Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Theory of the State

1. Mystification

Feuerbach’s transformative criticism

Philosophy and religion are forms of human alienation

Philosophy, as abstract thought, is the unconscious projection of real human powers (e.g. thought) on to an abstraction (e.g. absolute spirit, reason)

Religion unconsciously projects human attributes (e.g. love) on to imagined figure of God

In this way, there occurs an alienation of the human essence

This essence is treated as something independent of, and thus separate from, actual human beings

In both cases, the real subject – the concrete, existing, finite human being - is treated as the predicate of an abstraction and the predicate is treated as an independent subject

This inversion of subject and predicate accords philosophical and religious abstractions an existence that is prior to, and independent of, empirical human beings

These abstractions are human constructs that come to dominate their creators

Transformative criticism produces insight into what is going on

It thus constitutes a precondition of overcoming alienation and domination

Marx applies this form of criticism specifically to Hegel’s account of the political state

Hegel’s ‘logical, pantheistic mysticism’

Hegel describes philosophical abstractions as though they act in accordance with ‘a determinate principle and toward a determinate end’ (1)

Ordinary empirical existence and real human activity are thereby treated as the phenomenal appearance of the existence and activity of an underlying essence

In places Hegel does indeed appear to be guilty of this charge:

The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea – the ethical spirit as substantial will, manifest and clear to itself, which thinks and knows itself and implements what it knows in so far as it knows it. (§ 257)

The state therefore knows what it wills, and knows it in its universality as something thought. Consequently, it acts and functions in accordance with known ends and recognized principles, and with laws which are laws not only in themselves but also for the consciousness; and it likewise acts in determinate knowledge of existing circumstances and relations in so far as its actions have relevance to these. (§ 270)

The following human attributes are ascribed to the state:

• Self-consciousness (‘thinks itself’)

• Self-knowledge of both itself and its ends (‘manifest and clear to itself’, ‘knows itself’)

• Capacity to form and to act in accordance with ends – purposive action (‘knows what it wills’)

• Conceptual thought (‘knows it in its universality as something thought’)

• Capacity to act in accordance with principles or laws which it has consciously imposed upon itself (‘it acts and functions in accordance with known ends and recognized principles, and with laws which are laws not only in themselves but also for the consciousness’)

• Capacity to reason instrumentally, by working out how its ends can be realised given its knowledge of existing conditions and circumstances (‘implements what it knows in so far as it knows it’, ‘acts in determinate knowledge of existing circumstances and relations in so far as its actions have relevance to these’)

Further criticisms

(1) Human activity is treated as the result, and not the origin, of the state;

[T]he conditions are put forward as what is conditioned, what determines as what is determined, the producer as the product of its product. (3)

It is the state that acts through human beings

Not human beings who act through the state which they have themselves created, and which would not exist without them

(Hegel acknowledges this in his account of ethical life, in so far as the latter is held to depend on human thought and activity for its existence)

(2) Uncritical acceptance of existing institutions and rationalisation of them

Institutions that are not rational in themselves are made to appear rational, by being treated as a necessary moment of a philosophical abstraction such as the ‘ethical Idea’:

[T]hey are as such not declared rational; but then again they are so declared, but only in so far as they are presented as the phenomena of a mediation which leaves them as they are but allows them to acquire the meaning of a determination of the Idea, a result and product of the Idea. (2)

Thus empirical actuality is admitted just as it is and is also said to be rational, but not rational because of its own reason, but because the empirical fact in its empirical existence has a significance other than itself. The fact, which is the starting-point, is not conceived to be such but rather to be the mystical result. (3)

Empirical social and political world represented as manifestation of a rational conceptual structure

Two stage process of inversion:

(1) Political concepts or institutions derived from empirical world are characterised as necessary elements of an a priori conceptual framework

(2) This framework is characterised as manifesting itself in essential features of the finite, empirical world

This process of inversion leads to blindness with respect to the irrationality of existing political conditions and institutions

Transformative criticism therefore paves the way for social and political criticism

Hegel’s PR provides an especially appropriate object of criticism

Despite (or rather because of) Germany’s economic and political backwardness, modern social and political actuality has become an object of reflection at the level of pure thought, i.e. philosophy

Thus, in criticising Hegel’s PR, Marx is criticising modern political conditions more generally, thereby paving the way for their abolition:

The criticism of German philosophy of right and of the state, which was given its most logical, profound and complete expression by Hegel, is at once the critical analysis of the modern state and of the reality connected with it … the German thought-version of the modern state … which abstracts from actual man, was only possible because and in so far as the modern state itself abstracts from actual man, or satisfies the whole man only in an imaginary way. In politics the Germans have thought what other nations have done. Germany was their theoretical conscience … the status quo of German political thought expresses the imperfection of the modern state. (63-4)

Abolition of human alienation caused by nature of the modern state requires the transition from pure thought to praxis – criticism must become a material force

Radical criticism and radical needs will combine to produce social revolution

This revolution requires the existence of a revolutionary class

This class is the proletariat, which is ‘a class in civil society, that is not of civil society’ (69)

This class is the material basis of civil society, while not enjoying any of its benefits

The proletariat will be driven by practical necessity - ‘its immediate situation, its material necessity, and its very chains’ (68) – to destroy altogether existing capitalist and class society

Unlike earlier revolutionary classes, it cannot emancipate itself without emancipating everyone else at the same time

Unity of philosophy and revolutionary action:

The emancipation of Germany is the emancipation of man. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat. Philosophy cannot be actualised without the abolition of the proletariat; the proletariat cannot be abolished without the actualisation of philosophy. (70)

Sovereignty as example of transformative criticism

Sovereignty treated as independent being that must be objectified in a subject, which appears as the self-incarnation of subjectivity = monarch as bearer and personification of sovereignty

Thus sovereignty treated as necessarily embodying itself in one natural person

Exercise of sovereignty is correspondingly identified with the arbitrary will of this person (personality of abstract right?)

