1. BRUNO BAUER, Die Judenfrage (The Jewish Question
),
Brunswick 1843.
2. BRUNO BAUER, Die Fähigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen,
frei zu werden (The Capacity of Modern Jews and
Christians to
become free), Zurich 1843.
1. BRUNO BAUER, Die Judenfrage, Brunswick 1843.
The German Jews crave for emancipation. What emancipation do they
crave? Civic, political emancipation.
Bruno Bauer answers them: Nobody in Germany is politically
emancipated. We ourselves are unfree. How shall we liberate you? You
Jews are egoists, if you demand a special emancipation for yourselves
as Jews. As Germans you ought to labour for the political emancipation
of Germany, as men for human emancipation, and you ought to feel the
special nature of your oppression and your disgrace not as an exception
from the rule, but rather as its confirmation.
Or do Jews demand to be put on an equal footing with Christian
subjects? Then they recognize the Christian State as justified, then
they recognize the régime of general subjugation. Why are they
displeased at their special yoke, when the general yoke pleases them?
Why should Germans interest themselves in the emancipation of the Jews,
if Jews do not interest themselves in the emancipation of Germans?
The Christian State knows only privileges. In that State the Jew
possesses the privilege of being a Jew. As a Jew, he has rights which a
Christian has not. Why does he crave the rights which he has not, and
which Christians enjoy?
If the Jew wants to be emancipated from the Christian State, then he
should demand that the Christian State abandon its religious prejudice.
Will the Jew abandon his religious prejudice? Has he therefore the
right to demand of another this abdication of religion?
By its very nature the Christian State cannot emancipate the Jews;
but, adds Bauer, by his very nature the Jew cannot be emancipated.
So long as the State is Christian and the Jew is Jewish, both are
equally incapable of granting and receiving emancipation.
The Christian State can only behave towards the Jew in the manner of
a Christian State, that is in a privileged manner, by granting the
separation of the Jew from the other subjects, but causing him to feel
the pressure of the other separated spheres, and all the more onerously
inasmuch as the Jew is in religious antagonism to the dominant
religion. But the Jew also can only conduct himself towards the State
in a Jewish fashion, that is as a stranger, by opposing his chimerical
nationality to the real nationality, his illusory law to the real law,
by imagining that his separation from humanity is justified, by
abstaining on principle from all participation in the historical
movement, by waiting on a future which has nothing in common with the
general future of mankind, by regarding himself as a member of the
Jewish people and the Jewish people as the chosen people.
Upon what grounds therefore do you Jews crave emancipation? On
account of your religion? It is the mortal enemy of the State religion.
As citizens? There are no citizens in Germany. As men? You are as
little men as He on whom you called.
After giving a criticism of the previous positions and solutions of
the question, Bauer has freshly posited the question of Jewish
emancipation. How, he asks, are they constituted, the Jew to be
emancipated, and the Christian State which is to emancipate? He replies
by a criticism of the Jewish religion, he analyses the religious
antagonism between Judaism and Christianity, he explains the nature of
the Christian State, and all this with boldness, acuteness, spirit, and
thoroughness, in a style as precise as it is forcible and energetic.
How then does Bauer solve the Jewish question? What is the result?
The formulation of a question is its solution. The criticism of the
Jewish question is the answer to the Jewish question.
The summary is therefore as follows:
We must emancipate ourselves before we are able to emancipate
others.
The most rigid form of the antagonism between the Jew and the
Christian is the religious antagonism. How is this antagonism resolved?
By making it impossible. How is a religious antagonism made impossible?
By abolishing religion.
As soon as Jew and Christian recognize their respective religions as
different stages in the development of the human mind, as different
snake skins which history has cast off, and men as the snakes encased
therein, they stand no longer in a religious relationship, but in a
critical, a scientific, a human one. Science then constitutes their
unity. Antagonisms in science, however, are resolved by science itself.
The German Jew is particularly affected by the lack of political
emancipation in general and the pronounced Christianity of the State.
In Bauer's sense, however, the Jewish question has a general
significance independent of the specific German conditions.
It is the question of the relation of religion to the State, of the
contradiction between religious entanglement and political
emancipation. Emancipation from religion is posited as a condition,
both for the Jews, who desire to be politically emancipated, and for
the State, which shall emancipate and itself be emancipated.
“Good, you say, and the Jew says so too, the Jew also is not to be
emancipated as Jew, not because he is a Jew, not because he has such an
excellent, general, human principle of morality; the Jew will rather
retire behind the citizen and be a citizen, although he is a Jew and
wants to remain one: that is, he is and remains a Jew, in spite of the
fact that he is a citizen and lives in general human relationships: his
Jewish and limited nature always and eventually triumphs over his human
and political obligations. The prejudice remains in spite of the fact
that it has been outstripped by general principles. If, however, it
remains, it rather outstrips everything else.” “Only sophistically and
to outward seeming would the Jew be able to remain a Jew in civic life;
if he desired to remain a Jew, the mere semblance would therefore be
the essential thing and would triumph, that is, his life in the State
would be only a semblance or a passing exception to the rule and the
nature of things” (“The Capacity of modern Jews and Christians to
become free,” p. 57).
Let us see, on the other hand, how Bauer describes the task of the
State: “France has recently (proceedings of the Chamber of Deputies,
26th December 1840) in connection with the Jewish question—as
constantly in all other political questions—given us a glimpse of a
life which is free, but revokes its freedom in law, and therefore
asserts it to be a sham, and on the other hand contradicts its free law
by its act.” “The Jewish Question,” p. 64.
“General freedom is not yet legal in France, the Jewish question is
not yet solved, because legal freedom—that all citizens are equal—is
limited in practice, which is still dominated by religious privileges,
and this unfreedom in practice reacts on the law, compelling the latter
to sanction the division of nominally free citizens into oppressed and
oppressor,” p. 65.
When, therefore, would the Jewish problem be solved for France?
“The Jew, for instance, must cease to be a Jew if he will not allow
himself to be hindered by his law from fulfilling his duties towards
the State and his fellow-citizens, going, for example, to the Chamber
of Deputies on the Sabbath and taking part in the public sittings.
Every religious privilege, and consequently the monopoly of a
privileged Church, must be surrendered, and if few or many or even the
great majority believe they ought still to perform religious duties,
this performance must be left to themselves as a private matter,” p.
