The Basis of the State in the Marx of 1842
Andrew Chitty
In his 1837 ‘letter to his father’ Marx famously describes how he became a Hegelian:
From the idealism which, by the way, I had compared and nourished with the idealism of Kant and Fichte, I arrived at the point of seeking the Idea in the actual itself [im Wirklichen selbst]. If previously the gods had dwelt above the earth, now they became its centre.
I had read fragments of Hegel’s philosophy, the grotesque craggy melody of which did not appeal to me. Once more I wanted to dive into the sea, but with the definite intention of finding that spiritual nature [die Geistige Natur] is just as necessary, concrete and firmly based as bodily ... (CW1: 18, MEGA 3/1: 7-8, t. m.)
In his first notebook on Epicurean philosophy of 1839, Marx tersely identifies ‘spiritual nature’ with the state (CW1: 409), and in fact Hegel himself in the Philosophy of Right describes the system of right which provides the institutional structure of the state as a ‘second nature’, a nature grounded in spirit rather than in the Idea, as physical nature is: ‘The system of right is the realm of actualised freedom, the world of spirit produced from within itself as a second nature’ (PR §4).[1] Thus in 1837 Marx was setting himself the project of showing that the state was ‘firmly based’ in some underlying essence of which it is the actualisation or realisation, just as for Hegel physical nature was based in, and the realisation of, the Idea.[2] I shall call this putative underlying essence ‘the basis of the state’. If he could discover it, it would enable Marx not only to explain the shape of existing states, as the realisation of that basis, but also to criticise them to the extent that they realised that basis inadequately, and thus to go beyond the alternatives of ungrounded idealism or lifeless positivism which confronted him in 1837 in his thinking about law. The aim of this paper is to elucidate the account of this basis that Marx went on to give in the writings of his Rheinische Zeitung period (January 1842 to March 1843). At the end I shall suggest that Marx’s conception of the basis of the state in this period served as a precursor to certain ideas in his later theory of history.
Hegel, ethical substance and the state
Today ‘the state’ is often used narrowly to mean a set of centralised decision-making and governing institutions, but Hegel generally uses it not in this sense but instead more broadly, to mean a legally and politically unified community as a whole, that is, a community unified by a single system of right and a single set of centralised governing institutions. For him ‘the state’ is a successor concept to the ancient Greek ‘polis’. The issue is confused because in the last section of the Philosophy of Right, named ‘the state’, Hegel groups together a discussion of the state in this broad sense (in paragraphs 257-271) with a discussion of its set of centralised governing institutions (in paragraphs 272-320, ‘the internal constitution’) and of its relations to other states which are necessarily mediated by those institutions (paragraphs 321-360), but his usage of the term ‘state’ throughout this section is consistent with the broad sense outlined here. In what follows I shall follow Hegel and use ‘state’ in this broad sense, sometimes pointing this out explicitly for the sake of clarity.
For Hegel the basis of the state, and of its complete institutional structure (the ‘system of right’), is freedom. As he says in the introduction to the Philosophy of History, ‘the state is the actualisation of freedom’ (RH 54), and in the Philosophy of Right, ‘right is any existence in general which is the existence of the free will’ (PR §29). Against Hobbes, for whom every state represented a necessary limitation on individuals’ freedom, Hegel conceives the system of right as a set of institutions through which alone human beings can properly realise their freedom, a freedom which, following Kant, he conceives as inseparable from reason.[3]
In the introduction to the Philosophy of Right Hegel gives a rather unconvincing dialectical derivation of genuinely free action as action that wills its own freedom (PR §§9-22), prior to expounding the totality of institutions described in the Philosophy of Right as realisations of that freedom. But arguably a better clue to how Hegel saw the system of right as the realisation of freedom is provided by his identification elsewhere of freedom with spirit: ‘Philosophy teaches us that all the properties of spirit exist only through freedom ... freedom is the sole truth of spirit’ (RH 22). For this identification suggests that the system of right, as the realisation of freedom, is equally the realisation of spirit, and in fact in the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel gives us an account of spirit as a collective ‘substance’ constituted by a community of mutually recognising individuals, which expresses itself in the customs and laws of that community, in other words in its ‘system of right’.
