Marx’s Hegelian Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of State

 "Criticism that struggles with its opposite remains dogmatic criticism, as for example in earlier times, when the dogma of the Blessed Trinity was set aside by appealing to the contradiction between 1 and 3. True criticism, however, shows the internal genesis of the Blessed Trinity in the human mind. It describes the act of its birth. Thus, true philosophical criticism of the present state constitution not only shows the contradictions as existing, but clarifies them, grasps their essence and necessity. It comprehends their own proper significance. However, this comprehension does not, as Hegel thinks, consist in everywhere recognising the determinations of the logical concept, but rather in grasping the proper logic of the proper object" --Marx

"Apart from anything else, philosophy with us is not as it was with the Greeks for instance, pursued in private like an art, but has an existence in the open, in contact with the public, and especially, or even only, in the service of the state." --Hegel

"Nature takes revenge on Hegel for the contempt he has shown her. If matter is to be shorn of its reality in favor of human will then here human will is left with no reality but that of matter" --Marx

Introduction

On November 10, 1837, Karl Marx wrote a letter to his father to bring him up to date on his study plans. No longer wanting to be a lawyer, as his father was before him, or a poet, Marx in this letter declared his intention to follow Hegel. The letter itself can be read as an act of philosophical conscience against his father, embarking on a new task to bring Hegel down to earth. He would do this by actualizing speculative idealism with a philosophy of practice, by fulfilling what he called the “double edged demand”: to make the world more philosophical and philosophy worldlier. The dialectic forged by Hegel would be used by Marx to go beyond Hegel’s own limitations. Hegel, while recognizing real social contradictions, could only overcome them at the level of thought, while man’s actual alienation reappears in real life, namely, in the form of bourgeois society.

It could be said that Marx continues Hegel’s own critique of Plato’s Republic. But it wasn’t that Hegel rejects Plato in toto (Hegel felt that the Republic itself constituted a proto-Philosophy of Spirit), but Hegel considered Plato’s idea of the ideal city obsolescent, as representing ancient ideals then in decline. One cannot jump over Rhodes, and no philosophy can transcend its own age. But Marx turns the tables on Hegel to show that the latter could not jump over Rhodes either, by merely opposing civil society to the State as it existed in Hegel’s absolute mind. Hegel tried jumping over Rhodes in a grand act of philosophical reification, of turning what is historical into something permanent, i.e. of reifying bourgeois society as something natural.

Between the years 1842 and 1843, Marx studied Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The study he managed to produce is a major document in the development of Marx’s thought, and one can see quite clearly that it is through Marx’s critique of the Philosophy of Right that he is able to formulate his ideas of communism. The study itself is a long, paragraph-by-paragraph reconstruction of Hegel’s philosophy of State. It is meant not only to demonstrate the philosophical presuppositions of Hegel’s politics, but the historical content that Hegel bounded his philosophical system around. Marx ultimately critiques Hegel for failing to legitimate the particular historical content of his system, but not for the merely positivistic reason that Hegel was subsuming the real under abstract ideas. Marx instead out Hegels-Hegel, by demonstrating that Hegel inadequately relates the historical content of bourgeois society to his own Idea.

The Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of State (sometimes translated Philosophy of State), was composed by Marx sometime between the months of March and August at Kreuznach in 1843. Unfortunately we have lost the first four pages of the manuscript, but the study is devoted to the third section (“The State”) of the third part (”Ethical Life”), of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The paragraphs analyzed by Marx are those numbered from 261 to 313 in Hegel’s text.

The Antinomies of Ethical Life

From what we have, the manuscript starts with a critique of Hegel’s speculative identity between the system of particular interests (the family and civil society) and the system of the general interest (the state). In Hegel, the state stands opposed to the spheres of family and civil society as an “external necessity”. But also, the laws and interests of the family and civil society are logically subordinate and dependent upon the state as a matter of conceptual necessity. The family and civil society have the state as their “immanent end”, and even if there is a conflict between these spheres, the family and civil society must give way to the state. Hegel does not talk of empirical conflicts, but only of “essential relationships”.

