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.
I. Hegel’s account
According to Hegel, the state necessarily, logically, and organically forms from civil society. To understand how, we must first understand how civil society itself forms. According to Hegel, civil society consists of individuals who have needs along with institutions and practices that arise from the resultant system of needs. Thus, Hegel writes that civil society is (1) “an association of members as self-sufficient individuals [Einzelner] … occasioned by their needs” and (2) “an external order for their particular and common interests” (§157). This external order contains the rudiments of the state. These are, namely, the functions of the executive: the court system, law enforcement, public education, public works, etc.4 These elements are part of both civil society and the government (the political state). The state as a whole emerges when the external order of civil society “withdraws and comes to a focus in the end and actuality of the substantial universal and of the public life which is dedicated to this — i.e. in the constitution of the state” (§157). Thus, Hegel says, civil society ispart of the state proper, which consists of civil society (the “external state”) and the government (the political state) together. In this section, I focus on the former: that is, how civil society itself forms.5
Civil society begins with the simple needs of the individual and entails the various systems that are developed to meet these needs in the context of the interdependence of many individuals. Civil society is fundamentally about the relationship between the individual and his or her peers as citizens. This relation requires the coordination of individual decisions, specializations, and desires. This mediation between the “particular person” and “other similar particulars” by structures and practices that coordinate individual agents shapes civil society (§182). Each individual “asserts itself and gains satisfaction through the others, and thus at the same time through the exclusive mediation of the form of universality” (§182). The actualization of the “selfish end” leads to the creation of a “system of all-round interdependence” (§183). In this system, “the subsistence and welfare of the individual and his rightful existence are interwoven with, and grounded on, the subsistence, welfare, and rights of all, and have actuality and security only in this context” (§183). This interweaving is what constitutes civil society.
This mediation between the particular individual and the universal system, a role assumed by civil society as “the external state,” is logically necessary. A good example of this logical necessity comes from one manifestation of civil society: the free market. As Shlomo Avineri points out, Hegel’s “definition of civil society follows the classical economists’ model of the free market.”6 Indeed, Hegel directly references “Smith, Say, and Ricardo” (three early economists) in the Remark (Anmerkung) to §189. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” describes a system that transforms individual self-interest into the common good. But Hegel thinks that the economists are wrong in seeing this principle as the ultimate driving force of social arrangements. Instead, Hegel says, the “invisible hand” is just an example of reason realizing itself in civil society. Thus, Hegel writes in §199:
In this dependence and reciprocity of work and the satisfaction of needs, subjective selfishness turns into a contribution towards the satisfaction of the needs of everyone else. By a dialectical movement, the particular is mediated by the universal so that each individual, in earning, producing, and enjoying on his own account [für sich], thereby earns and produces for the enjoyment of others.
Hegel sees practices and institutions of coordination emerging logically from the mediation of the particular by the universal. This is not a top-down process where some metaphysical logical template is imposed on recalcitrant reality. Instead, individual needs and decisions “turn into” universal enjoyment by a process which exemplifies the larger logic which indicates the “cunning of reason.”7
It is by this dialectical movement that civil society necessarily forms systems of mediation that make up “the external state.” Take again the example of capitalism. On the one hand, particular interest (the “selfish end”) “indulg[es] itself in all directions as it satisfies its needs, contingent arbitrariness, and subjective caprice” (§185). In so doing, particularity “destroys itself and its substantial concept in the act of enjoyment” (§185). On the other hand, particularity also makes “contingent” the “satisfaction of both necessary and contingent needs” because it is “infinitely agitated and continually dependent on external contingency and arbitrariness” (§185). It is “in these opposites and their complexity” that we witness the “spectacle of extravagance and misery as well as … physical and ethical corruption” (§185) that civil society affords. In this vivid description, Hegel alludes to the poverty and alienation that resulted from the unchecked development of capitalism in his day. According to Hegel, these negative externalities are the result of a lack of mediation between the particular and the universal. But Hegel sees a remedying logic at work that solves these problems. In “the very act of developing itself independently [für sich] to totality, the principle of particularity passes over into universality, and only in the latter does it have its truth and its right to positive actuality” (§186).
