II
MARX’S RESPONSE TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT
I was led by my studies to the conclusion that legal relations as well as the forms of the state could neither be understood by themselves, nor explained by the so-called general processes of the human mind, but that they are rooted in the material conditions of life, which are summed up by Hegel after the fashion of the English and the French of the eighteenth century under the name ‘civic society’.[1]
In order to set into the proper context our discussion of Marx’s critique of the Hegelian state, it is useful to review Hegel’s theory of the state and the purposes for which it arose. For Hegel, history is the chronicle of the struggle of Absolute Mind, or Geist, to overcome its estrangement from the temporal, extended universe—a universe which is in fact Mind in its finite phase. As explained in the previous chapter, this alienation of finite Mind from infinite Mind was an ontological necessity because Absolute Mind, in its undifferentiated form, would be incapable of anything more than a dull, self-referential, disembodied kind of consciousness. From the perspective of Absolute Mind then, the historical process is characterized by a progressive ‘coming to self-consciousness’ of itself as absolute. From the perspective of finite Mind, of which the consciousness of men is a constituent, the historical process takes the form of steadily approaching universal consciousness, and of moving through a set of social institutions which correspond to the human consciousness of a specific epoch. If history is a process by which Geist strives to grasp itself through the mediation of its finite phase and, ultimately, transcends its alienation from the universe of extension, then, for human beings, history is the process by which limited, contingent knowledge is unmasked and people strive for universality and freedom. By Hegel’s reasoning, the purpose of history is to bring Geist to a condition in which it is at home with itself as Absolute, and humanity to a state of absolute consciousness, having overcome all contingency. This is a condition to which Hegel refers in the Phenomenology of Spirit as “Absolute Knowing” in which all history is revealed as “the circle that returns into itself, the circle that presupposes its beginning and reaches it only at the end”.[2]
To Hegel, the state is the light of Absolute Reason as it manifests itself in the finite realm. The state is not to be understood simply in instrumental terms, as an apparatus which enforces contracts and the rule of law, but as the earthly embodiment of Absolute Mind which facilitates the ongoing universalization of human consciousness and the eventual reconciliation of Absolute Mind with its finite phase. As such, Hegel’s state has significance not only in itself, but as a parenthesis in Hegel’s metaphysics. In addition to coordinating such comparatively mundane tasks as public works, the state is the institution through which the historical struggle of Absolute Mind to reconcile itself with finite being is revealed to finite eyes. As the repository of Mind in the finite sphere, the state—according to Hegel—stands in contradistinction to civil society, the character of which is emergent from the state. Being prior to the material relationships of civil society, the state has the capacity to modify human consciousness and bring it closer to universality. The very existence of civil society presupposes the state which is able, through its many offices and bodies, to mediate between the particularistic concerns of civil life and universal ends.
The ultimate goal of Hegel’s state is to overcome the opposition between the mass of particular, egoistic desires intrinsic to civil society, and the universal ends of ethical community. This is accomplished through the mediating structures of the state machinery, such as the Assembly of the Estates and the Executive. The end result, in Hegel’s thinking, would be that the egoistic, self-absorbed individual has the capacity to grasp the universal interest of his community, and the reason to see that his own personal interests, in fact, coincide with the universal ones. The ability to see one’s own interest in the ethos of one’s community is the sine qua non of freedom in the Hegelian sense, and the means by which human beings can rise above crude self-interest. In short, the division which has stood throughout history, between the infinite and the finite, the universal and the particular, is transcended when the finite consciousness of humanity is elevated to infinite consciousness through the mediation of the state. The alienation of the particular man from the human community is overcome with the subsumption of the finite consciousness into the infinite consciousness, and with the particular being at home within the universal.
Since Hegel’s theory of the state has its basis in a particular conception of reality (as outlined in such works as the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic), Marx’s critique of Hegel’s theory of the state is equally a critique of Hegel’s metaphysics. In the first instance, Marx is critical of the general notion that the empirical world is contingent upon Absolute Mind. Following closely the form of Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique of religion, Marx argues that the essentially religious relation of human beings to Absolute Mind or its worldly concomitant—the state—is merely a symptom of humanity’s alienation from its own essence, and of humanity’s confrontation of this disembodied essence as an external force. Like Feuerbach’s critique of the relation between human beings and God, Marx’s critique of the relation between the state and civil society suggests that Hegel posited this relation in an inverted fashion. Instead of the state being a truly autonomous body which moulds the character of civil society and attenuates the particular, egoistic desires which run rampant within it, Marx argues that the state is a dependent body, a reflection of these egoistic desires which has only the appearance of autonomy. In doing so, Marx, like Feuerbach, takes issue with what he believes to be the transposition of subject and object in Hegel’s philosophy. However, Marx goes much farther than subjecting Hegel’s political philosophy to a Feuerbachian critique. More than simply applying a borrowed methodology to Hegel’s theory of the state, Marx further subjects the institutions of Hegel’s state to critical analysis and calls into question the idea that the state can influence civil consciousness, that the state represents universality, and, ultimately, that there is a distinction between the state and civil society at all.
II. TRANSFORMATION AND DEMYSTIFICATION
In the 1872 Preface to Capital, Marx offers a summary statement of the critique of Hegel upon which he first embarked some thirty years earlier. Marx writes of Hegel’s philosophy that,
the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea’, [Hegel] even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea’. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.[3]
Marx’s misgivings about the Hegelian preeminence of Mind did not, however, represent a rejection of Hegel. Marx is quick to identify himself with Hegel and his ‘dialectical’ method in spite of his opinion that Hegel’s use of the method obscures the true nature of reality. According to Marx,
[t]he mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.[4]
In other words, Hegel’s philosophy is, to Marx’s mind, quite informative. As Marx stated years earlier in the third part of his “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts”,
Hegel’s Phenomenology is a concealed, unclear and mystifying criticism, but in so far as it grasps the alienation of man (even though man appears only as mind) all the elements of criticism are contained in it, and are often presented and worked out in a manner which goes far beyond Hegel’s own point of view.[5]
The shortcomings of the Hegelian system thus do not involve the content of that system; rather, Marx is questioning the manner in which that content is being presented. Therefore, Marx’s aim is not to reject the entire system on the grounds that it mystifies the true nature of reality, but to strip away the “mystical shell” of Hegel’s system so that the “rational kernel” within it can be more clearly revealed.
Marx’s earliest significant attempt at a demystification of Hegel’s philosophy can be found in his marginal notes to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, which were written during the spring and summer of 1843. These notes, which consist of passages copied from Hegel’s text followed by critical commentary, address paragraphs 261 to 313 of the text in which Hegel outlines his doctrine of the state. The critique of Hegel which Marx offers here is significant because it addresses in a broad fashion the problem of Hegel’s metaphysics, and, in particular, the difficulties arising from his theory of the state. As will be demonstrated in this chapter, Marx does not fault Hegel on his description of the problem facing the state, i.e., how to best overcome the disjunction between the particular interests of individuals and the universal interests of the ethical community. Instead, Marx argues that the institutional structures which are supposed to unify the particularistic aims of civil society and the universal aims of the state qua ethical community, the Estates and Executive, are self-contradictory and inherently ineffective. More importantly, Marx argues that, although Hegel posits civil society as an emergent phenomenon of the universal state, Hegel is at every point forced into a “crass materialism” which shows the state for what it really is—a tool of the particular interests which run rampant in civil society rather than an expression of universality and Absolute Mind.