But as Marx points out, such immanent and internal necessities are in tension with the previously mentioned “external necessity” the state imposes on the family and civil society, where the state runs counter to those other spheres and changes the internal essences of them. This tension reveals a forced, or specious identity, that can only be described as “external necessity”. The phrase “external necessity” obfuscates what is for Marx an “unresolved antinomy” between immanent end and external necessity: “Family and civil society appear as the dark ground of nature from which the light of the state is born”: family and civil society are just finite phases that presuppose the “infinite real mind” of the state. To Marx, the empirical nature of these concrete relationships are sacrificed to what he calls (in the most Feuerbachian language) “logical, pantheistic mysticism”. The real relationships are transmuted by speculative philosophy into mere appearances of an infinite mind, where the relationships between the respective spheres are not governed by their own logic, but by a mind alien to the appearances.

History is presented in Hegel as having two aspects, one esoteric and one exoteric. The latter is conceived as empirical relationships, but the true esoteric message of the Idea relegates family and civil society to imaginary actors in a real inner activity of mind. Marx wants to privilege the exoteric story of history, (and thus any realistic, or proto-materialistic insights of Hegel), as the actual development, but for Hegel, these exoteric moments are only the real Idea of the state condescending to the lower phases of the family and civil society in order to transcend itself in them to bring about its infinity.  As Marx sums up later in his reconstruction: “The crux of the matter is that Hegel everywhere makes the Idea into the subject, while the genuine, real subject…is turned into the predicate. The development, however, always takes place on the side of the predicate.”

In Hegel, the transitions from family to civil society to state do not result from the particular natures of the spheres but from “the universal relationship of freedom and necessity”. What is strange for Marx about this operation is not that the infinity of the state swallows whole the family and the state, but it is an infinity that necessarily comes about through the empirical real, and leaves the empirical reality as it is. The infinite emerges only to justify what exists; by showing what exists has a meaning other than itself in the Idea. The result is a mystical positivistic consecration of what exists, a move which, according to Marx, can only justify and not critique. Hegel, of course, would contend that it is an absurd accusation that his philosophy was incapable of critique.

Not only does this result in an uncritical positivism for Marx. Hegel does not offer real knowledge of what the nature of the state is, since it is Hegel’s sole concern to uncover the Idea in every sphere, and constitutions and other specific determinations are reduced to mere names of one Idea, of one essential organism that the various elements tie into dialectically. But these determinations “remain uncomprehended because their specific nature has not been grasped”. The main problem again is rendering what is properly empirical speculative, where Hegel passes off what are really empirical propositions (about private property, the various powers of state), as logical deductions of an Idea. But these are not proper deductions for Marx, as Hegel fails to provide conceptual bridges leading from general ideas to specific phenomena. The fate of these specific phenomena is “sealed in the holy archives of the Santa Casa {the prison of the Inquisition in Madrid} (of the Logic)”.

From this Marx declares that Hegel’s “true interest is not the philosophy of right but logic…the entire Philosophy of Right is no more than a parenthesis within the Logic” The task of Hegel’s philosophy of state is not to understand how ideas can be embodied in particular political entities but how these entities dissolve themselves into abstractions. “Logic does not provide a proof for the state, but the state provides a proof for the logic.”

Hegel’s conceptual confusions efface the particular individuality of the agencies and activities that make up the state, specifically occluding how these activities are human functions. For Hegel, these bureaucrats are connected to the state in an external and contingent way in regards to the interest of private property, and the interest of their immediate personalities. But Marx argues the essence of the particular persons operating in these agencies is not the merely that of private persons used to express the infinite idea, nor can these civil servants be reduced to their “beard and blood and abstract Physis”. The essence of these persons must be defined in light of their social qualities, since the affairs of state are “nothing but the modes of action and existence of the social qualities of men.”

