In my chapter, I focus on the problem of atheism from the perspective of the history of ideas. What I aim for, is to consider atheism to be not so much an abstract philosophical position taken regarding the question of God’s existence, but rather a concrete political idea. As a contribution to the history of the idea of atheism, this chapter is an attempt to reconstruct the historical context of the idea of “positive abolition of religion”, presented by Karl Marx in his early writings: in the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and in the review On The Jewish Question. Insofar as the integral part of that context is Marx’s critique of liberal, “atheistic” state, identified by him, paradoxically, as “perfectly Christian”, I do not confine myself to a reconstruction of the historical meaning of that idea. What I rather aim for is to take into consideration the possibility of its, also contemporary, political significance.

While researching that meaning, I focus here, therefore, not so much on the relation between the “atheism”, ascribed to Marx, and “theism” or “pantheism”, criticized by him, but rather on that between the “atheism” and other Marx’s core idea, that is, “radicalism”. Insofar as the idea of the positive abolition of religion in the philosophy of Marx is usually interpreted as the expression of his both radical atheism and atheistic radicalism, the aim of that reconstruction is the critical assessment of the priority of these ideas over each other. The question, which I would like to ask, can be formulated as follows: is an integral, philosophical and sociopolitical radicalism of young Marx, indeed, the reverse of his same integral “positive atheism”? Or is it rather to interpret as an expression of some “political religion” (Voegelin 1999, 19ff.)?

The very first passages of the “Introduction” to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right confirm explicitly that the idea of radicalism and that of the abolition of religion are for Marx closely interconnected. “The evident proof of the radicalism of German theory, and hence of its practical energy, writes Marx there, is that it proceeds from a resolute positive abolition of religion” (Marx and Engels 2010b, 182). As I shall argue, it is by no means correct to assume that the terms “atheism” and “positive abolition of religion” are for Marx just replaceable and that not only “German theory” but also his own position is to be interpreted as insofar “radical” and practically significant as it is atheistic. The closest historical context of the idea of such an abolition makes, of course, Hegel’s understanding of that concept. Therefore, in order to reveal its proper meaning, it would be necessary to reconstruct the sense of that idea within Marx’s critique, not only, of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right” but also whole Hegelian dialectics.

For the purpose of that paper, it is perhaps enough to point out, that the phrase “positive abolition of religion” used by Marx in the over-mentioned sentence must be understood on a footing of Hegel’s dialectics as openly pleonastic. In the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, Hegel notes explicitly the double meaning of the German word aufheben. He states, that, “by «aufheben» we understand on the one hand something like clearing out of the way or negating, and we accordingly speak of a law, for instance, or an institution as having been «aufgehoben». On the other hand, however, aufheben also means something like preserving, and in this sense, we say that something is well taken care of [gut aufgehoben, taken out of harm’s way and put in a safe place]” (Hegel 2010, 153). This double usage of language, which gives the same word a positive and negative meaning, is according to Hegel, not an accident, but rather a testimony of the “speculative spirit” of German. It is well known that while making the word Aufhebung the core concept of his dialectics, Hegel himself uses it in its speculative sense of both “annulment” or “cancelling”, and “lifting up”, that is, elevating to a higher form and preserving in that form. Therefore, the abolition of religion in “philosophical science” is for Hegel, broadly speaking, both negative and positive: it means the cancelling of religion in its presently existing form and bringing it into accordance with its essence (Fulda 1971, 619).

If Marx feels inclined to write about the positive abolition of religion, the supposition arises that he means by that the practical result of some more “radical atheism” than that which would proceed from its simple, that is “negative” abolition. Nevertheless, even though he stresses explicitly the “positivity” of such an abolition as an evident proof of the radicalism of German theory, the question, to which extent he considers this positivity to be the same evident proof of its “atheism”, requires closer examination. The first thing that must be mentioned here is the polemical meaning of the expression “German theory” itself, by which Marx means the left wing of the Hegelian school, represented among others by Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer and Arnold Ruge. There is no doubt that Marx endorsed from the very beginning the stand of “atheism” and “political radicalism” of the Left or “Young” Hegelians, taken by them in open opposition to the absolutist, “political theology” of that time. It is also out of the question that he shared their criticism against the theology, professed in their opinion also by Hegel, which legitimized the monarch’s personal sovereignty over the state by the idea of the “personal God” (Breckman 1999, 10). What the reconstruction of his understanding of the idea of the positive abolition of religion must take into account, first of all, is, therefore, his both belonging to the school of Left Hegelians and criticism of its mere “theoretical” radicalism.