The Critique of Hegel’s System in General
As Marx’s main concern is the practical critique of Hegel’s theory of the state as presented in Philosophy of Right, it is not surprising that Marx does not confront Hegel’s metaphysics directly. Instead of entering into an abstract discussion of Hegel’s system in general, Marx attempts to show that Hegel’s theory of the state forces one to the false conclusion that the finite, material spheres of family and civil society are derived from the infinite ‘Idea’ of the state. By demonstrating the logical difficulties of positing the state as autonomous and unconditioned, and civil society as contingent upon the state, Marx shows by specific example the failure of Hegel’s metaphysics in general. Just as it is incorrect to argue that ‘real’, empirical institutions, such as the family and civil society, are contingent upon the state, so too is it incorrect to argue that the finite, material universe is derived from infinite, absolute being.
The passage from Philosophy of Right which, for Marx, most clearly demonstrates the confusion and needless mystification of Hegel’s theory of the state in particular, and his philosophical system in general, is found in paragraph 262. In it, Hegel writes:
The actual Idea is mind, which, sundering itself into the two ideal spheres of its concept, family and civil society, enters upon its finite phase, but it does so only in order to rise above its ideality and become explicit as infinite actual mind. It is therefore to these ideal spheres that the actual Idea assigns the material of this its finite actuality, viz. human beings as a mass, in such a way that the function assigned to any given individual is visibly mediated by circumstances, his caprice and his personal choice of his station in life.[6]
Marx finds this passage troublesome for several reasons. Though Hegel’s claim that Mind is actual, and that it divides itself into the finite spheres of family and civil society, is quite consistent with his idealism, he is not clear about why this development occurs. Hegel says that the division of the “actual Idea” into the finite spheres of family and civil society occurs in order that it might transcend these finite phases and be reunited with itself as “infinite actual mind”. However, this statement is, for Marx, the height of obfuscation. The problem Marx sees is that the Idea (the state) is represented as acting with purpose according to which “[i]t divides into finite spheres and it does this ‘in order to return to itself, to exist for itself’, in such a way that it is just as it really is”.[7] In other words, the cycle by which the actual Idea (the state) sunders itself into its finite components (the family and civil society) and then transcends these in order to, once again, become actual Mind is pointless because Mind is no more actual or complete after the cycle is completed than it was before the cycle began. Furthermore, in making the transcendence of its finite spheres a condition of its emergence as infinite and actual, Marx notes that Hegel makes the allegedly autonomous Mind contingent upon its finite spheres.
From this it becomes evident to Marx that Hegel is willing to uphold the primacy of the ideal and, thus, the integrity of his system, even at the expense of all good sense. The obscurity of the relationship between the state and civil society described by Hegel is the result of his refusal to view the living, material world as anything more than mere phenomena or appearance. While Hegel is prepared to admit that material circumstance, chance, and personal choice influence the function of the state, material reality—the world of our experience—is still forever relegated to second-class standing. The influence a man has upon the state because of chance or choice is understood to be the state working on itself. To Hegel, the apparent influence over the ideal sphere by material circumstances is little more than that: appearance. These circumstances, explains Marx,
this caprice and this personal choice of a station in life, this real mediation, are merely the appearance of a mediation which the real Idea performs on itself and which takes place behind the scenes. Reality is not deemed to be itself but another reality instead. The ordinary empirical world is not governed by its own mind but by a mind alien to it; by contrast the existence corresponding to the real Idea is not a reality generated out of itself, but is just the ordinary material world.[8]
In short, the Idea is taken, incorrectly, to be the subject, and all of the real material subjects, such as civil society, are taken to be the unreal predicates of this Idea.[9]
To recapitulate then, Hegel’s conception of the relationship between state and civil society is as follows. Civil society and the family are finite spheres which are the products of infinite Mind. Both the family and civil society do not give rise to the state as part of their own natural, material development; rather, it is the life of the state—the earthly embodiment of Mind—which has distinguished these finite spheres from itself. As a result of the division of the finite spheres from the infinite sphere, we are left with a civil society which is indebted for its existence to a mind which is not its own, and which is determined by this mind. Thus, the goal of civil society is not to exist in its own right, but to exist according to the imperatives of the Idea which is trying to become explicit as infinite, actual Mind. Civil society’s purpose is simply to be transcended by infinite Mind so that Mind can enjoy its own infinity.
Marx is, however, quick to point out the contradictions which this line of thinking demonstrates. Hegel has already told us that finite reality, of which civil society is a part, is to be understood as a secondary phenomenon. Nevertheless, civil society is also shown by Hegel to be essential to the process by which Mind becomes infinite and absolute. In other words, Marx states, “the political state cannot exist without the natural basis of the family and the artificial basis of civil society. These are its sine qua non; and yet the condition is posited as the conditioned, the determinator as the determined, the producer as the product.”[10] In this persistent inversion of subject and predicate which characterizes Hegel’s treatment of the relationship between state and civil society, Marx sees a particular example of the failure of Hegel’s system as a whole. For Marx, this failure consists in the fact that the material reality “which serves as a starting point is not seen as such but as a mystical result”, that “[t]he real becomes a mere phenomenon”, and that the Idea “has no goal beyond the logical one to ‘become explicit as infinite real mind’”.[11] As much as Hegel wishes to demonstrate in Philosophy of Right that material reality is at all points contingent upon Absolute Mind, material reality is ultimately shown to be the basis of Absolute Mind. Thus, one is compelled to conclude with Marx that in paragraph 262 lies “the whole mystery of the Philosophy of Right and of Hegel’s philosophy in general”.[12]
An Aside About Feuerbach and the Transformative Critique
The originality of Marx’s critique of Hegel consists in the fact that Marx begins with Hegel’s political philosophy as a means to criticising his whole metaphysical system. Marx, as Avineri suggests, is not much of a metaphysician; his concern is with real social and political issues. Nonetheless, in his initial examination of the institutions of Hegel’s state, found in the first section of the “Critique”, Marx is able to put the general problem of Hegel’s metaphysical system in a nutshell: “Hegel everywhere makes the Idea into the subject, while the genuine, real subject ... is turned into a predicate”.[13] For Marx then, the key to liberating the empirical truths, the real subjects, of Hegel’s philosophy from dependence upon the Idea requires, in part, the inversion of subject and predicate. The precedent for this kind of transformative critique of Hegel was found in the work of Marx’s contemporary, Ludwig Feuerbach.
Feuerbach was active as a philosopher in the period immediately following Hegel’s death in 1831. Though he began his public intellectual life as a Hegelian, Feuerbach is most noted for his ‘materialist’ critique of Hegel’s idealism. In two of his major works, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future and The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach attacks the view that Hegel’s ‘Universal’ is the primary reality. Instead of grasping the world through thought and abstraction, as was the practice of the Hegelian school, Feuerbach proposed a philosophy based on material phenomenon and sense perception. This is not to say that Feuerbach is engaged in mere “sensualism”.[14] Like Hegel, Feuerbach believed that the world must be apprehended by the mind; however, unlike Hegel, Feuerbach argued that the only opening to the mind is through the senses. Thought itself is not problematic; rather, it is thought which claims to encompass all reality—as in Hegel’s system—which is problematic. Thus, to Feuerbach, Hegel’s belief in an absolute mind which had to become objectified, and enter into a finite phase constituting the material universe, was insupportable because it was empirically unverifiable. Hegel’s thought tells us that the objective world, containing all our experiences and sensations, is not real in the way we understand it intuitively, but is a predicate of Absolute Mind—a whim in the daydream of Geist. This, thinks Feuerbach, is pure mystification.
