Marx – Aliosha Pittaka Bielenberg

In his book Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, Shlomo Avineri writes that Hegel’s political theory “is perhaps best expressed by Hegel’s ambiguous attitude to civil society: on one hand, it is the major achievement of the modern world; on the other, woe to that society of men that allows the forces of civil society to rule unimpeded.”¹ This duality in Hegel’s attitude towards civil society reflects what Warren Breckman calls the “dual meaning of the German term bürgerliche Gesellschaft,” which Hegel exploited to “describe civil society as both the ‘bourgeois’ sphere of market relations and the ‘civic’ sphere of institutionalized individual and communal rights.”² The bourgeois sphere of market relations must be checked by the state; otherwise, unregulated capitalism unleashes a “spectacle of extravagance and misery,” as Hegel already perceived in the Philosophy of Right (§185).³ On the other hand, the creativity and freedom of the civic sphere flourish under conditions of autonomy from the state.

Between these two extremes, what should the relationship between civil society and the state look like? Hegel’s account is still one of the richest explorations of this problematic. In this essay, I articulate Hegel’s account of the relationship between civil society and the state with reference to Marx’s subsequent critique thereof. I argue that Hegel outlines a logically coherent account of how the state emerges necessarily and organically from civil society. Marx proceeds to misrepresent Hegel’s account on at least two counts: its method and its politics. However, I argue that Marx is ultimately correct to criticize Hegel for his anti-democratic tendencies, which I think blind Hegel to the political import of his analysis.

To support this argument, I structure this paper in three sections. In the first section, I examine Hegel’s account of the relationship between the state and civil society in the Philosophy of Right. I focus on how the institutions and practices of civil society form from the “system of needs” around which civil society revolves. In the second section, I turn to Marx’s criticism of Hegel’s account, as found in Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State. I consider and reject Marx’s objections to Hegel’s method and politics. In the third section, I turn to Marx’s critique that Hegel is essentially anti-democratic. I return to Hegel’s account of how the political state forms to explain in what sense this objection holds.

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In this essay, I briefly sketch the trajectory of the “objective” or “objectivity” in three canonical German philosophers: Kant, Hegel, and Marx. My motivation for pursuing this essay is looking backwards from the place of “objectivity” today, especially as the word has been variously contested in the last forty years or so in the emerging field of science and technology studies (e.g., by Donna Haraway). Too often, in these debates objectivity is deployed as a strawman, a crude caricature of logical positivism to be hacked away at by (often equally crude) postmodern critiques. A more sophisticated account of objectivity is given by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison in their seminal 2008 book, Objectivity, which traces the rise of successive “epistemic virtues” through a close study of scientific atlases from around 1750 to 1950. There have also been recent attempts to recuperate objectivity as part of the broad coalition of movements grouped under the “ontological turn.” I think a move of this sort was anticipated by Hannah Arendt in her late Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. I think all these discussions would be enriched by a more nuanced understanding of the history of this word.

But enough of this talk. This paper is more proximately driven by a fundamental foreignness I perceived when reading the German philosophers of the early nineteenth century, for whom “objectivity” seems to mean something else quite different. For the purposes of this essay, I want to reconstruct as faithfully as I can the various meanings of objectivity and objects in the work of Kant, Hegel, and Marx. I bracket both my motivations and the later development of the term to focus on an immanent account of each of these thinkers in turn. One more preliminary note: part of the foreignness can be attributed (as so often it is) to difficulties of translation. In particular, “subject” is also a Latinate term in German (Subject or Subjekt). By contrast, “object” can be either Object/Objekt (the Latinate term) or the Germanic Gegenstand, whence also Gegenständlich (“objective”) and Gegenständlichkeit (“objectivity”). Gegenstand has the distinction that it literally “stands against” something. Kant talked mostly of Objecte — but not really, since he divided the world into the realm of appearances (phenomena) and things-in-themselves. The Subjekt has a double meaning, of course: it is both subject-matter (“what is the subject of this book?”) in which case it can be rather synonymous with “object”; and it is the ethical or epistemological subject, the self that knows or acts. So much for a bird’s-eye view of the development. Let us now dive in and get our hands dirty.

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Tag: Marx

The Relationship Between Civil Society and the State Between Hegel and Marx

Objectivity in Kant, Hegel, and Marx