65. “When there is no longer a privileged religion, there will no
longer be a religion. Take from religion its excommunicating power, and
it exists no longer,” p. 66.
On the one hand, Bauer states that the Jew must abandon Judaism, and
that man must abandon religion, in order to be emancipated as a
citizen. On the other hand, he feels he is logical in interpreting the
political abolition of religion to mean the abolition of religion
altogether. The State, which presupposes religion, is as yet no true,
no real State. “At any rate the religious idea gives the State
guarantees. But what State? What kind of State?” p. 97.
At this point we are brought up against the one-sided conception of
the Jewish question.
It was by no means sufficient to inquire: Who shall emancipate? Who
shall be emancipated? Criticism had a third task to perform.
It had to ask: what kind of emancipation are we concerned with? Upon
what conditions is the desired emancipation based? The criticism of
political emancipation itself was only the eventual criticism of the
Jewish question and its true solution, in the “general question of the
time.”
Because Bauer does not raise the question to this level he falls
into contradictions. He posits conditions which are not involved in the
nature of political emancipation itself. He suggests questions which
his problem does not imply, and he solves problems which leave his
questions unsettled. Whereas Bauer says of the opponents of Jewish
emancipation: “Their mistake was that they assumed the Christian State
to be the only real State, and did not subject it to the same criticism
that they applied to Judaism,” we find Bauer's mistake to consist in
the fact that it is only the Christian State, and not the “general
State,” that he subjects to criticism, that he does not investigate the
relation of political emancipation to human emancipation, and
consequently lays down conditions which are only explicable from an
uncritical confusion of political emancipation with general human
emancipation.
When Bauer asks Jews: Have you the right from your standpoint to
crave political emancipation? we would inquire on the contrary: Has the
standpoint of political emancipation the right to demand of Jews the
abolition of Judaism, or from men generally the abolition of religion?
The complexion of the Jewish question changes according to the State
in which Jews find themselves. In Germany, where no political State, no
State as State exists, the Jewish question is a purely theological
question. The Jew finds himself in religious antagonism to the State,
which acknowledges Christianity as its basis. This State is theologian
ex professo. Here criticism is criticism of theology, is two-edged
criticism, criticism of Christian and criticism of Jewish theology. But
however critical we may be, we cannot get out of the theological
circle.
In France, in the constitutional State, the Jewish question is the
question of constitutionalism, of the incompleteness of political
emancipation. As the semblance of a State religion is there preserved,
although in a meaningless and self-contradictory formula, in the
formula of a religion of the majority, the relationship of Jews to the
State retains the semblance of a religious and theological antagonism.
It is only in the North American Free States—at least in part of
them—that the Jewish question loses its theological significance and
becomes a really secular question. Only where the political State
exists in its completeness can the relation of the Jew, of the
religious man generally, to the political State, and therefore the
relation of religion to the State, be studied in its special features
and its purity. The criticism of this relationship ceases to be
theological criticism when the State ceases to adopt a theological
attitude towards religion, when its attitude towards religion becomes
purely political. The criticism then becomes criticism of the political
State. At this point, where the question ceases to be theological,
Bauer's criticism ceases to be critical. In the United States there is
neither a State religion nor a religion declared to be that of the
majority, nor the predominance of one cult over another. The State is
alien to all cults. (Marie ou l'esclavage aux Etats-Unis, etc.,
by G. Beaumont, Paris 1835, p. 214.) There are even North American
States where “the constitution does not impose religious beliefs or the
practice of a cult as a condition of political privileges” (l. c. p.
225). Yet “nobody in the United States believes that a man without
religion might be an honest man” (l. c. p. 224). Yet North America is
pre-eminently the country of religiosity, as Beaumont, Tocqueville and
the Englishman Hamilton assure us with one voice. Meanwhile, the North
American States only serve us as an example. The question is: What is
the attitude of completed political emancipation towards religion? If
even in the country of completed political emancipation we find
religion not only existing, but in a fresh and vital state, it proves
that the existence of religion does not contradict the completeness of
the State. But as the existence of religion indicates the presence of a
defect, the source of this defect may only be looked for in the nature
of the State. We are no longer concerned with religion as the basis,
but only as the phenomenon of secular shortcomings. Consequently we
explain the religious handicap of the free citizens from their secular
handicap. We do not assert that they must remove their religious
handicap as soon as they cast off their secular fetters. We do not
transform secular questions into theological questions. We transform
theological questions into secular questions.
After history has for so long been dissolved in superstition, we
dissolve the superstition in history. The question of the relation of
political emancipation becomes for us the question of the relation of
political emancipation to human emancipation. We criticize the
religious weakness of the political State by criticizing the political
State in its secular construction, apart from the religious weaknesses.
We transmute the contradiction of the State with a specific religion,
like Judaism, into the contradiction of the State with specific secular
elements, and the contradiction of the State with religion generally
into the contradiction of the State with its general assumptions.
The political emancipation of the Jew, of the Christian, of the
religious man in general, means the emancipation of the State from
Judaism, from Christianity, from religion generally. In its form as
State, in the manner peculiar to its nature, the State emancipates
itself from religion by emancipating itself from the State religion,
that is, by the State as State acknowledging no religion.
Political emancipation from religion is not a thorough-going and
consistent emancipation from religion, because political emancipation
is not effectual and consistent human emancipation.
The limit of political emancipation is immediately seen to consist
in the fact that the State can cast off a fetter without men really
becoming free from it, that the State can become a free State without
men becoming free men. Bauer tacitly assents to this in laying down the
following condition for political emancipation. “Every religious
privilege, and therefore the monopoly of a privileged Church must be
surrendered, and if few or many or even the great majority believe they
ought still to perform religious duties, this performance must be left
to themselves as a private matter.” The State may therefore achieve
emancipation from religion, although the great majority are still
religious. And the great majority do not cease to be religious by being
religious privately.
The political elevation of the individual above religion shares all
the defects and all the advantages of political elevation generally.
For example, the State as State annuls private property, the individual
declares in a political manner that private property is abolished as
soon as he abolishes the census for active and passive eligibility,
which has been done in many North American States. Hamilton interprets
this fact quite correctly from the political standpoint: “The great
multitude has won the victory over the property owners and the monied
men.” Is not private property ideally abolished when the have-nots
become the legislators of the haves? The census is the last political
form to recognize private property.