Feuerbach accounts for the primacy of Absolute Mind in Hegel’s thought in the following fashion. According to Feuerbach, all conceptions of the Absolute are to be accounted for by the alienation of human beings from their own true essence. To Feuerbach, the material world is not some self-alienated form of Absolute Mind, nor is the human consciousness a finite form of Mind in the process of de-alienation. Instead of being the absolute basis of reality which human beings can only dimly grasp with their limited intellect, Absolute Mind is, in fact, self-alienated humanity. Absolute Mind is the abstracted, absolutized essence of Man which, in its estrangement from its subject, takes on the appearance of an external, infinite being. In this alienated form, the human essence confronts men as something absolute and inhuman—as God.
The kind of religious alienation characteristic of Hegel’s writing is to be explained by a process in which men, fully knowledgeable of their own finitude, project their own infinite qualities onto Heaven, objectify these, and make their own objectified qualities the focus of religious reverence. It is a disuniting of human beings from themselves. But, as Feuerbach argues, the fact that the human consciousness of God is identical to human self-consciousness does not mean that one is aware of this identity. In fact, religion is premised upon the ignorance of this identity. The power of this objectification lies precisely in the fact that its origin in human finiteness, and the human need to overcome this, is not acknowledged. Through projection and objectification, human beings create their own ideal image, but this image is not recognized as human in origin. Because men fail to see the basis of divinity within themselves, they have a divine fantasy instead—a God created in Man’s image.
In this way “Man first of all sees his nature as if out of himself, before he finds it in himself. His own nature is in the first instance contemplated by him as that of another being”.[15] At all times, God as He appears to us is the truth of humankind revealed in the divine realm:
Such as are a man’s thoughts and dispositions, such is his God; so much worth as a man has, so much and no more has his God. Consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge. By his God thou knowest the man, and by the man his God; the two are identical. Whatever is God to a man, that is his heart and soul; and conversely, God is the manifested inward nature, the expressed self of a man, —religion the solemn unveiling of a man’s hidden treasures, the revelation of his intimate thoughts, the open confession of his love-secrets.[16]
For example, God is conceived to be loving because human beings love and consider this to be God-like. God is understood to be wise and benevolent because human beings themselves know nothing better than wisdom and benevolence. Thus, in religion, human beings do not really contemplate the glory of God, but their own latent nature. “The reason”, writes Feuerbach, “ that conceives of God as an unlimited being conceives of God only its own limitlessness”.[17] Indeed, the divine essence is nothing more than human essence which has been liberated from the limits of nature and material life.[18] Correctly understood then, the end of religion should not be to become God-like. Instead, because “this differencing of God and man, with which religion begins, is a differencing of man with his own nature”,[19] the end of religion should be to reject God entirely and to bring to full realization the human essence which men have mistakenly understood as belonging to God. Religion, speaking its truth in a non-obscurantist fashion, will be the positive affirmation of humanity.[20]
The understanding of religion offered by Feuerbach’s transformational critique has quite interesting implications for Hegel’s philosophy.[21] Transformational criticism of Hegel’s system suggests that, far from being the fundamental truth of the universe, Hegel’s Absolute Mind is “a phenomenon of human self-estrangement”.[22] In Feuerbach’s critique, Hegel’s conception of history, as the process by which Absolute Mind transcends its finite phases and returns to itself, is transformed into an alternate conception of history in which human beings achieve full self-realization by reclaiming their “species essence”[23] from their self-made idols. History is not the chronicle of Absolute Mind’s coming to self-consciousness through Man, its finite phase. On the contrary, it is the process by which humankind unmasks and abolishes the many religious and ideological forms which appear to men initially as external necessities but which are revealed to be manifestations of human mental activity. History, as such, is not the daydream of Absolute Mind but the protracted struggle of real human beings to abolish illusory gods.
Marx’s contribution to the Feuerbachian critique was to realize that human alienation can be identified in spheres other than religion. Within weeks of completing the “Critique”, Marx formulated with great clarity the critical power of Feuerbach’s transformative method in its capacity to “unmask human self-alienation in its secular forms, once its sacred form has been unmasked”[24] What Feuerbach had done was to transform the usual Hegelian subject, thought, into the predicate and the Hegelian predicate, human beings, into the subject. This liberated people, finite beings, from Hegel’s system which held up the mental creations of men as independent things having power over them. Marx understood that the state, like Absolute Mind, was a concept in Hegel’s philosophy indicative of alienation. This realization was the basis for Marx’s critique of Hegel’s doctrine of the state on the grounds that it reversed subject and predicate. As already noted, paragraph 262 of Philosophy of Right provides a vivid example of this reversal. Instead of positing the family and civil society as the true material basis of the state, Marx argues, Hegel mystifies this relationship by insisting that the state is the basis of these finite spheres and that it creates civil society simply to transcend its finiteness. Thus, it might be argued with some justification that Marx, in this particular case, was a practitioner of Feuerbach’s transformative method, and that this is the backbone of his critique of Hegel’s political philosophy.
Such a position has been taken by a number of commentators on Marx and his critique of Hegel’s political philosophy. For example, Hal Draper, in attempting to explain the nature of Marx’s “Critique”, writes that “one characteristic is basic. Throughout, following the lead already given in philosophy by Feuerbach, Marx is intent on inverting Hegel, turning him upside down, in a sense which he later described in his preface to Capital”.[25] Furthermore, according to Draper,
[i]n the 1843 ‘Critique’, this process is seen in terms of the relationship of ‘subject’ to ‘predicate’—of What Is (the existing reality) to the idea of What Is. Which engenders which? Shouldn’t the real point of departure be the actual state, the one that really exists, rather than a philosophical concept (idea) of a state which does not exist anywhere but in the philosophizing head?[26]
Likewise, Shlomo Avineri tells us that “Marx suggests that such a transformative criticism of Hegel’s political philosophy could easily reveal that for Hegel the individual, the real subject, appeared as a mere predicate of an abstraction hypostatized into an independent, all-embracing subject” and that “Marx sees in the transformative method the cipher which would enable him to decode the truth in Hegel’s thought”.[27] For both Draper and Avineri, Marx’s critique of Hegel can be collapsed to a process of transformation—a reversal of subject and predicate.
Certainly Marx would be the last to deny the influence of Feuerbach’s critique of religion on his own critique of Hegel’s political philosophy.[28] Nevertheless, the reduction of Marx’s critique to a simple inversion of subject and predicate should not be taken uncritically. As already noted, in the 1872 Preface to Capital, Marx believed that Hegel presented reality “standing on its head” and that Hegel’s metaphysical system “must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell”.[29] However, this is not to say that Marx’s critique of Hegel entailed only a transposition of subject and predicate. Indeed, in the opening remarks to Capital, Marx’s primary complaint about Hegel is not that he inverts reality but that he presents reality in a mystified fashion. This is a critical point because it suggests that Marx’s aim in the critique of Hegel was not simply to apply Feuerbach’s transformational formula to Hegel’s philosophy and, in so doing, magically salvage its truth. Contrary to Draper’s view, Marx was not intent on simply inverting Hegel’s philosophy. Rather, his aim was to demystify it.
