ons of this
egoistic life remain in existence outside the sphere of the State, in
bourgeois society, but as the peculiarities of bourgeois society.

Where the political State has attained its true development, the
individual leads not only in thought, in consciousness, but in
reality, a double life, a heavenly and an earthly life, a life in the
political community, wherein he counts as a member of the community,
and a life in bourgeois society, wherein he is active as a private
person, regarding other men as a means, degrading himself into a means
and becoming a plaything of alien powers.

The political State is related to bourgeois society as
spiritualistically as heaven is to earth. It occupies the same
position of antagonism towards bourgeois society; it subdues the
latter just as religion overcomes the limitations of the profane
world, that is, by recognizing bourgeois society and allowing the
latter to dominate it. Man in his outermost reality, in bourgeois
society, is a profane being. Here, where he is a real individual for
himself and others, he is an untrue phenomenon.

In the State, on the other hand, where the individual is a generic
being, he is the imaginary member of an imagined sovereignty, he is
robbed of his real individual life and filled with an unreal
universality.

The conflict in which the individual as the professor of a particular
religion is involved with his citizenship, with other individuals as
members of the community, reduces itself to the secular cleavage
between the political State and bourgeois society.

For the individual as a bourgeois, "life in the State is only a
semblance, or a passing exception to the rule and the nature of
things." In any case, the bourgeois, like the Jew, remains only
sophistically in political life, just as the citizen remains a Jew or
a bourgeois only sophistically; but this sophistry is not personal. It
is the sophistry of the political State itself. The difference between
the religious individual and the citizen is the difference between the
merchant and the citizen, between the labourer and the citizen,
between the landowner and the citizen, between the living individual
and the citizen. The contradiction in which the religious individual
is involved with the political individual is the same contradiction in
which the bourgeois is involved with the citizen, in which the member
of bourgeois society is involved with his political lionskin.

This secular