The initial encounter between two self-conscious[4] beings in the Phenomenology leads, of course, to the master-servant relationship characterised by the one-way recognition by the servant of the master as authoritative over him. This relationship constitutes a community of sorts, but a profoundly unsatisfactory one because neither the master nor the servant can see itself in the other, since one is independent and one is dependent, yet it was the aim of finding an object which would display itself as identical to oneself that initially drove self-conscious beings to seek each other out.[5] So the master-servant relationship must give way to a community of mutual recognition, in which each is in the position of:
beholding, in the independence of the other, complete unity with it, of having for my object the free thinghood of an other, which confronts me and is the negative of myself, as my own being-for-myself. (PS §350, t. m.)[6]
Hegel calls this community ‘a people’ (PS §350).[7] It involves a process of mutual constitution between self-conscious individuals and their shared ‘ethical substance’ (PS §349). On the one hand, this substance is only constituted by their mutual recognition of one another, but on the other they are only properly self-conscious beings by virtue of belonging to this substance:
Reason is present here as the universal fluid substance, as unchangeable simple thinghood, which yet bursts asunder into many completely independent beings [Wesen], just as light bursts asunder into stars as countless self-luminous points, which in their absolute being-for-self are dissolved, not merely in themselves, but for themselves, into the simple independent substance. They are conscious of being these individual [einzelne] independent beings through their sacrifice of their individuality, and through this universal substance being their soul and essence, just as this universal again is their own doing as individuals, or is the work that they have produced. (PS §350, t. m.)
Now this substance is what Hegel also calls spirit,[8] the ‘I that is We and We that is I’ that he refers to earlier in the Phenomenology (PS §177), and the customs and laws of a people are the expression of their shared ethical substance or spirit: ‘this universal substance speaks its universal language in the customs and laws of its people’ (PS §351, t. m.). In so far as we can speak of the ethical substance becoming self-conscious by expressing itself in this ‘language’, and realising itself in so far as it becomes self-conscious, we can speak of customs and laws as realising the spirit of a people.
Of course, for Hegel the life of a people as such is self-inadequate in that their spirit is for them ‘in the form of being’ (PS §354), i. e. in so far as they experience it as something merely given rather than as constituted by their own actions, and also in so far as each individual thinks of him or herself just as a member of the ethical substance and not also as ‘pure individuality [Einzelheit] for itself’ (PS §355, t. m.). These are the shortcomings of ancient Greek society. We might summarise them by saying that a people must go on to become a ‘self-conscious people’: both individually self-conscious in that each member is conscious of itself as an autonomous being as well as an instantiation of the collective spirit, and ‘collectively self-conscious’ in the sense that all are conscious of that collective spirit as constituted by their own actions, as nothing but themselves in another guise. Nevertheless, when Hegel introduces the concept of the state (in his broad sense) in paragraph 257 the Philosophy of Right he does so in terms which strikingly echo those he used in the Phenomenology to describe the ethical substance of a people:
The state is the actuality of the ethical idea - the ethical spirit as manifest, clear-to-itself, substantial will, which thinks and knows itself and implements what it knows insofar as it knows it. It has its immediate existence in customs and its mediated existence in the self-consciousness of the individual [des Einzelnen], in the individual’s knowledge and activity, just as this [self-consciousness], through its disposition, has its substantial freedom in the state as its essence, its goal and the product of its activity. (PR §257, t. m.)[9]
Admittedly, one element of the Phenomenology description is heavily downplayed here: the idea that the universal substance is not only the essence of individuals but also ‘their own doing’ or (as he says in the present quote) their ‘product’. Nevertheless, if we put this passage together with the earlier discussion, we can surmise that for Hegel the modern system of right, i. e. the full set of institutions of the modern state (in the broad sense), from private property and the family through to constitutional monarchy, both expresses and realises the common spirit of an (individually and collectively) self-conscious society of mutually recognising individuals, who both constitute and are constituted by that common spirit.
