Robert C. Tucker - The Marx-Engels Reader (Chapter 1.5: "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right lyrics

Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right KARL MARX In line with his program of effecting "a ruthless criticism of everything existing," Marx during 1843 took up the criticism of politics, He set a bout this by working on a commentary on Hegel's treatise on the state, * To the Hegelian political philosophy (which he called, following Feuerbach, "speculative philosophy") he applied the method of "transformational criticism" that Feuerbach had applied to the Hegelian philosophy of religion,* * * Although the work was left incomplete and unpublished, it was, as Marx later said (see p. 4, above), a milestone on his road to historical materialism: it led him to the view that instead of the state being the basis of "civil society," as Hegel held, civil or bourgeois society is the basis of the state. Despite its incompleteness-the extant part of the commentary starts with paragraph 261 of Hegel's treatise and deals only with selected further sections up to paragraph 308-this work remains of interest as Marx's most extensive single piece of purely political writing, although his standpoint at the time of writing was no more than proto-Marxist. The State and Civil Society1 * * * The idea is made the subject and the actual relation of family and civil society to the state is conceived as its internal imaginary activity. Family and civil society are the premises of the state; they are the genuinely active elements, but in speculative philosophy things are inverted. When the idea is made the subject, however, the real subjects, namely, civil society, family, "circumstances, caprice, etc.," become unreal objective elements of the idea with a changed significance. * * * Rationally interpreted, Hegel's propositions would mean only this : The family and civil society are parts of the state. The material of the state is distributed amongst them "by circumstances, cap­ rice and the individual's own choice of vocation." The citizens of the state are members of families and members of civil society. "The actual idea, mind, divides itself into the two ideal spheres of its concept, family and civil society, that is, its finite phase"-­ hence, the division of the state into family and civil society is ideal, i.e., necessary as part of the essence of the state. Family and civil society are actual components of the state, actual spiritual existences of the will; they are modes of existence of the state. Family and civil society constitute themselves as the state. They are the driving force. According to Hegel, they are, on the contrary, produced by the actual idea. It is not the course of their own life which unites them in the state; on the contrary, it is the idea which in the course of its life has separated them off from itself. Indeed, they are the finiteness of this idea. They owe their presence to another mind than their own. They are entities determined by a third party, not self-determined entities. Accordingly, they are also defined as "finiteness," as the "actual idea's" own finiteness. The purpose of their being is not this being itself; rather, the idea separates these presuppositions off from itself "so as to emerge from their ideality as explicitly infinite actual mind." That is to say, there can be no political state without the natural basis of the family and the artificial basis of civil society; they are for it a conditio sine qua non. But the condition is postulated as the conditioned, the determinant as the determined, the producing factor as the product of its product. The actual idea only degrades itself into the "finiteness" of the family and civil society so as by transcending them to enjoy and bring forth its infinity. "Accordingly" (in order to achieve its purpose), it "a**igns to these spheres the material of this, its finite actuality" (this? which? these spheres are indeed its "finite actuality," its "material" ), "individuals as a multitude" ("the individuals, the multitude" are here the material of the state; "the state consists of them"; this composition of the state is here expressed as an act of the idea, as an "allocation" which it undertakes with its own material The fact is that the state issues from the multitude in their existence as members of families and as members of civil society. Speculative philosophy expresses this fact as the idea's deed, not as the idea of the multitude, but as the deed of a subjective idea different from the fact itself), "in such a way that with regard to the individual this a**ignment" (previously the discussion was only about the a**ignment of individuals to the spheres of the family and civil society) "appears mediated by circumstances, caprice, etc." Empirical actuality is thus accepted as it is. It is also expressed as rational, but it is not rational on account of its own reason, but because the empirical fact in its empirical existence has a different significance from it itself. The fact which is taken as a point of departure is not conceived as such, but as a mystical result. The actual becomes a phenomenon, but the idea has no other content than this phenomenon. Nor has the idea any other purpose than the logical one of being "explicitly infinite actual