Yet private property is not only not abolished with the political
annulment of private property, but is even implied therein. The State
abolishes in its fashion the distinctions of birth, status, education,
and occupation when it declares birth, status, education, and
occupation to be unpolitical distinctions, when, without taking account
of these distinctions, it calls upon every member of the community to
participate in the popular sovereignty on an equal footing, when it
deals with all the elements of the real popular life from the State's
point of view. Nevertheless the State leaves private property,
education, occupation operating in their own manner, that is, as
education, as occupation, and developing their potentialities.
From abolishing these actual distinctions, it rather exists only
upon their basis, and is conscious of being a political State and
enforcing its communal principle only in opposition to these its
elements. Consequently Hegel defines the relation of the political
State to religion quite correctly when he says: “If the State is to
have reality as the ethical, self-conscious realization of spirit, it
must be distinguished from the form of authority and faith. But this
distinction arises only in so far as the ecclesiastical side is in
itself divided into several churches. Then only is the State seen to be
superior to them, and wins and brings into existence the universality
of thought as the principle of its form.” (“Philosophy of Right,” Eng.
tr. p. 270.)
By its nature the completed political State is the generic life of
man in contradistinction to his material life. All the assumptions of
this egoistic life remain in existence outside the sphere of the State,
in bourgeois society, but as the peculiarities of bourgeois society.
Where the political State has attained its true development, the
individual leads not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality,
a double life, a heavenly and an earthly life, a life in the political
community, wherein he counts as a member of the community, and a life
in bourgeois society, wherein he is active as a private person,
regarding other men as a means, degrading himself into a means and
becoming a plaything of alien powers.
The political State is related to bourgeois society as
spiritualistically as heaven is to earth. It occupies the same position
of antagonism towards bourgeois society; it subdues the latter just as
religion overcomes the limitations of the profane world, that is, by
recognizing bourgeois society and allowing the latter to dominate it.
Man in his outermost reality, in bourgeois society, is a profane being.
Here, where he is a real individual for himself and others, he is an
untrue phenomenon.
In the State, on the other hand, where the individual is a generic
being, he is the imaginary member of an imagined sovereignty, he is
robbed of his real individual life and filled with an unreal
universality.
The conflict in which the individual as the professor of a
particular religion is involved with his citizenship, with other
individuals as members of the community, reduces itself to the secular
cleavage between the political State and bourgeois society.
For the individual as a bourgeois, “life in the State is only a
semblance, or a passing exception to the rule and the nature of
things.” In any case, the bourgeois, like the Jew, remains only
sophistically in political life, just as the citizen remains a Jew or a
bourgeois only sophistically; but this sophistry is not personal. It is
the sophistry of the political State itself. The difference between the
religious individual and the citizen is the difference between the
merchant and the citizen, between the labourer and the citizen, between
the landowner and the citizen, between the living individual and the
citizen. The contradiction in which the religious individual is
involved with the political individual is the same contradiction in
which the bourgeois is involved with the citizen, in which the member
of bourgeois society is involved with his political lionskin.
This secular conflict to which the Jewish question is finally
reduced, the relation of the political State to its fundamental
conditions, whether the latter be material elements, like private
property, etc., or spiritual elements, like education or religion, the
conflict between the general interest and the private interest, the
cleavage between the political State and bourgeois society—these
secular antagonisms are left unnoticed by Bauer, while he controverts
their religious expression. “It is precisely its foundation, the need
which assures to bourgeois society its existence and guarantees its
necessity, which exposes its existence to constant dangers, maintains
in it an uncertain element and converts the latter into a constantly
changing mixture of poverty and wealth, distress and prosperity,” p. 8.
Bourgeois society in its antagonism to the political State is
recognized as necessary, because the political State is recognized as
necessary.
Political emancipation at least represents important progress; while
not the last form of human emancipation generally, it is the last form
of human emancipation within the existing world order. It is understood
that we are speaking here of real, of practical emancipation.
The individual emancipates himself politically from religion by
banishing it from public right into private right. It is no longer the
spirit of the State, where the individual—although in a limited
manner, under a particular form and in a special sphere—behaves as a
generic being, in conjunction with other individuals; it has become the
spirit of bourgeois society, of the sphere of egoism, of the bellum
omnium contra omnes.[6] It is no longer the essence of the
community, but the essence of social distinctions.
It has become the expression of the separation of the individual
from his community, from himself and from other individuals—what it
was originally. It is only the abstract profession of special
perversity, of private whim. The infinite splitting-up of religion in
North America, for example, gives it outwardly the form of a purely
individual concern. It has been added to the heap of private interests,
and exiled from the community as community. But there is no
misunderstanding about the limits of political emancipation. The
division of the individual into a public and a private individual, the
expulsion of religion from the State into bourgeois society, is not a
step, it is the completion of political emancipation, which thus
neither abolishes nor seeks to abolish the real religiosity of the
individual.
The splitting-up of the individual into Jew and citizen, into
Protestant and citizen, into a religious person and citizen, this
decomposition does not belie citizenship; it is not a circumvention of
political emancipation; it is political emancipation itself, it is the
political manner of becoming emancipated from religion. Moreover, in
times when the political State as a political State is forcibly born of
bourgeois society, when human self-liberation strives to realize itself
under the form of political self-liberation, the State is driven the
whole length of abolishing, of destroying religion, but it also
proceeds to the abolition of private property, to the law of maximum,
to confiscation, to progressive taxation, just as it proceeds to the
abolition of life, to the guillotine. In the moment of its heightened
consciousness, the political life seeks to suppress its fundamental
conditions, bourgeois society and its elements, and to constitute
itself as the real and uncontradictory generic life of the individual.
It is, however, only enabled to do this by a flagrant violation of its
own conditions of life, by declaring the revolution to be permanent,
and the political drama therefore ends as inevitably with the
restoration of religion, of private property, and all the elements of
bourgeois society, as war ends with peace.
