Can Human Rights Be Reconciled with Modern Citizenship? Reconsidering Marx’s Zur Judenfrage Today

This essay critically re-examines Marx’s youthful analysis of the separation of church and state and his complex views about the function of rights in the modern state. I argue that Marx’s condemnation of Christian nationalism and endorsement of citizenship for Jews is consistent with his view that the modern, secular state cannot emancipate itself entirely from religiosity, as evidenced by the continuing legacy of nationalism and cultural identity politics today. Although Marx correctly follows Hegel in identifying modernity with a structural differentiation between civil society and state, I argue that he misunderstands the nature of this separation and, along with it, the relationship between private property rights, on one side, and civil, political, and social rights on the other. I conclude that Marx’s mistake resides in his failure to adhere to his own Rousseau-inspired social understanding of rights. In the final analysis, far from rejecting the deontological moral intuition underlying rights according to which individuals possess a human dignity (social nature) that merits protection, he rather upholds this idea against what he perceives to be its degradation in service to narrow sectarian self-interest, whose pursuit obstructs rather than promotes the full development of our humanity.