KARL MARX

7 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
Marx had brought with him from Kreuznach an essay entitled 'On the
Jewish Question', a distillation of his reading the previous summer on
France and America. His central problem was still the contemporary
separation of the state from civil society and the consequent failure of
liberal politics to solve social questions. The question of Jewish emancipation
was now of general interest in Prussia where, since 1816, the Jews
had enjoyed rights far inferior to those of Christians. Marx himself had
been thinking about this issue for some time. As early as August 1842 he
had asked Oppenheim to send him all the anti-semitic articles of Hermes,
editor of the Kolnische Zeitung, who favoured a sort of apartheid for Jews
in Germany. Marx made little use of this material but in November 1842
Bauer published a series of articles on the problem in Ruge's Deutsche
Jahrhiicher. Marx considered that Bauer's view were 'too abstract', 42 and
decided that a lengthy review would be a convenient peg on which to
hang his criticism of the liberal state. In his articles Bauer had claimed
that, in order to be able to live together, both Jews and Christians had
to renounce what separated them. Neither Christians nor Jews as such
could have human rights: so it was not only Jews but all men who needed
emancipation. Civil rights were inconceivable under an absolute system.
Religious prejudice and religious separation would vanish when civil and
political castes and privileges were done away with and all men enjoyed
equal rights in a liberal, secular state.
Marx welcomed Bauer's critique of the Christian state, but attacked
him for not calling into question the state as such - and thus failing to
examine the relationship of political emancipation (that is, the granting
of political rights) to human emancipation (the emancipation of man in
all his faculties). Society could not be cured of its ills simply by emancipating
the political sphere from religious influence. Marx quoted several
authorities to show the extent of religious practice in North America and
went on:
The fact that even in the land of complete political emancipation we
find not only the existence of religion but its living existence full of
freshness and strength, demonstrates that the continuance of religion
does not conflict with or impede the perfection of the state. But since
the existence of religion entails the existence of a defect, the source of
this defect can only be sought in the nature of the state itself. On this
view, religion no longer has the force of a basis for secular deficiencies
but only a symptom. Therefore we explain the religious prejudice of
free citizens by their secular prejudice. We do not insist that they
abolish their religious constraint in order to abolish secular constraints:
we insist that they abolish their religious constraints as soon as they
have abolished their secular constraints. We do not change secular