mind." The entire mystery of the philosophy of law and of Hegel's philosophy as a whole is set out in this paragraph. * * * If Hegel had set out from real subjects as the bases of the state he would not have found it necessary to transform the state in a mystical fashion into a subject. "In its truth, however," says Hegel, "subjectivity exists only as subject, personality only as person." This too is a piece of mystification. Subjectivity is a characteristic of the subject, personality a characteristic of the person. Instead of conceiving them as predicates of their subjects. Hegel gives the predicates an independent existence and subsequently transforms them in a mystical fashion into their subjects. The existence of predicates is the subject, so that the subject is the existence of subjectivity, etc.; Hegel transforms the predicates, the objects, into independent entities, but divorced from their actual independence, their subject. Subsequently the actual subject appears as a result, whereas one must start from the actual subject and look at its objectification. The mystical substance, therefore, becomes the actual subject, and the real subject appears as something else, as an element of the mystical substance. Precisely because Hegel starts from the predicates of the general description instead of from the real ens (lnr0XEtltn'ov, subject), and since, nevertheless, there has to be a bearer of these qualities, the mystical idea becomes this bearer. The dualism consists in the fact that Hegel does not look upon the general as being the actual nature of the actual finite, i.e., of what exists and is determinate, or upon the actual ens as the true subject of the infinite. Sovereignty So in this case sovereignty, the essential feature of the state, is treated to begin with as an independent entity, is objectified. Then, of course, this objective entity has to become a subject again. This subject then appears, however, as a self-incarnation of sovereignty; whereas sovereignty is nothing but the objectifed mind of the subjects of the state. * * * As if the actual state were not the people. The state is an abstraction. The people alone is what is concrete. And it is remarkable that Hegel, who without hesitation attributes a living quality such as sovereignty to the abstraction, attributes it only with hesitation and reservations to something concrete. "The usual sense, however, in which men have recently begun to speak of the sovereignty of the people is in opposition to the sovereignty existing in the monarch. In this antithesis the sovereignty of the people is one of those confused notions which are rooted in the wild idea of the people." The "confused notions" and the "wild idea" are here exclusively Hegel's. To be sure, if sovereignty exists in the monarch, then it is foolish to speak of an antithetical sovereignty in the people; for it is implied in the concept of sovereignty that sovereignty can­ not have a double existence, still less one which is contradictory. However: 1) This is just the question: Is not that sovereignty which is claimed by the monarch an illusion? Sovereignty of the monarch or sovereignty of the people-that is the question. 2) One can also speak of a sovereignty of the people in opposi tion to the sovereignty existing in the monarch. But then it is not a question of one and the same sovereignty which has arisen on two sides, but two entirely contradictory concepts of sovereignty, the one a sovereignty such as can come to exist in a monarch, the other such as can come to exist only in a people. It is the same with the question: "Is God sovereign, or is man?" One of the two is an untruth, even if an existing untruth. "Taken without its monarch and the articulation of the whole which is necessarily and directly a**ociated with the monarch, the people .is that formless ma** which is no longer a state. It no longer possesses any of the atrributes which are to be found only in an internally organized whole-sovereignty, government, courts of law, the administration, estates of the realm, etc. With the appearance in a nation of such factors, which relate to organisation, to the life of the state, a people ceases to be that indeterminate abstraction, which, as a purely general notion, is called the nation." All this is a tautology. If a people has a monarch and the structure that neces- sarily and directly goes with a monarch, i.e., if it is structured as a monarchy, then indeed, taken out of this structure, it is a formless ma** and a purely general notion. "If by sovereignty of the people is understood a republican form of government and, more specifically, democracy...then...there can be no further discussion of such a notion in face of the developed idea." That is indeed right, if one has only "such a notion" and not a "developed idea" of democracy. Democracy Democracy is the truth of monarchy; monarchy is not the truth of democracy. Monarchy is necessarily democracy inconsistent with itself; the monarchical element is not an inconsistency in democracy. Monarchy cannot be understood in its own terms; democracy can. In democracy none of the elements attains a significance other than what is proper to it. Each is in actual fact only an element of the whole demos [people]. In monarchy one part determines the character of the whole. The