While using the adjective “positive” regarding the idea of abolition of religion, Marx, as a Young Hegelian himself, seems, on the one hand, to accentuate the Hegelian legacy and speculative sense of that idea. What he aims for is to differentiate the critical, speculative approach of the Young Hegelians to religion from the other, unspeculative and undialectical ones, for instance, from the philosophical “atheism”, represented by such French materialists like Jean Meslier, Julien La Mettrie, Denis Diderot or Baron d’Holbach. Although Marx stated about them too, that their “criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism” (Marx and Engels 2010b, 175), he criticized their “materialist” atheism for abolishing the religion as a mere “abstraction”. As Peter Thomson notices in his article from the Oxford Handbook of Atheism, “Marx maintained, they had not gone far enough and had merely replaced God with a form of Natural Law in which – in an early form of reductionist Darwinism – the way people were was fixed now by natural genetic forces rather than supernatural certainties. This may well be a step forward, Marx said, but it was a step into a sort of pantheistic dogmatism” (Thompson 2013).

On the other hand, if Marx accentuates the positive meaning of the abolition of religion in German theory and even writes that adjective in italics, he refers to the attempt to overcome its “pure speculative” or, in the terms of the Left Hegelians, only “negative” abolition by Hegel. The meaning of this difference Marx clearly expressed in his letter to Arnold Ruge, by pointing out that “if there is to be talk about philosophy, there should be less trifling with the label «atheism» (which reminds one of children, assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the bogy man), and that instead the content of philosophy should be brought to the people” (Marx and Engels 2010a, 395). Herbert Marcuse noticed in the chapter “Positive and Negative Philosophy” of his Reason and Revolution, that in the decade following Hegel’s death, European thought entered an era of “positivism”, understood as a conscious, philosophical reaction against the critical and destructive tendencies of French and German rationalism (Marcuse 1955, 323–325). Represented in France by Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive and in Germany by Julius Stahl’s political theology and philosophy of the state (Stahl 1830), “positive philosophy”, Marcuse wrote, “was supposed to overcome negative philosophy in its entirety, that is, to abolish any subordinating of reality to transcendental reason” (Marcuse 1955, 326). Because of its critical, destructive tendencies in regard to any positive beliefs, especially the Hegelian system was designated by them as “negative philosophy”. As they assumed, insofar it abolished any irrational, unreasonable reality, it could neither explain nor justify things as they are, that is, reach their actual content, which is not deducible from logical forms (Marcuse 1955, 326).

While the so-called Right Hegelians like Stahl, who criticized Hegel for his insufficient, theological and political “conservatism” and who developed their positive philosophy of the state in the form of “speculative theism” (Breckman 1999, 49) that sought not to “abolish”, but in contrary, to recover the personal God, the main representatives of the leftist, Young Hegelians like Ludwig Feuerbach saw their task in the appropriation of the religious contents by philosophy (Schütte 1971, 598). The “positivity” of the abolition of religion in the philosophy of Feuerbach, who even called himself “the positive atheist”, consisted, as Leszek Kołakowski noticed in his reconstruction of “Marxism before Marx”, in the “positive affirmation of humanity” (Kołakowski 1978, 114). In his Critique of Positive Philosophy as well as in The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach argued that the “secret of theology is anthropology”, that is, that everything men have said about God is an expression in “mystified” terms of their knowledge about themselves (Kołakowski 1978, 114). As no more just a “label” and not as the label more needed, the “speculative atheism” of Feuerbach and Young Hegelians was regarded by Marx as the evident proof of its radicalism insofar as it “brought to the people” that positive, anthropological content. “Man, who looked for a superhuman being in the fantastic reality of heaven and found nothing there but the reflection of himself”, he wrote, “will no longer be disposed to find but the semblance of himself, only an inhuman being, where he seeks and must seek his true reality” (Marx and Engels 2010b, 175).

