Marx’s Response to the Philosophy of Right

In his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843), Marx immediately saw the loose ends of Hegel’s argument: 1) ‘the political constitution is the constitution of private property’;^ 2) ‘the actuality of the Ethical Idea appears as the religion of private property’;^ 3) ‘the class in need of immediate labour, of concrete labour, forms less a class of civil society than the basis upon which the spheres of civil society rest and move’U⁵ Hegel spoke of the constitution as ‘essentially a system of mediation’,^⁶ but the propertyless could never be mediated into Hegel’s state, for they belonged, by definition, to no Corporation.

In democracy, the constitution, the law, the state, so far as it is [a] polit­ical constitution, is itself only a self-determination of the people, and a determinate content of the people. all forms of state have democracy for their truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democracy.^{[232] [233] [234] [235] [236]}

Immediate democracy meant that the political state must disappear as the institutionalised ‘other’ of the people. ‘Democracy is human existence, while in the other political forms man has only legal existence’.^⁸ In the immediacy of democracy, the people are the state, and nothing more remains to be said. A ‘true’ state would have neither classes, corporations, nor a bureaucratic civil service - pretending to be what Hegel called the ‘universal class’ - only the direct expression of the people’s will.14⁹

In On theJewish Question, also written in 1843, Marx claimed that all political institutions express an irreconcilable contradiction, a double existence that made nonsense both of Hegel’s unity of objective spirit and of Kant’s categor­ical imperative:

Where the political state [i.e.

In the schemes of both Hegel and Kant, Marx saw man as merely ‘the imaginary member of an imaginary sovereignty, divested of his real, individual life, and infused with an unreal universality’.^ The state was Hegel’s abstract form of pure spirit, while civil society was the sphere of active egoism. The demand for universal suffrage pointed to transcendence of this contradiction. If every individual were in the state immediately, the state's otherness in relation to civil society would disappear. Marx summarised in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:

... the vote is the immediate, the direct, the existing and not simply ima­gined relation of civil society to the political state. In unrestricted suf­frage,. civil society has actually raised itself for the first time to an abstraction of itself, to political existence as its true universal and essential existence. But the full achievement of this abstraction is at once [without any institutional mediation] also the transcendence [Aufhebung] of the abstraction. In actually establishing its political existence as its true exist­ence, civil society has simultaneously established its civil existence [the existence of private property owners]. as inessential. Within the abstract political state the reform of voting advances the dissolution [Aufhebung] of this political state, but also the dissolution of civil soci­ety.^[237]

Universal suffrage points beyond the institutional state. It also points beyond private property because it abolishes the property qualification for political life. But if property is politically inessential - and if political existence is, indeed, the ‘true, universal and essential existence', then it must also follow that property is inessential in all other respects. True human community must then lie beyond not only the institutional state but also private property. The philosophical critique of Hegel's state necessarily pointed to a critique of the property foundations of civil society itself.