pure form as soon as civil society has fully engendered
the political state. The god of practical need and self-interest is
money.
Money is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god
may exist. Money abases all the gods of mankind and changes them
into commodities. Money is the universal and self-sufficient value
of all things. It has, therefore, deprived the whole world, both the
human world and nature, of their own proper value. Money is the
alienated essence of man's work and existence; this essence domi
nates him and he worships it.
The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the
god of this world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew.
His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.
The mode of perceiving nature, under the rule of private prop
erty and money, is a real contempt for, and a practical degradation
of. nature, which does indeed exist in the Jewish religion but only
as a creature of the imagination.
It is in this sense that Thomas Munzer declares it intolerable
"that every creature should be transformed into property-the
fishes in the water, the birds of the air, the plants of the earth: the
creature too should become free."7
That which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish reli
gion-contempt for theory, for art, for history, and for man as an
end in himself-is the real, conscious standpoint and the virtue of
the man of money. Even the species-relation itself, the relation
between man and woman, becomes an object of commerce.
Woman is bartered away.
The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the
trader, and above all of the financier.
The law, without basis or reason, of the Jew, is only the religious
caricature of morality and right in general, without basis or reason;
the purely formal rites with which the world of self-interest encir
cles itself.
Here again the supreme condition of man is his legal status, his
relationship to laws which are valid for him, not because they are
the laws of his own will and nature, but because they are
dominant and any infraction of them will be avenged.
Jewish Jesuitism, the same practical Jesuitism which Bauer dis
covers in the Talmud, is the relationship of the world of self
interest to the laws which govern this world, laws which the world
devotes its principal arts to circumventing.
Indeed, the operation of this world within its framework of laws
is impossible without the continual supersession of law.
Judaism could not develop further as a religion, in a theoretical
form, because the world view of practical need is, by its very
nature, circumscribed, and the delineation of its characteristics soon
completed.
The religion of practical need could not, by its very nature, find
its consummation in theory, but only in practice, just because prac
tice is its truth.
Judaism could not create a new world. It could only bring the
new creations and conditions af the world within its own sphere of
activity, because practical need, the spirit of which is self-interest, is
always passive, cannot expand at will, but finds itself extended as a
result of the continued development of society.
Judaism attains its apogee with the perfection of civil society; but
civil society only reaches perfection in the Christian world. Only
under the sway of Christianity, which objectifies all national, natu-
ral, moral and theoretical relationships, could civil society separate
itself completely from the life of the state, sever all the species
bonds of man, establish egoism and selfish need in their place, and
dissolve the human world into a world of atomistic, antagonistic
individuals.
Christianity issued from Judaism. It has now been re-absorbed
into Judaism.
From the beginning, the Christian was the theorizing Jew; conse-
quently, the Jew is the practical Christian. And the practical Chris
tian has become a Jew again.
It was only in appearance that Christianity overcame real
Judaism. It was too refinedtheoretical fashion, the alienation
of man from himself and from nature.
It was only then that Judaism could attain universal domination
and could turn alienated man and alienated nature into alienable,
saleable objects, in thrall to egoistic need and huckstering.
Objectification is the practice of alienation. Just as man, so long
as he is engrossed in religion, can only objectify his essence by an
alien and fantastic being; so under the sway of egoistic need, he can
only affirm himself and produce objects in practice by subordinat-
ing his products and his own activity to the domination of an
alien entity, and by attributing to them the significance of an alien
entity, namely money.
In its perfected. practice the spiritual egoism of Christianity nec
essarily becomes the material egoism of the Jew, celestial need is
transmuted into terrestrial need, subjectivism into self-interest. The
tenacity of the Jew is to be explained, not by his religion, but
rather by the human basis of his religion-practical need and
egoism.
It is because the essence of the Jew was universally realized and
secularized in civil society, that civil society could not convince the
Jew of the unreality of his religious essence, which is precisely the
ideal representation of practical need. It is not only, therdore, in
the Pentateuch and the Talmud, but also in contemporary society,
that we find the essence of the present-day Jew; not as an abstract
essence, but as one which is supremely empirical, not only as a lim
itation of the Jew, but as the Jewish narrowness of society.
