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Marx's Idealist Critique of Hegel's Theory of Society and Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

David A. Duquette
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Extract

The article is a comparative study of Hegel and Marx on the nature and function of the political state and it argues that Marx's critique of Hegel on this topic is aimed not at the “idealism” of the state, which concerns the principle of universal freedom, but rather at the “material” presuppositions of the state. Indeed, Marx's critique of political institutions is premised upon the way in which they are infected with the egoism and self-seeking of civil (bürgerliche) society. The relationship between the views of Hegel and Marx on these points is explored by (1) giving an exegesis of Hegel's conception of civil society as a foundation for freedom, (2) examining Marx's critique of Hegel's theory of the state, (3) distinguishing the Hegelian and Marxian philosophical conceptions of freedom, the individual, and community, and (4) evaluating the fairness and cogency of Marx's critique of Hegel.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , Spring 1989 , pp. 218 - 240
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1989

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References

My thanks go to Joseph O'Malley and Loyd Easton for reading earlier versions of this paper. I want to give special appreciation to my colleague Ken Zahorski for the detailed stylistic comments he offered, and to the Review referees for their constructive criticisms.

1. Hegel, G. W. F., Philosophy of Right, trans. Knox, T. M. (London: Oxford University Press, 1978)Google Scholar. The section on “Civil Society” runs from pp. 122–55 in the Knox translation. Paragraph and page numbers are cited in the text of this paper.

2. Cf. on the same page: “Particularity by itself, given free reign in every direction to satisfy its needs, accidental caprices, and subjective desires, destroys itself and its substantive concept in this process of gratification.”

3. Cf. Hegel's, discussion of willing and action in paragraphs 105–14, pp. 74–79.Google Scholar

4. “But the subject, an entity reflected into himself and so particular in correlation with the particularity of his object, has in his end his own particular content, and this content is the soul of the action and determines its character. The fact that this moment of the particularity of the agent is contained and realized in the action constitutes subjective freedom in its more concrete sense, the right of the subject to find his satisfaction in the action” (par. 121, p. 82). Cf. par. 124, p. 83 where Hegel says that “[w]hat the subject is, is the series of his actions.” For Hegel the “Principle of Subjectivity” makes its first appearance in world history in the Lutheran Reformation. Here in the recognition of the subject as a being reconciled with God through divine grace, the individual is given an infinite value in and of himself.

5. “The right of the subject's particularity, his right to be satisfied, or in other words the right of subjective freedom, is the pivot and center of the difference between antiquity and modern times” (par. 124, p. 84).

6. “The fact that I must direct my conduct by reference to others introduces here the form of universality. It is from others that I acquire the means of satisfaction and I must accordingly accept their views. At the same time, however, I am compelled to produce means for the satisfaction of others” (par. 192 add., p. 269).

7. “In civil society each member is his own end, everything else is nothing to him. But except in contact with others he cannot attain the whole compass of his ends, and therefore these others are means to the end of the particular member. A particular end, however, assumes the form of universality through his relation to other people, and it is attained in the simultaneous attainment of the welfare of others” (par. 182 add., p. 267).

8. Cf. par. 207 add., p. 271 for Hegel's view of the importance of membership in a social class.

9. Cf. Avineri, Shlomo, Hegel's Theory of the Modem State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 147–48;CrossRefGoogle ScholarWalton, A.S., “Economy, Utility and Community in Hegel's Theory of Civil Society,” in The State and Civil Society: Studies in Hegel's Political Philosophy, ed. Pelczynski, Z.A. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 252–55.Google Scholar

10. “The principle of rightness passes over in civil society into law. My individual right, whose embodiment has hitherto been immediate and abstract, now similarly becomes embodied in the existent will of everyone, in the sense that it becomes recognized. Hence property acquisitions and transfers must now be undertaken and concluded only in the form which that embodiment gives to them. In civil society, property rests on contract and on the formalities which make ownership capable of proof and valid in law” (par. 217, p. 139; cf. par. 218, p. 140).

11. Cf. par. 236, p. 147. In the addition to the paragraph on p. 276 Hegel says that u[t]he oversight and care exercised by the public authority aims at being the middle term between an individual and the universal possibility, afforded by society, of attaining individual ends.”

