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1 Introduction

Written in 1843 and published in 1844 in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, On the Jewish Question marks a pivotal moment in Marx’s intellectual trajectory: it stands at the juncture where his Young Hegelian critique of religion turns into a structural critique of the modern state and civil society. In the controversy over whether Jews could be emancipated, Bauer reduced the question to a conflict of religions and demanded the abolition of faith; Marx, by contrast, takes the continued flourishing of religion under conditions of the separation of church and state as counter-evidence, thereby forcing the discussion back to political emancipation itself.

Starting from the structural mechanism of the separation between the political state and civil society, this paper analyzes how the abstract universality of political emancipation is constituted and how, in its fully developed form, it generates a bifurcated life, a dualization of rights, and the fetishism of money. On this basis, it clarifies Marx’s theoretical orientation toward human emancipation and self-emancipation.

2 Framing the Problem: From “Religious Controversy” to the Question of the Limits of Political Emancipation

2.1 How Bauer Reduces the Question to Religious Antagonism

In the polemical context of Marx’s debate with Bruno Bauer over “Jewish emancipation”, Bauer treats the Jewish question as a religious antagonism and argues that political emancipation requires the abolition of religion and faith (Li, 2025). Marx (2002) responds that the Jewish question cannot be reduced to religious difference: in modern states where political emancipation has been completed, religion not only persists but can continue to flourish. This indicates that the problem must be relocated to the structural relation between the modern political state and civil society. Accordingly, Marx transforms the “Jewish question” into a question concerning the intrinsic limits of political emancipation in the modern state, that is, the separation between civil society and the political state (Wang, 2025).

On this basis, taking On the Jewish Question as the primary text, this article proceeds in four steps: the formulation of the problem, the critique of its intrinsic limit, the unfolding of the consequences of that limit, and the direction of human emancipation as a possible path beyond political emancipation.

2.2 Religion Flourishing in the Fully Politically Emancipated State: Reorienting the Problem toward State Structure

That political emancipation can be completed while religion remains vigorous suggests that the source of the defect lies not in religion itself but in the structure of the modern state. Marx (2002) writes: “Since even in the country which has attained full political emancipation, religion not only exists, but displays a fresh and vigorous vitality, this proves that the existence of religion is not in contradiction to the perfection of the state. But since the existence of religion is the existence of a defect, the source of this defect can only be sought in the nature of the state itself.”

Under conditions of the separation between civil society and the political state, political consciousness functions as a mediator: individuals acquire abstract equality in the political sphere as “citizens”, yet in civil society, they remain private persons who bear the burdens of difference and competition. Religion is thereby relegated to the private sphere and can continue to flourish—an especially visible pattern in countries such as the United States, where the separation of church and state is institutionally entrenched.

The question, therefore, is not whether religion should be abolished, but rather: how does political emancipation establish formal universality through state structure, and why does it continue to generate structural defects in its “fully developed form”?

2.3 Conceptual Clarification: Why the “Intrinsic Limit” of Political Emancipation Is Not Mere “Incompleteness”

On the one hand, Marx (2002) affirms the progressive significance of political emancipation: it establishes universal civic status in legal form—“Political emancipation is, of course, a big step forward…” On the other hand, he insists that its limit does not consist in its being “insufficiently thorough” (Marx, 2002), but in its very mode of completion: the separation of public and private persons and the displacement of religion into civil society. As Marx puts it, “this is not a stage of political emancipation; it is political emancipation completed”. Hence, even in a state where political emancipation has been completed, religion does not automatically disappear.

It must be emphasized that Marx’s “limit” of political emancipation does not refer to an unfinished project or a lack of consistency; rather, it is rooted in the way political emancipation is constituted. Political emancipation establishes abstract equality and universal qualification at the political level, while leaving concrete differences and interests to be dealt with in civil society. For this reason, its limit should be understood as a structural problem that persists precisely in its completed form.

Accordingly, while the Young Hegelians remained entangled in religious disputes, Marx had already pushed the problem toward a critique of the intrinsic limits of political emancipation in the modern state: political emancipation has genuine historical progressiveness, yet its abstract universality presupposes the separation between state and civil society and, in its “fully developed form”, exposes the structural defects of the modern polity.

