400 401 THE CLASS STRUGGLE CONCERNING THE JEWISH QUESTION man.
its peculiarity. The criticism of this relation ceases to be theological criticism as soon as the state ceases to take a theological attitude toward religion, as soon as it assumes the attitude of the state, that is, a political attitude, toward religion. This criticism then becomes criticism of the political state. At this point, where the question ceases to be theological, Bauer criticism ceases to be critical. Il existe aux Etats Unis ni religion de etat, ni religion déclaree celle de la majorite, ne preeminence un culte nur un antre. etat est estranger a tous les cultes. Marie ou esclavage aux Etats Unis, etc. par de Beaumont, Paris, 1835, 214. There are even some North American states in which la constitution impose pas les croyances religieuses et la pratique un culte comme condition des privileges solitiques (i. 225. Nevertheless on ne croit pas aux Etas Unis qu un homme sans religion puisse etre un honnete homme (1. 224. Nevertheless, America is by preference the land of religiosity, as Beaumont, Tocqueville, and the Englishman Hamilton assure us with one accord. However, the North American states interest us only as an illustration.
The question is, what is the relation of complete political emancipation to religion? If we find even in the land of complete political emancipation not only the existence but the strong and thriving existence of religion, that is proof that the presence of religion is not incompatible with the perfection of the state.
But since the existence of religion connotes the existence of a failing, the source of this failing must be sought in the nature of the state itself. Religion no longer appears to us as the cause but merely as the expression of secular prejudice. We therefore explain the religious prepossession of the free citizen through his secular prepossession. We do not maintain that men must give up their religious bias in order to do away with their secular prejudice. We maintain that they will put aside their religious bias as soon as they put aside their secular prejudice.
We do not transform the secular questions into theological ones, We transform the theological questions into secular ones. Since history has been long enough merged in superstition, we are merging superstition in history. The question of the relation of political emancipation to religon becomes for us the question of the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation.
We criticize the religious weakness of the political state by criticizing the political state, aside from its religious failings, in the light of its secular construction. The contradiction between the state and a certain religion, say Judaism, we convert into a human problem the contradiction between the state and certain secular elements, between the state and religion as a whole, the contradiction between the state and all of its basic assumptions.
The political emancipation of the Jew, of the Christian, of men in general as followers of religion, implies the emancipation of the state from Judaism, from Christianity, from all religion. In its own form, in the manner peculiar to its nature, as a state, the state emancipates itself from religion by emancipating itself from state religion, that is, by professing no religion as a state but rather professing itself as a state. Political emancipation from religion is not the complete, the noncontradictory emancipation from religion, because political emancipation is not the complete, the non contradictory mode of human emancipation.
The limits of political emancipation are at once apparent when we consider that a state may free itself from a restraint without the individual really becoming free from it, that the state may be a free state and the individual still not be a free Bauer himself tacitly admits this when he makes political emancipation dependent upon the following principle. Every religious privilege, including therefore the monopoly of a privileged church, would have to be abolished; and if a few, or a larger number, or even the majority should still feel constrained to fulfill certain religious obligations, this observance would have to be left to them individually as a purely personal matter. Thus the state may have emancipated itself from religion while the great majority is still religious. And the great majority does not cease being religious by being religious privately.
But the attitude of the state toward religion, particularly the attitude of the free state, is in reality only the attitude of the people comprising the state toward religion. Hence it follows that the individual frees himself from a restraint through the medium of the state, politically frees himself, by raising er partially above this restraint. Furthermore, it follows that himself in a self contradictory, in an abstract and limited manin freeing himself politically the individual frees himself indirectly, through a medium, even though a necessary medium, Finally it follows that the individual, even if, through the medium of the state, he proclaims himself an Atheist, which is as much as to say if he proclaims the state atheistical, still retains the religious bias, for the very reason that only indirectly, only through a medium does he acknowledge himself. For religion is simply the recognition of the individual indirectly, through a mediator. The state is the mediator between men and the free