If one reads Marx’s critique of Hegel’s political theory as the mere application of a method appropriated from Feuerbach, one runs the risk of glossing over some of its most important elements. Such a reading will lead to the conclusion that Marx’s approach was formulaic and that Marx was only interested in engaging Hegel on a metaphysical level. However, if Marx is read as trying to demystify Hegel’s account of the state, the complexity of Marx’s enterprise becomes evident. Marx’s concern is not merely a metaphysical one that asks whether it is the state which engenders civil society or civil society which engenders the abstract state. Throughout the “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State” Marx’s concern is with the actual institutions of Hegel’s state, the implications of their failure for the state in general, and the mystification that the state suffers at the hands of Hegel. The “Critique” is not simply a philosophical exercise in subject-object transposition but an attempt to tear away the mystification arising from what Marx believed to be Hegel’s identification of the Prussian state with the activity of Absolute Mind, and his subsequent reification of the status quo. To free Marx from the assumption that his critique of Hegel was exclusively transformative is to see that Marx’s critique is not merely an abstract, formulaic exercise—a materialist version of Hegelian metaphysics—but a practical, concrete analysis of real institutions and real social problems. Ultimately, the significance of Feuerbach’s transformative critique to Marx’s thought must be appreciated by readers of Marx; yet, this should not be done at the expense of reducing Marx’s critique of Hegel’s political theory to a simple formula. To do justice to Marx’s encounter with Hegel’s political philosophy one must also consider, in addition to the transformative critique, Marx’s practical critique, in which he took issue with actual institutions and not merely philosophical categories like “subject” and “predicate”. This can be found in Marx’s analysis of the state’s mediating structures—the Executive and the Estates—where the contradictions of these structures are enumerated.
The Failure of Mediation and the Illusion of the State
Marx is critical of the mediating structures of the state posited by Hegel, the purpose of which is to achieve a synthesis of individual interests and the universal interests of the ethical community. While Hegel maintains that these structures have the capacity to attenuate the particularistic desires of individuals in civil society, and provide a sphere in which the particular in transformed into the universal, Marx argues that the supposed unity of particularity and universality which is achieved within these structures is merely apparent and formal. The mediating structures of Hegel’s state are in fact a veiled antagonism, and serve only to propagate particular interests in the ostensibly universal realm of the state rather than engendering universal thinking in civil society. The disjunction between the particular and the universal, though theoretically abolished, re-emerges when Hegel’s political institutions are subjected to analysis. Marx elaborates on this in his examination of the Executive and the two Estates.
According to Marx, the tendency of individual self-interest to appear clad in the respectable clothing of universality permeated Hegel’s theory. At all points, the alleged universality of the state is merely cloaked individualism. To Marx, the general problem of particularity masquerading as universality could be found in paragraph 289 of Philosophy of Right. In this passage, Hegel explains that the “corporation mind”, the mind of the individual as it exists in civil society, undergoes a process of transformation by which it converts itself into the mind of the state. The reason for this, according to Hegel, is that the individual, acquisitive, self-interested mind finds in the state the means of securing its particular ends through positive law, rights, and the enforcement of contracts. For Hegel, the fact that individuals see their interests to be bound up in the universal interests of the state “is the secret of the patriotism of the citizens in the sense that they know the state as their substance, because it is the state that maintains their particular spheres of interest together with the title, authority, and welfare of these”. Because individuals see their own well-being to be rooted directly in the universal, it is in the sphere of civil society “that the depth and strength which the state possesses in sentiment is seated”.[30]
Marx finds this statement to be quite indicative of the true nature of the state in general. Ultimately, it is nothing more than the egoistic desires of men which form the basis of the patriotic sentiment and devotion to the universal aims of the state. However, the ostensibly universal state is understood by Hegel to be autonomous and free from such particularistic influences. Hence the contradiction. While Hegel tries to preserve the autonomy of the state, he is forced simultaneously to admit that the integrity and legitimacy of the state is contingent upon its ability to preserve individual interests which Hegel must then uphold as the perfect expression of universality. Or, in Marx’s words, “[a]s the universal is made autonomous, it is directly confounded with empirical existence and this limited existence is at once uncritically judged to be the expression of the Idea”.[31] Having identified the general problem of the state as veiled self-interest, Marx attempts to uncover the specific instances of this in the State’s mediating bodies.
For Hegel, the function of the Executive is to administer such functions as the judiciary and the police.[32] Such executive functions cannot be carried out reliably by casual servants who may fail to fulfil their duty to the state out of concern for their own interests. What is required to secure reliable civil service is that
men shall forgo the selfish and capricious satisfaction of their subjective ends; by this very sacrifice, they acquire the right to find their satisfaction in, but only in, the dutiful discharge of their public functions. In this fact, so far as public business is concerned, there lies the link between universal and particular interest which constitutes both the concept of the state and its inner stability.[33]
In short then, what is required is a class of civil servants who are paid by the state to perform their duties and to keep the state apparatus functioning in good order. The civil servant is to be “assured satisfaction of particular needs” and also freed from “external compulsion which may tempt a man to seek ways and means of satisfying them at the expense of his official duties”.[34] As it is conceived by Hegel, the bureaucratic class is a universal class. Freed from need, the bureaucratic class is said to be able to transcend the particularism of civil society and serve the state in a selfless fashion.
Marx, however, is not satisfied by this description of the bureaucratic class. The reason for this is the fact that the universality of the bureaucrat is a formal, rather than a real, characteristic. Instead of embodying the selflessness which is adequate to the concept of the universal state, the bureaucracy becomes a special enclave within the state apparatus “which has really made itself into civil society”,[35] i.e., it uses its powers merely to satisfy the interests of those individuals who occupy its offices. The bureaucracy, argues Marx, “is the ‘state formalism’ of civil society”;[36] it is all of the particularistic desires of civil society concealed under the mantle of the universal. Furthermore, this ‘state as formalism’ is said by Marx to be the essence and, in fact, the purpose of the bureaucracy. The bureaucrat, who understands his ersatz universality to be the true and real achievement of universality, sees the real purpose of the state—to engender genuine universality—as a purpose opposed to the state. In Marx’s words,
[t]he mind of the bureaucracy is the ‘formal mind of the state’. It therefore makes the ‘formal mind of the state’ or the real mindlessness of the state into a categorical imperative. The bureaucracy appears to itself as the ultimate purpose of the state. As the bureaucracy converts its ‘formal’ purposes into its content, it comes into conflict with ‘real’ purposes at every point. It is therefore compelled to pass off form as content and content as form. The purposes of the state are transformed into the purposes of offices and vice-versa.[37]
As the offices of the ‘universal’ state are twisted to the private purposes of the bureaucracy, the state is held “in thrall, as [the bureaucrats’] private property”.[38]
As far as the individual bureaucrat is concerned, “the purpose of the state becomes his private purpose, a hunt for promotion, careerism”.[39] For Marx, it is not the case that the identity which is posited, between the interest of the state and the particular interest, results in the bureaucrats taking on the universal interest of the state as their own. Rather, it is the private interests of bureaucrats, which stand in opposition to other private interests, that are injected directly into the state. Ultimately, in reifying the universal interest in the form of the bureaucratic class, Hegel introduces particular interest into the heart of the state and yet is forced to treat this particularity as the earthly expression of Absolute Mind—a development undoubtedly ironic to Marx. The formal universality of the bureaucratic class is a poor surrogate for actual universality because it solves the antagonism between particularity and universality in thought only. What is needed, Marx believes, is not a formal subsumption of particular interests into the universal state, but a real absorption of the universal interest into the particular individual:
The bureaucracy can be superseded only if the universal interest becomes a particular interest in reality and not merely in thought, in abstraction as it does in Hegel. And this can take place only if the particular interest really becomes the universal interest. Hegel proceeds from an unreal antithesis and hence can resolve it only into an imagined identity which is in reality antagonistic. The bureaucracy is such an identity.[40]
In addition to the bureaucrats’ tendency to make state offices a springboard for lucrative careers, Marx points out another problem with their claims to universality. Not only are bureaucratic offices the expression of particular interests, but the appointment of bureaucrats to these offices is a particular act. In part, bureaucrats are appointed to their posts according to objective criteria, i.e., tests which measure “knowledge and proof of ability” such that “the state will get what it requires”.[41] Yet, the actual appointment is subjective. Since the qualification for employment in the civil service is not genius, there are necessarily many candidates of good intelligence and ability whose relative merit cannot be determined objectively. Thus,
[t]he selection of one of the candidates, his nomination to office, and the grant to him of full authority to transact public business—all this, as the linking of two things, a man and his office, which in relation to each other must always be fortuitous, is the subjective aspect of election to office, and it must lie with the crown as the power in the state which is sovereign and has the last word.[42]
While Hegel would like to argue that the monarch is the embodiment of the universal will in a single man, Marx realizes, correctly, that the particular will of the monarch is simply that: particular. Consequently, by making the appointment of civil servants dependent upon the decision of the sovereign, Hegel effectively rules out the possibility that these bureaucrats might ever function for universal ends. The allegedly universal bureaucratic class at best expresses the particular will of the monarch, and, at worst, the particular wills of all its constituents. The bureaucratic sphere is permeated throughout with self-interest.
