In this text Marx begins to make clear the distance between himself and his radical liberal colleagues

among the Young Hegelians; in particular Bruno Bauer. Bauer had recently written against Jewish
emancipation, from an atheist perspective, arguing that the religion of both Jews and Christians was
a barrier to emancipation. In responding to Bauer, Marx makes one of the most enduring arguments
from his early writings, by means of introducing a distinction between political emancipation
essentially the grant of liberal rights and liberties and human emancipation.
The essay is a response to Bruno Bauer - note the additional quote marks in the title. Bauer is
responding to demands for emancipation of Germany's Jews from the various legal restrictions they
were subject to. Bauer has two objections. First, he says, there are no citizens in Germany, only
different classes of subjects with their own distinct privileges and assigned roles. Jews have one set,
Christians have another, but no one is free. Second, even if freedom were possible in Germany, Jews
could only become citizens if they were willing to limit their Jewisness to private life -- no special
accomodations for religious observance, no maintaining their own institutions. "The Jew must retreat
behind the citizen." Bauer argued that Jews could achieve political emancipation only by
relinquishing their particular religious consciousness, since political emancipation requires a secular
state, which he assumes does not leave any "space" for social identities such as religion.
Marx replies: (Marks kae da Bauer postavlja pogrena pitanja) All that is true as far as it goes. But
that only shows the limitations of the liberal conception of freedom. It is true, as Bauer says, that
political emancipation requires the Jews (like everyone else) to make their religion a purely private
matter, but all that shows is how far short political emancipation falls of human emancipation.
In Marx's view, Bauer fails to distinguish between political emancipation and human emancipation.
As noted above, political emancipation in a modern state does not require the Jews (or, for that
matter, the Christians) to renounce religion; only complete human emancipation would involve the
disappearance of religion, but that is not yet possible "within the hitherto existing world order".
Marx's reply to Bauer is that political emancipation is perfectly compatible with the continued
existence of religion, as the contemporary example of the United States demonstrates. However,
pushing matters deeper, in an argument reinvented by innumerable critics of liberalism, Marx argues
that not only is political emancipation insufficient to bring about human emancipation, it is in some
sense also a barrier. Liberal rights and ideas of justice are premised on the idea that each of us needs
protection from other human beings. Therefore liberal rights are rights of separation, designed to
protect us from such perceived threats. Freedom on such a view, is freedom from interference. What
this view overlooks is the possibility for Marx, the fact that real freedom is to be found
positively in our relations with other people. It is to be found in human community, not in isolation.
So insisting on a regime of rights encourages us to view each other in ways which undermine the
possibility of the real freedom we may find in human emancipation. Now we should be clear that
Marx does not oppose political emancipation, for he sees that liberalism is a great improvement on
the systems of prejudice and discrimination which existed in the Germany of his day. Nevertheless,
such politically emancipated liberalism must be transcended on the route to genuine human
emancipation.
Human emancipation would recognize that we exist only in relation to myriad other people, and in
these relationships we are conscious, moral, rational beings, making choices about our collective
lives. Political emancipation, by contrast, isolates our conscious collective life in the political sphere,
leaving us disconnected egoists in our private life. (TO JE RAZLIKA IZMEDJU POLITIKE ZAJEDNICE I
GRADJANSKOG DRUTVA)
Where the political state has attained its true development, man ... 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 his most immediate
reality, in civil society, man is a secular being. Here, where he regards himself as a real individual, and
is so regarded by others, he is a fictitious phenomenon. In the state, on the other hand, where man is
regarded as a species-being, he is the imaginary member of an illusory sovereignty, is deprived of his
real individual life and endowed with an unreal universality.
Political emancipation allows people to participate in collective decision-making but only on
condition that they give up or deny any concrete, organic identity or connections they have beyond
abstract citizenship. While in private life people are free to be really ourselves, but disconnected
from the society we continue to depend on, we experience this freedom as being "the plaything of
alien powers."
This connects directly back to the Jewish Question: Judaism is the kind of community or collective
identity that people must give up to become citizens in the liberal state. Or rather, pretend to give
up:
Man, as the adherent of a particular religion, finds himself in conflict with his citizenship and with
other men as members of the community. This conflict reduces itself to the secular division between
the political state and civil society. For man as a bourgeois, life in the state is only a semblance or
a temporary exception to the essential and the rule. Of course, the bourgeois, like the Jew, remains
only sophistically in the sphere of political life, just as the citoyen only sophistically remains a Jew or a
bourgeois. But, this sophistry is not personal. It is the sophistry of the political state itself. The
difference between the merchant and the citizen, between the day-laborer and the citizen, between
the landowner and the citizen, between the merchant and the citizen, between the living individual
and the citizen. The contradiction in which the religious man finds himself with the political man is
the same contradiction in which the bourgeois finds himself with the citoyen, and the member of civil
society with his political lions skin.
While liberal political life is organized on the principle of reasoned debate between disinterested
equals, it is not actually the case that inequality and particular interests disappear. One important
thing to note in this passage: Here, as elsewhere, Jewishness is only one of various examples of a
particular identity. Which should make clear: This is an essay about the limits of political freedom in
the liberal state, not an essay about Jews. It's an essay about "The Jewish Question," not about the
Jewish Question.