In reality, sovereignty ‘is really nothing but the objectified spirit of the state’s subjects’ (5)

Thus sovereignty is a result (or predicate), not a subject existing prior to, and independent of, the consciousness of actual individuals

Rather, the people are the real, concrete subject of political life, which embodies their shared consciousness

The people – not the Idea - create the constitution

This implies that sovereignty cannot be identified with only one person or subject but rather should be identified with many persons or subjects

Popular sovereignty - the people are the state – and democracy – collective decision-making - are shown to be logical outcomes of transformative criticism (putting subject and predicate in right, as opposed to inverted, order)

Thus the political constitution is recognised to be a human construct:

Democracy is the resolved mystery of all constitutions. Here the constitution not only in itself, with regard to its essence, but with regard to its existence, its actuality, is returned to its actual ground, to actual man, the actual people, and established as the people’s own work. The constitution looks like just what it is, the free product of man. (8-9)

Hegel’s position is more ambiguous:

But it is at any rate utterly essential that the constitution should not be regarded as something made, even if it does have an origin in time. On the contrary, it is quite simply that which has being in and for itself, and should therefore be regarded as divine and enduring, and as exalted above the sphere of all manufactured things. (§ 273R)

2. The modern state as an alienated form of life

Hegel’s division between family and civil society, on the one hand, and political state, on the other, accurately reflects nature of modern state

State is something ‘formal’ in that it dominates other spheres (e.g. through drawing up and administering laws) ‘without actually governing, i.e. materially permeating the content of the remaining non-political spheres’. (10)

On the one hand, the economic and social world of work and material needs (civil society) has been freed from entanglement with common interests;

Rather, it is a sphere of particular interests alone

At the level of civil society, membership of a social class has become fluid, determined by education and wealth

Thus, it becomes an arbitrary matter, with only an external relationship existing between the individual and his or her social membership and activity

All that remains, then, is the isolated individual’s end of ‘enjoyment and the capacity to enjoy’ (19)

(Emphasis on individualism and consumption v. social relations and productive activity, which have become mere means)

On the other hand, a distinct sphere concerned with common interests (the state) has emerged

The political state relates only externally to the non-political spheres, including civil society, in relation to which it is therefore ‘something alien and external’ (15)

The political state is ‘abstract’ in the sense that:

(i) Forms a separate, isolated sphere with its own distinct organising principle (i.e. concern for common good), which is antagonistic to civil society

It is conceived to be a sphere of universality in which human beings overcome their individualism and egoism

(ii) Remote from everyday life and the influence of ordinary citizens

This abstraction is a historical product (and therefore not something fixed by nature or in some other sense ‘necessary’) (11)

Division between material and political life occurs within human beings as both members of civil society (bourgeois) and members of the political state (citizens):

[P]olitical man has his particular and separate existence alongside the unpolitical, private man. Property, contract, marriage, civil society appear here … to be particular modes of existence alongside the political state, i.e. to be the content to which the political state relates as the organizing form, or really only as the determining, limiting intelligence which says now ‘yes’ now ‘no’ without any content of its own. (9)

Results in unnatural separation and dysfunctional relation between separate entities:

(i) Between individuals in civil society given absence of any concern for common good – unnatural because of the human being’s social nature

Alienation from one’s social essence – the social relations that make one into what one is

(ii) Between individual and political community – political alienation

(iii) Within individual as member of both civil society and the state – self-alienation

Bureaucracy

Institutional expression of political alienation

The bureaucracy is the imaginary state alongside the real state; it is the spiritualism of the state. (13)

The bureaucracy is meant to be concerned with the common good, but it is, in fact, self-serving, being concerned with its own ends

(e.g. justifying its own existence, maintaining its privileged position vis-à-vis rest of society, the careers of individual bureaucrats)

Thus, ‘the state’s interest becomes a particular private aim opposed to the other private aims’. (14)

Example of how state masks particularistic, egoistic interests typical of civil society, which here masquerade as universal ones

Bureaucracy embodies the illusion that the state realises human universality

In failing to penetrate this illusion, individuals are alienated from the social world also in the sense of holding false or distorted beliefs about it

In dispelling such illusions, social criticism helps overcome this form of alienation

Illusion of the political state’s independence

In modern (post-French Revolutionary) state a person’s social standing is not meant to determine his or her political standing

Social distinctions and private distinctions are in theory held to play no role when it comes to an individual’s status as citizen

Rather, all such distinctions are abstracted from

This reflects the complete separation of state and civil society

Marx, however, claims that in practice material conditions of political life (i.e. those of civil society) determine political state

Private property

State not only exists to protect private property but is, in fact, based on it

Private property therefore no longer has a merely private significance but also a public one

This primacy of private property is revealed in PR by the political function that Hegel assigns to entailed landed property (property which cannot be divided or sold but must instead be passed on intact to the eldest son - primogeniture)

For Hegel, this makes the members of the ‘substantial’ estate more independent of state resources and the executive power as well as of the power of the ‘masses’

Its position is also more secure – and thus independent - than that of the estate of trade and industry (§ 306)

For Marx, private property – as a condition of political independence – determines political membership and activity, whereas it was held to be unconditionally valid only at the level of abstract right:

At its highest levels, the state appears to be private property, whereas here private property should appear as the property of the state. Instead of making private property a quality of citizenship, Hegel makes political citizenship, existence, and disposition a quality of private property. (25)

Property – as inalienable – becomes independent of the human will altogether and controls human beings

Another inversion of subject and predicate: property has become the subject, and the human being, citizenship and the state its predicates