12. “We say earlier [Addition to Paragraph 184] that in fending for himself a member of civil society is also working for others. But this unconscious compulsion is not enough; it is in the Corporation that it first changes into a known and thoughtful ethical mode of life” (par. 255 add., p. 278).

13. Cf. Mikkelsen, Jon Mark, “Marx's Critique of Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie” Auslegung 8, no. 3 (Winter 1981): 274–83.Google Scholar

14. Marx, Karl, Critique of Hegel's “Philosophy of Right,” ed. O'Malley, Joseph (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 26, 33–35;Google ScholarWerke, Bd. 1 (op. cit.), pp. 227, 234–37. (Hereafter cited in the text with successive references to the English and German.) On p. 40; 242, Marx writes: “If however the prince is the abstract person who has the state in him, then this can only mean that the essence of the state is the abstract person… He is the lone private person in whom the relation of the private person in general to the state is actualized.”

15. There is a widespread tendency in Marx's writings to belittle symbolic modes of expression, like religion, that do not have direct concrete functional significance. In the state, Marx sees the symbolism of sovereignty in the monarch as nothing more than a useless and mystifying abstraction (Cf. ibid, p. 110; 314–15).

16. Thus, for Marx democracy is distinct also from a republican form of government. “The struggle between monarchy and republic is itself a struggle within the abstract form of the state. The political republic [ — that is, the republic merely as political constitution — ] is democracy within the abstract form of the state” (ibid, p. 31; 232).

17. Cf. for Hegel's, arguments the Philosophy of Right, paragraphs 294–97.Google Scholar

18. “In the constitution, wherein primogeniture is a guarantee, private property is the guarantee of the political constitution. In primogeniture, it appears that this guarantee is a particular kind of private property. Primogeniture is merely a particular existence of the universal relationship of private property and the political state… Thus the constitution here is the constitution of private property” (Cf. ibid, p. 109; 313–14).

19. Cf. p. 121; 326–27 for Marx's elaboration on how reform of voting helps toward dissolving the separateness of political state and civil society.

20. Cf. Dahlstrom, Daniel, “Marxist Ideology and Feuerbach's Critique of Hegel, ” Philosophical Forum 15 (Spring 1984): 234–248;Google Scholar also my “From Disciple to Antagonist: Feuerbach's Critique of Hegel,”Philosophy and Theology 3 (Winter 1988): 183–199.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21. Cf. Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. by Tucker, Robert C. (New York: W. W. Norton Co., 1978), p. 33;Google ScholarWerke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1953), p. 354.Google Scholar

22. Cf. Teeple, Gary, Marx's Critique of Politics 1842–1847 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984)Google Scholar, for elaborations on this claim by Marx. While Teeple stresses how the idea of the organic unity of society guides Marx's critique of the modern state, he fails to see its idealist implications.

23. Ibid, p. 46; 370. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844)Google Scholar Marx also uses the concept of species-being normatively to critique alienated labor. Moreover, David McLellan claims, in the introduction to his translation of selections from Marx's, Grundrisse (1857–1858)Google Scholar, that there is significant continuity between the Manuscripts and the Grundrisse: “The beginning of the chapter on capital reproduces almost word for word the passages in the Manuscripts on human need, man as speciesbeing, the individual as social being, the idea of nature as, in a sense, man's body, the parallels between religious alienation and economic alienation, etc. The two works also have in common a Utopian and almost millennial strain. One point, in particular emphasizes this continuity: the Grundrisse is as ‘Hegelian’ as the Paris Manuscripts” (The Grundrisse [London: Harper & Row, 1971], p. 12Google Scholar).

24. As a result, and as Joergen Poulsen points out, the conflict resolving institutions of society are ignored by Marx, (“Natural Society, Reification, and Socialist Institutions in Marx,” Social Research, 53, no. 4 [Winter 1986]: 591–613).Google Scholar

25. In a similar vein, Loyd D. Easton argues that Marx provided “internal criticism of Hegel from the premise of Hegel's own rationalism” (“Alienation and Empiricism in Marx's Thought,” Social Research, 37 (Autumn 1970): 405Google Scholar). Easton also believes that the appeal to the “demands of Reason” continues to inform Marx's writings in the German Ideology and Capital, but that when Marx's rationalism combined with his scientific empiricism the result was an a priorism concerning historical necessity, especially with regard to the prediction of socialism.