As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of
Judaism-huckstering and its conditions-the Jew becomes impos
sible, because his consciousness no longer has an object. The sub-
jective basis of Judaism-practical need-assumes a human form,
and the conflict between the inaividual, sensuous existence of man
and his species-existence, is abolished.
The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of
society from Judaism.
Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's
Philosophy of Right: Introduction
KARL MARX
Written at the close of 1843 and published in the Deutsch-Franzosische
Jahrbuche in 1844, this essay is a consummate expression of the radical
mind. It proclaims the need for a "radical revolution" as the way to man's
self-realization. Germany is taken as the focal point of this revolution, and
the proletariat-the concept of which makes its first appearance in Marx's
writings here-as its class vehicle. In August 1844 Marx sent a copy of the
essay to Ludwig Feuerbach along with a long letter expressing love and
respect for that thinker, whose writing had provided, he wrote, a "philo-
sophical foundation for socialism" by bringing the idea of the human
species from "the heaven of abstraction to the real earth." Feuerbach's in-
fluence, along with that of Hegel, is clearly visible in the essay.
For Germany, the cristicism of religion has been largely com
pleted; and the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.
The profane existence of error is compromised once its celestial
oratio pro aris et focis has been refuted. Man, who has found in
the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a supernatural
being, only his own reflection, will no longer be tempted to find
only the semblance of himself-a non-human being-where he
seeks and must seek his true reality.
The basis of irreligious criticism is this: man makes religion;
religion does not make man. Religion is indeed man's self
consciousness and self-awareness so long as he has not found him
self or has lost himself again. But man is not an abstract being,
squatting outside the world. Man is the human world, the state,
society. This state, this society, produce religion which is an
inverted world consciousness, because they are an inverted world.
Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic com
pendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its
enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its general
basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization
of the human being inasmuch as the human being possesses no
true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly a
struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real
suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of
the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the
soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of men, is a
demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions
about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which
requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, the
embryonic criticism of this vale of tears of which religion is the I
halo.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not
in order that man shall bear the chain without caprice or consola
tion but so that he shall cast off the chain and pluck the living
flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man so that he will
think, act and fashion his reality as a man who has lost his illusions
and regained his reason; so that he will revolve about himself as his
own true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun about which man
revolves so long as he does not revolve about himself.
It is the task of history, therefore, once the other-world of truth
has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. The immediate
task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, is to unmask
human self-alienation in its secular form now that it has been
unmasked in its sacred form. Thus the criticism of heaven is trans-
formed into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the
criticism of law and the criticism of theology into the criticism of
politics.
The following exposition1-which is a contribution to this
undertaking-does not deal directly with the original but with a
copy, the German philosophy of the state and of right, for the
simple reason that it deals with Germany.
If one were to begin with the status quo itself in Germany, even
in the most appropriate way, i .e. negatively, the result would still
be an anachronism. Even the negation of our political present is
already a dusty fact in the historical lumber room of modern
nations. I may negate powdered wigs, but I am still left with
unpowdered wigs. If I negate the German situation of 1843 I have,
according to French chronology, hardly reached the year 1789, and
still less the vital centre of the present day.
German history, indeed, prides itself upon a development which
no other nation had previously accomplished, or will ever imitate in
the historical sphere. We have shared in the restorations of modern
nations without ever sharing in their revolutions . We have been
restored, first because other nations have dared to make revolutions,
and secondly because other nations have suffered counter
revolutions; in the first case because our masters were afraid, and in
the second case because they were not afraid. Led by our shep
herds, we have only once kept company with liberty and that was
on the day of its internment.
A school of thought, which justifies the infamy of today by that
of yesterday, which regards every cry from the serf under the knout
as a cry of rebellion once the knout has become time-honoured,
ancestral and historical, a school for which history shows
only its a posteriori as the God of Israel did for his servant
Moses-the Historical school of law2-might be supposed to have
invented German history, if it were not in fact itself an invention
of German history, A Shylock, but a servile Shylock, it swears upon
its bond, its historical, Christian-Germanic bond, for every pound
of flesh cut from the heart of the people.
On the other hand, good-natured enthusiasts, German chauvin
ists by temperament and enlightened liberals by reflection, seek our
history of liberty beyond our history, in the primeval Teutonic
forests. But how does the history of our liberty differ from the his
tory of the wild boar's liberty, if it is only to be found in the
forests? And as the proverb has it: what is shouted into the forest,
the forest echoes back. So peace upon the primeval Teutonic
forests!