Especially the positive atheism of Feuerbach, consisting of the idea of regaining the human essence of religion by philosophy, proved to Marx also its “practical energy”, insofar as it translated Hegel’s vision of reconciliation of “thought” and “being” into a goal to be attained in the future (Breckman 1999, 263). Instead of mere “secularization” of Christian idea, that is, of its preservation in the form of the modern state, which “secular life” Hegel called in his lectures on the philosophy of history “the positive and definitive embodiment of the Spiritual Kingdom” (Hegel 1956, 456), Feuerbach reconceived Hegelian retrospective orientation as a future-oriented philosophy of practice and proceeded from the resolute “struggle against religion” in order to “establish the truth of this world” (Marx and Engels 2010b, 176). As Marx wrote, while referring primarily to Feuerbach in the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, “to abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. (…) The criticism of religion disillusions man to make him think and act and shape his reality like a man who has been disillusioned and has come to reason so that he will revolve around himself and therefore round his true sun” (Marx and Engels 2010b, 176).

In spite of sharing the Young Hegelians’ idea of the positive abolition of religion as well as their attempt to turn outward from the concept to practice, Marx criticized, at the same time, what he perceived as “metaphysical” and “idealistic” premises of their criticism of religion. The historical reconstruction of the intellectual relationship between young Marx and Young Hegelians, delivered by Warren Breckman, shows explicitly that shaping Marx’s own idea of the positive abolition of religion as well as his growing awareness of the insufficiency of Young Hegelians’ radicalism was a relatively long process. The common starting point of Feuerbach’s and Marx’s criticism regarding the positive political theology of that time was, according to Breckman, their “humanist atheism” and “idealist republicanism” (Breckman 1999, 276). While they both were drawn to Hegel by the promise of a philosophical reconciliation between the ideal and the actual, Feuerbach, no later than in 1830, and Marx, in 1840, arrived at the conclusion that Hegel had failed to achieve a genuine synthesis of thought and being in the present. Against Hegel’s dialectical understanding of the relationship between the rational and the real, regarded as a logical, pantheistic mysticism, they set together the conception of critical philosophy as a world-transforming “practical energy”, that synthesized Hegelian and Rousseauian elements by identifying the general will with philosophical comprehension of the rational, collective spirit of the public sphere (Breckman 1999, 276).

Nevertheless, no later than in 1842, Marx proposed a fundamental shift in the target of their “radical critique”. As a retreat from Feuerbach’s “contemplative materialism” (Marx 1976, 18) that referred “to much to nature and too little to politics” (Marx and Engels 2010a, 400), it consisted in the resolute transition from “irreligious” (Marx and Engels 2010b, 175) to social-political criticism, grounded upon the idea of the social essence of the human being. In the same letter to Arnold Ruge, where he criticized atheism as the abstract label, Marx began to formulate a theory of ideology that regarded religion less as a cause of political and social egoism than as an ideological legitimation of private secular and material interests. Insofar as religion, according to that theory, as Marx put it in that letter, “in itself is without content”, that is, insofar as “it owes its being not to heaven but to the earth” (Marx and Engels 2010a, 395), the target of the critique should be in his opinion the over-mentioned political and social egoism rather than religion itself. He requested there, that “religion should be criticised in the framework of criticism of political conditions rather than that political conditions should be criticised in the framework of religion”, and prophesied that “with the abolition of distorted reality, of which it is the theory, it will collapse of itself” (Marx and Engels 2010a, 395).

