conflict to which the Jewish question is finally reduced,
the relation of the political State to its fundamental conditions,
whether the latter be material elements, like private property, etc.,
or spiritual elements, like education or religion, the conflict
between the general interest and the private interest, the cleavage
between the political State and bourgeois society--these secular
antagonisms are left unnoticed by Bauer, while he controverts their
religious expression. "It is precisely its foundation, the need which
assures to bourgeois society its existence and guarantees its
necessity, which exposes its existence to constant dangers, maintains
in it an uncertain element and converts the latter into a constantly
changing mixture of poverty and wealth, distress and prosperity," p.
8.

Bourgeois society in its antagonism to the political State is
recognized as necessary, because the political State is recognized as
necessary.

Political emancipation at least represents important progress; while
not the last form of human emancipation generally, it is the last form
of human emancipation within the existing world order. It is
understood that we are speaking here of real, of practical
emancipation.

The individual emancipates himself politically from religion by
banishing it from public right into private right. It is no longer the
spirit of the State, where the individual--although in a limited
manner, under a particular form and in a special sphere--behaves as a
generic being, in conjunction with other individuals; it has become
the spirit of bourgeois society, of the sphere of egoism, of the
_bellum omnium contra omnes_.[6] It is no longer the essence of the
community, but the essence of social distinctions.

It has become the expression of the separation of the individual from
his community, from himself and from other individuals--what it was
originally. It is only the abstract profession of special perversity,
of private whim. The infinite splitting-up of religion in North
America, for example, gives it outwardly the form of a purely
individual concern. It has been added to the heap of private
interests, and exiled from the community as community. But there is no
misunderstanding about the limits of political emancipation. The
division of the individual into a public and a private individual, the
expulsion of religion from the State into bourgeois society, is not a
step, it is the completion of politica