Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
헤겔 법철학 비판
The name for two texts by Karl Marx: the manuscript he wrote between March and August 1843, mostly at Kreuznach that summer, going paragraph by paragraph through the theory of the state in Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right, and the Introduction he wrote between late 1843 and January 1844 and published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in Paris in 1844. The manuscript charges Hegel with making the Idea the subject and the real subjects, the family and civil society, its predicates, and calls democracy "the solved riddle of all constitutions". The Introduction, with its line "religion is the opium of the people", proclaims for the first time a human emancipation whose head is philosophy and whose heart is the proletariat. The manuscript was not published in Marx's lifetime and first appeared in print in 1927.
In depth
Why did Marx begin with Hegel's theory of the state?
In the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) Marx looked back on where his thinking began. As editor of the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842–1843 he found himself obliged to speak about so-called "material interests", the debates of the Rhenish Diet on wood theft and the condition of the Moselle peasants among them, and when the paper was sentenced to closure he withdrew from the public stage to his study. "The first work I undertook to resolve the doubts that assailed me was a critical revision of the Hegelian philosophy of right, a work whose introduction appeared in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher published in Paris in 1844."
The same text sums up the result. Legal relations and forms of state can be understood neither by themselves nor from the so-called general development of the human mind; rather, they are rooted in the material conditions of life, whose totality Hegel, following the English and French of the eighteenth century, grouped under the name "civil society". "The anatomy of civil society, however, is to be sought in political economy."
Meine Untersuchung mündete in dem Ergebnis, daß Rechtsverhältnisse wie Staatsformen weder aus sich selbst zu begreifen sind noch aus der sogenannten allgemeinen Entwicklung des menschlichen Geistes, sondern vielmehr in den materiellen Lebensverhältnissen wurzeln, … daß aber die Anatomie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft in der politischen Ökonomie zu suchen sei.
This short retrospect places the manuscript exactly. Wrestling with Hegel's theory of the state led Marx to civil society, and from civil society to political economy; the next stop on that road was the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of the following year.
What did the 1843 manuscript turn upside down in Hegel?
The Kreuznach manuscript survives as 39 sheets, the first of which is lost. What remains copies out the state sections of Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right (from §261) one by one, with Marx's commentary beneath each. His target is the way Hegel presents reality as the product of the Idea, what he calls "logical, pantheistic mysticism". For Hegel, the family and civil society are spheres into which the real Idea divides itself as its finitude. Marx reads it the other way round: "Family and civil society make themselves into the state. They are the driving force." In Hegel, however, the condition is turned into the conditioned, the determining into the determined.
Wichtig ist, daß Hegel überall die Idee zum Subjekt macht und das eigentliche, wirkliche Subjekt, wie die »politische Gesinnung«, zum Prädikat.
"What matters is that Hegel everywhere makes the Idea the subject and turns the proper, real subject into the predicate." This is the method Feuerbach had applied to theology in The Essence of Christianity, putting subject and predicate back in their proper places, carried over to the philosophy of the state. The manuscript goes on to the crown, the bureaucracy and the assembly of estates, taking apart one by one the institutions of a Prussian-style constitutional monarchy that Hegel had justified as necessary moments of the rational state.
Why is democracy "the solved riddle of all constitutions"?
The most quoted passage of the manuscript compares monarchy and democracy. "In monarchy we have the people of the constitution; in democracy the constitution of the people. Democracy is the solved riddle of all constitutions." In democracy the constitution is constantly brought back to its own ground, real human beings, the real people, and posited as the people's own work. Here too Marx argues in parallel with the critique of religion: "Just as religion does not make man, but man makes religion, so the constitution does not make the people, but the people the constitution."
Die Demokratie ist das aufgelöste Rätsel aller Verfassungen.
The democracy meant here is not simply one parliamentary form of government. Marx notes that the republic, too, is only a particular form of state, in which political man exists separately alongside the unpolitical private person, and adds that "the more recent French have understood this to mean that in true democracy the political state disappears". A direction beyond the separation of state and civil society is already visible. The manuscript was not published in Marx's lifetime; it first appeared in print in 1927, in the first volume of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow.
What is the Introduction and why is it so famous?
In autumn 1843 Marx moved to Paris to publish the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher with Arnold Ruge. In the only issue, a double number of February 1844, he printed "On the Jewish Question" and "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Introduction". It was written as the introduction to the Kreuznach manuscript, but it goes much further.
It opens: "For Germany the criticism of religion is essentially completed, and the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism." Man makes religion. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world; man is the world of man, the state, society, and because this state and society are an inverted world they produce religion, an inverted consciousness of the world. Then comes the famous passage: "Religious misery is at once the expression of real misery and the protest against real misery. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
Die Religion ist der Seufzer der bedrängten Kreatur, das Gemüt einer herzlosen Welt, wie sie der Geist geistloser Zustände ist. Sie ist das Opium des Volkes.
The line is often quoted as contempt for religion, but in context it reads differently. Before it is a lie, religion is an expression of suffering and a protest, so the way to abolish it is not to mock it but to abolish the condition that needs it. "Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower." Hence "the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics." The German Wikipedia notes that the "opium" phrase sharpened a formulation of Heinrich Heine.
Why does the Introduction call on the proletariat?
The second half of the Introduction asks how the criticism of philosophy becomes practice. "The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons; material force must be overthrown by material force. But theory also becomes a material force as soon as it grips the masses." Theory grips the masses when it is radical, when it grasps things at the root, and "for man the root is man himself". The criticism of religion ends in the teaching that man is the highest being for man, and so in the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned and contemptible being.
Die Waffe der Kritik kann allerdings die Kritik der Waffen nicht ersetzen, die materielle Gewalt muß gestürzt werden durch materielle Gewalt, allein auch die Theorie wird zur materiellen Gewalt, sobald sie die Massen ergreift.
Where, then, lies the possibility of emancipation in backward Germany? Marx's answer is "a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society", one that claims no particular right because it suffers not a particular wrong but wrong as such, one that is the complete loss of humanity and can win itself only through the complete recovery of humanity. "This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat." And the conclusion: "The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat. Philosophy cannot realise itself without the abolition of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot abolish itself without the realisation of philosophy."
Der Kopf dieser Emanzipation ist die Philosophie, ihr Herz das Proletariat.
This is the first appearance of the proletariat as a historical subject in Marx's writing. It is still a philosophical argument, not an economic analysis, and the proletariat appears as the "material weapon" philosophy makes use of. The reversal of that relation, deriving the class's historical role from its real situation, comes in the 1844 manuscripts, in The Holy Family and in The German Ideology of 1845–1846. The closing sentence, "when all the inner conditions are fulfilled, the day of German resurrection will be heralded by the crowing of the Gallic cock", is, as the German Wikipedia explains, an image set against Hegel's comparison of philosophy with the owl of Minerva that takes flight only at dusk.