THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ESSENCE:
THE 1843 MANUSCRIPT
The repetition of the essential evidences through which Marx’s thought is gradually constituted, and which will define the ground upon which the economic analysis in its turn will be built, necessarily has its starting point in the systematic elucidation of The Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State, which is presented to us as Marx’s first great theoretical work. What is at issue here is not, in fact, simply an initial phase in the thinking of the “young Marx,” but rather, from 1842-43 on, the emergence of the decisive intuitions which will direct the entire work to come and which, by placing it from the outset in contact with the real, will thus determine it from the beginning as a philosophy of reality. The Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State is a paragraph-by-paragraph, sentence-by-sentence, and at times word-by-word commentary on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The part of Marx’s manuscript that has been preserved is an analysis of paragraphs 261 to 313 of Hegel’s work. In this extraordinary text of unlimited philosophical import, we begin by following step-by-step what was actually Marx’s own personal dialogue with Hegel, the initial working out of a thought which simultaneously succumbs to Hegelianism and makes a radical break with it and with the principles which, since ancient Greece, have dominated Western philosophy.
Paragraph 261 of the Philosophy of Right states: “In contrast with the spheres of private rights and private welfare (the family and civil society), the State is from one point of view an external necessity and their higher authority; its nature is such that their laws and interests are subordinated to it and dependent on it. On the other hand, however, it is the end immanent within them, and its strength lies in the unity of its own universal end and aim with the particular interest of individuals, in the fact that individuals have duties to the State in proportion as they have rights against it.” Marx’s immediate position with respect to this text provides us with the initial and final presupposition of his entire analysis: this presupposition is Hegelian; it asserts that the State is not superimposed on civil society or on the family like some synthetic addition to their being, some external principle intended to organize, to rule them from outside; quite the contrary, the State is the very reality of the spheres that are placed under it. It is the State which animates them, which defines their life and, as a result, their end as an “immanent end.” This idea that the ontological reality of the State constitutes the reality of civil society and of the family is expressed in Hegelian terms as the homogeneity of the particular and of the universal, a homogeneity which alone makes possible and defines concrete freedom, that is, the identity of the system of private interest, which is displayed in civil society, with the system of general interest, which is none other than the State—a homogeneity which is, however, to be understood in the sense we have just stated, that is, as a radical determination of the particular by the universal. It is with this thesis taken from Hegel, one which is still Marx’s own, that he overturns the Hegelian edifice. Marx himself wants the identity of the particular and the universal, and what he reproaches Hegel with is having affirmed this identity without being able to establish it, as becomes apparent in his discourse itself. For how could the State present itself as a necessity external to the family and to civil society if it truly constituted their internal reality and their “immanent” end? But how does Hegel account for the affinity of the particular and the universal on the level of being; how does the State determine the concrete spheres of society and the family?
Paragraph 262 of the Principles of the Philosophy of Right answers this question: “The actual Idea is mind, which, sundering itself into the two ideal spheres of its concept, family and civil society, enters upon its finite phase, but it does so only in order to rise above its ideality and become explicit as infinite actual mind. It is therefore to these ideal spheres that the actual Idea assigns the material of this its finite actuality, viz. human beings as a mass, in such a way that the function assigned to any given individual is visibly mediated by circumstances, his caprice and his personal choice of his station in life.” This means that, in order to realize itself to be mind and to manifest itself the mind divides itself sets itself in opposition to itself not just in the form of an empty horizon but poses something vis-à-vis itself being, the opaque determination it requires in order to reflect its own light, so that in this reflection it returns to itself, emerges into actuality, into the infinity of being-for-itself—what Hegel terms, precisely, the real idea, infinity. Hegel’s fundamental thesis—namely that the Idea is not a mere concept but includes reality, empirical reality, within itself, that the Idea realizes itself—becomes transparent when it displays its ultimate phenomenological motivation. Once the reality of the Idea is admitted, the family and civil society are posited within the State. With the help of his recent reading of Chapter VIII of the first part of The Essence of Christianity in which Feuerbach presents—in a cursory manner, certainly—the thought of Schelling and, especially, of Boehme, Marx recognizes what is at the root of German philosophy, what constitutes the ultimate explanation of its “pantheism,” of the necessity of including nature within mind in order to make it possible. His commentary is explosive: “The family and civil society appear as the dark ground of nature [der dunkle Naturgrund] from which the light of the State is born.”1
Posited as included within the development of the Idea and willed by it, necessary for this development and within it, the family and civil society are to be understood as “ideal spheres” and also as “finite” ones. They are finite inasmuch as they do not find their reason for existing within themselves but only outside of themselves, precisely in the Idea, that is; in the final analysis, in exteriority as such and in the conditions for its actual phenomenological becoming.