entire constitution has to adapt itself to this fixed point. Democracy is the genus Constitution. Monarchy is one species, and a poor one at that. Democracy is content and form. Monarchy is supposed to be only a form, but it falsifies the content. In monarchy the whole, the people, is subsumed under one of its particular modes of being, the political constitution. In democracy the constitution itself appears only as one determination, that is, the self-determination of the people. In monarchy we have the people of the constitution; in democracy the constitution of the people. Democracy is the solved riddle of all constitutions. Here, not merely implicitly and in essence but existing in reality, the con-­ stitution is constantly brought back to its actual basis, the actual human being, the actual people, and established as the people's own work. The constitution appears as what it is, a free product of man. It could be said that in a certain respect this applies also to consti-­ tutional monarchy; but the specific distinguishing feature of democracy is that here the constitution as such forms only one element in the life of the people-that it is not the political constitution by itself which forms the state. Hegel starts from the state and makes man the subjectified state; democracy starts from man and makes the state objectified man. Just as it is not religion which creates man but man who creates religion, so it is not the constitution which creates the people but the people which creates the constitution. In a certain respect the relation of democracy to all other forms of state is like the relation of Christianity to all other religions. Christianity is the religion INSERT TEXT,2the essence of religion-deified man as a particular religion. Similarly, democracy is the essence of all state constitutions-social-­ ised man as a particular state constitution. Democracy stands to the other constitutions as the genus stands to its species; except that here the genus itself appears as an existent, and therefore as one particular species over against the others whose existence does not correspond to their essence. To democracy all other forms of state stand as its Old Testament. Man does not exist for the law but the law for man-it is a human manifestation; whereas in the other forms of state man is a legal manifestation. That is the fundamental distinction of democracy. All other state forms are definite, distinct, particular forms of state. In democracy the formal principle is at the same time the material principle. Only democracy, therefore, is the true unity of the general and the particular. In monarchy, for example, and in the republic as a merely particular form of state, political man has his particular mode of being alongside unpolitical man, man as a private individual. Property, contract, marriage, civil society, all appear here (as Hegel shows quite correctly with regard to these abstract state forms, but he thinks that he is expounding the idea of the state) as particular modes of existence alongside the political state, as the content to which the political state is related as organising form; properly speaking, the relation of the political state to this content is merely that of reason, inherently without content, which defines and delimits, which now affirms and now denies. In democracy the political state, which stands alongside this content and distinguishes itself from it, is itself merely a particular content and particular form of existence of the people. In monarchy, for example, this particular, the political constitution, has the significance of the general that dominates and determines everything particular. In democracy the state as particular is merely particular; as general, it is the truly general, i .e., not something determinate in distinction from the other content. The French have recently interpreted this as meaning that in true democracy the political state is annihilated. This is correct insofar as the political state qua political state, as constitution, no longer pa**es for the whole. In all states other than democratic ones the state, the law, the constitution is what rules, without really ruling-i.e., without materially permeating the content of the remaining, non-political spheres. In democracy the constitution, the law, the state itself, insofar as it is a political constitution, is only the self-determination of the people, and a particular content of the people. Incidentally, it goes without saying that all forms of state have democracy for their truth and that they are therefore untrue insofar as they are not democracy. Politics: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern In the states of antiquity the political state makes up the content of the state to the exclusion of the other spheres. The modern state is a compromise between the political and the unpolitical state. In democracy the abstract state has ceased to be the dominant factor. The struggle between monarchy and republic is itself still a struggle within the abstract state. The political republic is democracy within the abstract state form. The abstract state form of democracy is therefore the republic; but here it ceases to be the merely political constitution. Property, etc., in short, the entire content of the law and the