Having deflated the universal pretensions of the bureaucratic class, Marx turns his attention to the Legislature[43] and its two constituent Estates: the first composed of representatives from the business class and the second composed of representatives from the landed class. Like the bureaucrats, the Estates, the bodies which represent civil society in legislative activity, are posited by Hegel as mediating strata between the self-interest of civil society and the universal ends of the state proper. However, Marx maintains that, like the bureaucrats, the Estates are only formally universal. To Marx, the Estates, in conjunction with the bureaucracy, ensure that
[t]he matters of universal concern are now complete without having become the real concern of the people. The real affairs of the people have sprung into being without the interference of the people. The Estates are the illusory existence of state affairs conceived as the affairs of the people. They are the illusion that matters of universal concern are really matters of universal, public concern or the illusion that the affairs of the people are matters of universal concern.[44]
In Marx’s critique, this general claim is developed by revealing the self-interest of the Estates which Hegel himself has imported into his account of them, and by a more typically ‘Marxist’ analysis of the relationship between private property and the supposedly universal landed gentry.
One of Hegel’s statements of the capacity of the Estates to engender universal consciousness in civil society can be found in paragraph 301 of Philosophy of Right. Here, he refers to the function of the Estates as “bringing into existence the moment of subjective formal freedom”, i.e. “the public consciousness as an empirical universal, of which the thoughts and opinions of the Many are particulars”.[45] However, Marx calls attention to some statements made further on in the Remark to this paragraph. First, in arguing that the Estates are a guarantee of the general welfare and public freedom, Hegel wants to make it clear that this capacity does not lie in their power of insight into the nature of the state’s organization or knowledge of the ‘ins-and-outs’ of the state. This kind of insight, thinks Hegel, rests with the bureaucrats who are “more habituated to the business of government and have greater skill in it, so that even without the Estates they are able to do what is best, just as they also continually have to do while the Estates are in session”. Second, in an attempt to deflect the accusation by the cynical “rabble” that the will of the Executive is bad, or less good, than the will of the ruled, Hegel tries to show that the Estates (unlike the bureaucracy) represent the real interests of the ruled. The presupposition held by citizens that all of the state’s executives are only concerned with murkily defined state interests
might at once be answered on its own ground by the counter-charge that the Estates start from isolated individuals, from a private point of view, from particular interests, and so are inclined to devote their activities to these at the expense of the general interests, while per contra the other moments in the power of the state explicitly take up the standpoint of the state from the start and devote them to the universal end.[46]
In Marx’s opinion, Hegel’s comments about the knowledge and the good will of the Estates accomplishes nothing but to suggest that the Estates are, in fact, superfluous, and, indeed, suspect. In comparing them with the bureaucracy, Hegel had attempted to demonstrate that the Estates had knowledge invaluable to the administration of the state arising from their direct involvement in material life and their desire to avoid the wrath of public criticism should they fail at their duties. However, as noted above, the bureaucracy would be able to administer the affairs of the state even in the absence of the Estates; in Hegel’s words, “even without the Estates [the bureaucracy] is able to do what is best”. Thus, to Marx, the Estates—which are redundant by Hegel’s own admission—are a “pure luxury”; “Their existence is a mere form in the most literal sense of the word.”[47] Furthermore, the good will of the Estates is called into question. In showing the true root of the Estates’ interests to be the particular sphere, Hegel had attempted to show that the members of the Assembly of Estates were not trapped in some nether-world of lofty-sounding state interests and were indeed concerned with the material interests of “the Many”. However, for Marx, this rootedness in the private standpoint is precisely what makes the Estates incapable of articulating the universal aims for which the Estates were created. The truth about the Estates, thinks Marx, “is that private interests are their universal concern, and not that universal concerns are their private interest”.[48] Because they have their basis in civil society, the Estates are nothing more than the interests of civil society smuggled into the state sphere in a Trojan Horse of universality; they are “the reflection of civil society upon the state”.[49]
Because the Estates were rooted in the material interests of civil society, it is understandable that Marx had reservations about their capacity to act universally. This is especially true in the case of the Estates’ representatives from the business class who, as businessmen, are not typically disposed to thinking beyond the pragmatism of commerce. However, Marx offers an additional criticism of the Estates pertaining specifically to the part played in the Assembly by the landed class. Unlike the representatives to the Estates from the business class who can only enter political life by being elected to their position, the representatives drawn from the landed class are entitled to sit in the Assembly of the Estates simply because they own property. According to Marx, this property qualification, and, in particular, the manner in which property is acquired, demonstrates the state’s subordination to property in Hegel’s political theory and its inability to pursue ends other than those which serve private property.
Hegel argues that, of the classes which constitute the Estates, the landed class is the one most naturally suited for political life because “its capital is independent alike of the state’s capital, the uncertainty of business, the quest for profit, and any sort of fluctuation in possessions”. For this reason, the landed class, unlike the business class, is essentially immune from all pressures and influences of material life, “whether from the executive or the mob”.[50] In the absence of personal need, this class is said to be publicly spirited and would not be inclined to engage in politics for personal ends. Furthermore, since entailed property is passed intact to the first-born of each generation—by the principle of primogeniture—the qualification for politics is completely outside the control of any individual; thus, amongst the land owning families, individuals do not choose independently to engage in politics, rather, political obligation chooses them. In short, land owners are ideal candidates for state service because they suffer none of the exigencies of material life, and are chosen for this service by something other than their own subjective will.
