Week Two
Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question”
Karl Marx has affected more human lives than has any other philosopher. He transposed Hegel’s dialectic into the key of economic materialism, following-out the socialist logic of the French Revolution in terms of the non-political requisites of emancipation and resolving into atheism its component tendency to identify Catholicism (and revealed religion in general) with reaction against rationalist emancipation. The Industrial Revolution brought the potencies of the Scientific Revolution into massive realization, changing the conditions of life totally. Medieval otherworldliness became generally incredible, but the alienation of the new conditions of existence called for a new kind of hope. Marx came preaching a kingdom of social equality: the immiseration of the proletariat in capitalism would become so intolerable as inevitably to cause the final revolution, resulting in a post-political communist paradise. Born in 1818, in what is now Trier, Germany, Marx descended from rabbis, but his father converted to Protestant Christianity because that was necessary to work as a lawyer in the Rhineland. The Jews had been emancipated (granted equal civil status) in the wake of Napoleon, but that gain was reversed in certain German states after the Congress of Vienna (1815).
“Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to a man himself.”
While studying law at the University of Berlin, Marx became interested in Hegel’s philosophy, joining in with the Young, or left, Hegelians, including Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer. As opposed to the Old, or right, Hegelians, who believed the dialectical process had culminated in the Prussian state and were more religiously conservative, the Young employed the dialectical method to catalyze political liberalization and attacked religion as prop of retrograde politics. Marx moved to Paris in 1843, becoming friends with Friedrich Engels. Their Communist Manifesto appeared in 1848. Marx moved to London in 1849, and would live there till his death in 1883.
The Davenant Institute on the key to Martin Luther’s theology, and view of eternal life.
In our selection, Marx responds to a book by Bauer. “The Jewish question” would eventually be taken over by anti-Semitism (even unto the horror of the Nazi “Final Solution”), but at first it was a way of describing the problematic of Jewish civil disabilities in the context of Enlightenment toleration, Revolutionary assertion of the universalism of human rights, and the rising fervor of nationalism—though also sometimes already a way of stigmatizing perceived Jewish singularity in a time of increasing conformism. Marx does not really have a politics—or, perhaps, here we have the supreme reduction of politics to economics, of the political to the social. Unfortunately, when Marxist revolutionaries took control of states, they wielded that state power to violently remake the social: totalitarianism. Be that as it may, there has been no more effective critique of liberalism than Marx’s. Reading Capital, you feel the prophetic fire in the words: Marx revolts against human misery.