The Intrinsic Limits of Political Emancipation in Marx’s On the Jewish Question

Taking Marx’s On the Jewish Question as its central text and situating it in his polemic with Bruno Bauer, this article reconstructs Marx’s diagnosis of the structural limits of political emancipation in its fully developed form. The separation of the political state from civil society, as secured constitutionally, secures formal equality and universal citizenship, yet it simultaneously reproduces a bifurcated existence (citizen/private person), a dual structure of rights (citizens’ rights/human rights), and the domination of money in social life. Marx, therefore, pushes the critique beyond political reform toward human emancipation and self-emancipation: the transformation of the real relations of civil society such that social power is no longer externalized as a political power standing over individuals.