Why not even the so-called Christian State, which acknowledges
Christianity as its basis, as the State religion, and therefore adopts
a proscriptive attitude towards other religions is the completed
Christian State. The latter is rather the atheistic State, the
democratic State, the State which consigns religion among the other
elements of bourgeois society. The State which is still theological and
which still officially prescribes belief in Christianity, has not yet
succeeded in giving secular and human expression to those human
foundations whose exaggerated expression is Christianity. The so-called
Christian State is simply no State at all, because it is not
Christianity as a religion, but only the human background of the
Christian religion which can realize itself in actual human creations.
The so-called Christian State is the Christian denial of the State,
although it is not by any means the political realization of
Christianity. The State, which still professes Christianity in the form
of religion, does not yet profess it in the form of the State, for its
attitude towards religion is a religious attitude. It is not yet the
actual realization of the human basis of religion, because it still
operates upon the unreality, upon the imaginary shape of this human
kernel. The so-called Christian State is the incomplete State, and the
Christian religion is regarded by it as the complement and the
redemption of its imperfection. Consequently religion becomes its
instrument, and it is the State of hypocrisy. 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 completion. It can rather do without religion, because it
represents the realization of the human basis of religion in a secular
manner. The so-called Christian State, on the other hand, adopts a
political attitude towards religion and a religious attitude towards
politics. If it degrades the State form to the level of a fiction, it
equally degrades religion to a fiction.
In order to elucidate these antagonisms, let us consider Bauer's
construction of the Christian State, a construction which has proceeded
from contemplating the Christian-Germanic State.
Says Bauer: “In order to demonstrate the impossibility or the
non-existence of a Christian State, we are frequently referred to that
pronouncement in the Gospel which it not only does not follow, but
cannot follow without dissolving itself completely as a State.” “But
the question is not settled so easily. What then does this Gospel text
enjoin? Supernatural self-denial, subjection to the authority of
revelation, the turning away from the State, the abolition of secular
conditions. Now all this is enjoined and carried out by the Christian
State. It has absorbed the spirit of the Gospel, and if it does not
repeat it in the same words as the Gospel expresses it, the reason is
only because it expresses this spirit in the State form, that is, in
forms which are indeed derived from the State of this world, but which
are degraded to a sham in the religious rebirth which they have to
undergo.”
Bauer goes on to show how the people of the Christian State are only
a sham people, who no longer have any will of their own, but possess
their real existence in the chief to whom they are subject, but from
whom they were originally and naturally alien, as he was given to them
by God; how the laws of this people are not their creation, but
positive revelations; how their chief requires privileged mediators
with his own people, with the masses; how these masses themselves are
split up into a multitude of special circles, which are formed and
determined by chance, which are distinguished by their interests, their
particular passions and prejudices, and receive as a privilege
permission to make mutual compacts (p. 56).
The separation of the “spirit of the Gospel” from the “letter of the
Gospel” is an irreligious act. The State, which makes the Gospel speak
in the letter of politics, in other letters than those of the Holy
Spirit, commits a sacrilege if not in human eyes, at least in its own
religious eyes. The State, which acknowledges Christianity as its
supreme embodiment and the Bible as its charter, must be confronted
with the words of Holy Writ, for the writings are sacred to the letter.
The State lapses into a painful, and from the standpoint of the
religious consciousness, irresolvable contradiction, when it is pinned
down to that pronouncement of the Gospel, which it “not only does not
follow, but cannot follow without completely dissolving itself as a
State.” And why does it not want to completely dissolve itself? To this
question it can find no answer, either for itself or for others. In its
own consciousness the official Christian State is an Ought, which is
impossible of realization. Only by lies can it persuade itself of the
reality of its existence, and consequently it always remains for itself
an object of doubt, an unreliable and ambiguous object. The critic is
therefore quite justified in forcing the State, which appeals to the
Bible, into a condition of mental derangement where it no longer knows
whether it is a phantasm or a reality, where the infamy of its secular
objects, for which religion serves as a mantle, falls into irresolvable
conflict with the integrity of its religious consciousness, to which
religion appears as the object of the world. This State can only redeem
itself from its inner torment by becoming the hangman of the Catholic
Church. As against the latter, which declares the secular power to be
its serving body, the State is impotent. Impotent is the secular power
which claimed to be the rule of the religious spirit.
In the so-called Christian State it is true that alienation counts,
but not the individual. The only individual who counts, the king, is a
being specially distinguished from other individuals, who is also
religious and directly connected with heaven, with God. The relations
which here prevail are still relations of faith. The religious spirit
is therefore not yet really secularized.
Moreover, the religious spirit cannot be really secularized, for
what in fact is it but the unworldly form of a stage in the development
of the human mind? The religious spirit can only be realized in so far
as the stage of development of the human mind, whose religious
expression it is, emerges and constitutes itself in its secular form.
This is what happens in the democratic State. It is not Christianity,
but the human basis of Christianity which is the basis of this State.
Religion remains the ideal, unworldly consciousness of its members,
because it is the ideal form of the human stage of development which it
represents.
The members of the political State are religious by virtue of the
dualism between the individual life and the generic life, between the
life of bourgeois society and the political life; they are religious
inasmuch as the individual regards as his true life the political life
beyond his real individuality, in so far as religion is here the spirit
of bourgeois society, the expression of the separation and the
alienation of man from man. The political democracy is Christian to the
extent that it regards every individual as the sovereign, the supreme
being, but it means the individual in his uncultivated, unsocial
aspect, the individual in his fortuitous existence, the individual just
as he is, the individual as he is destroyed, lost, and alienated
through the whole organization of our society, as he is given under the
dominance of inhuman conditions and elements, in a word, the individual
who is not yet a real generic being.
The sovereignty of the individual, as an alien being distinguished
from the real individual, which is the chimera, the dream, and the
postulate of Christianity, is under democracy sensual reality, the
present, and the secular maximum.
The religious and theological consciousness itself is heightened and
accentuated under a completed democracy, because it is apparently
without political significance, without earthly aims, an affair of
misanthropic feeling, the expression of narrow-mindedness, the product
of caprice, because it is a really other-worldly life. Here
Christianity achieves the practical expression of its universal
religious significance, in that the most various philosophies are
marshalled in the form of Christianity, and, what is more, other
members of society are not required to subscribe to Christianity, but
to some kind of religion. The religious consciousness riots in the
wealth of religious antagonism and of religious variety.