But war upon the state of affairs in Germany! By all means ! This
state of affairs is beneath the level of history, beneath all criticism;
nevertheless it remains an object of criticism just as the criminal
who is beneath h umanity remains an object of the executioner. In
its struggle against this state of affairs criticism is not a passion of
the head, but the head of passion. It is not a lancet but a weapon.
Its object is an enemy which it aims not to refute but to destroy.
For the spirit of this state of affairs has already been refuted. It is
not, in itself, an object worthy of our thought; it is an existence as
contemptible as it is despised. Criticism itself has no need of any
further elucidation of this object, for it has already understood it.
Criticism is no longer an end in itself, but simply a means; indigna
tion is its essential mode of feeling, and denunciation its principal
task.
It is a matter of depicting the stifling pressure which the differ
ent social spheres exert upon other, the universal but passive
ill-humour, the complacent but self-deluding narrowness of spirit;
all this incorporated in a system of government which lives by con
serving this paltriness, and is itself paltriness in government.
What a spectacle! Society is infinitely divided into the most
diverse races, which confront each other with their petty antipa
thies, bad conscience and coarse mediocrity; and which, precisely
because of their ambiguous and mistrustful situation, are treated
without exception, though in different ways, as merely tolerated
existences by their masters. And they are forced to recognize and
acknowledge this fact of being dominated, governed and possessed,
as a concession from heaven! On the other side are the rulers them
selves, whose greatness is in inverse proportion to their number.
The criticism which deals with this subject-matter is criticism in
a hand-to-hand fight; and in such a fight it is of no interest to know
whether the adversary is of the same rank, is noble or interest
ing-all that matters is to strike him. It is a question of denying
the Germans an instant of illusion or resignation. The burden must
be made still more irksome by awakening a consciousness of it, and
shame must be made more shameful still by rendering it public.
Every sphere of German society must be depicted as the partie
Honteuse of German society; and these petrified social conditions
must be made to dance by singing their own melody to them. The
nation must be taught to be terrified of itself, in order to give it
courage. In this way an imperious need of the German nation will
be satisfied, and the needs of nations are themselves the final causes
of their satisfaction.
Even for the modern nations this struggle against the limited
character of the German status quo does not lack interest; for the
German status quo is the open consummation of the ancien
régime, and the ancien régime is the hidden defect of the modern
Footnotes:
1. For further particulars on the publishing history, see the Note on Texts and Terminology, below.
2. The notion that Marxism has its foundation in "dialectical materialism," a general world-view of which historical materialism is the application to human history, is a later growth particularly associated with Russian and subsequently Communist Marxism, and is not the classical Marxist position. For Marx the prime subject of Marx ism was human history, hence historical materialism was the foundation of the teaching. Moreover, historical materialism was itself dialectical in that the human historical process showed a revolutionary pattern of development through opposition and conflict. To this it must be added that Engels, who more than Marx was interested in the progress of natural science in the nineteenth century, did give an initial impetus to the later emergence of a Marxist "dialectical materialism" by his speculations on the presence of dialectical laws in natural processes. He began but never completed a book on this subject, the manuscript of which was first published in the twentieth century under the title Dialectics of Nature. The term "dialectical materialism" was put into currency by the Russian Marxist GeorgiPlekhanov in one of his writings of the late nineteenth century. For a long while the authoritative version of the viewpoint of Communist Marxism on this subject was the essay by. Joseph Stalin, "Dialectical and Historical Materialism," published as a part of Chapter Four of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks). Short Course (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, many editions).
3. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works,2 vol. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), vol.II, p.387.
4. From a review, written in 1859, of Marx's A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Italics added.
5. On this see Marx's own testimony in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, p 4, below. For the commentary itself, see pp. 16-25, 53-65, below.
6. This is a main theme of the important section of the 1844 manuscripts on estranged labor. See below. pp. 70-81.
7. The account given here of the origin and development of Marx's thought
follows the lines of the interpretation presented in greater length and detail, with supporting evidence, in Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (New York : Cambridge University Press, 1961 ; 2nd ed., 1972).