Let us place ourselves, however, along with Marx in the perspective of these spheres which designate nothing other than the concrete activity of individuals; their life within the family; their work to provide for it; the relationships they enter into with other individuals in the exchange of labor and of products; meetings; conflicts that arise within the workings of these relationships; in short, what we call civil society. It then appears that, in his philosophy of the State, Hegel does not describe these spheres for themselves; he does not grasp their reality as it is, in itself; the laws he recognizes are not their laws but the law of the Idea; the determinations he confers upon them are not their own determinations but the predicates of something else; the life he grasps within them is not their life with its demands, its immanent, individual, and genuinely life-oriented motivations, but the life of a different essence; their mind is not their own but an alien mind and, to be blunt, it is simply not their existence that is in question. Still under the influence of Feuerbach, but with a tone more reminiscent of Kierkegaard, Marx writes: “Reality is not deemed to be itself but another reality instead. . . . (it) is not governed by its own mind but by a mind alien to it.”2 “. . . it is not the course of their [the family and civil society] own life that joins them together to comprise the State, but the life of the Idea which has distinguished them from itself. They are moreover the finite phase of this Idea; they are indebted for their existence to a mind other than their own; they are not self-determining but are instead determined by another; for this reason they are defined as ‘finitude’, the ‘real Idea’s’ own finite phase. The goal of this existence is not that existence itself.”3
Because the interplay of individual activity which is displayed in the family and in society does not have its principle in the individual himself, in his needs, but in the real idea, in the State, it is nothing more than an “appearance” of the universal essence in the sense of a simple “phenomenon” of this essence, whose self-realization then unfolds “behind the scenes”—so that the entire development becomes at once ideal and unconscious. The mediation between individuals that constitutes this real interplay is nothing more than “the appearance of a mediation which the real Idea performs on itself’; the acts that make up this interplay “are not regarded as true, necessary and intrinsically self-justified; they are not as such deemed to be rational. If they are held to be rational it is only in the sense that, while they are regarded as furnishing an illusory mediation and while they are left just as they were, they nevertheless acquire the meaning of a determination of the Idea. . . .”4 And Marx continues: “Thus . . . reality . . . is even declared to be rational. However, it is not rational by virtue of its own reason, but because the . . . fact in its . . . existence has a meaning other than itself.”5
Here, the Hegelian claim to identify the real and the rational is reversed, along with the affirmation of the homogeneity of the particular and the universal. Or rather, the very place accorded to reason and, in just the same way, to reality is shifted. For, in taking a closer look at this, Marx in no way contests that the real is rational, but, quite the opposite, he affirms this; more precisely, he affirms that the rationality belonging to the real resides in it. “In it” and not outside of it in some other reality. What is the reality which is external to the real, foreign to it, the reality which is not its rationality, which is not rationality and which, by the same stroke, is not genuine, is not reality? This is “the light of the State”; it is light itself, that which is produced in the internal process of self-opposition by which the Idea realizes itself by objectifying itself—it is objectivity as such, otherness, ideality. And objectivity is ideal not only because it is produced in the internal development of the idea and so belongs to it, but precisely because it is not reality. However, according to Hegel, the Idea does not only produce objectivity, the light of the State; it also produces through its own development and, consequently, posits by itself the “materials of the State,” namely, the family and civil society.