3 Critiquing the Intrinsic Limit: The Structural Mechanism of the Separation between the Political State and Civil Society

3.1 The Mechanism of Separation: How the Abstract Universality of the Political State Is Constituted

In the first part of On the Jewish Question, Marx shifts the critical focus from Bauer’s critique of religion to a critique of the modern political state itself. The central question thus moves from “how to abolish religious antagonism” to “how the political state establishes its universality”. In this shift, Marx identifies the institutional mechanism by which the abstract universality of the political state is constituted: the structural separation of the political state from civil society.

In real life, the “universality” of the political state first presents itself as an abstraction. Whereas Hegel treats the state as the rational ground that mediates the passage from civil society to the state and thus attributes rational universality to the modern state, Marx argues that such “universality” can only be achieved by abstracting from real differences—religion, property, occupation, and so on—within political forms, without thereby dissolving separation and opposition within civil society itself (Fu, 2025).

More precisely, the universality of the political state is not realized through the actual homogenization of social life, but through the demarcation of public and private spheres. On the one hand, the state recognizes individuals as formally equal “citizens” in constitutional and juridical terms; on the other hand, “particularities” such as religious belief, property ownership, and conflicts of interest are assigned to civil society and preserved as private affairs. The political state acquires universality as an abstract community precisely by presupposing civil society as the real arena of difference and antagonism.

On this basis, the state appears as an abstraction analogous to religion. Against Bauer’s claim that Prussia, as a “Christian state” without a completed separation of church and state, had not achieved political emancipation, Marx argues instead that a modern North American state that has institutionalized the separation of church and state is, in a certain sense, the “true Christian state”. What Marx underscores here is the abstract character of the state. To elucidate this abstraction, he draws an analogy to Christianity’s “mediating” structure: just as Christianity, through Christ as mediator, directs human beings away from the real world toward the Kingdom of Heaven, the modern state, as mediator, extracts individuals from the real relations of civil society and admits them into the political community as abstract “citizens”. In civil society, individuals are separated and differentiated by class, status, and occupation; under universal suffrage, by contrast, everyone is inserted into the political community, and the state-as-abstraction seems to erase social disparities in political form. Yet precisely because this is an abstraction, it cannot resolve, within civil society, the real separations, oppositions, and differences embodied in social relations. This also helps explain why, during his Rheinische Zeitung period, Marx confronted striking social problems but was unable to resolve them decisively within the domain of the political state.

Thus, while the modern state can emancipate itself from religious privileges in the political-legal sense through the separation of church and state, individuals within civil society continue to be differentiated and set against one another by estates, status, and interests, and they are by no means automatically liberated from the social conditions under which religion persists.

Therefore, the separation of church and state merely removes religious privilege from the state in a political-legal sense; it does not mean that individuals in civil society are freed from difference or from the real influence of religion. On the contrary, once religion is reduced to a private affair, its secular foundations often become more visible as remaining embedded in social life.

3.2 Evidence from the Fully Developed Form: Separation of Church and State Does Not Abolish Religion, but Reveals Political Emancipation as a Political-Only Completion

The separation of church and state enables the state to free itself, in legal and political terms, from the formal rule of religious privilege; but it does not entail the disappearance of religion in actual life. As Marx emphasizes through the counter-example of North America, even in a country where political emancipation is relatively complete, religion not only exists but may display vigorous vitality. This indicates that political emancipation is accomplished primarily at the political level, without transforming the social structure of everyday life.

This intrinsic limitation does not lie in political emancipation being “not thorough enough” but in the fact that it presupposes an abstract political community and institutionalizes the separation between state and civil society (Qin, 2025). In civil society, individuals live as atomized private persons grounded in private interest; in the political state, the same subjects enter universal political life as “citizens”. The result is not an accidental psychological split, but a structurally generated “double life”, which also provides the real basis for the subsequent dualization of “human rights” and “citizens’ rights” and for political alienation (Zhang, 2023).

Accordingly, the separation between the political state and civil society is not a temporary transition toward a higher stage; it is the institutional mode through which political emancipation is constituted in its completed form. The abstract universality of the political state is produced precisely through the process of “returning” real differences to civil society, and this mode of production simultaneously constitutes an intrinsic limit that political emancipation cannot overcome by itself.