8. I am referring to Erich Fromm's Man for Himself (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1 947). See also his autobiographical study, Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962 ). For a discussion of Marx from an existentialist viewpoint, see F. H. Heinemann,.Existentialism and the Modern Predicament (New York: Harper & Row, 1958).
9. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, edited by Dirk J. Struik (New York: Inter national Publishers, 1 964), pp. 197,226. Engels' "Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy" appears here as an appendix.
1. See in this connection the selection included here under the title "Working-Class Manchester" (pp. 579-585, below ) .
2. Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Okonomie (Moscow, 1939-41). The full text in English is available in Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, translated by Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage Books, 1973). ( See below, pp.221-293, for selections. )
3. See the selection en titled "Alienation and Social Classes," below
4. On Marx's use of the terms "mode of production" and "relations of production," see Robert C. Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea (New York: W.W.Norton, 1969) , chapter 1.
5. Dirk J.Struik has pointed out that Marx does not completely renounce the Term "alienation" in his later economic writings. It makes a reappearance in the Grundrisse and in the following passage from Capital, Vol. III, Part I, chapter 5, section 1: "The relations of capital conceal indeed the inner connection.(of the facts) in the complete indifference, exteriorization and alienation in which it places the worker in relation to the conditions of the realization of his own labour (The Economic and Philosophic 111 manuscripts of 1844, p. 235).
6. For Marx's scorn of the distributive orientation in socialist thought, see particularly his comments in The Critique of the Gotha Program, pp. 528- 532, below. On the problem of dis tributive justice in Marx, see Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea, chapter 2.
7. What Is to Be Done?, in The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), p.19. By "movement" in this context Lenin meant an organized political movement led by a political party
8. "The work of Marx on the Civil War of 1871 has an extraordinary historical significance: for by this bold step Marx annexed the memory of the Commune. It is only since then that Marxism has possessed a revolutionary tradition in the eyes of mankind. By 1870 Marx had already acquired a reputation as an outstanding theoretician of the labour motivement, but the general public knew nothing of the political and revolutionary activity of the Marxists .... It is only since 1871 that Marxism has been clearly associated with the labour revolution .... In this manner Marx provided an important tradition for the future movements of the working class. and he placed his own doctrines in the centre of these movements" (Arthur Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism [Boston : Beacon Press. 1965]. pp. 204-205).
9. See Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism, pp. 2 02-205, for further particulars and a discussion of this issue.
1. When informed in 1864 that the newspaper of the General German Workers' Society would be called The Social Democrat, Engels wrote to Marx: "What a disgusting title-The Social Democrat! Why don't those fellows frankly call the thin g : The Proletarian?" Marx answered: "Social Democrat is a bad title. Yet one shouldn't immediately use the best title for something which may turn out to be a failure" (Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism, p. 162). A Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party came into existence in 1 898. In 1917, out of disgust with the behavior of the Social Democratic leaders of various countries who had supported their governments in World War I in contravention of Marxist internationalism, Lenin persuaded his Bolshevik branch of the Russian Social Democratic Party to change its name to "Communist Party."
2. See the text of this speech. below .
3.For Lenin's argument see The State and Revolution in The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton. 1975), p. 337. For Kautsky's position and the Lenin-Kaut-sky conflict, see Karl Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,196 4), and Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea, chapter 3. Soviet Marxism's espousal of the concept of a peaceful path is analyzed in chapter 6 of the latter work.
4. Engels, "The Tactics of Social Democracy," below.
5. Engels, Ludwig Feuerback and the End of Classical German Philosophy. p.386.
6. Selections from this work appear below.
7. See below.
1. For one of Marx's versions of the grand project, see the Grundrisse, below p.244. The successive versions are discussed by Joseph J. O'Malley in "Marx's 'Economics' and Hegel's Philosophy of Right: An Essay on Marx's Hegelianism," Political Studies, vol. XXIV, no. 1 (March 1976),pp. 48 ff.
2. For this and other particulars about the Institute I have drawn upon E.A.Stepanova, "O sobirianii i nauchnoi publikatsii v SSSR literaturnogo
nasledstva osnovopolozhnikov marksizma," in Iz istorii marksizma (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1961), pp.6-59.
3. I am indebted to Professor Joseph J.O'Malley for this information.
4. See below, pp.291-292, and Martin Nicolaus' discussion of the point in his Foreword to the full translation ( Karl Marx, Grundrisse : Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy [New York: Vintage Books, 1 9731. p. 32).