Such a system of right is the realisation of freedom in that, for Hegel, freedom is the essential characteristic of a self-conscious community of mutually recognising individuals; that is, human freedom consists in living in such self-conscious mutual recognition. The norms of right spell out the ways in which individuals must or may behave towards each other if they are to form such a community, and thus if they are to be properly free. Therefore in a certain way the system of right expresses their own shared will: a shared ‘will to live freely together’ which develops out of human beings’ primordial urge to self-determination as a result of their encounters with others with a similar urge.[10] This shared will is universal or general, but in a different way to Rousseau’s general will (to which it is Hegel’s response). While Rousseau’s general will is universal in that is a shared will to satisfy individual material interests that all have in common but which can only be realised by joint action; Hegel’s equivalent is universal in that it is a shared will to achieve a freedom that can only be achieved by all together. Hegel calls this will the ‘will that is rational in and for itself’ (PR §258, ES §435A). It is a rational will not so much because it acts universalisably, as in Kant, but because the process of its formation out of this initial urge to individual self-determination is a rational one, so that the ‘will to live freely together’ that results from it is rational too.
Ruge and Marx on Hegel
The Left Hegelians began to take an openly critical attitude to Hegel’s political philosophy with Arnold Ruge’s articles of June 1840 and August 1842. Ruge’s comments on paragraph 257 of the Philosophy of Right, which he quotes at the start of the second of these articles, are especially helpful in seeing his own position as a starting point for examining Marx’s at the time. On the one hand, just before quoting this paragraph (as I have above), he says that Hegel has asserted ‘the most profound concept of the state that humanity had thus far achieved’ (Ruge 1842b: 216). Yet on the other hand, immediately after quoting it he paraphrases the paragraph in a way that emphasises that the state is the product of self-conscious subjects, and in turn construes this in terms of public debate and self-rule, although the first of these ideas is almost hidden in Hegel’s own text, and the second and third are quite absent. Ruge says:
Therefore the public spirit and the process of public thinking and achievement is the state; the state is the essence, and the self-conscious subject is its existence; yet the essence is not only the goal, but also the product of the activity of the self-conscious subject, and thus freedom is the self-producing and self-ruling thinking and willing, which exists immediately as customs, but mediately by self-conscious subjects. (Ibid., t. m.)
In this way Ruge, while officially endorsing Hegel’s concept of the state in paragraph 257, provides a decisively republican gloss on it, in part by restoring an element in it from the corresponding passage in the Phenomenology. It is in the light of the concept of the state so glossed that he goes on to criticise Hegel for failing to make room for the ideas of public political discussion and collective self-determination in his account of the centralised governing institutions of the state (in the broad sense), so that in effect this account makes Hegel’s state as a whole a ‘police state’: one in which government officials ensure the welfare of individuals who for their part lead purely private lives.
As a starting point it seems reasonable to assume that Marx, who corresponded with Ruge throughout 1842 and 1843, might have taken a similar attitude to the Philosophy of Right in this period. We know that he made a study of the book in the autumn of 1841, a few months after submitting his doctoral dissertation, and that in November 1841 he began working on an article criticising it. In a letter to Ruge in March 1842 he says that this article is finished apart from some corrections, and describes it as:
a critique of Hegelian natural right, insofar as it concerns the internal constitution. The central point is the struggle against constitutional monarchy as a hybrid which from beginning to end contradicts and abolishes itself. (CW1: 382, MEW 27: 397, t. m.)