Once this structure of separation is established, the political state and civil society coexist in a mutually supporting arrangement: the state, in the name of “universality”, guarantees formal equality and political rights, while civil society continues to produce real inequality on the basis of private property and competitive interests. The limit of political emancipation thus unfolds structurally into the dualization of subjectivity and of rights, and it further points toward a critique of civil society centered on money relations.

4 Consequences of the Intrinsic Limit: Dual Existence, Dual Rights, and the Fetishism of Money

After exposing the abstract universality of the political state and its separation from civil society, Marx further demonstrates the chain of consequences this structure produces in real life: the subject is bifurcated into citizen and private individual, rights are dualized into citizens’ rights and human rights, and the fetishism of money emerges as the general “spirit” of civil society that, in turn, constrains politics.

4.1 Dual Existence: The Citizen/Private Individual Split and the “Heavenly/Earthly” Contrast

The communal life provided by the political state has an abstract universality that diverges from real life in civil society, thereby institutionally splitting individuals into citizens and private persons (Marx, 2002).

In civil society, atomized individuals act on the basis of private interest and instrumentalize others as means to their own ends; in the political state, individuals withdraw from private life as “citizens” and participate in universal political life. The divergence between these two domains forms the real basis of modern “double life”.

Marx (2002) captures this split through the contrast between “heaven” and “earth”: “Where the political state has attained its true development, man leads not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life, a twofold life—one celestial and the other terrestrial.” Here, “celestial life” refers to the public life of the political community, whereas “terrestrial life” refers to the private life of civil society.

This split drives a general self-alienation: individuals are dominated by alien powers in their “terrestrial” existence, a domination that, in the context of the Jewish question, appears as the worship of money—that is, the ideological form of the fetishism of money.

4.2 Dual Rights: The Tension between Human Rights and Citizens’ Rights

Within the framework of the state-civil society separation, modern individuals exist in civil society as private persons and enter the political community as citizens. Consequently, “rights” assume a dual structure: citizens’ rights promise universality in the political sphere, whereas human rights, in their concrete content, rest on the private principle of civil society, thereby generating an internal tension (Zhang, 2016).

Marx’s analysis of rights such as liberty, equality, security, and property aims to show that “human rights” primarily protect private existence within civil society. Liberty signifies the separation of individuals from one another and the freedom to dispose of private property; equality is largely an abstract recognition; security expresses the state’s role as an external force protecting private interests; and property becomes the substantive core where the foregoing rights converge.

Accordingly, the modern state that speaks in the name of human rights remains, in reality, oriented toward civil society as its end: the political state, by means of abstract universality, provides the institutional space within which private property and competitive interests can operate. Political emancipation thus completes universality at the formal level, while struggling to touch the durable relations of domination that persist in social life.

4.3 The Fetishism of Money: The “Jewish Spirit” as the Universal Principle of Civil Society

Using the socio-historical conditions of the 1840s debates over Jewish emancipation as a rhetorical entry point, Marx argues that the secular foundation of what he polemically and metaphorically calls “Judaism” (Judentum) lies in money: practical need and egoism are institutionalized as universal principles within civil society. This terminology is not intended as an essentializing criticism of Jews as a people, nor of Judaism as a religious tradition; rather, it is a polemical condensation of the monetary principle of modern bourgeois civil society (Avineri, 1964).

With this methodological shift, the “Jewish question” is grasped as an ideological expression of civil-society relations: so-called “practical need” and “egoism” are not accidental traits of a particular religious community, but principles produced and generalized by modern civil society itself.

In this sense, Marx mobilizes a language of “fetishism” to expose the domination of money: money is elevated into an autonomous value, depriving the world of its intrinsic value, and, as an alien power, governs human labor and interaction, thus becoming a “worldly god”.

It must therefore be stressed that Marx’s notion of the “Jewish spirit” is a critical condensation of the money principle of modern civil society; it does not reduce the problem to a moral defect of a particular nation or religious group. References to Jews in the text function primarily to illuminate how civil society continuously produces and reinforces such a monetary logic.