Marx goes on to comment on how the peculiar nature of sovereignty for Hegel only manifests itself in its proper reality in times of war (paragraph 278 in Philosophy of Right). In times of peace, the sovereignty of the state is a mere external compulsion exerted by the ruling power on private life, where the various elements of society, including the state, turn to their own self-interests to indirectly benefit the whole. But only in war, or in states of emergency, where the particular spheres fuse into one concept of sovereignty to handle the conflict, does the state come into its own. Thus for Marx, the ideality of the state does not develop in terms of a rational system, but a movement from unconscious self-seeking (akin to the logic of the market), to its essence being brought about only in exceptional moments. Marx’s critique of Hegel’s idea of sovereignty has applications elsewhere in terms of 20^th century conceptions of sovereignty; specifically Schmitt’s fascistic re-reading of Hegel in his 1933 tract State, Movement, People.

Monarchy

The sovereignty of the state in Hegel, its essence, is reified as something independent of its constituent parts, where the object is transmuted into a subject. Contra Hegel, real sovereignty for Marx is the “objectified spirit of the subjects of the state”. But as Hegel formulated it, sovereignty must as a subject in a single person to unify the disparate interests of society. Hegel selected this “God-man” as the real embodiment of the Idea in the monarch. The monarch, defined by his capriciousness, is where sovereignty can come into existence as an ungrounded self-determination of a decisionistic will. This is the strictly individual aspect of the state that gives it personality and freedom. The existence of the monarch is logically necessary for Hegel in light of the movement of the concept, from universal, to particular, to individual, each having an “explicitly real and separate formation”. The universal is expressed in the legislator, where the citizens determine that phase. But the citizen who can really exercise the individuality of the will to make the concept of the state function is the monarch. Two subjects are conflated by Hegel to turn empirical matters into metaphysical axioms, of converting the Idea that has to be expressed in one individual who is self-conscious of himself as sovereign.

Marx questions this logical schema by asking why we need just one individual to be conscious in order to exercise sovereignty. It is true that a subjectivity sure of itself will wish to exercise his will in reality, as an individual. However, why do we need only one will to be representative of freedom? This “oneness” of sovereignty for Marx can only really exist as “many ones”, that the predicate, (the essence), is never exhausted by one person (i.e. that subjectivity need not be reduced to a single subject). Hegel deduced that the idea of the state is founded upon the individual will of an ungrounded self-determined caprice, “inaugurat{ing} all activity and reality” (see remark on paragraph 279). This “personified rationality has no other content than the abstraction “I will”. L’etat c’est moi.” But with the same “beautiful logic”, according to Marx’s ironic criticism, of reducing subjectivity to one subject, Hegel could also argue “with no less justification that because the individual man is one, the human species is only a single human being.”

Hegel treats the individual monarch’s will as more real, and thus deserving of this exercise of sovereignty, compared to what he casts as “artificial” constructs, such as society, community, and the family. However concrete society and the family may be they cannot be as a concrete as a single will. But while Hegel treats these species-forms (Gattungsgestaltungen), these forms of life, as abstractions, it is these very forms that ground people in their actual concrete existence (again, the essence of people for Marx are their social qualities). Yet the rational for Hegel is not realized in real persons but in the realization of moments of an abstract concept that the monarch happens to embody.

The conception of monarchy is one that Hegel admits is the “hardest for ratiocination”, or the categories of the Understanding. Hegel argues that the monarch is not something merely deduced from its form, but is an idea of something “purely self-originating”. Marx dismisses this by arguing that according to this logic, it could be said every being is “purely self-originating”, and in this respect “the monarch’s louse is as good as the monarch.”

It is interesting in the Philosophy of Right how Hegel prefers the hereditary monarch to the elective, since the latter is closer to particular interests and in election the “offices of state turn into private property.” (Paragraph 281). Hereditary monarchy proves more metaphysically adequate to subjective foundations of state. The monarch is said to be of a different species, so as to make him separate from all private interests in order that he represents those interests better. What makes the king of a different species is his body, since “the highest function of the body is sexual activity” and the highest act of the king is to make children, or to perpetuate his own body in his sons. Thus the chief offices of state take on an animal reality, which negates what should make them distinctively human or rational. Nature takes it revenge on Hegel and as Marx later on in his critique states cuttingly, “zoology is the secret of the nobility”.