Marx never published the article,[11] but we can surmise that its approach might have been the same as that of the section on the monarch in his 1843 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, where he attacks the idea of the monarchy from the standpoint of a conception of the state that looks similar to Hegel’s own in paragraph 257.[12] So it is quite possible that in 1842 Marx, like Ruge, continued to endorse Hegel’s conception of the basis of the state, as it is summarised in that paragraph, while repudiating the detailed conclusions he had drawn about the proper form of its centralised governing institutions, its ‘internal constitution’.[13]
Marx on human self-realisation and the basis of the state
In fact an analysis of the Rheinische Zeitung writings[14] indicates that at least for most of 1842 this is just what Marx did. Before showing this, we need to establish that for the Marx of this period, even more clearly than for Hegel, ‘the state’ meant not a set of centralised governing institutions (a ‘government’ as I shall say from here on) [15] but a legally and politically unified community as a whole. In fact Marx specifically attributes the former view of the state to a misunderstanding characteristic of officials within the government:
To the official only the sphere of activity of the authorities is the state, whereas the world outside this sphere of activity is an object of state, completely lacking the state disposition and state understanding. (JCM 344, MEGA 1/1: 309)
Elsewhere he repeatedly counterposes the state as a whole to the government (DFP 155, BLA 122, MNA 363), to the central state power (QC 183), and to the state-administration (JCM 337). At one point he refers to the ‘state organism’ in contrast to state institutions (CLP 122), and at another he describes the government as an organ of the state (CLP 120).[16] Specifically, if the state as a whole is an organism, then Marx’s view seems to be that the government or administration is the organ through which it is able to engage in conscious activity: that ‘the state possesses its conscious and active existence in the administration’ (JCM 345).[17]
For Marx in 1842 the basis of the state lies in human nature. On the one hand human beings are essentially free: ‘Freedom is so much essence of man that even its opponents implement it while combating its reality’ (DFP 155). But, like Rousseau, Marx asserts that humans can only realise their freedom by associating into a state:
[T]he state itself educates [erzieht] its members in that it makes them into state-members, in that it converts the aims of the individual into universal aims, raw instinct into ethical inclination, natural independence into spiritual freedom, in that the individual enjoys himself in the life of the whole and the whole [enjoys itself] in the disposition of the individual. (LKZ 193, MEGA 1/1: 181, t. m.)[18]
The state is a ‘free association of ethical human beings’ which is the ‘actualisation of freedom’ (LKZ 192, t. m.). In turn, Marx identifies the human freedom that is realised by the state with rationality:
The more ideal and thorough view of recent philosophy ... considers the state as the great organism, in which rightful, ethical and political freedom has to be actualised, and in which the individual citizen in obeying the laws of the state obeys only the natural laws of his own reason, of human reason. (LKZ 202, MEGA 1/1: 189, t. m.) [19]
Thus a state is an association of individuals who by virtue of that association have become transformed - have undergone a ‘political rebirth’ (CEP 306) - realising their own intrinsic capacity for freedom and reason, where reason stands not for instrumental reason but for a reason through which individuals think for the whole rather than just for themselves.[20] The free press plays a crucial role in this process of collective human self-education (of ‘the spiritual education of a people [Volksbildung]’) in that ‘it transforms the material struggle into an ideal struggle, the struggle of flesh and blood into a struggle of minds, the struggle of need, desire, the empirical into a struggle of theory, of understanding, of form’ (CEP 292, MEGA 1/1:272, t. m.).[21]
It follows that the laws of the state are nothing but conscious articulations of human freedom and rationality, the means whereby associated human beings publicly spell out the content of their own freedom and rationality, and bind themselves to living in accord with it, thereby realising it:
Law [die Gesetzt] ... is true law only when in it the unconscious natural law of freedom has become conscious state law. Where the law is actual law, i. e. the existence of freedom, it is the actual freedom-existence of man. Laws, therefore, cannot prevent the actions of man, for they are the inner laws-of-life of his action itself, the conscious mirror-images of his life. Hence law withdraws into the background in the face of man’s life as a life of freedom, and only when his actual behaviour has shown that he has ceased to obey the natural law of freedom does it, as state law, compel him to be free, just as the laws of physics confront me as something alien only when my life has ceased to be the life of these laws, when it has been struck by illness. (DFP 162-3, MEGA 1/1:150-1, t. m.)