It is this logic at work that creates the elements of the political state from civil society. Drawing on the work of political economists, Hegel demonstrates how systems necessarily, logically, and organically come about from the mediation of particular interests. The “system of all-round interdependence” that is thus created is really the incipient state. Thus, Hegel writes that one “may regard this system in the first instance as the external state [äußeren Staat], the state of necessity and of the understanding [Not- und Verstandesstaat]” (§183). As we will see, however, these functions of government are only part of the state proper; the crown and the legislature, for instance, belong to the political state, which does not form organically from civil society. Before returning to this point, I will turn to Marx’s objections to help clarify Hegel’s account of the relationship between civil society and the state.
II. Marx’s critique
In the 1843 manuscript published as the Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State, Marx presents three related objections to Hegel’s account of the relationship between the state and civil society.8 First, Marx says that Hegel incorrectly makes political theory from logic; second, in so doing Marx thinks Hegel acts as an apologist for the conservative Prussian regime. Both these objections rest on misrepresentations of Hegel. I deal with each in turn before returning to the third objection, that Hegel is basically anti-democratic.
Marx criticizes Hegel’s dialectical logic for being in fact “logical, pantheistic mysticism” (61). According to Marx, Hegel confuses who the actual agent is that creates the world. As Marx writes: “Hegel everywhere makes the Idea into the subject, while the genuine, real subject, such as ‘political sentiment,’ is turned into the predicate” (65). For Hegel, Marx says, reason is made into a divine, transcendent power that realizes itself in the things of the world (thus why Hegel’s mysticism is “pantheistic”). In reality, Marx says, the subjects of the world are real people and things, from which reason emerges.
In my opinion, Marx is constructing a strawman to then attack with this objection. As I explained above, Hegel is not such a mystical idealist as Marx portrays. Hegel is instead more like a natural scientist, who identifies certain rational laws from empirical observations of nature. The scientist does not deify a law by observing that it follows some pattern of reason. When Hegel identifies logic at play in the development of civil society, he observes something that happens in the world and recognizes a pattern in it. For instance, in §186 Hegel writes that that it is “in the very act of developing itself independently [für sich]” that “the principle of particularity passes over into universality.” The development of particularity itself is independent (für sich), not dictated by external logic.
Marx advances his critique of Hegel’s method in order to level a second, more critical objection: that Hegel merely provides philosophical dressing on existing reality, and thus becomes an apologist for the conservative Prussian order. Marx thinks it is typical that
Hegel takes an empirical instance of the Prussian or modern state (just as it is — lock, stock and barrel) … [and] does not inquire whether this mode of subsumption is adequate or rational. He simply holds fast to the one category and contents himself with searching for something corresponding to it in actual existence. Hegel thus provides his logic with a political body; he does not provide us with the logic of the body politic. (109)
In other words, Hegel finds examples that are convenient to him and shows how they conform to his prior, conservative politics. In so doing, he provides a philosophical, logical foundation for fundamentally illogical, repressive politics.
In reality, Hegel’s attitude is far from an unapologetic defense of the existing order. Hegel is best understood as a liberal reformer, committed to many of the same ideals that Marx and other German liberals also wanted to achieve — including a constitution with representative institutions, checks on the monarch’s unlimited authority, and trial by jury, all aspects Hegel outlines in the Philosophy of Right.9 Hegel’s greatest error in this respect is that he chooses as examples things he knew from experience: his Philosophy of Right does indeed largely refer to examples close at hand like those of Prussia. But Hegel does not take Prussia “lock, stock, and barrel”; some elements of the Prussian state he approves of, and some he criticizes.
Neither of these objections are particularly sound, as they rest on misrepresentations of the Philosophy of Right. Yet in articulating these objections, Marx does find some valid grounds for a critique of Hegel’s account of the relationship between civil society and the state, as I will elaborate in the next section.