More importantly, this monetary logic does not stop at the level of civil society; it also feeds back into the real operation of the political state. Although politics appears, at the level of ideas, to stand above money, it may in practice be dominated by monetary power, thereby exposing the practical limits of political emancipation.

Drawing on the example of North American society (especially the United States), Marx points to the tendency toward the universalization of the “Jewish spirit”: the principle of commerce and profit penetrates public life and can even drive the commodification of religious affairs. This indicates that the fetishism of money is not a peculiar belief of any single group, but a general spiritual expression of modern civil society.

Furthermore, when the money principle permeates religion and propels its secularization, religion as the symbolic mediator of the political state’s abstract universality is eroded, and the state’s “universality” is more directly revealed as a political form of economic relations.

Hence, Marx pushes the problem toward the direction of “self-emancipation”: to escape this real “Judaism” (that is, the pursuit of profit and the domination of money) requires emancipation from money relations themselves. The ultimate meaning of the “emancipation of the Jews” is the emancipation of humanity from the monetary logic that Marx polemically condenses under the name of the “Jewish spirit”.

It follows that the formal universality of political emancipation does not automatically become real emancipation; when the logic of money in turn dominates politics, the abstract universality of the modern state increasingly reveals its historical limit.

5 Toward Human Emancipation: Paths and Directions Beyond Political Emancipation

The foregoing analysis shows that political emancipation establishes abstract universality through the separation of state and civil society, yet, in its completed form, it produces a bifurcated life, a dualization of rights, and the domination of money. It is precisely by exposing these consequences that Marx advances the discussion to the level of “human emancipation”.

5.1 From Political Emancipation to Human Emancipation: A Shift in the Field of the Problem

Unlike political emancipation, human emancipation does not consist in repairing the defects of political emancipation from within the political state; rather, it aims at the sublation—understood as a dialectical process that both overcomes and preserves—of the very presupposition of state and civil society separation. Publicness must be realized as a social relation among real individuals, rather than existing merely as an abstract political form (Peled, 1992).

Accordingly, human emancipation cannot be achieved through a merely political-institutional adjustment. It must touch the real foundations that generate separation and alienation—private property, the money domination it supports, and the instrumental relations among individuals.

At the end of the first part of On the Jewish Question, Marx (2002) writes: “Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his ‘own powers’ as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.”

5.2 The Real Basis of Human Emancipation: Overcoming the Domination of Money and Private Property

In this sense, human emancipation means bringing publicness back from the political state’s abstract “heaven” into real society: only when individuals no longer treat money and private interest as their sole bond, but can organize and deploy their own powers in common life, can the oppositions between citizen and private person, and between state and society, be genuinely dissolved.

This also implies that the “rights of man” analyzed above no longer remain a form of rights premised on the separation of individuals: liberty no longer presupposes mutual isolation; equality is not merely abstract recognition; security is not merely the state’s protection of private possession; and property no longer functions as a dominant social principle. Only then can the formal equality of political emancipation be transformed into real freedom.

6 Conclusion: The Progress, Limits, and Implications of Political Emancipation for Human Emancipation

In sum, by criticizing Bauer’s approach of reducing the “Jewish question” to religious antagonism, Marx instead grasps the intrinsic limits of modern political emancipation through the structural relation between the political state and civil society. The historical progressiveness of political emancipation lies in its establishment of universal qualification in legal form and its completion of the separation of church and state, through which individuals acquire the status of “citizens” and enter an abstract political community. Yet its limit is precisely here: abstract universality presupposes the separation between state and civil society (Zhang, 2016).

The consequences of this structure unfold as a chain: subjectivity is bifurcated into citizen and private individual and life splits into “heavenly” and “earthly” spheres; rights are dualized into citizens’ rights and human rights, with the concrete content of human rights grounded in the private principles of civil society (liberty, equality, security, and property); and these private principles finally take on an ideological form in the fetishism of money, which in turn constrains the political state and leads political forms to serve money relations more directly.

Therefore, to go beyond political emancipation is not to deny its historical value, but to push the problem toward human emancipation and self-emancipation: through transforming the real structure of civil society and overcoming private property and the domination of money, the abstract citizen can be restored to the real individual, and social power will no longer appear as a political power separated from individuals.

References

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