Thus, echoing Hegel to the word, Marx can say that law ‘is right because it is the positive existence of freedom’ (DFP 162). [22] Furthermore, and again following Hegel, law is not simply the articulation of human freedom and rationality in the abstract, but of a collective spirit that is formed when individuals associate into a state, and of the freedom and rationality which they possess as participants in this spirit.[23] It is this collective spirit that Marx really identifies as the immaterial basis or essence of the state, the equivalent of the soul of a living organism. He says this most clearly in a passage that closely mirrors §257 of the Philosophy of Right in its conception of the state:
In the living organism, all trace of the different elements as such has disappeared. The difference no longer consists in the separate existence of the various elements, but in the living movement of distinct functions, which are all inspired by one and the same life, so that the very difference between them does not exist ready-made prior to this life but, on the contrary, continually arises out of this life itself and as continually vanishes within it and becomes paralysed. Just as nature does not confine itself to the elements already present, but even at the lowest stage of life proves that this diversity is a mere sensuous phenomenon that has no spiritual truth, so also the state, this natural spiritual kingdom [natürliche Geisterreich], must not and cannot seek and find its true essence in a fact apparent to the senses (CEP 295, MEGA 1/1: 275, t. m.)
Historical change and the basis of the state
So far it looks as if Marx’s conception of the basis of the state in 1842 is very close to Hegel’s, despite the much more strongly republican conclusions that he draws from this conception, just as with Ruge. It is true that Marx nowhere mentions mutual recognition as the means whereby humans form themselves into citizens of a state, and that - possibly under the influence of Feuerbach, Rousseau, or Aristotle - he is much more willing to connect the ideas of freedom and rationality with the term ‘human nature’ than Hegel is. It is also true that his conception of the rationality that citizens of the state acquire is too vague to identify it specifically with Hegel’s will that is ‘rational in and for itself’, as opposed to, say, Rousseau’s general will. Furthermore, Marx goes far beyond Hegel in his use of this conception of the basis of the state to criticise, first, theocracy; second, particularism (and the associated reduction of the state to a ‘spiritual animal kingdom’); third, the misattribution of the state spirit to individuals that Feuerbach and others had already attacked under the term ‘personalism’ (Breckman 1999); and, fourth, the fetishism whereby private property owners become ‘possessed’ by their own property.[24] Nevertheless the conception of state and its basis remains very similar to Hegel’s. Where Marx starts to move substantially beyond Hegel in his conception of the basis of the state is where he begins to talk about that basis as changing over historical time.
Of course for Hegel too the spirit that is the basis of the state changes historically, developing in the direction of greater self-consciousness, with the result that the forms of the state have to change. So it is not by referring to historical change as such that Marx begins to deviate from Hegel. Rather it is by the way that, in referring to historical change, he starts to conceive the basis of the state differently. The best way to see this is by briefly tracking some of Marx’s uses of the idea that the job of the legislator is to describe and articulate a pre-existing reality, rather than to invent laws ab initio. This pre-existing reality must be the basis of the state of which we have been speaking. Given the way that Marx has written above, it would be natural for him to say that what the law must describe is the collective spirit of the people, or perhaps the freedom and rationality inherent in that collective spirit. As this spirit and its freedom and rationality develop, laws would have to change to reflect it.[25] This would be Hegel’s own way of seeing things. Instead, however, Marx characterises that which positive law must describe in different ways, for example in November 1842 as ‘the practical life forces’:[26]
[T]he law can only be the ideal, self-conscious image of actuality, the theoretical expression, made independent, of the practical life forces [Lebensmächte]. (CRK 273, MEGA 1/1: 259)
In December, referring to electoral law, he speaks of the basis which the law must reflect as ‘the internal construction of the state’, namely the districts and provinces into which it is divided in practice, and as ‘state-life’:
We do not demand that in the representation of the people one should abstract from actual and present differences. On the contrary, we demand that one should proceed from the actual differences created and conditioned by the internal construction of the state, and not fall back from state-life into imagined spheres that state-life has already robbed of their significance. (CEP 296, MEGA 1/1: 276, t. m.)