5. The meaning of Aufhebung in the context of Hegel's philosophy of spirit is explicated in Robert C.Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (New York: 1972), pp. 51-52, 59-60.
1. Rheinische Zeitung (Rhenish Gazette) : A daily radical newspaper published in Cologne in 1842-43 ; from October 15, 1842, to March 18, 1843, its editor was Marx.
2. Marx has in mind his article, "Der Kommunismus und die Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung" ( Communism and the Augsburg General Journal) , Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe, Abt. I, B. I, Halbband I, Frankfurt am Main, 1927, S. 260-65.
3. Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher (German-French Annals) : Organ of revolutionary and communist propaganda, published by Marx in Paris in 1844
4. Here all mistrust must be abandoned And here must perish every craven thought.(Dante. The Divine Comedy)
1. Heine.
2. The Doctors' Club was founded by representatives of the radical wing of the Hegelian school in Berlin in 1837.Among its members were lecturer on theology of Berlin University Bruno Bauer. gymnasium history teacher Karl Friedrich Koppen, and geography teacher Adolf Rutenberg. The usual meeting place was the small Hippel cafe. The Club, of which Marx was also an active member, played an important part in the Young Hegelian movement.
For a fuller statement of this interpretation, see Robert C. Tucker. Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx", pp. 75-80.
1. Course of life.
1. Theodore Dezamy, author of Code de la nature (1842). [R.T.]
2. Wilhelm Weitling, a German journeyman tailor whose Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom (1842) advocated communism. [R.T.]
3. This is the title of Cabet's utopian noyel published in Paris in 1840. At that time Cabet's followers were called "communists." [R.T.]
4. From the political point of view.[R.T.]
5. The system of representation by estates (classes) as opposed to the system of representation by individuals. [R.T.]
The treatise is available in English as Hegel's Philosophy of Right, translated with notes by T.M.Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942). The complete text of Marx's commentary is available in Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, translated and edited by Joseph J, O'Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
For more on transformational criticism and Marx's application of it in this commentary, see the Introduction, pp. xxiii-xxiv, above.
l. Subheadings supplied by R.C.T.
2. Par excellence -i.e., "Christianity is the pre-eminent religion."
3. I.e., state, republic; etymologically, "public affairs."
1. The Jewish question. [Braunschweig, 1843.-Marx]
2. Bauer, "Die Fahigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen, frei zu werden," Einundzwanzig Bogen, p. 57. [Marx] Emphases added by Marx.
3. Chamber of Deputies. Debate of 26th December, 1840. [Marx]
4. Bauer, Die Judenfrage, p. 64. [Marx]
S. Ibid., p. 65. [Marx]
6. Loc. cit. [Marx]
7. Ibid., p. 71. [Marx]
8. Bauer, Die Judenfrage, p. 66.[Marx]
9. Ibid., p. 97. [Marx]
1. Bauer, Die judenfrage, p. 3. [Marx]
2. Gustave de Belaumont, Marie ou l'esclavage aux Etats-Unis, Bruxelles, 1835, 2 vols., II, p. 207. [Marx] Marx refers to another edition, Paris, 1835.
3. Ibid., p. 216. Beaumont actually refers to all the States of North America.
4. Ibid., p. 217. [Marx]
5. G. de Beaumont, op. cit. [Marx]
6. A. de Tocqueville, De la democratie en Amerique. [Marx]
7. Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in North America, Edinburgh, 1833, 2 vols. [Marx] Marx quotes from the German translation, Mannheim.1834
8. Hamilton, op. cit., I, pp. 2 88, 306,309. [Marx]
9. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophiedes Rechts, Ier Aufgabe, 1821, p. 346. [Marx] See the English translation by T. M. Knox, Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Oxford, 1942, p.173.
1. The terms "species-life" (Gattungsleben) and "species-being" (Gattungswesen) are derived from Feuerbach. In the first chapter of Das Wesen des Christentums [The Essence oj Christianity], Leipzig, 1841, Feuerbach discusses the nature of man, and argues that man is to be distinguished from animals not by "consciousness" as such, but by a particular kind of consciousness. Man is not only conscious of himself as an individual ; he is also conscious of himself as a member of the human species, and so he apprehends a "human essence" which is the same in himself and in other men. According to Feuerbach this ability to conceive of "species" is the fundamental element in the human power of reasoning: "Science is the consciousness of species." Marx, while not departing from this meaning of the terms, employs them in other contexts : and he consciousness" defines the nature of man, man is only living and acting authentically (i.e. in accordance with his nature) when he lives and acts deliberately as a "species-being," that is, as a social being.