III. Democracy between Marx and Hegel
The third objection Marx advances is that Hegel incorrectly thinks that the state transcends civil society, when in fact the state is entirely immanent in the relations of people acting together in civil society. Hegel cannot see the essential democratic role people play in creating the state, according to Marx. As I will show, Hegel does indeed display disturbing anti-democratic tendencies. But to fully understand this objection, we must first return to how Hegel thinks the political state forms and how it remains distinct from civil society.
There are three moments of Ethical Life (Sittlichkeit) in the Philosophy of Right, each of which logically follows from the previous. These are: family, characterized by particular altruism; civil society, characterized by universal egoism; and the state, characterized by universal altruism.10 The state emerges out of but transcends civil society. The state for Hegel includes the institutions and practices we form out of our altruism — that is, our willingness to make sacrifices in solidarity with others — not just our egoism. This is where Hegel clearly departs from social contract theory. For instance, according to Hegel, we accept taxation not because it is in our self-interest but because we see it as useful in helping other people. The political state thus arises not from particular interests, which characterize civil society, but from universality, which gives the political state “a foundation which is stable and legitimate in and for itself” (§303).
According to Marx, Hegel denies that people are the political agents that form the state. Marx writes:
the fact is that the state evolves from the mass existing as members of families and of civil society; speculative philosophy [sc., Hegel] explains this fact as the act of the Idea, not as the Idea of the mass, but as the act of a subjective Idea distinct from the fact itself. (63)
This fact is empirically true. Of course, there is no God called Reason who creates bureaucracy, public health, and the military. These are all human constructs. Yet the corrective Marx advances, that the state is made by man, is in my view not too far from Hegel’s own account. Hegel already writes that civil society forms “the external state” — government functions like education, public health, and the court system. To say that we can recognize the cunning of reason in how the government forms is not to deny that people form the government. So why can Hegel not accept that the government, too, is the product of people acting together? Why can Hegel not follow his own line of thinking to realize that the state as a whole emerges from civil society?
Hegel does entertain this possibility yet firmly rejects it. In the Remark to §303, Hegel strenuously criticizes the “prevalent idea [Vorstellung] according to which” politics consists of private interests participating in formal political institutions such as the legislature, “whether representatives are elected to fulfil this function or whether every individual is in fact to have a vote himself.” Hegel goes on to say that
the state is essentially an organization whose members constitute circles in their own right [für sich], and no moment within it should appear as an unorganized crowd. The many as single individuals … do indeed live together, but only as a crowd, i.e. a formless mass whose movement and activity can consequently only be elemental, irrational, barbarous, and terrifying. … The idea [Vorstellung] that those communities which are already present in the circles referred to above can be split up again into a collection of individuals as soon as they enter the sphere of politics … involves separating civil and political life from each other and leaves political life hanging, so to speak, in the air; for its basis is then merely the abstract individuality of arbitrary will and opinion, and is thus grounded only on contingency rather than on a foundation which is stable and legitimate in and for itself. (§303)
Hegel vividly describes his view of the demos as essentially a rabble. According to Hegel, people massed together should not be entrusted with political power. That would mean basing the political state on “arbitrary will and opinion.” The political state is based on a different solid foundation, which is universality. A charitable interpretation would interpret universality as universal altruism, that is being in community with other people beyond our narrow self-interest. Thus, the political state subsumes individuals participating as members of society but transcends that idea.
In my view, Hegel is quite right to look for a foundation of the state on something more than the egoism of civil society. Political communities at their best should be based on bonds of solidarity that transcend self-interest. This interpretation of Hegel provides an antidote to the sting of neoliberalism, which would have us take the citizen to be a mere taxpayer and think of the state as nothing more than a set of guarantees for a free market. Political life proper transcends civil society, understood as the market relations of individuals. But what Hegel misses is that this sort of political life can also arise from civil society, that is from people acting together in free association.
