Why Political Equality Isn’t Enough

In On the Jewish Question, Karl Marx argues that modern liberal society divides human life into two separate spheres: the political state and civil society. In the political realm, individuals appear as equal citizens endowed with rights. In everyday life, however, they exist as private individuals pursuing their own interests within market relations. This split produces what Marx calls political emancipation—formal equality without real social freedom.

Marx explains that political citizenship abstracts individuals from their lived reality. In the state, man becomes “the imaginary member of an imaginary sovereignty, divested of his real, individual life, and infused with an unreal universality” (34). Political equality thus exists only at the level of law, while material inequality persists in civil society. People come to treat political life as their “true life,” even though it remains distant from their actual existence (39).

Meanwhile, everyday social life is organized around private property and competition. Individuals relate to one another instrumentally, and collective power appears as something external rather than something they consciously shape. Marx describes this condition as one in which people “treat other men as means” and become subject to “alien powers” (34). Liberal freedom therefore amounts mainly to the freedom of economic actors, not genuine collective self-determination.

Rather than overcoming this alienation, the modern state reinforces it. Marx notes that “political life declares itself to be only a means, whose end is the life of civil society” (44). Politics exists primarily to protect private interests, not to transform social relations. As a result, political power is separated from everyday life, leaving individuals fragmented while institutions govern in their name.

What is most striking in Marx’s critique is not simply that liberalism fails to deliver equality, but that it misplaces human agency. Reason, morality, and collective will are confined to formal politics, while everyday economic life is treated as natural and unquestionable. People are encouraged to vote, deliberate, and identify as citizens—yet discouraged from seeing work, property, and production as political matters. Freedom is reduced to participation in institutions rather than shared control over social life itself.

For Marx, this division blocks true human emancipation. Although individuals are recognized as citizens, they remain socially isolated and economically constrained. Real freedom requires overcoming the split between political universality and private life. Human emancipation, Marx argues, will be complete only when “the real, individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen” (46)—when political agency becomes part of everyday social existence. Only then can people fully realize their species-being: living socially, productively, and consciously as a collective rather than experiencing politics and the economy as forces imposed from outside.