This has been difficult to follow, and frankly, of little interest to me. But Marx considered Hegel to have hit on something important- the alienation between individuals and the state. Marx just thinks Hegel’s conclusions about it are off. The importance of the work is only in understanding how Marx arrived at his own ideas about alienation, which would, of course, go on to have a huge, and particularly negative, effect on the world at large.
Summary
Marx has two criticisms of Hegel.
First, he criticizes the philosophical form of the work. Hegel inverts the real situation by deriving institutions from the Idea, which Marx calls uncritical mysticism.
Second, is a textual criticism showing that Hegel’s concern to depict the institutions as rational leads to inconsistencies.
Both Hegel and Marx wanted to resolve the split between man fighting for his individual interests and man as a citizen of the state. For Hegel, this is resolved through the sovereign. Marx argues instead for universal suffrage with an aim that all humans must play an active part in political society.
Body of Text
Marx’s main criticism of Hegel is that in trying to be ‘philosophical’ about the institutions of the state; the constitution, the monarchy, the legislature, the state itself, the people; Hegel has reasoned these institutions into abstractions. Then he converted those abstractions into the subjects, and the actual facts of what those institutions did as the predicates. Marx believes this to be an inversion. The sum of the people, society, is the true subject, and the institutions created are the predicate, not the other way around. Rather than describe society and look into why it produced its institutions, Hegel essentially produced a defense of them as inevitable.
Marx comments that in a ‘true democracy’, as opposed to the constitutional monarchy that Hegel defends, is the subject > predicate relation correctly maintained. Democracy is the real voice of the people, so the people remain the subject, with the laws, constitution, etc as results of the will of the people.
Marx notes that the republic, as exists in America, is essentially the same as a monarchy: merely a form of the abstract ‘state’, which becomes the subject. In this relation, the people are inverted to become dependent on the state, rather than the state being dependent on the people.
Clearly Marx means democracy, not in the sense of people just voting on particular issues, but in a more total sense of the “will” of the people being expressed. How exactly that “will” is expressed is not yet defined.
Marx next speaks of the abstraction of the political state being a modern creation. He states that in the middle ages, the life of the people was identical with the life of the state, but man was not free. It was a democracy of unfreedom, a perfected estrangement. In modern states, there is an antithesis between private interests and state interests. Marx sees that Hegel experiences the separation of the state from civil society as a contradiction, but misdiagnosis the issue. Civil society is basically the class of private citizens. Political society, perhaps also called the “state”, are those making the rules. Marx sees these two as distinct, and moreover, mutually exclusive. To be a regular citizen is one thing, to be part of the state is separate. For Marx, the individual, as an individual, is alienated per se by the very fact that he has goals of his own, and not those of the community/society.
Dave note:
Marx’s definition of democracy is, I believe, some state of affairs where the will of the people is truly expressed; the unification of both the civil and political in the individual, where the individual expresses his political nature to achieve what is best for the community. It isn’t what we currently know where individual citizens vote occasionally on specific issues.
Marx sees the modern state as an antithesis between the executive and civil society. He acknowledges the legislature, but calls it a hotch-potch that only appears to be an attempt to engage civil society, not a real democratic state.
Marx writes that private property is the child of Roman reason and Germanic sentiment. The Romans were the first to develop the law of private property as abstract, civil law, but they never mystified it by developing it into constitutional law.
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Since Marx’s writing was dense for me, I relied heavily on the introduction’s summary, AND this article I found. I wrote a summary of it too, so I’ll include it here. The Author gives us an account first of what Hegel was saying, and then writes about Marx’s Critique.
Hegel’s Account
Civil society is both the bourgeois sphere of market relations and the civic sphere of individual and communal rights. The sphere of market relations must be checked by the state or unregulated capitalism unleashes massive inequality. On the other hand, creativity and freedom of the civic sphere flourish when left alone by the state.
Hegel says the state organically and necessarily forms from civil society. Civil society consists of individuals who have needs, and the institutions and practices that result from those needs. As such, civil society is 1) an association of individuals to meet their needs, and 2) an external order for their particular and common interests. The external order makes up the functions of the state; a court system, law enforcement, public education, etc. These elements are part of both civil society and the government, also known as the political society.
Civil society is primarily concerned with meeting the needs of individuals in relationship to one another. We gather together in groups in so far as we can meet each other’s needs. This ‘selfish end’ creates interdependence, so that the needs of the individual are grounded in the welfare and rights of all, and only have actuality and security in this context. This interweaving is what constitutes civil society.
Mediating between the particular individual and the entire system requires an external state. Adam Smith refers to an “invisible hand” that transforms individual self-interest into the common good. Hegel notes that the theory has instead produced poverty and alienation with the inequality that arose from it. This is the reason governments, the instrument of mediation, arose- to act as a check on the balance between the needs of the individual and the needs of the whole.
Marx’s critique
Marx says Hegel has turned reason into a transcendent power that realizes itself in the world, where in reality, the subjects are the real people and things, from which reason emerges. The author says Marx is constructing a straw man in order to knock down Hegel’s defense of the existing system.
Democracy between Marx and Hegel
Marx says Hegel can’t see the democratic role people play in creating the state.
Hegel believed there were three moments of ethical life, each following logically from the previous: family, characterized by particular altruism ; civil society, characterized by universal egoism ; and the state, characterized by universal altruism. The state emerges from our willingness to make sacrifices to advance the whole, not just our own interests, because we see it as in our own self-interests to help others too. The political state arises not from our particular interests, but from universal interests.
Marx replies that it is people, not some universal reason, that make the political state. Yeah…. reason isn’t an external god. These are human constructs. Recognizing the role reason plays in forming the state isn’t denying that people formed it. But Hegel doesn’t seem to accept that the government is the product of people trying to solve a problem. Possibly because Hegel sees the people as rabble, and basing the political state on them would end up in chaos.
The author feels that political society at best should be based on solidarity reaching beyond self-interests. Hegel can’t get there because of his prejudice against the common people as rabble.
Marx, on the other hand, doesn’t have that prejudice. His conclusion is to unfetter democracy.