The decisive arguments for the insufficiency of Feuerbach’s “positive atheism” were delivered by Marx in his Theses on Feuerbach from 1845. The target of the “radical critique” there became not only Feuerbach’s relatively positive view of the religious impulse as resulting in his attempt of translating Christian “love of neighbour” into a love of humanity (Breckman 1999, 282). While accepting Feuerbach’s explanation of religious feeling as an alienated human species-being, Marx also emphasized in opposition to him—that real men could only be understood as products of social relations. As he noticed in his fourth thesis, even though Feuerbach rightly started from the “fact of the religious self-estrangement, of the duplication of the world into the religious, imaginary world and a real one” (Marx 1976, 7), he overlooked at the same time another, in his opinion more important fact, that after completing this work, “the chief thing still remains to be done” (Marx 1976, 7). Insofar as Feuerbach did not see that “the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual”, but in reality, it is “the ensemble of the social relations”, he overlooked in the interpretation of Marx, that also “the ‘religious sentiment’ is itself a social product” (Marx 1976, 8). He did not see on that way as well—that the only “positive” thing that is to be done after having resolved the essence of religion into the essence of man, is to annihilate the social conditions, responsible for such a religious “production”. One could add: to abolish them in a negative sense.

Marx’s own idea of the “positive” abolition of religion, considered in its immediate context, seems thus not to refer to some more “radical atheistic” than that of Feuerbach, either the materialist or naturalist standpoint of Marx himself, to some “stronger” conviction or belief, taken by him in advance in regard to God’s existence. Such a conviction or such an “irreligious sentiment” must have been regarded by him after his transition from the criticism of religion to the criticism of politics as nothing but a social product too. At the most, by using that phrase, he pays compliments to the “positive atheism” of Feuerbach, which, in spite of its historical significance in radicalizing the German Theory, needs to be overcome in Marx’s opinion by its realization in practice. While describing religion as not only the “opium of the people” but also “the expression of real distress”, “the sigh of the oppressed creature” (Marx and Engels 2010b, 175), Marx has been considered the “positive atheism” of Feuerbach to be a position of mere “theoretical party”, blind for the necessity of practical abolition of the “soulless” relations of human alienation. Even though the work of Feuerbach consisted—as he wrote—“in resolving the religious world into its secular basis” (Marx 1976, 7), Marx considered his atheism to be still the “criticism of Heaven” that didn’t turn yet into “the criticism of Earth” (Marx and Engels 2010b, 176). Although the criticism of religion also ended for Marx “with the teaching that man is the highest essence for man”, he identified the idea as not only theoretical but also practical, not until then “positive abolition” with “the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being” (Marx and Engels 2010b, 182).

In order to shed some more light on the historical meaning as well as on the contemporary political significance of Marx’s own idea of positive abolition of religion, it is worth to take into consideration not only his critical assessment of “abstract”, both, “negative” and “positive” atheism of his time, but also his attempted “radicalism” itself. While the “atheism” of Marx, as Peter Thompson states, can be described in light of his “criticism of philosophy” as to the same extent “anti-atheism” (Thompson 2013), his practical radicalism seems to be all but “speculative” or “dialectical”. According to the definition of radicalism, given by Marx in the famous paragraph of his introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “to be radical is to grasp the root of the matter” (Marx and Engels 2010b, 182). The radicalism was considered by Marx to be tantamount to “humanism”, insofar as he identified that “root” with “man” and stated that “for man the root is man himself” (Marx and Engels 2010b, 182). In light of that definition, radicalism seems to be tantamount for Marx as well as to the “positive atheism” in the sense of Feuerbach, understood as grasping the root of “God”—a “superhuman” or “inhuman being”—in the “man”, proclaimed “to be the highest being for man” (Marx and Engels 2010b, 187). The question arises, to which extent that “positive atheistic”, “humanistic” radicalism, understood as an attribute of both theory and practice, means for Marx the irreligious, and to which extent religious “grasping”.

Since the introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is the only text where Marx attempts to give the “positive”, “content” definition of radicalism as a category of his “criticism of politics”, the answer to that question requires the reconstruction of its broader, historical meaning. The most immediate context of use by Marx and Engels of the word “radicalism” is, like in all German theory of the first half of the nineteenth century, the commentary on the social and political relations in England and France. While analyzing Rheinische Zeitung in 1842, the British party system, Friedrich Engels pointed out that “in England there exist only three parties of any importance: the landed aristocracy, the moneyed aristocracy, and radical democracy” (Engels 2010, 375). In regard to the last one, he wrote, that “the working class is daily becoming more and more imbued with the radical-democratic principles of Chartism and is increasingly coming to recognize them as the expression of its collective consciousness. However, at present this party is only in process of formation and therefore cannot yet act with full vigor” (Engels 2010, 375).