As Marx points out though, this apparently perfect basis for political life—landed property—has a totally unexpected characteristic which ultimately calls into question the capacity of property owners to think universally. This is a result of the fact that entailed property cannot be alienated, i.e., sold, at will. Hegel understands the principle of primogeniture to be a desirable thing which grants a modicum of stability to landowners and, as such, serves the best interests of the state. It is posited as something determined by the state to contribute to its own stability, “not as a end but as a means to justify and construct an end”. But, Marx argues, primogeniture is not the state’s doing. In reality,
primogeniture is a consequence of private property in the strict sense, private property petrified, private property (quand même) at the point of its greatest autonomy and sharpest definition. What Hegel asserts to be the end, the determining factor, the prime cause of primogeniture is in fact an effect of it, a consequence. Whereas according to Hegel primogeniture represents the power of the political state over private property, it is in fact the power of abstract private property over the political state. He makes the cause into the effect and effect into the cause, the determining factor into the determined and vice-versa.[51]
All that is left to the state is the illusion that, through positive law, it determines the movement of private property when in fact it is determined by that movement.[52]
The problem with property given and received by primogeniture is that it is inalienable. It is fortified against the will of its owner. Thus, private property becomes the subject of the owner’s will; the owner’s will is present only as a predicate of the private property. Property does not exist as something in which the owner can invest his will, but as something by which personal will can only exist as an epiphenomenon. Personal will cannot actively possess inalienable property, but is possessed by that property. Nevertheless, it is not simply the fortification against the wilfulness of the property owner imposed by property that makes this property problematic. Since the right, and, indeed, the obligation, to engage in politics is contingent upon property ownership, and property ownership is dependent upon an institution—primogeniture—which is independent of the will of the owner, private property owns both the will of the owner and the office that this owner occupies in the state. For Marx, the fact that primogeniture appears in such a positive light in Hegel’s theory is indicative of Hegel’s conservatism, and his desire to preserve the privileges of the landed class while making these appear to be in the interest of the state as a whole. What makes primogeniture positively glow is that “private property, i.e. private willfulness in its most abstract form, utterly philistinic, unethical and barbaric willfulness, is made to appear as the highest synthesis of the political state”.[53] In reality though, instead of being the state’s greatest achievement, primogeniture determines the state. Through primogeniture, private property actually inherits the first born son and makes his will the property of the property. Since the political qualifications arising from property ownership are actually the political qualifications of the property, “political qualifications appear here as the property of landed property, as something directly arising from the purely physical earth”.[54] In this way, Hegel’s system “can be seen to degenerate into the crassest materialism”[55] by which “[t]he political constitution at its highest point is ... the constitution of private property” and “[t]he loftiest political principles are the principles of private property”.[56]
Marx appears to make two related yet distinct claims here. On the one hand, he argues that private property based on primogeniture inverts the relationship between private property and the state posited by Hegel. Contrary to Hegel’s claim, the state is not prior to this kind of private property, this “private willfulness in its most abstract form”. Rather, Marx argues, “[i]n the constitution guaranteed by primogeniture, private property is the guarantee of the political constitution. In primogeniture this guarantee appears to be provided by a particular form of private property.” However, on the other hand, Marx makes a much stronger claim about the relationship between private property and the state. In addition to the initial claim that, contrary to Hegel’s opinion, the constitution of the state is determined by the principle of primogeniture, Marx further posits a general relationship between the state and property tout court—regardless of how this property is acquired. “Primogeniture”, he writes in the same passage, “is merely the particular form of the general relationship obtaining between private property and the political state”. Thus, it is not simply the case, according to Marx, that the state is dominated by entailed private property, but by private property in general. The domination of the state by property is a feature of modern life.[57]
At all parts of Hegel’s description of the mediating structures of the state, the state is shown to be subordinate to those same particular influences that it was supposed to transcend and bring to universality. In the Executive, the universal potential of the bureaucratic class is debased by the fact that executive offices are used as a springboard for careerism and personal gain. Moreover, in the Estates, the explicit rootedness of the business class and the landed class in material life calls into question their capacity to be universal. In particular, the landed estate does not facilitate the universal sentiment in civil society but is complicit in the domination of the political constitution by private property. The Estates merely introduce the self-interests of entrepreneurs and land-owners into the workings of the state which, in turn, endows these interests with the appearance of universality. By this function “[t]he Estates are the lie, legally sanctioned in constitutional states, that the state is the interest of the people or that the people is the interest of the state”.[58]
More importantly though, the Estates contribute to a distorted impression of the structure of society as a whole. Because the Estates exist as the embodiment of the apparent mediation between the universal state and particularistic civil society, they make it appear as if there really is a clear distinction between state and civil society in the modern state. What Marx argues, though, is that there really is no state qua ethical community, and that the Estates are merely the formal representation of the universal state in a society which is nothing more than a multiplicity of particular interests. The Estates, says Marx, “are supposed to ‘mediate’ between the sovereign and the executive on the one hand, and the people on the other; but they do not do this”. Indeed, such a mediation is impossible because it is premised upon an actual division between the universal state on the one hand, and the self-interested civil society on the other. Such a division does not exist. The state as conceived by Hegel is a fiction. Instead of being an actual opposition of state and civil society, society (as a whole) is an undifferentiated totality. Understood as nothing more than a plenum of self-interest, modern society shows Hegel’s Estates for what they really are: as the “organized political antagonism of civil society” which “itself stands in need of mediation”.[59]
Certainly, Marx’s assessment in “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State” is not above question. At times it is needlessly polemical, and it often substitutes aphorism for closely reasoned argument. For example, his critique of paragraph 262 of Philosophy of Right, mentioned earlier, does cut to the heart of Hegel’s mysticism. However, his reading of the historical development of Hegel’s state, in which the state is simply identified with the ‘Idea’ and is said to divide itself into its finite phases simply to transcend these phases and thus become what it already was, is tersely worded and perhaps fails to grasp the complexity of Hegel’s argument. Marx unfortunately has greater success at building a straw-man at this point than at being a serious interlocutor. Also disconcerting is the lack of clarity in Marx’s statement of the most devastating part of his critique of Hegel—the argument that private property in fact owns the state. While Marx makes a convincing case for the control that entailed property exerts over politics, his claim that the relationship between entailed property and the state is merely a specific example of a general relationship between all private property and the state is poorly developed. While this claim accords with Marx’s later claims about the relationship between property and the state it is not altogether clear how this was arrived at in the “Critique”. Furthermore, despite his attempts to cut through Hegel’s mysticism, Marx’s argument about the relationship between the state and private property is, in itself, mysterious. While faulting Hegel for attributing autonomy to the abstract state, Marx is perfectly happy to attribute will to inert private property. In spite of Marx’s intentions, he often matches Hegel, obscurity for obscurity.