state, is the same in North America as in Prussia, with few modifications. The republic there is thus a mere state form, as is the monarchy here. The content of the state lies outside these constitutions. Hegel is right, therefore, when he says: The political state is the constitution, i.e., the material state is not political. What obtains here is merely an external identity, a determination of changing forms. Of the various elements of national life, the one most difficult to evolve was the political state, the constitution. It developed as universal reason over against the other spheres, as ulterior to them. The historical task then consisted in its [the constitution's] rea**ertion, but the particular spheres do not realise that their private nature coincides with the other-worldly nature of the constitution or of the political state, and that the other-worldly existence of the political state is nothing but the affirmation of their own estrangement. Up till now the political constitution has been the religious sphere, the religion of national life, the heaven of its gener­- ality over against the earthy existence of its actuality. The political sphere has been the only state sphere in the state, the only sphere in which the content as well as the form has been species-content, the truly general; but in such a way that at the same time, because this sphere has confronted the others, its content has also become formal and particular. Political life in the modern sense is the scho-­ lasticism of national life. Monarchy is the perfect expression of this estrangement. The republic is the negation of this estrangement within its own sphere. It is obvious that the political constitution as such is brought into being only where the private spheres have won an independent existence. Where trade and landed property are not free and have not yet become independent, the political constitution too does not yet exist. The Middle Ages were the democracy of unfreedom. The abstraction of the state as such belongs only to modern times, because the abstraction of private life belongs only to modern times. The abstraction of the political state is a modern product. In the Middle Ages there were serfs, feudal estates, merchant and trade guilds, corporations of scholars, etc.: that is to say, in the Middle Ages property, trade, society, man are political; the material content of the state is given by its form; every private sphere has a political character or is a political sphere; that is, politics is a characteristic of the private spheres too. In the Middle Ages the political constitution is the constitution of private property, but only because the constitution of private property is a political constitution. In the Middle Ages the life of the nation and the life of the state are identical. Man is the actual principle of the state-but unfree man. It is thus the democracy of unfreedom-estrangement carried to completion. The abstract reflected antithesis belongs only to the modern world. The Middle Ages are the period of actual dualism; modern times, one of abstract dualism. "We have already noted the stage at which the division of constitutions into democracy, aristocracy and monarchy has been made­ the standpoint, that is, of that unity which is still substantial, which still remains within itself, and has not yet come to its process of infmite differentiation and inner deepening,: at that stage, the element of the final self-determining resolution of the will does not emerge explicitly into its own proper actuality as an immanent factor in the state." In the spontaneously evolved monarchy, democracy and aristocracy there is as yet no political constitution as distinct from the actual, material state or the other content of the life of the nation. The political state does not yet appear as the form of the material state. Either, as in Greece, the res publica 3 is the real private affair of the citizens, their real content, and the private individual is a slave; the political state, qua political state, being the true and only content of the life and will of the citizens; or, as in an Asiatic despotism, the political state is nothing but the personal caprice of a single individual; or the political state, like the material state, is a slave. What distinguishes the modern state from these states characterized by the substantial unity between people and state is not, as Hegel would have it, that the various elements of the constitution have been developed into particular actuality, but that the constitution itself has been developed into a particular actuality alongside the actual life of the people­- that the political state has become the constitution of the rest of the state. * * * Bureaucracy The "state formalism" which bureaucracy is, is the "state as formalism"; and it is as a formalism of this kind that Hegel has described bureaucracy. Since this "state formalism" constitutes itself as an actual power and itself becomes its own material content, it goes without saying that the "bureaucracy" is a web of practical illusions, or the "illusion of the state." The bureaucratic spirit is a jesuitical, theological spirit through and through. The bureaucrats are the jesuits and theologians of the state. The bureaucracy is la republique pretre. Since by its very nature