Marx goes on to analyze the reifying moves Hegel makes to render what is empirical metaphysically valid. “The most simple thing becomes the most complicated and the most complicated becomes the most simple. What should be a starting point becomes a mystical result and what should be a rational result becomes a mystical starting point.” The final subjectivity of the decision of the monarch, based on his pure subjectivity, is a capriciousness which is not objective, and is itself incapable of an objective metaphysical proof Hegel wants to provide it with. “The whole critical failure” of the Philosophy of Right rests for Marx with Hegel’s confusion that his analysis of the fundamental presuppositions of monarchy translates into a demonstration of their validity.

Marx analyzes the remark to paragraph 279 where Hegel grounds the sovereignty of the people and the sovereignty of the ruler both in terms of a shared nationality. In order for a people to be sovereign, they must be part of one nation that has a monarch. Different nationalities and peoples can only be fully expressed in separation from one another, as organized into different monarchies. But this idea of sovereignty is found wanting, as Hegel’s real task is not to analyze the real empirical relationships, but to discover these empirical relationships in the truth of the Idea. And it is this Idea that lacks dialectical mediation, since the Idea of the state is born as an individual and achieves its existence in the birth of a ruler.

The Executive

Marx in his critique of Hegel’s sections dealing with executive power credits Hegel for his frankness in defining civil society as the “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes), of uncovering private egoism to be the real source of patriotism, and that there is a conflict between man as a private individual of civil society and man as a citizen of the state. But for Marx most of this section doesn’t deserve the name of philosophical exposition, but could be “inserted word for word as they stand into the Prussian Legal Code…”

The executive function of the state recruits those based on merit and knowledge, and not from birth, giving every citizen the “opportunity of joining the class of civil servants.” (see paragraph 291). It is from the middle classes the bureaucracy is representative of, where a “developed intelligence” can be found. Just by passing a strenuous examination, when the citizen is “baptized with bureaucratic knowledge”, can anyone become a civil servant. Marx jokes: “It is not recorded that Greek and Roman statesmen ever took examinations. But then what is a Roman statesman compared to a Prussian civil servant!” In paragraph 294, Hegel derives the real identity between the officials to the state with their salaries. Since the state guarantees their existence with a salary, the “real identity of civil society and the state is postulated”.

Ideally for Hegel, the civil service serves as a buffer against tyranny at the top (the monarch) and tyranny from the bottom (the masses). The existence of the bureaucracy arises from the material conditions of society (the differentiation between private and public spheres), and from the existence of corporations, where corporations could be said to be the bureaucracies of civil society. The corporations are the “materialism of the bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy is the spiritualism of the corporations.” But while the bureaucracy is posited by Hegel as representing a universal interest, Marx describes the bureaucratic interest as another particular one, and a private one. The interest of the state and particular private purposes are conflated in a speculative identity in Hegel but the real interest of the state is one particular purpose opposed to other private interests.

The bureaucracy as an alien interest can only be overcome if the “universal interest becomes a particular interest in reality and not merely in thought, in abstraction, as it does in Hegel.” This takes place only when a particular interest really becomes a universal interest. But only later for Marx will this concrete universal be incarnated in the interest of the proletariat. For Hegel, the bureaucracy subsumes the individual into the universal, and uses the Prussian state (“lock, stock and barrel”) for an illustration of this “subsumption”.

Hegel according to Marx does not even ask if this mode of subsumption of the Prussian state is rational: he just asserts it. But what is crucial for Marx is not the “pseudo-universality” of the bureaucratic class, but the real universality that every citizen has the chance to devote himself. The capacity of the universal class to be truly universal is to be the class of every citizen in “the true state” (later when Marx and Engels experienced the historical event of the Paris Commune, this “true state” came to be known as the first “non-state” in history). But in Hegel, only the officials’ examinations and “daily bread are the final syntheses” that guarantee the universal character of the bureaucrats. It is really only later on, in the remark to paragraph 308, that Hegel “describes the authentic spirit of the bureaucracy…when he talks of ‘mere business routine’ and ‘the horizon of a restricted sphere”.