Most significantly, and again in December, Marx argues that the job of the divorce courts is to reflect the underlying truth about whether the relationship between the married partners is alive or dead:
Just as in nature decay and death appear of themselves where an existence has totally ceased to correspond to its determination, just as world history decides whether a state has so greatly departed from the idea of the state that it no longer deserves to exist, so, too, the state decides in what circumstances an existing marriage has ceased to be a marriage. Divorce is nothing but the statement of the fact that the marriage in question is a dead marriage, the existence of which is mere semblance and deception. It is obvious that neither the arbitrary decision [Willkür] of the legislator, nor the arbitrary decision of private persons, but only the essence of the matter can decide whether a marriage is dead or not, for it is well known that the statement that death has occurred depends on the facts, and not on the desires of the parties involved. (DB 309, MEGA
1/1: 288-9, t. m.)
Now what is common to these three cases is Marx’s reference to ‘life’ and ‘life forces’. It is true that earlier in the year Marx had used the idea of ‘life’ to characterise the basis of the state, as when he spoke of ‘man’s life as a life of freedom’ as the basis of law in April (quoted above, DFP 162-3). But there, the idea of life was tied directly to that of freedom. In these later cases it is noticeable that ‘life’ and ‘life-forces’ are not presented as intrinsically related to spirit, rationality or freedom. Instead their existence and dynamics are left unexplained, as brute facts.[27]
R. N. Berki (1990) has seen in Marx’s 1842 conception of the ‘true state’, the state in so far as it corresponds to its concept, an anticipation of his later notion of communism. Here I would like to make an alternative suggestion, although the two are not mutually exclusive. It is that Marx’s conception of the basis of the state, that essence of which the laws of the state are (or should be) the conscious expression, anticipates his later notion of ‘human productive powers’, of which the fundamental property relations of a society are the expression in his later theory of history. At another level, the early idea of the basis of the state anticipates his later idea of the ‘mode of production’, the integrated totality of human productive powers and fundamental property relations of a society, to whose description in the case of capitalism he devoted the last 35 years of his life, for in his theory the laws and even the general political forms of a society are the expression of its mode of production. Accordingly it is in Marx’s move in late
1842 from conceiving the basis of the state in a classically Hegelian way to thinking of it in more vitalist and thus potentially ‘materialist’ terms, a move that he made long before he began his study of political economy, that we should locate the starting point for Marx’s distinctive form of Left Hegelianism.
Bibliography
(1) Works by Hegel:
PS = Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. Miller (Oxford: OUP, 1977)
PR = Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. A Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
RH = Reason in History, tr. R. S. Hartman (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1953)
EL = Encyclopaedia Logic, tr. Geraets et al (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991)
VRP4 = Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie, volume 4, ed. K-H. Ilting (Stuttgart: Frommann Verlag, 1974).
Werke, in 20 volumes, eds. E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970)
(2) Works by Marx (dates are of composition):
In CW1 (Marx Engels, Collected Works, Lawrence and Wishart, 1975-, vol. 1):
CLP = ‘Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction’ (Jan-Feb 1842)
PMH = ‘Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law’ (Apr-Aug 1842)
DFP = ‘Debates on Freedom of the Press’ (Apr 1842)
QC = ‘The Question of Centralisation’ (May 1842)
LKZ = ‘The Leading Article in the Kölnische Zeitung’ (Jun-Jul 1842)
DLT = ‘Debates on the Law on Theft of Wood’ (Oct 1842)
CRK = ‘Communal Reform and the Kölnische Zeitung (Nov 1842)
DBE = ‘The Divorce Bill - Editorial Note’ (Nov 1842)
DB = ‘The Divorce Bill’ (Dec 1842)
CEP = ‘The Supplement to 335/336 of the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung on the Commissions of the Estates in Prussia’ (Dec 1842)
BLA = ‘The Ban on the Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung’ (Dec 1842 - Jan 1843)
JCM = ‘Justification of the Correspondent from the Mosel’ (Jan 1843)
MNA = ‘Marginal Notes to the Accusations of the Ministerial Rescript’ (Feb 1843)
In CW3 (Marx Engels, Collected Works, Lawrence and Wishart, 1975- vol. 3):
CHPR = ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ (Mar-Aug 1843)
MEGA = Karl Marx Friedriech Engels Gesamtausagabe (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1975-)
(3) Other works
Berki, R. N. 1990. ‘Through and through Hegel: Marx’s road to communism’, Political Studies 38, pp. 654-671
Breckman, W. 1999. Marx, The Young Hegelians and the Origins of Radical Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Chitty, A. 1998. ‘Recognition and social relations of production’, Historical Materialism 2, pp. 57-97.