For Marx and Engels, radicalism was thus a concept of, first of all, political and not philosophical significance. It referred to the “thinking on the modern state”, the reality of which remained for the German speculative philosophy of right, as wrote Marx in his contribution to its critique, “a thing of the beyond, if only beyond the Rhine” (Marx and Engels 2010b, 181). As such, the concept of radicalism remained for both of them the instrument of their philosophical and political criticism rather than its subject. If they criticized in The Communist Manifesto the French Radicals for having entered into a “holy alliance” with the Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot and German police-spies to exercise “the specter of communism haunting Europe”, they did it only in an over-mentioned “Hegelian” sense. Their criticism called for the abolition of presently existing, French radicalism, represented by Alexandre Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc, and bringing it into accordance with its revolutionary essence. Marx and Engels jeered at Radicals in their Manifesto: “Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists” (Marx and Engels 1976, 477 f.).

Marx perceived the radicalism of his time as a core concept of the left-wing bourgeoisie, which adopted that word in France for its own during the July Monarchy because the law forbade parties to define themselves as “Republican” (Wende 1984, 114ff.). He was aware that the word itself was originated from the British political language, where the negative label “radicals” was used since the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to describe a group of politically committed Utilitarianists, whose leading figures were Jeremy Bentham and James—and subsequently John Stuart—Mill (Halévy 1901, 12). They formed in England the phenomenon of the so-called philosophical radicalism, characterized, on the one hand, by advocating more democratic electoral laws and, on the other hand, by developing the idea of “moral arithmetic”, conceived to provide a mathematical base for the legal sciences, especially with regard to the theory of criminal law and, as in the case of Smith, Malthus and Ricardo, political economy (Wende 1984, 114ff.). While in England the radical ideas of Utilitarianists, especially in regard to the election system, as well as their reputation as “radicals”, was taken over by Chartists, described by Engels in his news from Lancashire, in France the word “radicalism” marked the extra-parliamentary opposition, which advocated democratic reforms like universal suffrage, freedom of the press and right of assembly as a vehicle of social progress (Wende 1984, 114ff.).

Even though Marx criticized the French Radicals in his political writings for representing the interests of bourgeoisie rather than those of more “despicable essences”, it would be hard to call him, at least to the same extent as an “anti-atheist”, an “anti-radical”. I mean by that not only the elements of Realpolitik, contained in the Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engels declare, that “the Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class, but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement” (Marx and Engels 1976, 477). While describing the position of the communists in relation to the various existing opposition parties, Marx and Engels thus pointed out that due to the responsibility for the future, “in France they ally with the Social-Democrats against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a critical position in regard to phases and illusions traditionally handed down from the great Revolution”, but, for example “in Switzerland, they support the Radicals, without losing sight of the fact that this party consists of antagonistic elements, partly of Democratic Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radical bourgeois” (Marx and Engels 1976, 477).

At the same time, in the “Introduction” to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx seems to ally with the Radicals and to support their radicalism not just from “real-political” reasons. He attempts to adopt the word “radicalism” for his own, to discover its “rational kernel”, that is, its latent truth, by pointing out, that in case of both English and French “radicals”, it remains nothing but a “label”. Nevertheless, even while doing so, Marx criticizes “radicalism” not as a concept, but rather as a word: his “criticism of radicalism” turns out to be etymological rather than speculative. To the fact of just etymological and not critical, Marx’s approach to the problem of radicalism testifies the term’s basic understanding in German of that time, which restricted the meaning of the word “radical” to be “deeply rooted”, “well established” or “primal”. According to the sense derived from the Latin term radix (root), Campe’s German dictionary of foreign terms from 1813 defined the word as “proceeding or reaching to the very roots. May be Germanized in conjunction with the word ground” (Campe 1813, 514). In Krug’s 1833 dictionary , which was first to run “political radicalism” as an entry, its reference was radical curation as opposed to palliative treatment. The term applied to all the efforts to heal the state from the fundaments, which, as was skeptically remarked, could hardly be done without revolution (Krug 1833, 413). It is precisely in that sense that Marx writes in Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction that “the real, radical cure for the censorship would be its abolition; for the institution itself is a bad one, and institutions are more powerful than people” (Marx and Engels 2010a, 131) or, like in the Communist Manifesto that “the Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas” (Marx and Engels 1976, 477).