The Legislature

Marx transitions from the executive principle to the legislative, quoting from paragraph 298 that “the legislature is itself a part of the constitution which is presupposed by it and to that extent lies absolutely outside the sphere directly determined by it”. But this is odd for Marx, since the constitution didn’t create itself, and these laws were established by a legislature that existed before the constitution. Hegel might retort that we are only talking about an empirical legislature and not the real one that conforms to its essence in the Idea of a constitution. Still, there is a contradiction, between the legislature as a power that “organize{s} the universal”, which as a power created the constitution, and the legislature as a constitutional power, as something “subsumed under the constitution.”

Hegel resolves this antinomy by arguing that the constitution lies outside the sphere of the legislature, but indirectly the “legislature modifies the constitution”. According to Marx this resolution winds up making the legislature “pull it {the constitution} apart retail because it cannot modify it wholesale”. Hegel only exchanges one contradiction for another, with the contradiction now one of activity in opposition to determination, or a contradiction between the actual and the legal activity of the legislature (or to put it in its most simple dimension, the conflict between what a legislature is and what it “means to do”).  

The state is emphasized by Hegel to be the realization of freedom, but as Marx explains--as Hegel elucidates the development of legislative power--it is not by the laws of reason that the constitution develops, but through blind natural necessity. The particular to universal interest the state is supposed to embody is mediated by chance “and against consciousness.” And yet Hegel aims to show this as “the realization of free will throughout the state!”, of the gradual modifications of the constitution over a contingent period of time. But empirically, the changes Hegel describes to explain this process are individual, and do not explain the advent of new constitutions. What do explain the introduction of new constitutions for Marx are “new needs” and real revolutions. Hegel’s gradualism “is firstly historically false and, secondly, explains nothing.” The real principle of the constitution, its progress, can only be found in its real incarnation, i.e. the people.

Over all other organs of state, Marx favors the legislature as expressing the real will of the people (species-will, Gattungswillen). It was the legislature according to Marx that “made the French Revolution”, and wherever the legislature has emerged as the “dominant factor”, it has made “universal revolutions”. The executive when dominant has only made “petty revolutions”, and has been on the whole reactionary, since the executive only represents a particular, capricious will. Thus the people who embody the real essence of state have the right to make a new constitution, since “a constitution that has ceased to be the real expression of the will of the people has become a practical illusion.” Against Hegel, (but also with Hegel’s method), Marx states that the problem of the constitution is not one of the universal will, but a problem of knowledge, in that the will of the people must be in accord with reason, in accord with “species-will”. It is a will that doesn’t make law, but “only discovers and formulates it”.

For Hegel, the Estates, or orders of men from civil society, are the deputation of civil society to the state, (the “many” to the state’s “one”). The Estates are really the legislature or the legislature as “distinct from the monarchy and the executive”. It is from the “empirical universal” of the Estates that matters of concern come into existence, from “which the thoughts and opinions of the Many are particulars” (paragraph 301). The many are supposed to articulate universal concerns, and while Hegel has “great respect for the state-mind, state-consciousness”, its real empirical manifestation in the collection of the many in the Estates brings the state-mind to its more crass existence. Marx says it’s surprising that when the state-mind comes down to earth in the empirical universal of the Estates, Hegel “regard{s} it with such undiluted contempt”.

Marx states the key to the entire riddle of Hegel’s mysticism of the state resides in Hegel crediting these empirical-public manifestations of consciousness an alien essence to them, while the true essence is attributed to the inappropriate forms of appearance. “Hegel idealizes the bureaucracy and empiricizes public consciousness.” He can treat the real empirical consciousness marginally because he treats the marginal consciousness of what he considers the true essence the real public one. “As long as the state-mind mystically haunted the antechambers it was treated with obsequious courtesy. Here, where we meet it in person it is scarcely heeded.”