2. See previous note.
3. I.e. as a member of civil society.
4. I.e. the individual with political rights.
5. Bauer, Die Judenfrage, p.8. [Marx]
6. Ibid., pp. 8-9. [Marx]
7. Bauer, Die ludenfrage, p.55. [Marx]
8. Ibid., p.56. [Marx]
9. Ibid., p.108. [Marx]
1. Bauer, Die ludenfrage, pp. 19-20. [Marx]
2. Beaumont, op.cit., II, pp. 2 06-7. [Marx]
3. Buchez et Roux, "Robes pierrejeune," Histoire parlementaire de la Revolution francaise, Tome XXVIIIp. 1 59. [Marx]
4. J.J. Rousseau, Du contrat social, Book II. Chapter VII, "The Legislator." Marx quoted this passage in French, and added the emphases; he omitted the portions enclosed in square brackets.
5. The capacity of the present-day Jews and Christians to become free. [In Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz (Ed. G. Herwegh ) , pp. 5 6-71 .-Marx]
6. Loc. cit., p. 71. [Marx]
7. Ibid., p. 70. [Marx]
8. Loc. cit., p. 65. [Marx]
9. Marx alludes here to Bruno Bauer, Kritik der e'llangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker, Vols. I-II, Leipzig, 1 841; Vol. III, Braunschweig, 1842,and David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, 2 vols. Tubingen, 1835-6 An English translation of Strauss' book by Marian Evans (George Eliot) was published in 1846 under the title Life of Jesus Critically Examined.
1. Bauer, "Die Fahigkeit ... etc. ," p.71. [Marx]
2. Bauer, Die Judenfrage, p. 14. [Marx]
3. Hamilton, op. cit., I, p. 2 1 3. [Marx] Marx paraphrases this passage.
4. Beaumont, op. cit., II, p. 1 79. [Marx]
5. Bauer, Die judenfrage, p. 14. [Marx]
6. The German word judentum had, in the language of the time, the secondary meaning of "commerce," and in this and other passages Marx exploits the two senses of the word.
7. Quoted from Thomas Munzer's pamphlet against Luther, "Hochverrusachte
Schutzrede und Antwort wider das geistlose, sanftlebende Fleisch zu Wittenberg, welches mit verkehrter Weise durch den Diebstahl der heiligen Schrift die erbarmliche Christenheit also ganz jammerlich besudelt hat." (p.B iii. 1 524.) [Marx]
1. Marx refers to his intention to publish a critical study of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, to which this essay was an introduction, One of Marx's preliminary manuscripts for such a study has been published entitled "Aus der Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts" (MEGA I,11, pp. 403-553).
2. The principal representative of the Historical school was F. K. von Savigny (1779-1861) who outlined its programme in his book Vom BeTuf unserer Zeit fur Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft (On the Vocation of our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence) .Heidelberg, 1814. Marx attended Savigny's lectures at the University of Berlin in 1836-7 ; but he was more attracted by the lectures of Eduard Gans (1798- 1839), a liberal Hegelian influenced by Saint-Simon, who emphasized in his teaching and writings the part played by reason in the development of law, and who was Savigny's principal opponent in Berlin.
3. In German, listigen; Marx is punning upon the name of Friedrich List
( 1789-1846 ), the apostle of industrial capitalism in a nationalist and protectionist form, who published in 1 840 his influential book, Das nationale System de,. politischen Okkonomie.
4. Anacharsis.
5, The laws of September, 1835, which increased the financial guarantees required from the publishers of news papers and introduced heavier penalties for "subversive" publications.
6. Aufhebung [R. T.]
7. I.e., the future German revolution will be sparked by revolutionary developments in France. (This last paragraph does not appear in the original Bottomore translation used here) [R.T]
The cross-outs are indicated by pointed brackets in the complete text
of the 1844 manuscripts as published in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
Collected Works, vol. 3 (Marx and Engels: 1843-44) (London: Lawrence Wishart, 1975), pp. 249-346. I am indebted to Thomas Ferguson for bringing the crossed-out material to my attention.