We have therefore shown: Political emancipation from religion leaves
religion in existence, although not as a privileged religion. The
contradiction in which the supporter of a particular religion finds
himself involved with his citizenship, is only a part of the general
secular contradiction between the political State and bourgeois
society. The completion of the Christian State is the State which
professes to be a State and abstracts from the religion of its members.
The emancipation of the State from religion is not the emancipation of
the real individual from religion.
We do not therefore tell the Jews with Bauer: You cannot be
politically emancipated without radically emancipating yourselves from
Judaism. We tell them rather: Because you could be emancipated
politically without entirely breaking away from Judaism, political
emancipation is not human emancipation. If you Jews desire to be
politically emancipated without emancipating yourselves humanly, the
incompleteness, the contradiction, lies not only in you, but it also
resides in the essence and the category of political emancipation. If
you remain enmeshed in this category, you share in a general
disability.
But if the individual, although a Jew, can be politically
emancipated and receive civic rights, can he claim and receive the
so-called rights of man? Bauer denies it: “The question is whether the
Jew as such, that is the Jew who admits that by his very nature he is
compelled to live in everlasting separation from others, is capable of
receiving and conceding to others the general rights of man.”
“The idea of the rights of man was first discovered in the last
century so far as the Christian world is concerned. It is not innate in
the individual, it is rather conquered in the struggle with the
historical traditions in which the individual has hitherto been brought
up. Thus the rights of man are not a gift from Nature, not a legacy
from past history, but the price of the struggle against the accident
of birth and against the privileges which history has bequeathed from
generation to generation up to now. They are the result of education,
and can only be possessed by those who have acquired and earned them.”
“Can they really be claimed by the Jew? So long as he is a Jew, the
limiting quality which makes him a Jew must triumph over the human
quality which binds him as a man to other men, and must separate him
from gentiles. By this separation he proclaims that the special quality
which makes him a Jew is his real supreme quality, to which the human
quality must give place.”
“In the same manner the Christian as Christian cannot grant the
rights of man,” pp. 19, 20.
According to Bauer, the individual must sacrifice the “privilege of
faith” in order to be able to receive the general rights of man. Let us
consider for a moment the so-called rights of man, in fact the rights
of man in their authentic shape, in the shape which they possess among
their discoverers, the North Americans and the French. In part these
rights of man are political rights, rights which are only exercised in
the community with others. Participation in the affairs of the
community, in fact of the political community, forms their substance.
They come within the category of political freedom, of civil rights,
which does not, as we have seen, by any means presuppose the
unequivocal and positive abolition of religion, and therefore of
Judaism. It remains to consider the other aspect of human rights, the
droits de l'homme apart from the droits du citoyen.
Among them is to be found liberty of conscience, the right to
practise any cult to one's liking. The privilege of belief is expressly
recognized, either as a human right or as the consequence of a human
right, of freedom.
Declaration of the rights of man and of citizenship, 1791,
article 10:[7] No penalty should attach to the holding of
religious opinions. The right of every man to practise the religious
cult to which he is attached is guaranteed by clause 1 of the
Constitution of 1791.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc., 1793, includes among
human rights, article 7: The free practice of cults. With
respect to the right to publish ideas and opinions and to assemble for
the practice of a cult, it is even stated: The necessity for
enunciating these rights presupposes either the presence or the recent
memory of a despotism.
Constitution of Pennsylvania, article 9, paragraph 3: All
men have received from Nature the imprescriptible right to worship the
Almighty according to the dictates of their conscience, and nobody may
legally be constrained to follow, to institute, or to support, against
his will, any religious cult or ministry. In no case may any human
authority interfere in questions of conscience and control the
prerogatives of the soul.
Constitution of New Hampshire, articles 5 and 6: Among the
number of natural rights, some are inalienable by their nature, because
nothing can take their place. Such are the rights of conscience.
The incompatibility of religion with the rights of man is thus not
implied by the conception of the rights of man, because the right to be
religious, to be religious according to one's liking, to practise the
cult of a particular religion, is expressly included among the rights
of man. The privilege of faith is a general right of man.
The rights of man as such are distinguished from the rights of the
citizen. What is man apart from the citizen? Nothing else than a member
of bourgeois society. Why is the member of bourgeois society called
“man,” and why are his rights called the rights of man? How do we
explain this fact? From the relation of the political State to
bourgeois society, from the meaning of political emancipation.
Above all we must record the fact that the so-called rights of man,
as distinguished from the rights of the citizen, are nothing else than
the rights of the member of bourgeois society, that is of the egoistic
individual, of man separated from man and the community. The most
radical constitution, the Constitution of 1793, may be cited:
Declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen. Article 2.
These rights, etc. (natural and imprescriptible rights) are: equality,
liberty, security, property.
Of what consists liberty? Article 6. Liberty is the power which
belongs to man to do everything which does not injure the rights of
others.
Freedom is therefore the right to do and perform that which injures
none. The limits within which each may move without injuring others are
fixed by the law, as the boundary between two fields is fixed by the
fence. The freedom in question is the freedom of the individual as an
isolated atom thrown back upon itself. Why, according to Bauer, is the
Jew incapable of receiving the rights of man? “So long as he is a Jew,
the limiting quality which makes him a Jew must triumph over the human
quality which binds him as a man to other men, and must separate him
from gentiles.” But the right of man to freedom is not based upon the
connection of man with man, but rather on the separation of man from
man. It is the right to this separation, the right of the individual
limited to himself.
The practical application of the right of man to freedom is the
right of man to private property.
In what consists the right of man to private property?
Article 16 (Const. of 1793): The right to property is the right
of every citizen to enjoy and dispose of as he likes his goods, his
income, the fruit of his toil and of his industry.
The right of man to private property is therefore the right to enjoy
and dispose of his property, at his will and pleasure, without regard
for others, and independently of society: the right of self-interest.
Each particular individual freedom exercised in this way forms the
basis of bourgeois society. It leaves every man to find in other men
not the realization, but rather the limits of his freedom. But it
proclaims above all the right of man to enjoy and dispose of his
property, his income, and the fruit of his toil and his industry
according to his pleasure.
There still remain the other rights of man, equality and security.
Equality here in its non-political significance is nothing but the
equality of the above described liberty, viz.: every individual is
regarded as a uniform atom resting on its own bottom. Article 5 of the
Constitution of 1793 states: Equality consists in the fact that
the law is the same for all, whether it protects or whether it
punishes.