Kelley, D. R. 1978. ‘The metaphysics of law: an essay on the very young Marx’, American Historical Review 83, pp. 350-367
McGovern, A. F. 1970. ‘The young Marx on the state’, Science and Society 34:4
McIvor, M. 2000. ‘Marx and political philosophy: the early writings’ (unpublished MS)
Moggach, D. 2002. The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Pascal, R. 1942. Karl Marx: His Apprenticeship to Politics (London: Labour Monthly)
Rosen, Z. 1977. Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx: The Influence of Bruno Bauer on Marx’s Thought (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff)
Rousseau, J.-J. [1762] The Social Contract, tr. M. Cranston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968)
Ruge, A. [1840]. ‘Zur Kritik des gegenwärtigen Staats- und Völkerrechts’ in G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophie des Rechts, ed. H. Reichelt (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1972), pp.
598-623
Ruge, A. [1842]. ‘Die Hegelsche Rechtsphilosophie und die Politik unsrer Zeit’, in G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophie des Rechts, ed. H. Reichelt (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein,
1972), pp. 624-49
Ruge, A. [1842b]. ‘Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right” and the politics of our times’ in L. Stepelevich ed. The Young Hegelians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)
Teeple, G. 1984. Marx’s Critique of Politics 1842-1847 (Toronto: Toronto University Press)
van Leeuwen, A. T. 1975. Critique of Earth (London: Lutterworth Press)
Wood, A. (ed.) 1991. Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
t. m. = translation modified.
Paper presented at the ISSEI Conference, Aberystwyth, July 2002
Corrections and revisions 15 October 2002
Published in Meyer-Dinkgräfe, Daniel (Ed). European Culture in a Changing World: Between Nationalism and Globalism. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference of ISSEI (International Society for the Study of European Ideas), 22-27 July 2002, Aberystwyth. Aberystwyth: ISSEI, 2002. ISBN 0-9544363-0-X. (CD-ROM)
Republished at http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/sefd0/papers/basisofstate.htm (NB In this version the translation of the first quote from Marx is slightly improved on that given in the original published version)
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[1] Cf. PR §151.
[2] In this paper I treat ‘realisation’ and ‘actualisation’, and their cognates, as interchangeable terms, but use the former in my own discussion and the latter (following convention) in translating Hegel’s and Marx’s Verwirklichung.
[3] See RH 54-55.
[4] More accurately, ‘self-certain’ or ‘immediately self-conscious’.
[5] For an elaboration of this account see Chitty 1998.
[6] At PS §349 Hegel describes this unity as ‘an in-itself universal self-consciousness’.
[7] Hegel also speaks of a ‘free people’ at PS §352 and §354.
[8] At PS §438 Hegel differentiates ethical substance from spirit by saying that spirit is ethical substance that is conscious of itself, but he does not maintain this distinction systematically.
[9] Cf. §260 and R, which is couched in similar terms, although it emphasises ‘complete freedom of particularity’ as a component of the idea of the state, and points out that this element was missing in the ancient Greek state.
[10] Of course in so far as the institutions of the modern state can be seen as expressing the will of every individual under it, they are the ‘record of their own will’, as Rousseau would have put it, and so in that sense the realisation of their own freedom, as every collectively agreed project would be. But this is a secondary way in which these institutions are the realisation of their freedom; the primary way is that they realise a self-conscious society of mutual recognition.
[11] He promised it for publication again as late as August (CW1: 393). It seems likely that he avoided publishing it because he recognised that a direct attack on the monarchy at the time would be too dangerous. It is noticeable that Marx avoids directly criticising the monarchy at any point in his Rheinische Zeitung articles (and at two points he even defends it, although in noticeably republican language: DFP 147, JCM 349). When the ministerial rescript ordering the closure of the paper was issued in January 1843 it cited the paper’s intention to ‘develop theories which aim at undermining the monarchical principle’ as one of the reasons for closure (MNA 361).
