While in their own idiosyncratic way, some Young Hegelians briefly came to see themselves as Jacobins, the view that Germany was a belated nation condemned to undergo a derivative, ‘catch-up’ revolution was an anathema to them. One could say that they were patriots of a coming two-fold Franco-German republic. While they scorned the mythical Gothic past of the Romantics, they nonetheless all partook in a discourse of national exceptionalism according to which the current generation of German radicals was called upon to make penance for their country’s infamous role in defeating the French Revolution. On this point of honor, they would show their mettle by appropriating and working out the final consequences of the latest advances of Western European thought. The German critique of religious consciousness had adopted the old Voltairean motto écrasez l’infâme and was now eager to expand the war on theology to its political and social corollaries. But repeating the passage from Enlightenment to Revolution was understood to entail transcending the limits of the French Revolution, uprooting the obstacles of religion and atomistic egoism on which it had crashed. Young Hegelian Germany would be the standard bearer of an atheistic revelation, adorned with Saint-Simonian notions of social reconstruction.
The leading lights of this scene all sought to occupy the vantage point of the absolute critique of the status quo and the falsely conceived alternatives to it, resulting in some memorable sectarian polemics. This eagerness to draw the most radical conclusions, to break with views that one just upheld, led Marx to call into question the scenario of political emancipation as a gateway to social emancipation that he had just been working through in the context of his unfinished work on Hegel. After the failure of the Young Hegelians to galvanize the public with their manifestoes and editorials, Marx’s earlier mentor, the theologian Bruno Bauer abandoned in 1842 the cause of liberal political opposition to the Prussian state, and his essays, later published as a book, rejecting the symbolically highly charged demand for Jewish civic equality provoked a number of determined rejoinders from his former allies. Marx’s break with liberalism radically diverged from Bauer’s and came into extreme opposition to it.
“Real extremes cannot be mediated with each other precisely because they are real extremes.”
This dictum did not just apply to conflicts with a hated status quo but also to divisions emerging within the camp of opposition. Marx’s polemics within the disintegrating provincially German Young Hegelian scene established the mold of later relations with friends, allies, and enemies in the wider world of European politics.
Bruno Bauer held that an unenlightened Christian-German monarchy simply could not grant emancipation to religiously observant Jews, nor could the latter ever emancipate themselves as long as they remained in thrall to their old god, willfully separating themselves from their Gentile hosts. Marx retorted that Bauer remained within the horizon of the liberalism he professed to reject by conflating the abolition of feudal-era status and religious privileges– the civic republican ideal- with the overcoming of new social forms of unfreedom rooted in the laws of exchange. Bauer’s limited
“See Bruno Bauer, ‘1842’ [1844] and ‘Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand der Kritik’ [1844], in Streit Der Kritik Mit Den Modernen Gegensätzen: mit Beiträgen von Bruno Bauer, Edgar Bauer, Ernst Jungnitz, Zelige U.a., Charlottenburg 1847. Marx, ‘Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, in mecw vol. 3, New York 1975, p. 88″ theological form of criticism naively equated ‘human’- alternately ‘social’- emancipation with the establishment of a state in which the intelligentsia would be free from the tutelage of clerics and philistines. The liberation of an educated public sphere was the furthest point to which Bauer’s philosophy of self-consciousness could go. Against its ascetic ideal of the modern scholar-critic fighting heroic battles against an incorrigibly retrograde public- ‘the mass’- Marx proclaimed that only a humanism attuned to bodily need and suffering of ordinary people could lay bare the social basis of both religious alienation as well as its secular successor- the pseudo-community of modern citizenship. From the vantage of true human, more precisely social emancipation, political democracy could be seen as a sphere in which society only imagines itself as self-determining, a mystification corresponding to, yet concealing the subjection of the individual to new forms of socio-economic compulsion.
Europeans of republican convictions often regarded the United States of America as the long foretold republican Atlantis, an opinion which Bauer seems to have shared in part. Marx referred his former mentor back to Tocqueville’s characterizations of the God-fearing Americans. First-hand observation of life in America had revealed that religion and egoistic self-interest do not wither but, on the contrary, flourish when stripped of their legally privileged status, relegating them to the sphere of civil society where they become the generalized forms of consciousness of atomized competitors. Even in the most democratic modern republic, the real life of the individual would unfold in the miserable trenches of civil society, with collective politics of the citizen as an occasional diversion. Arguably, Marx was prophetic here in foreseeing that a democratic republic would turn out to be the best shell of bourgeois society, even though over most of this early period, he subscribed to the then more widely held view that universal suffrage would open the door to social revolution.
The stark contrast of political and human, alternately social emancipation that distinguishes the thesis of this essay from the argument he advanced in the manuscript of The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (which tended to see the second as continuation of the first) raised a new problem of the nature of the transitional period between the two. Did bourgeois-democracy represent an incomplete stage in the long transition from the utter bondage of Christian-feudalism to full human emancipation, or was it rather a new and higher stage of the alienation and self-mystification of man, an impasse and not a passageway to emancipation? The so-called Jewish question was not simply a matter of the legal status of a non-Christian people within a Christian polity, nor of the constitutional forms separating state from civil society. What was at stake was also the sequence of stages through which human emancipation had to pass.