402 THE CLASS STRUGGLE CONCERNING THE JEWISH QUESTION 403 dom of men. Just as Christ is the mediator upon whom men impose the whole burden of their religious prepossession, so the state is the mediator that is made to bear all their irreligion, all their human freedom from bias, The political exaltation of men above religion partakes of all the failings and all the advantages of political exaltation in general. The state as a state for example annuls private ownership, and men by political means declare private ownership void, as soon as they abolish the property qualification for suffrage as has happened in many North American states.
Hamilton interprets this fact from the political point of view quite correctly when he says, The great mass of people has triumphed over the property owners and over wealth. Is not private ownership ideally abolished when the unpropertied man has become the law giver of the propertied man? The property qualification is the last political form of recognizing private ownership.
Yet with the political annullment of private ownership, private ownership is not only not abolished but even presupposed. The state does away with the differences of birth, rank, education, occupation in a way by declaring them to be unpolitical differences, by proclaiming every member of the people an equal participant in the popular sovereignty, by treating all elements of the real national life from the state point of view.
Nevertheless the state allows private ownership, education, occupation to work in their way, that is, as private ownership, as education, as occupation, and to assert their particular character. Far from abolishing these actual differences, it rather exists only by presupposing them, regards itself as the political state and asserts its general function only in opposition to these its elements. Hegel determines the relation of the political state to religion quite correctly, therefore, when he says: In order that the state as the self conscious ethical reality of the spirit may come into being, it is necessary to differentiate it from the form of authority and of faith; but this differentiation is evident only in so far as this formal side organized religion accomplishes a separation within itself; only in this way, by subordinating the different churches, has the state attained universality of thought, which is the principle of its form, and brought it into existence. Hegel Philosophy of Law, 2nd ed. 346. True! Only in this way, over its different elements, does the state constitute itself as a universal, all transcending institution.
The perfected political state represents by nature the generic life of man. that is, the wider life of the human race, of humanity) in opposition to and transcending his material life.
All the institutions implied under the latter, egoistic life persist outside the sphere of the state in bourgeois society. but as characteristics of bourgeois society. Wherever the political state has attained its true development, man, not alone mentally, in his consciousness, but in reality, in actual life, leads a double existence, an ethereal and a mundane life, the life of the political community, in which he regards himself as a community being, and the life of bourgeois society, in which he moves and acts as a private person, regarding the rest of the people as means to an end and in turn degrading himself to a mean and becoming a pawn in the game of strange forces. The political state stands in as spiritual a relation to bourgeois society as heaven to earth. It is opposed to this society in the same way, overcomes it in the same way as religion is respectively related to the prepossessions of the profane world, that is, by likewise being compelled to recognize the institution it is supposed to transcend, build it up, and permit itself to be dominated by it in turn. Man in his immediate real surroundings, in bourgeois society, is a profane being. Here, where he regards himself and is regarded as a real individual, he is a true phenomenon. In the state, on the other hand, where man is regarded as a generic being, he is the imaginary member of an imagined sovereignty, he is robbed of his real individual life and filled with an unreal universality.
The conflict in which man as the adherent of a particular religion finds himself with his civic life, with his fellows as members of the community, reduces itself to the secular separation between the political state and bourgeois society. For man as a bourgeois his life in the state is a mere form, or a momentary exception to the real essential and the rule. It is true, the bourgeois, like the Jew, only sophistically maintains a place in the life of the state, just as the citizen 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 of religious man and man the citizen is the difference of the merchant and the citizen, of the day laborer and the citizen, of the landholder and the citizen, of the active individual and the citizen. The contradiction which exists between man religious self and his political self is the same contradiction ex The expression bourgeois throughout this article refers simply to man in the sphere of his traditionally private activity as opposed to his traditionally public, political life, and does not here connote a critical characterization of the entire present system of society.