Soc 50

5/29/1998

Notes for "On the Jewish Question"

Though the title of this essay suggest that Marx is here concerned with religion, in fact, this is Marx's (probably) most important essay on the French Revolution.

Marx argues that modern man (where the issues of the French Rev - the Rights of Man - have been instituted) lives a peculiarly double life: that of citizen in the communal political community and that of private individual in the vicious battleground of competing interests in civil society.

In the state or political community, all distinctions based on birth, rank, education, and occupation are abolished - everyone is equal before the law of the state, can vote, etc.

This represents great progress over the feudal structures, but it is only political emancipation and not human emancipation (just the final form of human emancipation within the framework of the prevailing social order.

Though these distinctions are eliminated in political life, they continue in their particular natures in civil society. Here, birth, rank, religion, and education remain exceedingly important.

Marx makes a nice analogy here: Heaven is to earth as political society is to civil society. That is, using the terms from The Communist Manifesto, political society is the ideal, while civil society is the material. Political emancipation cannot be complete human emancipation because it has not yet taken place in the material world of civil society.

As you should recall, it is the material, the mode of production, that drives the ideas of the political system.

Marx notes that the precedence of man in civil society (material) over man in political society is seen in the fact that the Rights of Man are called this instead of the rights of the citizen.

In fact, the Rights of Man are really nothing more than the rights of a member of civil society (bourgeois).

The right to liberty is founded on the separation of man from man and is really just the right of such separation, the right of circumscribed individuals.

The right to property is nothing more than the right to self-interest- "thus men see in other men the limitation of their own liberty.

The right to equality just means that men are equal before the law - that every man is equally regarded as a "self-sufficient monad."

The right to security is just the necessity for police and the assurance of man's egoism.

 It is only with the end of bourgeois society and the establishment of communism that we can shed all of our particular interests and recognize our commonalties.