404 THE CLASS STRUGGLE CONCERNING THE JEWISH QUESTION 405 isting between the bourgeois and the citizen, between the member of bourgeois society and his political lion skin.
This contradiction of secular life to which the Jewish question eventually reduces itself, the relation of the political state to its fundamentals (whether these be only material elements, such as private ownership, etc. or intellectual ones, like education and religion. the contradiction between the general good and private interest, the division between the political state and bourgeois society, these secular antitheses Bauer allows to persist, while he directs his attack upon their religious expression. The very foundation of bourgeois society, the end which insures its existence and guarantees its essentiality, exposes its existence to constant dangers, maintaining within that society an uncertain element and producing that constantly changing mix, ture of poverty and wealth, want and prosperity, in fact, all changes in general (p. Compare the entire section headed Bourgeois Society 9, which follows the outlines of the Hegelian philosophy of law. Bourgeois society in its opposition to the political state is recognized as necessary because the political state is recognized as necessary.
Political emancipation is certainly a great step in advance; it is not, to be sure, the last form of human emancipation altogether, but it is the last form of human emancipation within our traditional world order. It is understood of course that we are here speaking of real, practical emancipation.
Man emancipates himself politically from religion by relegating it from public to private jurisdiction. Religion is no longer the spirit of the state, in which man even though within narrow limits, under a particular form and in a particular sphere conducts himself as a generic being, in communion with others; it has become the spirit of bourgeois society, of the sphere of egoism, of the bellum omnium contra omnes. It is no longer the essence of communion, it is the essence of discrimination. It has come to be the expression of the separation of man from his communal existence, from himself and his fellows as it was originally. It is now only the abstract confession of individual perverseness, of personal caprice, of arbitrariness. The infinite dismemberment of religion in North America, for example, gives it even superficially the aspects of a purely individual affair. It is degraded to the mass of private interests and exiled from the community life as such. But we should have no illusions about the limits of political emancipation. The division of man into a public and a private being, the dislocation of religion from the state to bourgeois society, this is not a step, it is the complete extent of political emancipation, which is therefore as little destined to abolish the actual religiosity of man as it is desirous of doing so.
The analysis of man into the Jew and the citizen, the protestant and the citizen, the religious believer and the citizen, this analysis is not a fraud upon citizenship, it is not a circumvention of political emancipation, it is political emancipation itself, it is the political manner of effecting the emancipaton from religion. Granted, that at times of the violent birth of the political state out of a bourgeois society, when human self liberation strives to come about by the method of political self liberation, the state can and must proceed to the abolition of religion, to the annihilation of religion, but only as it proceeds to the abolition of private ownership, to the maximum, to confiscation, to the progressive tax, as it proceeds to the repudiation of life, to the guillotine. In moments of particular consciousness of strength the political life seeks to crush its foundation bourgeois society and its elements and to constitute itself as the real, non contradictory generic life of man. This, however, it is able to do only through violent contradiction of its own conditions of life, only by declaring the Revolution as permanent. hence the political drama just as inevitably ends in the reestablishment of religion, of private ownership, of all the elements of bourgeois society, as war ends in peace.
Indeed, not the so called Christian state, which professes Christianity as its foundation, as the state religion, and hence maintains an attitude of exclusion toward other religions, is the consummate Christian state, but rather the atheistic state, the democratic state, the state that assigns to religion a place among the other elements of bourgeois society. The state which is still steeped in theology, which still officially confesses the Christian faith, which does not yet dare to proclaim itself as a state, that state simply has not yet succeeded in expressing in secular, human form, in its reality as a state, the human basis of which Christianity is the transcendent expression. The so called Christian state is simply the non state, for not Christianity as a religion but only the human background of the Christian religion is capable of materializing itself in the shape of real human creations.
The so called Christian state is the Christian negation of the state and by no means the fulfillment of Christianity in the form of the state. The state which still professes Christianity