Thus, in light of that context, Karl Marx’s criticism of religion turns out to be the expression of his uncritical radicalism. While accepting Hegel’s abstract understanding of the historical dialectic, but while rejecting and criticizing both Hegel’s idealism and his “false positivism”, that is, his implicit justification of the existing state of things, Marx himself is grasping to the “root” or “ground”, that needs for him any further critique or explanation. His “true positivism” seems to consist in rather uncritical, at its core even evangelical, assumption that the truth will set you free as well as in his “positive” “content” answer to the same evangelical question, “what is truth?” About the integrity of his both philosophical and political radicalism decided the settling down of the truth not in the Revelation nor in the realm of pure thought as a “Whole”, but in the social nature of the human being. As Marx wrote in his Introduction, “it is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics” (Marx and Engels 2010b, 176).

What differentiates the practical radicalism of Marx from the abstract radicalism of both, English and French Radicals, is not its rooting in, so to say, secular revelation. While sharing the uncritical assumption about the vanishing of the “other-world of truth” in some magical way, Marx and the “radical bourgeois” were diametrically opposed in regard to the “human nature” or the “essence of man”. Marx presented the meaning of that difference in his review of Bruno Bauer’s book The Jewish Question, where he criticized the anthropological foundation of that unholy form of human self-estrangement, which was, according to him, the liberal democratic, constitutional state. While analyzing the concept of man that forms the basis of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, he set in his review just political emancipation, which takes place in such a state, against the human emancipation, which has to be achieved only by the revolution.

In the closing part of my chapter, I would like to deliver some remarks on the contemporary significance of Marx’s analysis. “Let us examine, for a moment, Marx writes, the so-called rights of man – to be precise, the rights of man in their authentic form, in the form which they have among those who discovered them, the North Americans and the French” (Marx and Engels 2010b, 146). The point of his criticism of the liberal idea of the “rights of man” is well known. The so-called Jewish question is for him the starting point for considering some more general question, namely that of the relationship between religion and the modern, liberal democratic state. Marx points out that “the political emancipation of the Jew, the Christian, and, in general, of religious man” in that state is not his emancipation from religion, that is not a form of human emancipation, but “the emancipation of the state from Judaism, from Christianity, from religion in general” (Marx and Engels 2010b, 146). It follows from this, he argues, “that man, even if he proclaims himself an atheist through the medium of the state – that is, if he proclaims the state to be atheist –remains in the grip of religion” (Marx and Engels 2010b, 146).

What Marx means is not just the fact that even in a country of complete political emancipation like North America, “religion not only exists, but displays a fresh and vigorous vitality” (Marx and Engels 2010b, 146). The point of his argument is that even while banishing religion from the sphere of public law to that of private law, such an apparently “atheistic state” turns out to be perfectly Christian. As he writes, “indeed, the perfect Christian state is not the so-called Christian state – which acknowledges Christianity as its basis, as the state religion, and, therefore, adopts an exclusive attitude towards other religions. On the contrary, the perfect Christian state is the atheistic state, the democratic state, the state which relegates religion to a place among the other elements of civil society” (Marx and Engels 2010b, 146).

The contemporary, political significance of the idea of the positive abolition of religion, proclaimed by Marx, seems to be quite obvious in the light of conclusions of his criticism of the liberal democratic state. After the holocaust and establishing Israel as a liberal democratic state, it is perhaps no more such significant in regard to the Jewish question as to the other, the most discussed, geopolitical question of our times. I mean by that the open conflict between the liberal, allegedly religiously “neutral” values of the Western democracies and those of the most spectacular political religion known from the breaking news, that is, “Islamist radicalism”. Even if the radical cure of social relations applied by Marx remains still problematic, to the same extent significant is, in my opinion, the question of motifs of his practical content, in short: positive radicalism. This question, nevertheless, requires a separate examination.