Martin Moorby "The Limits of Political Emancipation".

The presentation clarifies the themes of emancipation from alienation and the comparison of politics and religion in Marx’s ‘On the Jewish Question’. The author argues that ‘species being’ plays two roles in this text: as both an explanatory framework and as teleological conception of human emancipation. Marx thought the human essence the ensemble of social relations (namely, mental conceptions, the body of state institutions, and civil society), and this framed his response to the ‘Jewish question’ as well as yielding an analysis sensitive to the internal relation between these constitutive ‘moments’ of social life. Moorby argues that, rather than a causal account of the relation between civil society, the state, and social consciousness, Marx’s philosophy treats the relation between these elements as mutual and internal.