Deficiencies aside however, Marx’s critique does demonstrate clearly the failure of Hegel’s political philosophy to achieve a synthesis of egoistic self-interest and universal ends. Most importantly though, it suggests how such a synthesis might actually take place. In making such a suggestion, Marx was not merely responding to the failure of Hegel but to a question which would have had as much currency in the Athenian Agora as it did in nineteenth century Germany: How is the individual to be reconciled with his world?[60] For Hegel, this happens when Absolute Mind, having gone through its process of self-alienation, comes to understand the world of extension as itself, assimilates the material universe as its own truth, and makes actual that which was previously only potential. Marx shifts the focus away from an absolute mind which develops through empirical individuals and towards these individuals themselves. In a way, Marx’s enterprise is identical to Hegel’s in the sense that both see the crowning achievement of history to be the reconciliation of human beings with the universe. Yet Marx differs from Hegel in that he views this reconciliation as coming from the human recognition of religious alienation and not the self-knowledge of Absolute Mind. This transcendence of the alienation between men and their own works, which nonetheless confront men as external necessity, is what Marx eventually called communism. For Marx, communism was not merely a variation on the existing institutional state but “a total transformation of human existence, the recovery of man of his species-essence”.[61] Contrary to the traditional liberal view,
social harmony is to be sought not by a legislative reform that will reconcile the egoism of each individual with the collective interest, but by removing the causes of antagonism. The individual will absorb society into himself: thanks to de-alienation, he will recognize humanity as his own internalized nature.[62]
Or, as Marx himself said it,
[h]uman emancipation will only be complete when the real, individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships, he has become a species-being; and when he has recognized and organized his own powers (forces propres) as social powers so that he no longer separates this social power from himself as political power.[63]
This is a remarkable statement because it captures both Marx’s dedication to the Hegelian enterprise and his departure from it. On the one hand, Marx saw communism as “the real future situation that Hegel had dimly adumbrated at the close of his Phenomenology, where spirit, having attained absolute knowledge, is beyond all alienation and fully ‘at home with itself in its otherness’”.[64] Communism was thus “Absolute Knowing” stripped of its mystical cloak. On the other hand though, Marx denied the capacity of Hegel’s instrument of universality—the state—to facilitate this transcendence, or that this transcendence could be based on a division between private and political life. He attacked the dualism of state and civil society at the heart of Hegel’s political theory. The prerequisites to true freedom were that the state be stripped of the appearance that it had a world-historical purpose aside from serving the desires of empirical individuals, and that human beings reabsorb into themselves the alienated functions of the state.[65] Freedom’s point of departure is the integration of private and community life within each and every human being, and the resolution of humankind’s species-essence into the lives of individuals such that the distinction between public and private is abolished.
In “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State”, Marx gives a short but provocative account of a political organization which overcomes alienation and the illusion of the state. The form that Marx suggests is democracy.
Democracy is the solution to the riddle of every constitution. In it we find the constitution founded on its true ground: real human beings and the real people; not merely implicitly and in essence, but in existence and in reality. The constitution is thus posited as the people’s own creation. The constitution is in appearance what it is in reality: the free creation of man.[66]
The use of the word ‘democracy’ requires some comment here. Though Marx advocates democracy, this does not suggest that he is simply a bourgeois democrat who believes in parliamentary government, popular elections, and the like. Such a conclusion would be nonsensical considering that Marx’s “Critique” is almost entirely a critique of the division of state and civil society, and of the relationship between the representative state and private property. Lucio Colletti is quite correct to write that, considering the content of the “Critique”, “it is scarcely possible to avoid perceiving that Marx goes well beyond the intellectual bounds of liberal constitutionalism”.[67] In fact, by ‘democracy’, Marx means something quite different from the contemporary understanding of the word. For Marx, democracy does not imply a representative government characterized by a division between the public and private realm; rather, it signifies “the organic community typified by the city-states of Antiquity (communities not yet split into ‘civil society’ versus ‘political society’)”.[68]
In the “Critique” Marx writes that “[i]n democracy the formal principle is identical with the substantive principle”. Democratic organization is thus distinguished from the organization of Hegel’s state in which there was always a disjunction between substance, i.e., the true interests of real human beings in civil society, and form—those interests as they were articulated at the political level in the state. Owing to the union of form and substance, democracy “is the first true unity of the particular and the universal”. In Hegel’s state, the political constitution “assumes the significance of the universal, determining and dominating all particulars”. By contrast, in democracy, “the state as particular is only particular, and as the universal it is really universal; i.e. it is not something determinate set off against other contents”. This realization leads Marx to perhaps the most original and fertile conclusion of the “Critique”: “the political state disappears in a true democracy”.[69] Even in an ostensibly democratic representative state like Hegel’s, “the constitution is dominant, but without really dominating, i.e. without materially penetrating the content of all the non-political spheres”.[70] It simply cannot because, even though representatives are chosen by the enfranchised public, the act of putting them into office cuts them off from the public that they were elected to serve. The form of the constitution is no longer identical with the substance of the constitution. Thus, the reconciliation of the universal and particular self-interest, which, in Hegel, is premised upon the division of the private sphere and the political state, actually requires an elimination of the state. Or more exactly, it requires a reabsorption of the political state into the individual.
What becomes evident in a reading of Hegel’s theory of the state as presented in Philosophy of Right, and Marx’s response to this theory in “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State”, is that Hegel and Marx had quite similar views of the foremost aim of politics. Like Hegel, Marx thought that political activity should be oriented towards ending the alienation between the universal on the one hand and the particular on the other. However, the two writers had opposing views of what the nature of the alienation was. For Hegel, alienation consisted in Absolute Mind being separated from finite mind. In the realm of human affairs, this alienation took the form of a separation of finite civil society from the universal state. Consequently, for Hegel, the cycle of alienation ended with the subsumption of finite, egoistic, self-interested consciousness into the universal state—facilitated by the mediating structures of the Executive and the Estates. In contrast, Marx understood this alienation as the projection, and subsequent objectification, of the human species-essence upon “the heaven of their political world”[71] which produced the illusion of an autonomous and universal state. Consequently, Marx understood alienation to end with the reabsorption of the abstract universal state—the species-essence of humankind—into each individual. To Marx, not only was Hegel’s account of alienation inverted, but Hegel’s exposition of the state’s mediating structures proved again and again that their bases were in the particularistic desires of civil society, not the universal ends of the state. The apparent synthesis of universality and egoistic individualism that Hegel achieves in the Executive and the Estates is in fact a veiled antagonism such that these mediating structures can never engender the universal in individuals; instead, individual particularity is made a universal principle. Ultimately, the state cannot be used as an instrument to overcome the separation of the particular and the universal interests inherent in political society because it is itself merely a reflection of particular interests.[72] The reconciliation of the particular and the universal, the finite and the infinite, coincides with the disappearance of the state.
V.I. Lenin therefore presents us with a vexing problem in his pamphlet State and Revolution. Like Marx, Lenin views the state as an alienated mirror of the human consciousness, and as a mindless subordinate to class and property interests. His reservations about the state lead him to the similar conclusion that human beings can lead authentic lives only in a society in which the state has been transcended. But Marx sees such transcendence as coming from the recovery of the human ‘species-essence’ from its alienated existence in the state. As indicated in his later analysis of capitalist production, Marx came to understand this reabsorption as coinciding with the spontaneous collapse of capitalism arising in part from over-production and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.[73] However, Marx never addressed the character of a communist society in great detail. The closest that Marx ever came to describing the institutions and form of a communist society was to identify the style of communist administration with that of the Paris Commune of 1871. Like the form of democracy which he outlined in the “Critique”, the Commune was vaguely characterized by Marx as
the reabsorption of the State power by society as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it, by the popular masses themselves, forming their own force instead of the organized force of their suppression—the political form of their social emancipation, instead of the artificial force ... of society wielded for their oppression by their enemies.[74]
Not surprisingly, problems arose when Lenin tried to draw practical conclusions from Marx’s theory and translate it into the language of a political program. Ultimately, Lenin came to the conclusion that for socialists to stress the gradual development, and spontaneous collapse, of capitalism was to wait for history to make a revolution which may or may not come.
The result was a conclusion which in the context of Marx’s thought is quite provocative. Unlike Marx, Lenin came to understand the state as having a major role in the process of its own abolition. While Marx would argue that the state is helpless to do anything but mirror particularity and class interest, the state has, for Lenin, the capacity to be the light of reason in the world and, in the proper hands, can be set on a course to withering away. Lenin’s solution to the problem of reconciling the interest of the individual with the collective interest of the ethical community was to adopt a state-centred approach to political rule designed to shape the consciousness of civil society. Before abolishing itself, the state needed to consolidate its power over civil society in order to make civil society capable of thinking universally. Thus, in Lenin’s Marxism there is an intrusion of Hegelian thinking. Though the state is to be mistrusted because it is simply an instrument of self-interest in civil society, the state, in the proper hands, has the capacity to bring civil society to universality and, in so doing, render itself obsolete.