And security? Article 8 of the Constitution of 1793:
Security consists in the protection accorded by society to each of its
members for the preservation of his person, his rights, and his
property.
Security is the supreme social conception of bourgeois society, the
conception of the police, the idea that society as a whole only exists
to guarantee to each of its members the maintenance of his person, his
rights, and his property.
By the conception of security bourgeois society does not raise
itself above its egoism. Security is rather the confirmation of its
egoism.
None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, goes beyond the
egoistic individual, beyond the individual as a member of bourgeois
society, withdrawn into his private interests and separated from the
community. Far from regarding the individual as a generic being, the
generic life, Society itself, rather appears as an external frame for
the individual, as a limitation of his original independence. The sole
bond which connects him with his fellows is natural necessity, material
needs and private interest, the preservation of his property and his
egoistic person.
It is strange that a people who were just beginning to free
themselves, to break down all the barriers between the various members
of the community, to establish a political community, that such a
people should solemnly proclaim the justification of the egoistic
individual, separated from his fellows and from the community, and
should even repeat this declaration at a moment when the most heroic
sacrifice could alone save the nation and was therefore urgently
required, at a moment when the sacrifice of all interests of bourgeois
society was imperative, and egoism should have been punished as a
crime. This fact is even stranger when we behold the political
liberators degrading citizenship and the political community to the
level of a mere means for the maintenance of these so-called rights of
man, proclaiming the citizen to be the servant of the egoistic man,
degrading the sphere in which the individual behaves as a social being
below the sphere in which he behaves as a fractional being, and finally
accepting as the true proper man not the individual as citizen, but the
individual as bourgeois.
The aim of every political association is the preservation of the
natural and imprescriptible rights of man. (Declaration of the
rights, etc., of 1791, article 2.) The purpose of government is
to assure to man the enjoyment of his natural and imprescriptible
rights. (Declaration of 1793, art. 1.)
Thus even at the time when its enthusiasm was still fresh and kept
at boiling point by the pressure of circumstances, the political life
proclaimed itself to be a mere means whose end is the life of bourgeois
society.
It is true that its revolutionary practice was in flagrant
contradiction to its theory. While security, for example, was
proclaimed to be a right of man, the violation of the secrecy of
correspondence was publicly proposed.
While the indefinite liberty of the press (1793 Constitution, art.
122) was guaranteed as a consequence of the right of man to individual
liberty, the freedom of the press was completely destroyed, for liberty
of the press could not be permitted when it compromised public liberty.
(Robespierre jeune, “Parliamentary History of the French Revolution.”
Buchez et Roux, p. 135.) This means that the right of man to liberty
ceases to be a right as soon as it comes into conflict with the
political life, whereas, according to theory, the political life is
only the guarantee of the rights of man, and should therefore be
surrendered as soon as its object contradicts these rights of man. But
the practice is only the exception and the theory is the rule. If,
however, we regard the revolutionary practice as the correct position
of the relation, the riddle still remains to be solved, why the
relationship was inverted in the consciousness of the political
liberators, the end appearing as the means, and the means as the end.
This optical illusion of their consciousness would still be the same
riddle, although a psychological, a theoretical riddle.
The riddle admits of easy solution.
The political emancipation is at the same time the dissolution of
the old society, upon which was based the civic society, or the
rulership alienated from the people. The political revolution is the
revolution of bourgeois society. What was the character of the old
society? It can be described in one word. Feudality. The old civic
society had a directly political character, that is, the elements of
civic life, as for example property or the family, or the mode and kind
of labour, were raised to the level of elements of the community in the
form of landlordism, status, and corporation. In this form they
determined the relation of the individual to the community, that is his
political relation, his relationship of separation and exclusion from
the other constituent parts of society. For the latter organization of
popular life did not raise property or labour to the level of social
elements, but rather completed their separation from the political
whole and constituted them as special societies within society. Thus
the vital functions and vital conditions of society continued to be
political, although political in the sense of feudality, which means
that they excluded the individual from the political whole, and
transformed the special relation of his corporation to the political
whole into his own general relation to the popular life. As a
consequence of this organization, the political unity necessarily
appears as the consciousness, the will and the activity of the
political unity, and likewise the general State power as the special
concern of a ruler and his servants sundered from the people.
The political revolution, which overthrew this domination and raised
political affairs to the rank of popular affairs, which constituted the
political State as a general concern, that is as a real State,
necessarily shattered all Estates, corporations, guilds, privileges,
which were just so many expressions of the separation of the people
from their community. The political revolution thereby abolished the
political character of civic society.
It dissolved civic society into its elemental parts, on the one
hand, into the individuals, on the other hand, into the material and
spiritual elements, which formed the vital content, the civic situation
of these individuals. It released the political spirit, which was
imprisoned in fragments in the various blind alleys of the feudal
society; it collected all these dispersed parts of it, liberated it
from its entanglement with the civic life, and constituted it as the
sphere of the community, of the general popular concerns in ideal
independence from its particular elements of civic life. The specific
life activity and the specific life situation settled into a merely
general significance. They no longer formed the general relation of the
individual to the political whole. The public business as such became
rather the general business of every individual and the political
function became his general function.
But the completion of the idealism of the State was at the same time
the completion of the materialism of civic society.
The throwing off of the political yoke was at the same time the
throwing off of the bond which had curbed the egoistic spirit of civic
society. The political emancipation was at the same time the
emancipation of civic society from politics, from even the semblance of
a general content.
Feudal society was resolved into its basic elements, its individual
members. But into the individuals who really formed its basis, that is,
the egoistic individual.
This individual, the member of civic society, is now the basis, the
assumption of the political State. He is recognized as such in the
rights of man.
The liberty of the egoistic individual and the recognition of this
liberty are, however, tantamount to the recognition of the unbridled
movement of the intellectual and material elements which inform him.
The individual was therefore not liberated from religion; he
received religious freedom. He was not freed from property; he received
freedom of property. He was not freed from the egoism of industry; he
received industrial freedom.
