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Analysis of Marx's "On the Jewish Question"

Marx's most explicit work on the subject of human rights is "On the Jewish Question" which appeared in 1844 in the "Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher". In this article, Marx takes a polemic against the ideas of his old friend and master Bruno Bauer, who had recently turned against the battle of German Jews for full citizenship rights, as has been the situation in France since Napoleon. Bauer's criticism of the Jewish citizen's rights campaign was based on the fact that as an emancipation movement it was not radical enough, in his opinion. According to Bauer... the people are guilty of a huge mistake in disconnecting the Jewish question from the general question of the time and [they] did not consider that not only the Jews, but also we want to be emancipated."


According to Bauer, the Jewish question was not settled with the offering of citizens' rights to the Jewish population since the roots of this question were very deep, notably in the (Jewish) religion itself. Only by giving up their faith and becoming atheists would Jews truly be able to emancipate themselves. According to Bauer, state and religion should be separated since political emancipation of Jews in a Christian state is per definition impossible.


In general, Marx agrees with Bauer's criticism of religion. However, he argues that human egoism in civil society, rather than religion - which he also finds repulsive - is the real obstacle to human emancipation in general and Jewish emancipation in particular. That is why, according to Marx, the separation of church and state, as Bauer advocates, is merely a cure of a symptom. 

Marx points in this connection to the United States: "Nevertheless, North America is pre-eminently the country of religiosity (...). Therefore we explain the religious limitations of the free citizens by their secular limitations. We do not assert that they must overcome their religious narrowness in order to get rid of their secular restrictions, we assert that they will overcome their religious narrowness once they get rid of their secular restrictions."


What are these "secular restrictions" that Marx argues have to be eliminated? It is the division between the state and civil society, which are respectively the domain of the public interest and the sphere of private interests. As a result, people live divided lives in two quite different worlds. On the one hand, they are state residents and as such serve the interests of the whole. On the other hand, they are bourgeois, members of a society where everyone pursues his or her own exclusive self-interest: "Where the political state has attained its true development, man - not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life- leads a twofold life, a heavenly and an earthly life: life in the political community, in which he considers himself a communal being, and life in civil society, in which he acts as a private individual, regards other men as a means, degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers."


In the civil society of his time Marx sees the modern variant of the Hobbesian state of nature. Civil society is a bellum omnium contra omnes in which man is intent on sustaining himself at the expense of others and is not ashamed of using himself and his fellow man as a tool to satisfy his own needs. 

In any case Marx – just as Kant – presumes that man must always be a Selbstzweck: an end in himself. It is precisely this principle of human dignity which suffers, according to him, in civil society. Civil society embodies therefore for Marx the negation of human dignity.

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