Back to Table of Contents[1]Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (N.I. Stone, trans.; Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, International Library Publishing Co., 1904 [1857]), 11.
[2]G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (A. V. Miller, trans.; Oxford, New York, Toronto, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1977 [1952]), §802.
[3]Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I (Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, trans.; Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1986 [1887]), 29.
[5]Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” in Early Writings (T. Bottomore, trans.; New York, Toronto, London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964), 202.
[6]G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (T.M. Knox, trans.; London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1967 [1952]), §262. For the sake of clarity and consistency with the previous chapter, all lengthy passages from Philosophy of Right cited by Marx will be quoted directly from Knox’s translation of the text rather than from Marx’s notes which occasionally alter, and add emphasis to, Hegel’s writing. Shorter quotations from Hegel, presented as parts of quotations from Marx, will be indicated with single quotation-marks.
[7]Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State” in Early Writings (Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, trans.; Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1992 [1975]), 61.
[9]Similarly, in The Grundrisse, (Martin Nicolaus, trans.; New York: Vintage Books, 1973), Marx says,
Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, whereas the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind. But this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being [101].
[10]Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State”, 63.
[14]Manfred H. Vogel in “Introduction” to Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (Manfred H. Vogel, trans.; Indianapolis, New York, Kansas City: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1966), xi.
[15]Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (George Eliot, trans.; Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1989), 13.
[17]Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, §6.
[19]Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 33.
[20]Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: I. The Founders (P.S. Falla, trans.; Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987 [1971]), 114.
[21]Marx believed that among Feuerbach’s greatest achievements was to demonstrate that Hegel’s metaphysical system was “nothing more than religion brought into thought and developed by thought, and that it is equally to be condemned as another form and mode of existence of human alienation”. See “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts”, 197.
[22]Robert Tucker in Introduction to The Marx-Engels Reader (Tucker, ed.; New York, London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978 [1972]), xxiii.
[23]“Species essence” refers to the essence of human beings not simply as individuals but as a member of the human species. According to Feuerbach, human beings, unlike animals, have the capacity to grasp in thought their abstract human essence in addition to their particular individual essences: “Man is at once I and thou; he can put himself in the place of another, for this reason, that to him is species, his essential nature, and not merely his individuality is an object of thought” [Essence of Christianity, 2]. Man’s capacity to be conscious of himself as a species and as an individual, his capacity to have internal discourse with himself, is his unique quality which makes alienation possible.
[24]Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction” in Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ (Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley, trans.; Cambridge, London, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1977 [1970]), 132.
[25]Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, I: State and Bureaucracy (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 78. The passage from Marx’s Capital, to which Draper refers, is quoted on page 66 of this chapter.
[27]Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971 [1968]), 13.
[28]Not one to shy away from a clever turn of phrase, Marx wrote in 1841 that “‘there is no other path to truth and freedom except that through the fiery stream [Feuer-Bach]’”. Attributed to Marx by Lucio Colletti in Marx, Early Writings (Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, trans.; Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1992 [1975]), 434.
[31]Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State”, 102.
[32]Hegel’s complete account of the Executive in Philosophy of Right is found from §287 to §297.
[35]Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State”, 107.
[43]Hegel’s discussion of the Legislature is found from §298 to §320.
[44]Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State”, 125.
[47]Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State”, 127.
[51]Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State”, 167.
[52]Interestingly, in addition to his claim about the capacity of property, ‘private willfulness in its most abstract form’, to dictate the content of the state, Marx makes an apparently parallel claim about currency. In Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s Philosophie de la Misère, it is argued that money is born of sovereign consecration in which the sovereign takes hold of pieces of precious metal and affixes his seal to them. To this, Marx responds:
one must be destitute of all historical knowledge not to know that it is the sovereigns who in all ages have been subject to economic conditions, but they have never dictated laws to them. Legislation, whether political or civil, never does more than proclaim, express in words, the will of economic relations.
Thus, of Proudhon’s claim, Marx asks:
Was it the sovereign who took possession of gold and silver to make them the universal agents of exchange by annexing his seal to them? Or was it not, rather, these universal agents of exchange which took possession of the sovereign and forces him to affix his seal to them and thus give them a political consecration? [The Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.), 83.]
Like his argument about private property in the “Critique”, Marx’s comment about currency reveals the contingency of the state upon material, economic phenomena.
[53]Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State”, 169.
[57]Marx made his clearest statement to this effect when he reduced the executive of the modern state to a committee for the administration of private property [See The Communist Manifesto (A.J.P. Taylor, intro.; Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1967 [1888]), 82.] But, because Marx sees the state as being owned by private property does not mean he sees the state as an instrument to preserve private property in the same way that, for example, John Locke does; to do so would be to view the state in an autonomous, Hegelian fashion. Marx’s concern is not with the state as a protector of property but as an epiphenomenon of property.
[63]Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question” in Early Writings (Bottomore, trans; New York, Toronto, London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964 [1963]), 31.
[65]The idea that Marx’s theory calls for human beings to reabsorb, rather than abolish, the state is given serious consideration in John F. Sitton’s, Marx’s Theory of the Transcendence of the State: A Reconstruction (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1989). This study provides a good counterpoint for books such as Henry B. Mayo’s Introduction to Marxist Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960) which takes the comparatively simplistic view that the future communist society “is to bring a condition of complete anarchy, without any government at all” [172].
[66]Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State”, 87.
[67]Lucio Colletti in Introduction to Karl Marx: Early Writings (Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, trans.; Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1992 [1975]), 40.
[69]Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State”, 88.
[72]A notable exception to the general conclusion that the state is a mirror of the particularistic civil society can be found later in Marx’s “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” [Surveys From Exile. Political Writings: Volume II (David Fernbach, ed.; Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1992 [1973])]. Using the example of Bonaparte’s Second Empire, Marx argues that, in some cases, when “all classes, equally impotent and mute fall on their knees before the rifle butt”, the authoritarian state is able to achieve relative autonomy from civil society. In the Second Empire, the bourgeois failure to “simplify the state administration, reduce the army of official as much as possible, and finally let civil society and public opinion create their own organs independent of the power of the government” was responsible for the bourgeoisie’s loss of political influence within Bonaparte’s regime. Thus, the regime became the “last triumph of a State separate and independent from society” [The Civil War in France (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1960), 167.] However, Marx was also quick to show that this autonomy does not contradict the notion that the state exists to serve a dominant class. Political power, after all, is not “suspended in mid-air”. The French bourgeoisie’s material interests were “most intimately imbricated precisely with the maintenance of the extensive and highly ramified state machine. It is that machine which provides its surplus population with jobs, and makes up through state salaries what it cannot pocket in the form of profits, interest, rents and fees” [“Eighteenth Brumaire”, 186]. Consequently, even while sacrificing its political interests, the French bourgeoisie “cried out all the more loudly for a ‘strong government’” [Ibid., 213] and, thus, preserved its private interests. The way in which the apparently autonomous Second Empire of Louis Bonaparte served bourgeois interests was by guaranteeing the safety of bourgeois initiatives and the stability of society, making possible the rapid development of capitalism. The bourgeoisie, “freed from political cares, attained a development unexpected even by itself” [Civil War in France, 66].
[73]See especially Capital, Volume III (Frederick Engels, ed.; Moscow: Progress Press, 1986 [1959]), 211-266.