the bureaucracy is the "state as formalism," it is this also as regards its purpose. The actual purpose of the state therefore appears to the bureaucracy as an objective hostile to the state. The spirit of the bureaucracy is the "formal state spirit." The bureaucracy therefore turns the "formal state spirit" or the actual spiritless ness of the state into a categorical imperative. The bureaucracy takes itself to be the ultimate purpose of the state. Because the bureaucracy turns its "formal" objectives into its content, it comes into conflict everywhere with "real" objectives. It is therefore obliged to pa** off the form for the content and the content for the form. State objectives are transformed into objectives of the department, and department objectives into objectives of the state. The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge. The top entrusts the under­ standing of detail to the lower levels, whilst the lower levels credit the top with understanding of the general, and so all are mutually deceived. The bureaucracy is the imaginary state alongside the real state­ the spiritualism of the state. Each thing has therefore a double meaning, a real and a bureaucratic meaning, just as knowledge (and also the will) is both real and bureaucratic. The really existing, however, is treated in the light of its bureaucratic nature, its other­ worldly, spiritual essence. The bureaucracy has the state, the spiritual essence of society, in its possession, as its private property. The general spirit of the bureaucracy is the secret, the mystery, preserved within itself by the hierarchy and against the outside world by being a closed corporation. Avowed political spirit, as also political­mindedness, therefore appear to the bureaucracy as treason against its mystery. Hence, authority is the basis of its knowledge, and the deification of authority is its conviction. Within the bureaucracy itself, however, spiritualism becomes cra** materialism, the materialism of pa**ive obedience, of faith in authority, of the mechanism of fixed and formalistic behaviour, and of fixed principles, views and traditions. In the case of the individual bureaucrat, the state objec­ tive turns into his private objective, into a after higher posts, the making of a career. In the first place, he looks on actual, life as something material, for the spirit of this life has its distinctly separate existence in the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy must therefore proceed to make life as material as possible. Secondly, actual life is material for the bureaucrat himself, i .e., so far as it becomes an object of bureaucratic manipulation; for his spirit is prescribed for him, his aim lies beyond him, and his existence is the existence of the department. The state only continues to exist as various fixed bureaucratic minds, bound together in subordination and pa**ive obedience. Actual knowledge seems devoid of content, just as actual life seems dead; for this imaginary knowledge and this imaginary life are taken for the real thing. The bureaucrat must therefore deal with the actual state jesuitically, whether this jesuitry is conscious or unconscious. However, once its antithesis is knowledge, this jesuitry is like wise bound to achieve self-consciousness and then become deliberate jesuitry. Whilst the bureaucracy is on the one hand this cra** materialism, it manifests its cra** spiritualism in the fact that it wants to do everything, i.e., by making the will the causa prima. For it is purely an active form of existence and receives its content from without and can prove its existence, therefore, only by shaping and restricting this content. For the bureaucrat the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him. When Hegel calls the executive the objective aspect of the sovereignty dwelling in the monarch, that is right in the same sense in which the Catholic Church was the real presence of the sovereignty, substance and spirit of the Holy Trinity. In the bureaucracy the identity of state interest and particular private aim is established in such a way that the state interest becomes a particular private aim over against other private aims. The abolition of the bureaucracy is only possible by the general interest actually-and not, as with Hegel, merely in thought, in abstraction-becoming the particular interest, which in turn is onlv possible as a result of the particular actually becoming the general interest. Hegel starts from an unreal antithesis and therefore achieves only an imaginary identity which is in truth again a contra-dictory identity. The bureaucracy is just such an identity. * * * Footnotes: *. The treatise is available in English as Hegel's Philosophy of Right, translated with notes by T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942). The complete text of Marx's commentary is available in Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, translated and edited by Joseph J. O'Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). **. For more on transformational criticism and Marx's application of it in this commentary, see the Introduction, pp. xxiii-xxiv, above. l. Subheadings supplied by R.C.T. 2. Par excellence-i.e., "Christianity is the pre-eminent religion." 3. I.e., state, republic; etymologically, "public affairs."