The Estates themselves are given an unimportant and suspect status by Hegel, since they do not constitute a “meaningful predicate”. The knowledge and good will of the Estates is “partly superfluous” and “partly suspect” because the people organized in these Estates do not know what they want. They do not possess the same degree of knowledge of all those civil servants that passed those excruciating examinations. Thus the civil servants must be able to do what is best for the people without the Estates, and “despite the Estates”. The civil servant is in a privileged position for Hegel since they represent the real universal interest, while the Estates are a mere amalgam of particular interests expressed chaotically. Thus the conscious true reality of universal interest can only be maintained by the bureaucracy in a purely formal way, while the concrete interests of the many acquires the form of a will that doesn’t know what it wants.

Hegel isn’t to be blamed for describing how the modern state really functions, or describing what its essence is, but for rendering that essence as a rational one (and not the truly rational state which for Marx is the end of the political state). Marx totally accepts that the rational should be real, but notices in Hegel that the irrational reality “at every point shows itself to be the opposite of what it asserts, and to assert the opposite of what it is.” The bureaucratic interest is a form without content, or what Marx calls a pseudo-form, (since a form without content is necessarily formless).

The state and the government (as identical) are consistently opposed to the people as a mass broken up into various associations and individuals. But it is the Estates that “stand as a mediating organ between the two”. According to Marx, it is the Estates, where it functions as a meeting house, working to fuse the identity of various individual wills into one articulation, that should constitute the essence of state, but for Hegel it can only “achieve symbolic representation in the Estates”. The Estates only express a contradiction between the state and civil society in the state. At the same time, “they symbolize the demand that this contradiction be resolved”.

The powerful mass of the people for Hegel cannot resolve itself into a rational agency, and must be represented and mediated through proper channels of the state apparatuses.  Representation can only be set in motion by the “monopolists of the ‘organic state’” and the Estates serve to reorganize the mass to better come to terms with the state. But for Marx this reorganization in reality means disorganization, in keeping the masses from becoming their own authority: “they preserve the state {the Estates} from the disorganized mass only by disorganizing the mass”. Hegel is less concerned with the activity of the Estates than with their “political rank”, but the Estates function contradictorily: as expressing a people in an oppositional function against the state, and as pacifying the people to be part of the executive apparatus. The Estates expose the lie of the state representing a totality (as they simultaneously try to preserve it by harnessing the people to the state machine). The state does not embody a totality, but a dualism between itself and the mass element.

Hegel is aware of the contradiction and separation of the state from civil society, but he makes a mistake to rest content with a semblance of a resolution he declares to be the real thing. Civil society is composed of private citizens that come together in the Estates to acquire political (read universal) significance. But the fact that this is a class of private citizens “indicates its antithesis to political significance and efficacy, its absence of political character…” The universal has nothing to do with the nature of civil society, and these private citizens do not have the universal as their end, but their own interests. Civil and political life are mutually exclusive, and in Hegel, this exclusivity is negated in a mystical fashion, when private citizens must undergo a “thoroughgoing transubstantiation” from particularism to universalism regarding their interests organized in Estates. The citizens are given a schizophrenic identity between social and private orders, making them have an ideal political status that is quite different from their real empirical reality as members of a class.

The various organs of the state have to play their part to mediate as middle terms when two sides are in conflict with one another. Accordingly, the sovereign will act as a middle term between the legislature and the executive, while already the executive forms the middle term between the sovereign and the Estates, and the Estates mediate between the Sovereign and civil society, etc. This reminds Marx of the “old story of the quarrel between a man and his wife. When the doctor attempts to intervene the man has to mediate between the doctor and his wife and the wife has to mediate between the doctor and her husband.” Marx also alludes to the lion from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who says both that he is a lion and “I one Snug the joiner am, No lion fell.” (or to retranslate: “I am the lion, and am not the lion, but Snug.” ). Further, the situation recalls to Marx the dilemma of Buridan’s ass, where when presented with two identical piles of hay, the donkey starves unable to make a decision. Literary allusions aside, Hegel can only reduce this absurd process of mediation to an abstract and mystical form of speculative logic. But these real extremes cannot be mediated “because they are real extremes.” The one does not bear within its womb “a longing, a need, an anticipation of the other”.