[12] Adopting Hegel’s conception of sovereignty as the ‘idealism of the state’, the integration of all its parts of the state into a single coordinated whole, he asserts that ‘sovereignty is nothing but the objectified spirit of the subjects of the state’ and asks, against Hegel: ‘What sort of state idealism would be that which, instead of being the actual self-consciousness of the citizens, the collective soul of the state, were to be one person, one subject?’ (CHPR 24). Again Marx emphasises the idea, underplayed in paragraph 257, that the state is the product of individuals’ actions.
[13] Direct references to Hegel are not of much help here. In the Rheinische Zeitung writings Marx makes only three very brief references to Hegel by name (LKZ 201, DB
309, MNA 362): the first two in approving and the third in disapproving terms.
[14] That is, his writings of the Rheinische Zeitung period, some of which were published in places other than the Rheinische Zeitung or went unpublished.
[15] In using ‘government’ as a shorthand for ‘centralised governing institutions’, rather than to refer to the control of those institutions by a particular party for a particular period of time (as in ‘the Major government’), I I am following what appears to be Marx’s usage of Regierung in 1842.
[16] Just as he calls the Rhenish press an organ of the province (CRK 272).
[17] So for Marx an example of ‘a state’ would be Prussia taken as a politically unified whole, not just the Prussian central government, in the same way as an example of ‘a province’ would be the Rhineland, again taken as a politically unified whole (LR3 384, MNA 362).
[18] Cf. the similar passage in Rousseau, The Social Contract book 1 chapter 8, and Hegel’s terse statement in VRP 4: ‘Our determination is freedom, which must actualise itself, and this actualisation is right’ (Quoted Wood 1991: 402, t. m.).
[19] Cf. PMH 209 where human freedom and rationality is contrasted with animal arbitrary power.
[20] See Marx’s contrast between ‘The utilitarian intelligence which fights for its hearth and home’ and ‘the free intelligence which fights for what is right despite its heart and home’ at CEP 301.
[21] Cf. DFP 165. Also MNA 363: ‘[T]he Rheinische Zeitung has not ‘tried to incite some estates against others, but to incite every estate against its own egoism and limitations’ (MNA 363).
[22] He is referring to ‘press law’ in the sentence but the sentiment is clearly intended to apply to law as a whole. Cf. DFP 162: ‘[R]ightful recognised freedom exists in the state as law. Laws are in no way repressive measures against freedom, any more than law of gravity is a repressive measure against motion ... Laws are rather the positive clear universal norms in which freedom has acquired an impersonal theoretical existence independent of the arbitrary-will of the individual. A legal code is a people’s bible of freedom.’
[23] See CHPR 58: ‘In the case of an irrational people one cannot speak of a rational organisation of the state.’
[24] Of course in each of these cases Marx can be seen to be drawing on resources in the Hegelian corpus as a whole: for example, the critique of ‘personalism’ can be traced to chapter 7C of the Phenomenology.
[25] At one point later in 1843 he does revert to something like this conception: ‘Here, in the philosophy of right, moreover, the will of the species [der Gattungswille] is our subject matter. The legislature does not make the law; it only discovers and formulates it.’ (CHPR 58, MEW 1: 260, t. m.)
[26] It may seem odd to the reader that I do not mention here Marx’s demand in October 1842 that the law be revised to recognise a ‘customary right’ of the poor to take fallen wood in private forests (DLT 230ff.). Marx does provide some odd arguments for this demand, at one point trying to ground it in the idea that the poor are excluded from civil society in the way that the fallen wood is separated from its tree (DLT 233). But overall his justification seems to appeal to an idea of human universality, which the poor have expressed in their practice of gathering wood, and this brings it close to the ideas set out above (DLT 231).
[27] The passage at CEP 295 (also quoted above), from December 1842, is somewhat indeterminate in this respect. There Marx speaks of the parts of the state as ‘all inspired by one and the same life’, and emphasises an analogy with physical life, but he also associates the idea of life with that of spirit. |
Evans Experientialism 