Hegel cannot draw this conclusion, which otherwise follows from his theory of civil society, because of his blinding prejudice against the “rabble.” Hegel can only see the demos as a “formless mass whose movement and activity can consequently only be elemental, irrational, barbarous, and terrifying” (§303). Hegel is of course right that a crowd can take on these attributes of a mob. But Hegel is wrong that this is necessarily the case. These attributes are historically contingent. In particular, the reason civil society is characterized by “universal egoism” is because we exist under conditions of (what Marx would later refer to as) capitalism. As long as Hegel thinks that a mass is only ever “barbarous and terrifying,” he cannot embrace a truly democratic state.
Because Marx does not have the prejudice against “rabble,” he can complete Hegel’s project. Marx sketches a theory of democracy where the state proper necessarily, logically, and organically follows from civil society. The key advance from Hegel is Marx’s insight that the state proper, too, is a public thing, a res publica, something we citizens build in common (91). Marx writes:
Democracy is the solution to the riddle of every constitution. In it we find the constitution founded on its true ground: real human beings and the real people; not merely implicitly and in essence, but in existence and in reality. The constitution is thus posited as the people’s own creation. … Hegel proceeds from the state and conceives of man as the subjectivized state; democracy proceeds from man and conceives of the state as objectified man. (87)
In democracy, all parts of the state are created entirely by the people. What I have endeavored to show is that this is not such a foreign idea for Hegel. Hegel showed how people come together to form certain functions of the state. But he confined the scope of this explanation, seeking alternative grounds for the legislature and executive, because of his fear of the demos. With these blinders removed, Hegel provides an outline of an organic relationship between civil society and the state.
Conclusion
Hegel is indeed anti-democratic, but not for the reasons often assumed. His method is not mistaken, nor are his politics suspect, as Marx asserts. Hegel’s reading of political economy leads him to perceptively theorize how state-like institutions and practices arise from civil society. But Hegel cannot endorse the conclusion of this argument: that the state is genuinely democratic, created by citizens acting together in civil society. Hegel cannot endorse this conclusion because of his essential anti-democratic prejudice, which he betrays in his comments about the “rabble.” Read generously, these comments show Hegel’s awareness of the problems unleashed by the forces of bourgeois market relations — one sphere of civil society, bürgerliche Gesellschaft. Under capitalism, civil society is dominated by self-interest. The resultant “formless mass” of individuals cannot form a stable and legitimate enough foundation for the state proper. Yet as a result, as Marx points out, Hegel favors an essentially conservative form of the state ruled by a monarch, not by the people.
But read with a Marxian democratic corrective in mind, Hegel provides a rich, thorough-going account of the creativity and freedom inherent in civil society. When people come together as full, free, equal citizens, they create nothing less than the state itself. Enriched by a deeper appreciation of democracy found in early Marx, Hegel provides an account of how civic life organically, logically, and necessarily forms the state. This is a profound vision of what the relationship between civil society and the state should be.
- Shlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 240.
- Warren Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self, Modern European Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3. Italics in original.
- All parenthetical references with section numbers are to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. Hugh Barr Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Throughout this paper, I preserve all italics and capitalization from this edition.
- In outlining this structure, I found helpful the account in Kenneth Westphal, “The Basic Context and Structure of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Frederick C. Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
- I focus on the process of formation, not the outcome; that is to say, I largely disregard the actual institutions and practices Hegel describes as making up civil society. It is the process of formation that matters most in understanding the relationship between civil society and the state.
- Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, 142.
- I do not have the space here to dwell on this theme, which is explained by Hegel in other parts of his work.
- The following quotations are drawn from the translation published as Karl Marx, Early Writings, ed. Lucio Colletti, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin Books, 1975). Parenthetical references are to pages of this edition. I have preserved formatting from the original.
- I will not dwell on the historical context for this assessment of Hegel here. A sound assessment can be found in Allen Wood’s introduction to Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, x.
- In presenting this schematic division, I follow Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, 134.