1. Particularly.
2. Marx refers here to the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer, who had published
in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung two long reviews dealing with books, articles and pamphlets on the Jewish question. Most of the quoted phrases are taken from these reviews in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, vol.1, December, 1843; vol. 4, March, 1844. The expressions "utopian phrase" and "compact mass" can be found in Bauer's article "Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand del' Kritik?" published in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, vol. 8, July, 1844. Allgemeine Literatuf-Zeitung (General Literary Gazette), a German monthly, was published by Bauer in Charlottenburg from December, 1843,to October, 1844.
3. Passages enclosed in brackets were crossed out by Marx in his manuscript.
4. The full title of this collection of articles is Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz (Twenty-One Sheets from Switzerland), Erster Teil, Ziirich and Winterthur, 1843.
5. Engels' "Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy."
6. Ludwig Feuerbach, Grundsatze der Philosophie der Zukunft (Principles of the Philosophy of the Future), Zurich and Winterthur, 1843.
7. Ludwig Feuerbach, Vorliiufige Thesen zur Reformation der Philosophie (Preliminary Theses on the Reformation of Philosophy) published in Anekdota, vol. II.
8. Marx's abbreviation for Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publicistik (Unpublished Materials Related to Modern German Philosophy and Writing), a two-volume collection published by Arnold Ruge in 'Switzerland. It included Marx's Notes on the Latest Prussian Instruction to Censors and Luther-the Arbiter Between Strauss and Feuerbach, and articles by Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, Friedrich Koppen, Arnold Ruge, etc.
9. Marx has in mind Hauer and his followers, who were associated with the
Allgemeine Lite,atur-Zeitung.
1. "Moment" is a technical term in Hegelian philosophy meaning a vital element of thought. The term is used to stress that thought is a process, and thus that elements in a system of thought are also phases in a movement.
2. In Hegel, "feeling" (Empfindung) denotes a relatively low form of mental life in which the subjective and the objective are still confused together "Consciousness" (Bewusstein)-the name given by Hegel to the first major section of his Phenomenology of Mind-denotes those forms of mental activity where a subject first seeks to comprehend an object. "Self-consciousness" and "mind" denote subsequent, higher phases in the evolution of "absolute knowledge" or "the absolute."
3. Die Entjremdete Arbeit. See the Note on Texts and Terminology. p. xli. above. for a discussion of this term. [R.T.]
4. "Alienation"- EntiiusseTung
5. "Species nature" (and, earlier, "species being")- Gattungswesen; "man's essential nature"- menschlichen Wesen.
6. At this point the first manuscript breaks off unfinished.
7. Prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer, and since it is a relationship in which falls not the prostitute alone, but also the one who prostitutes-and the latter's abomination is still greater-the capitalist, etc., also comes under this head. [Marx]
8. For this reason it is just as highly
priced as the determinations of human
essence and activities. [Marx]
9. In practice I can relate myself to a thing humanly only if the thing relates itself to the human being humanly. [Marx]
1. "Essential powers"-Wesenskrcijte: i.e., powers belonging to me as part of my essential nature, my very being.
2. Spontaneous generation.
3. Forces of human nature: menschlichen Wesenkraft; human nature: menschlichell Wesens.
4. James Mill, Elements of Political Economy.
5. In the manuscript the lower left corner of the page is torn off. Just the right-hand endings of the last six lines remain, making restorations of the text impossible. It is possible to surmise, however, that Marx here criticizes Hegel's idealistic "transcending" of estrangement ( the words that have survived are cited in the next footnote ) .
6. In "transcending" estrangement "in the old German manner-the manner
of the Hegelian phenomenology," i.e., in transcending it exclusively in the "consciousness" of the subject.
7. The bottom of the page is torn. Three or four lines are missing.
8. This word is illegible.
9. Goethe, Faust, ( Part I-Faust's (Penguin, 1949 ) , p.91. Study, III), translated by Philip Wayne
1. Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, Act 4, Scene 3. Marx quotes the Schlegel-Tieck German translation. ( Marx's emphasis .)
2. Ibid.
3. An end of the page is torn out of the manuscript.
( Robert C. Tucker )
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