Hegel can only mystify the transition from the most heterogeneous and antithetical elements into one social substance, since he himself has provided every demonstration against such a false synthesis. It is a false synthesis that itself is “an abstraction from civil society.” The political life is an “airy life”, the “aethereal region of civil society”. Civil society, (specifically the bourgeois property relations which organize class structures), is the real anatomy of the modern state, and is the ideological antithesis of the ideal state of Hegel’s Idea. Hegel fails to mediate the extreme opposing elements as “{t}heir cup of mediation runneth over”, and the “political constitution at its highest point is thus the constitution of private property.” Hegel’s ideal constitution overturns into its opposite, as not something conveying the universal, but as bounded by the logics of private property.

The Absolute Mediation of Democracy

The real question for Marx is whether or not this sovereignty the monarch has in Hegel’s system is merely an illusion. “Sovereignty of the monarch or the people—that is the question.” But the people for Marx are the real essence that the state in Hegel is denying through monarchy, with the state made into an abstraction against the mass. Only the people can have this concrete reality Hegel wants to assign to the monarch and the state. Hegel tries to treat the sovereignty of the people and the sovereignty of the monarch as two sides of one coin, but Marx asserts that they are collaterally negating ideas, or two

“wholly opposed conceptions of sovereignty, of which one can come into being only in the monarch and the other only in the people. It is analogous to the question whether God or man is sovereign. One of the two must be false, even though an existing falsehood.”

Marx argues that if the monarch for Hegel is an expression of a united people, that the sovereignty of the people “constitutes a state of its own” then the monarch is only a representative and a symbol of the people’s united power. “The sovereignty of the people is not based on him, but he on it”. Hegel does concede that the sovereignty of the people is a “living quality”, but to assign this quality to the people against the sovereignty of the monarch is a “wild idea”. “Taken without its monarch {for Hegel}…the people is a formless mass and no longer a state.”

For Marx contra Hegel, “democracy is the truth of monarchy” but monarchy cannot be the truth of democracy. Monarchy is by its necessity democracy in contradiction with itself, but democracy does not have monarchy as an inconsistent moment within itself. Monarchy, as we have seen with Hegel, cannot be explained in its own terms unless one has recourse to the concrete reality of the united people. But democracy acquires its own meaning through the demos as a whole. Marx turns the tables on Hegel by dialectically defining democracy as “both form and content, while Monarchy is supposed to be only a form, but it falsified the content {i.e. the people the monarch is supposed to represent as form}”. All other states are untrue ones to the extent that they are not democracy, the real idea of the state.

Democracy, (like communism as described in the Paris Manuscripts of 1844), is the solution to the riddle of every form of government. In democracy we find a constitution founded on the true ground of “real human beings and real people”, in their real existence and not merely in their posited essence. Hegel presupposes the state as primary, and man as a subjectivized moment of the state, but it should be the opposite: “just as religion does not make man, but rather man rather makes religion, so the constitution does not make the people, but the people make the constitution.” Democracy is the essence of all constitutions like Christianity is the essence of all religions, where deified man (Christ) manifests itself in a particular religion to express the centrality of man in religion, and not an abstract God. “Democracy relates to all its other forms of state as its Old Testament.” since in democracy, man does not exist for the sake of the law, but law for the sake of human beings. In other constitutions, man is an effect of legality and is defined by his legal existence. In a true democracy, “the political state disappears” as a separate entity from its content. This is the first anticipation in all of Marx’s writings of how the state “withers away”.

Democracy conceived of as a political republic is still for Marx abstract, as that form of state is not fully integrated with its content. Marx uses the example of the American republic, where the content of the state (the private interest of property) lies beyond the abstract republican form: “Hence the Republic in America is just as much a mere form of state as the monarchy here {Prussia}”. Republicanism is therefore a phase in which the existence of the state has not caught up with its essence in democracy and “Political life in the modern sense is the scholasticism of the life of a people”. In the American state, Marx still sees an antinomy between the political constitution as functioning as a transcendent principle and the early existence of the actual reality of the people.