The constitution of the political State and the dissolution of civic
society into independent individuals—whose relation is right, as the
relation of the members of Estates and of guilds was privilege—is
accomplished in one and the same act. But the individual as a member of
civic society, the unpolitical individual, necessarily appears as the
natural individual. The rights of man appear as natural rights, for the
self-conscious activity concentrates itself upon the political act. The
egoistic individual is the sediment of the dissolved society, the
object of immediate certitude, and therefore a natural object. The
political revolution dissolves the civic society into its constituent
parts without revolutionizing and subjecting to criticism those parts
themselves. It regards bourgeois society, the world of needs, of
labour, of private interests, as the foundation of its existence, as an
assumption needing no proof, and therefore as its natural basis.
Lastly, the individual as a member of bourgeois society counts as the
proper individual, as the man in contradistinction to the citizen,
because he is man in his sensual, individual, closest existence,
whereas political man is only the abstract, artificial individual, the
individual as an allegorical, moral person. The real man is only
recognized in the shape of the egoistic individual, the true man is
only recognized in the shape of the abstract citizen.
The abstraction of the political man was very well described by
Rousseau: He who dares undertake to give instructions to a nation
ought to feel himself capable as it were of changing human nature; of
transforming every individual who in himself is a complete and
independent whole into part of a greater whole, from which he receives
in some manner his life and his being; of altering man's constitution,
in order to strengthen it; of substituting a social and moral existence
for the independent and physical existence which we have all received
from nature. In a word, it is necessary to deprive man of his native
powers, in order to endow him with some which are alien to him, and of
which he cannot make use without the aid of other people.
All emancipation leads back to the human world, to relationships, to
men themselves.
Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one side, to
the member of bourgeois society, to the egoistic, independent
individual, on the other side, to the citizen, to the moral person.
Not until the real, individual man is identical with the citizen,
and has become a generic being in his empirical life, in his individual
work, in his individual relationships, not until man has recognized and
organized his own capacities as social capacities, and consequently the
social force is no longer divided by the political power, not until
then will human emancipation be achieved.
2. The Capacity of Modern Jews and Christians to become Free,
by BRUNO BAUER.
Under this form Bauer deals with the relation of the Jewish and
Christian religion, as well as with the relation of the same to
criticism. Its relation to criticism is its relation “to the capacity
to be free.”
It follows: “The Christian has only one stage to surmount, viz.: his
religion, in order to abolish religion generally,” and therefore to
become free. “The Jew, on the contrary, has to break not only with his
Jewish essence, but also with the development of the completion of his
religion, with a development that has remained alien to him” (p. 71).
Bauer therefore transforms here the question of Jewish emancipation
into a purely religious question. The theological scruple as to who
stood the most chance of being saved, Jew or Christian, is here
repeated in the enlightened form: which of the two is most capable of
emancipation? It is no longer a question of whether Judaism or
Christianity makes free? but rather on the contrary: which makes more
for freedom, the negation of Judaism or the negation of Christianity?
“If they wish to be free, Jews should be converted, not to
Christianity, but to Christianity in dissolution, to religion generally
in dissolution, that is to enlightenment, criticism and its results, to
free humanity,” p. 70.
It appears that Jews have still to be converted, but to Christianity
in dissolution, instead of to Christianity.
Bauer requires Jews to break with the essence of the Christian
religion, a requirement which, as he says himself, does not arise from
the development of Jewish essentials.
As Bauer had interpreted Judaism merely as a crude-religious
criticism of Christianity, and had therefore read “only” a religious
meaning into it, it was to be foreseen that the emancipation of the
Jews would be transformed into a philosophic-theological act.
Bauer conceives the ideal abstract being of the Jew, his religion as
his whole being. Consequently he correctly infers: “The Jew gives
mankind nothing, when he despises his narrow law, when he abolishes his
whole Judaism,” p. 65.
The relation of Jews and Christians is therefore as follows: the
sole interest of Christians in the emancipation of the Jews is a
general human, a theoretical interest. Judaism is a detrimental fact in
the religious eyes of Christians. As soon as their eyes cease to be
religious, this fact ceases to be detrimental. The emancipation of Jews
in itself is no work for Christians.
But in order to emancipate himself, the Jew has to undertake not
only his own work, but at the same time the work of the Christian, the
criticism of the synoptics, etc.
We will try to get rid of the theological conception of the
question. The question of the capacity of the Jews for emancipation is
from our standpoint transformed into the question, what particular
social element has to be overcome in order to abolish Judaism? For the
capacity for emancipation of the modern Jew is the relation of Judaism
to the emancipation of the modern world. This relation is necessarily
disclosed by the special position of Judaism in the modern subjugated
world.
Let us consider the real worldly Jews, not the Sabbath Jews, as
Bauer does, but the every-day Jews.
We will not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but we
will look for the secret of religion in the real Jew.
What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical needs, egoism.
What is the secular cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his
secular God? Money.
Very well. Emancipation from huckstering and from money, and
therefore from practical, real Judaism would be the self-emancipation
of our epoch.
An organization of society, which would abolish the fundamental
conditions of huckstering, and therefore the possibility of
huckstering, would render the Jew impossible. His religious
consciousness would dissolve like a mist in the real vital air of
society. On the other hand: if the Jew recognizes as valueless this his
practical essence, and labours for its abolition, he would work himself
free of his previous development, and labour for human emancipation
generally, turning against the supreme practical expression of human
self-alienation.
We therefore perceive in Judaism a general pervading anti-social
element, which has been carried to its highest point by the historical
development, in which Jews in this bad relation have zealously
co-operated, a point at which it must necessarily dissolve itself.
The emancipation of the Jews in its last significance is the
emancipation of mankind from Judaism.
The Jew has already emancipated himself in Jewish fashion. “The Jew
who in Vienna, for example, is only tolerated, determines by his
financial power the fate of the whole Empire. The Jew who may be
deprived of rights in the smallest German State, determines the fate of
Europe.”
“While the corporations and guilds excluded the Jew, the enterprise
of industry laughs at the obstinacy of the medieval institution.”
(Bauer, “The Jewish Question,” p. 14.)
This is no isolated fact. The Jew has emancipated himself in Jewish
fashion, not only by taking to himself financial power, but by virtue
of the fact that with and without his co-operation, money has become a
world power, and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical
spirit of Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves in so
far as Christians have become Jews.
