I limiti dell'emancipazione politica all'interno della società borghese

“The difference between the religious man and the citizen is the difference between the tradesman and the citizen, between the day-labourer and the citizen, between the landowner and the citizen, between the ‘living individual’ and the ‘citizen’. The contradiction which exists between religious man and political man is the same as exists between the ‘bourgeois’ and the ‘citoyen’, between the member of civil society and his ‘political lion’s skin’. This secular conflict to which the Jewish question ultimately reduces itself – the relationship of the political state to its presuppositions, whether they be material elements, like private property, etc., or spiritual ones, like education, religion, the conflict between the ‘general interest’ and the ‘private interest’, the split between the ‘political state’ and ‘civil society’ – these secular oppositions Bauer does not touch, but polemicizes instead against their ‘religious’ expression. “It is precisely its foundation – the need that assure ‘civil society’ its existence and ‘guarantees its necessity’ – that exposes it to constant dangers, maintains an element of uncertainty in it and brings forth that restless alternation of wealth and poverty, need and prosperity which constitutes change in general” (Bauer, The Jewish Question, p. 8). Compare the whole section ‘Civil Society’ (ibid., pp 8.-9), which broadly follows the main features of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Civil 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 big step forward. It may not be the last form of general human emancipation, but it is the last form of human emancipation ‘within’ the prevailing scheme of things. Needless to say, we are here speaking of real, practical emancipation. Man emancipates himself ‘politically’ from religion by banishing it from the province of public law to that of private law. It is no longer the spirit of the ‘state’ where man behaves – although in a limited way, in a particular form and a particular sphere – as a species-being, in community with other men. It has become the spirit of ‘civil society’, the sphere of egoism and of the ‘bellum omnium contra omnes’. It is no longer the essence of ‘community’ but the essence of ‘difference’. It has become the expression of the ‘separation’ of man from his ‘community’, from himself and from other men, which is what it was ‘originally’. It is now only the abstract confession of an individual oddity, of a ‘private whim’, a caprice. The continual splintering of religion in North America, for example, already gives it the ‘external’ form of a purely individual affair. It has been regarded to the level of a private interest and exiled from the real community. But it is important to understand where the limit of political emancipation lies. The splitting of man into his ‘public’ and his ‘private’ self and the ‘displacement’ of religion from the state to civil society is not one step in the process of political emancipation but its ‘completion’. Hence political emancipation neither abolishes nor tries to abolish man’s ‘real’ religiosity” [Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question] [(in) Karl Marx, Early Writings, 1977]