So: Under the bourgeois state (of which Marx already recognizes the northern US as offering the
purest example) religion goes from being the most public question, to the most private. "Religion ...
is no longer the essence of community, but ... the expression of man's separation from his
community ... It is only the abstract avowal of specific perversity, private whimsy, and arbitrariness."
It is, in short, now just a matter of taste.

In the private sphere we are all just automatic pleasure-and-pain machines; our capacity for moral
and rational action is limited to the political sphere. Just look at the distinction the French Revolution
made between the "rights of the citizen" and the "rights of man":
The rights of man, ... as distinct from the rights of the citizen, are nothing but the rights of a member
of civil society, the rights of egoistic man, separated from other men and from the community. ... It is
the question of the liberty of man as an isolated monad. ... The rights of man appear as "natural"
rights because conscious activity is concentrated on the political act. ... Political emancipation is the
reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent
individual, and on the other, to a citizen, a juridical person.
Economics, perhaps even more than other social sciences, has taken this distinction and made it
doctrine. A core methodological assumption of economics is that private choices are purely arbitrary,
they are given natural facts. We can't discuss them, debate them, subject them to reason: De
gustibus non est disputandum. In private life, we are animals or not even, we are mechanical objects.
Where economics poses a choice, it is invariably: What should the State do?

There is a more direct connection with economics, too. While individuals in civil society are
conceived of as monads, they do still relate to each other, through the medium of property. Marx:

The practical application of man's right to liberty is man's right to private property ..., the right to
enjoy one's property ... without regard to other men, independently of society, the right of self-
interest. This individual liberty ... makes every man see in other men not the realization of his own
freedom, but the barrier to it.
Social life, to take another tack, is a series of hugely complicated coordination problems. When these
problems are solved through norms or tradition, or through rational debate, we experience their
resolution as freedom. We see ourselves doing what is right, because it is right. When they are solved
by markets or other forms of coercion, we experience unfreedom. One person decides and the rest
of us comply.

At the start of the essay, Marx poses the question: "Does the standpoint of political emancipation
give the right to demand from the Jew the abolition of Judaism?" Here towards the end, it's clear
that Marx's answer is, No. A democratic politics that allows us to act as rational beings only by
denying our particular identities is no true democracy. And a private life that allows us our
individuality only as arbitrary personal tastes, and in which have no organic ties or moral duties to
anyone else, offers no true freedom. Marx does hope and expect that Judaism, like all religions, will
eventually disappear. But that's only possible once the separation of political life and civil society has
been transcended. We will be able to dispense with religion only once we are able to act as moral
agents in our daily lives. Or as he says:

Only when the real, individual man reabsorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual
human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, and in his particular situation, only
when man has recognized and organized his own powers and, consequently, no longer separates
power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been
accomplished.
In the second part of the essay, Marx disputes Bauer's "theological" analysis of Judaism and its
relation to Christianity. Bauer has stated that the renouncing of religion would be especially difficult
for Jews, because Judaism is, in his view, a primitive stage in the development of Christianity. Hence,
to achieve freedom by renouncing religion, the Christians would have to surmount only one stage,
whereas the Jews would need to surmount two. In response to this, Marx argues that the Jewish
religion does not need to be attached to the significance it has in Bauer's analysis, because it is only a
spiritual reflection of Jewish economic life. This is the starting point of a complex and somewhat
metaphorical argument which draws on the stereotype of the Jew as a financially apt "huckster" and
posits a special connection between Judaism as a religion and the economy of contemporary
bourgeois society. Thus, the Jewish religion does not need to disappear in society, as Bauer argues,
because it is actually a natural part of it. Having thus figuratively equated "practical Judaism" and
"huckstering", Marx concludes, that "the Christians have become Jews"; and, ultimately, it is
mankind (both Christians and Jews
[8]
) that needs to emancipate itself from ("practical")
Judaism.
[9]
Quotes from this part of the essay are frequently cited as proof of Marx' antisemitism.
For analyses, see the Interpretations section.