Enrico Ferri

The Jewish Question in Max Stirner and in the Libertarian Perspective

The political emancipation of the Jews following the French Revolution, the philosophical debate on the nature of Christian religion and of its Jewish pattern in the Enlightenment first and then in German Idealism, and the call for civil and political emancipation by many of the Jewish communities in western Europe are some of the most important theoretical and social questions in the debate on the “Jewish question” that emerged in Germany after the death of Hegel in the revolutionary current of the philosophical movement that he inspired, the Hegelian left, among such figures as Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Karl Marx and Max Stirner.

This debate also influenced such philosophers as Proudhon and Bakunin, who were drawn towards revolutionary Hegelianism in the 1840s, even if only briefly.

The writers remembered here saw the “Jewish question” essentially as a variable of the broader “religious question”, which was primarily as the presence and role of Judeo-Christian tradition and culture in European history. In both revolutionary Marxism and in the more variegated libertarian and anarchist thought, with its far richer set of influences, history is seen as a long and tormented story which prepared the way for the coming “Reign of God on Earth”, to use Hegel’s term; what Marx in 1844 called the solution to the enigma of history, the reconciliation between essence and existence. In other words, the new society which would emerge from the revolution was presented using categories which were entirely foreign to philosophy and to the history of ancient and modern European thought.  It aimed at a “new man” who would be completely and definitively reconciled with himself and with other men, at a humanity which would have defeated the war, poverty and discrimination that had recurred constantly in the course of history.

The works of Max Stirner show the ambivalence of Hegelian philosophical radicalism, which interested both Marxist and anarchist thought.  It saw the Jewish-Christian tradition as a factor in alienation and a cultural element at the roots of the “principle of authority”, that is as justifying the domination of man over man, while taking from that tradition the idea and the certainty of a definitive, radical and universal “liberation”. In Stirner it is possible to see, admittedly somehow vaguely, the anti-Semitic prejudice which recurs constantly in modern revolutionary though and in writers such as Proudhon and Bakunin, according to which Judaism would be not only a religion but rather a forma mentis, a psychology and a social and political attitude of exclusivity and exclusion.