“The pious and politically free inhabitant of New England,” relates
Colonel Hamilton, “is a kind of Laokoon, who does not make even the
slightest effort to free himself from the serpents which are throttling
him. Mammon is his god, he prays to him, not merely with his lips, but
with all the force of his body and mind.
“In his eyes, the world is nothing more than a Stock Exchange, and
he is convinced that here below he has no other destiny than to become
richer than his neighbours. When he travels, he carries his shop or his
counter on his back, so to speak, and talks of nothing but interest and
profit.”
The practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has
reached such a point in North America that the preaching of the Gospel
itself, the Christian ministry, has become an article of commerce, and
the bankrupt merchant takes to the Gospel, while the minister grown
rich goes into business.
“He whom you see at the head of a respectable congregation began as
a merchant; his business failing, he became a minister. The other
started his career in the ministry, but as soon as he had saved a sum
of money, he abandoned the pulpit for the counter. In the eyes of a
large number, the ministry is a commercial career.” Beaumont.
According to Bauer, to withhold political rights from the Jew in
theory, while in practice he wields enormous power, exercising
wholesale the influence he is forbidden to distribute in retail, is an
anomaly.
The contradiction between the practical, political power of the Jew
and his political rights is the contradiction between politics and
financial power generally. While the former is raised ideally above the
latter, it has in reality become its bond slave.
Judaism has persisted alongside of Christianity not only as
religious criticism of Christianity, not only as the embodiment of
doubt in the religious parentage of Christianity, but equally because
Judaism has maintained itself, and even received its supreme
development, in Christian society. The Jew who exists as a peculiar
member of bourgeois society, is only the particular expression of the
Judaism of bourgeois society.
Judaism has survived not in spite of, but by virtue of history.
Out of its own entrails, bourgeois society continually creates Jews.
What was the foundation of the Jewish religion? Practical needs,
egoism. Consequently the monotheism of the Jew is in reality the
polytheism of many needs. Practical needs or egoism are the principle
of bourgeois society, and they appear openly as such so soon as
bourgeois society gives birth to the political state. The God of
practical needs and egoism is money.
Money is the jealous God of Israel, by the side of which no other
god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man and converts them
into commodities. Money is the general and self-constituted value of
all things. Consequently it has robbed the whole world—the world of
mankind as well as Nature—of its peculiar value. Money is the being of
man's work and existence alienated from himself, and this alien being
rules him, and he prays to it.
The God of the Jews has secularized himself and become the universal
God. Exchange is the Jew's real God.
The conception of Nature which prevails under the rule of private
property and of money is the practical degradation of Nature, which
indeed exists in the Jewish religion, but only in imagination.
In this sense Thomas Münzer declared it to be intolerable “that all
creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in the water, the
birds in the air, the growths of the soil.”
What remains as the abstract part of the Jewish religion, contempt
for theory, for art, for history, for man as an end in himself, is the
real conscious standpoint and virtue of the monied man. The generic
relation itself—the relation of man to woman, etc., becomes an object
of commerce. Woman is bartered.
The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the
merchant, of the monied man generally.
The baseless law of the Jew is only the religious caricature of the
baseless morality and of right generally, of the merely formal
ceremonies which pervade the world of egoism.
Here also the highest relation of man is the legal relation—the
relation to laws which do not govern him because they are the laws of
his own will and being, but because they are imposed on him from
without. Any infraction thereof is punished.
Jewish Jesuitism, the same practical Jesuitism that Bauer infers
from the Talmud, is the relation of the world of egoism to the laws
which dominate it, and the cunning circumvention of which is the
supreme art of this world.
The movement of this world within its laws is necessarily a
continual abrogation of the law.
Judaism cannot develop any further as a religion, that is
theoretically, because the philosophy of practical needs is limited by
its nature and is exhausted in a few moves.
Judaism could create no new world; it could only draw the new world
creations and world relations within the orbit of its activity, because
the practical need whose rationale is egoism remains a passive state,
which does not extend itself by spontaneous act, but only expands with
the development of social conditions.
Judaism reaches its acme with the completion of bourgeois society,
but bourgeois society first completes itself in the Christian world.
Only under the reign of Christianity, which turns all national,
natural, moral and theoretical relations into relations external to
man, can bourgeois society separate itself entirely from the political
life, dissever all the generic ties of the individual, set egoism in
the place of these generic ties, and dissolve the human world into a
world of atomized, mutually hostile individuals.
Christianity sprang out of Judaism. It has again withdrawn into
Judaism.
The Christian from the outset was the theorizing Jew; the Jew is
therefore the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has
again become a Jew.
Christianity had only appeared to overcome Judaism. It was too
noble, too spiritual to abolish the crudeness of practical needs except
by elevation into the blue sky.
Christianity is the sublime idea of Judaism. Judaism is the common
application of Christianity, but this application could only become
general after Christianity had completed the alienation of man from
himself, and theoretically from Nature. Not until then could Judaism
attain to general domination and turn the alienated individual and
alienated Nature into alienable and saleable objects.
Just as the individual while he remained in the toils of religion
could only objectivize his being by turning it into a fantastic and
alien being, so under the domination of egoistic needs he can only
manifest himself in a practical way and only create practical objects
by placing both his products and his activity under the domination of
an alien being, and investing them with the significance of an alien
being—of money.
The Christian selfishness of bliss is necessarily transmuted in its
completed practice into the material selfishness of the Jew, heavenly
needs become earthly needs, and subjectivity becomes egoism. We do not
explain the Jew's tenacity from his religion, but rather from the human
basis of his religion, that is, practical needs, egoism.
Because the real essence of the Jew has been generally realized and
secularized in bourgeois society, the latter could not convince the Jew
of the unreality of his religious essence, which is merely the ideal
reflexion of his practical needs.
Consequently, it is not only in the Pentateuch or the Talmud, but
also in present-day society that we find the essence of the modern Jew;
not as an abstract, but as an extremely empirical being, not merely in
the form of the Jew's limitations, but in that of the Jewish
limitations of society.
As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of
Judaism, the huckster, and the conditions which produce him, the Jew
will become impossible, because his consciousness will no longer have a
corresponding object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, viz.:
practical needs, will have been humanized, because the conflict of the
individual sensual existence with the generic existence of the
individual will have been abolished.
The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society
from Judaism.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] The war of all against all.
[7] The italicized passages following are given in French in the
original.