On the Jewish QuestionKarl Marx

Marx's 1843 essay responds to Bruno Bauer's argument that Jews must abandon their religion before claiming political emancipation. Marx agrees that Bauer poses the question too narrowly, but for the opposite reason: the real problem is not religious particularism but the limits of political emancipation itself.

Political emancipation, Marx argues, frees the citizen in the public sphere while leaving civil society untouched. The state declares religion a private matter, but this only transfers religious, economic, and egoistic life to the realm of civil society, where it flourishes unchecked. The "rights of man" enshrined in liberal constitutions are the rights of the isolated, self-interested individual: the right to property, security, and the pursuit of private advantage.

True human emancipation requires the abolition of the split between the political citizen and the bourgeois individual. When actual human beings reabsorb the abstract citizen into themselves, when social power is no longer organized as political power separate from society, then emancipation will be real rather than merely formal.

The essay is among Marx's earliest and sharpest statements of the difference between political and human liberation.