Hegel, state and civil society
Hegel adopts and integrates the concept of “civil society” in his political and philosophical system under the name of Burgerliche Gesellschaft. The main feature of this new vision of the society is that a new sphere obtains between the private and public spheres, which could be characterized as “social sphere”, “between the family and the state” (Hegel 1821 [1967]: s.
182, addendum), where economic activity develops. However, Hegel emphasizes that the formation of civil society “follows later in time than that of the state” (ibid.). We must understand by this remark that civil society is a sphere based in the modern world thanks to a new conception of the state. The latter abolishes all personal dependence among individuals and so allows the liberation of individual actions. In this sense the modern state appears as the condition of civil society as a spontaneous order. The modern state, which learns progressively not to consider the subjectivity or the difference as a danger and a threat for its integrity, gives vent to the creative capacity of individual actions. In connection with this theme of subjectivity and individual creativeness, the praise directed by Marx to the Hegelian conception of man which is recalled in the introduction is highly meaningful:The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phanomenologie and of its final outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is thus first that Hegel conceives the selfcreation (Selbsterzeugung) of man as a process... that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man - true, because real man - as the outcome of man’s own labour (als Resultat seinereignen Arbeit). (Marx 1844 [1975]: 332-3)
According to Hegel, modern man, the member of civil society, is not only a simple labourer who creates goods and products. More profoundly, he is the product of his own labour.
In other words, the civil society is the space of the recognizing and rehabilitation of the infinite value of labour as the essence of man. In Hegelian political and philosophical thought, freedom and labour are two concepts inseparably linked.The originality of the Hegelian conception of modern society lies in its observation of the close complementarity between civil society and modern state, between the bourgeois and the citizen. The bourgeois is not seen exclusively in his negative face, as a purely egoistic individual, a mean-minded economic agent whose exclusive motivation is to maximize his private comfort. Obviously an individual who obeys such a motivation reduces necessarily all of his relations with others to instrumental ones and considers the other as a simple means at the disposal of his own interests. Yet Hegel is deeply aware of the negativity carried out by civil society; he calls it the “false infinite” (Hegel 1821 [1967]: s. 185 add). That is the reason why in the Hegelian system civil society could not pretend to a self-sufficient reality. Civil society abandoned to its logic of “false infinite” destroys itself necessarily. However, for Hegel, civil society is also the space of a highly positive phenomenon. The bourgeois represents the figure of an individual who is for himself his own end in the sense that he enjoys the juridical and material conditions of his own realization of himself, his subjectivity. Civil society allows individuals to achieve their specific potentialities by freeing them from the constraint of the personal dependence relations. More exactly, the removal of this constraint through the intervention of the modern state gives birth to the emergence of civil society. In Hegelian terminology there is a dialectical relation between civil society and modern state in the sense that each of them is the justification (raison d’etre) of the other.
It is well known that Marx criticizes this Hegelian positive conception of the complementarity between civil society and modern state, between bourgeois and citizen, in particular in “Zur Judenfrage” (Marx 1843 [1963]) and Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie (Marx 1843-44 [1994]).
The Marxian critique also concerns the question of the freedom for all. In his analysis of the alienated labour, which finds its rigorous expression in his Okonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844, Marx stresses the violence which undermines civil society, a violence Hegel omits to face: the class struggle. On close examination, unbearable relations of exploitation of labour deform the beautiful space of the emancipation of the subjectivity. If Hegel refuses to face this tortured reality the reason lies, according to Marx, in his non-questioning of the issue of private property, especially the private property of the means of production. Marx considers that modern society is too far from achieving the conditions of freedom for all. Because of private property of the means of production, the overwhelming part of civil society is totally subjected to the will of the private owners of productive forces. The freedom of civil society is only a formal one, says Marx.On the other hand, in his often relevant criticism of Hegelian political philosophy, Marx greatly misjudges the decisive philosophical importance of the difference between understanding (Verstand) and (dialectical) reason (Vernunft). It seems that this misjudgement could be explained by a certain “romanticism” Marx used to adopt as regards politics: he always distrusted the major operation of Hegelian philosophy, namely, the “mediation” (Vermittelung). Hegelian analysis shows admirably that modern man is the seat of a difficult tension between the particular and the universal. The romantic vision tries to overcome this tension. However, such a tension seems to be the condition of the development of subjectivity in society. Among the contemporary philosophers, one of the authors who best integrates in his reflection the importance of this tension through the Hegelian concept of “reconciliation” is John Rawls.