Marx contests this. The unveiling of the concrete activity of individuals and of the interplay of this activity within the family and within civil society may well take place in the light of ideality and through it; however, the origin of this activity, its nature, its power, its development and its product are not the origin, the power, the development, the product of the internal process of the concept, of the movement by which the Idea realizes itself through objectifying itself. This is why the law of the Idea has nothing to do with the law of this concrete activity, why the power of the Idea is powerless with respect to real power, namely the power of individuals to produce and maintain their life through organizing into the family and into society. Real activity is not objedification. Objectification allows what is to exist but changes nothing about it, and as Marx said regarding individuals and the intersecting of their activities, “they are left just as they were.”6 And, moreover, this is why the mediation of objective appearance is the “appearance of a mediation,”7 because it has had no part in what has really been produced. If what is really produced in the family and in civil society through the activity of individuals, which is concrete, circumstantial, and seemingly arbitrary, does not stem from the movement of the idea, then it cannot be understood as the Idea in the being that it has become through its objectification as ob-ject;* and Hegel’s sophism is thereby denounced. “The real subjects,” says Marx, “—civil society, the family, ‘circumstances, caprice, etc.,’—are all transformed into unreal, objective moments of the Idea referring to different things.”8 They are not real and cannot be as long as they are the objects of objectification; they have a different sense, one different from their true sense or rather from their reality as long as this sense refers to the way in which they proceed from the idea. In short, objectivity contains reality as that which it does not contain, does not explain, does not produce, as that for which it does not represent the reason. In the movement of the Idea’s objectification, reality, which is allowed to exist as ob-ject, is mere “caprice”; it is arbitrary.
The Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State is first and foremost the radical critique of all subsumption, namely the subsumption of the particular under the universal, the belief that reality is really explained, exposed in its being when it is exposed in the light of the Idea. This exposition, however, is never itself the reason for what is exposed in this way, for its own internal, specific, particular reality. Hegel conceives of the Idea’s development as organic, but why is this organism called the political organism, the organism of the State rather than the animal organism or the solar system?9 The Idea is not the yardstick of the real; every ideal subsumption is arbitrary. And yet every subsumption is ideal: subsumption is not only arbitrary, it is the source and the foundation of the arbitrary as such, the source and the foundation of contingency. Hegel’s ekstatic* rationality forms the horizon of contingency and is identical with it. Within the horizon of this subsumption all “differentia” “are and remain uncomprehended because their specific nature has not been grasped”10—this includes all differentia, political differentia as well, executive power, for instance. “The only philosophical category introduced by Hegel to define the executive power is that of the ‘subsumption’ of the individual and particular under the universal, etc. Hegel rests content with this. The category of the ‘subsumption’ of the particular, etc., must be realized, and so he takes an empirical instance of the Prussian or modern State (just as it is—lock, stock, and barrel) which can be said to realize this category among others, even though this category may fail to express its specific nature.”11 Anything at all can be “subsumed,” and any ideal unit of measurement is an illusion. Marx contests the claim that a mathematical investigation of the real can be undertaken and criticizes in advance the “scientific” development of the “human sciences.” “After all, applied mathematics is also a subsumption.”12
If the real is arbitrary in the ekstasis of subsumption, as ob-ject, it is, however, rational in itself, in the immanence of its own being; and the place accorded to reason is found in and through its identity with the real. Marx discovers the concept of a reason which is unrelated to the development of the Idea, to universality, to thought. What, then, is this reason, what is the real with which it is identified? As we have seen, this is individual activity, the need in which it is rooted, life. The life of individuals is reason because it is this life which explains and produces the formation of the family and of civil society. The life of individuals is true reason because its explanation is not fully explicit, allowing what is to be spread out before us, a mere theory involving what Marx called “deference,”13 an interpretation which leaves what it interprets unchanged precisely because it produces what it explains and because in this way it constitutes the reason in the ontological sense of foundation, of grounding.
The political State too has its origin in the specific activity of individuals and can be understood only on this basis. Hegel interprets the State as the objectification of the Idea but the State offers a particular content, an internal distinction; it is divided into diverse powers; its organization is expressed and summed up in the constitution. Do all of these political determinations stem from the movement of the Idea and are they to be explained on the basis of it? Is it enough to describe the legislative power as the thought and the definition of the universal, the executive power as classifying individual cases under this universal and, finally, the crown as the power of decision to which the supreme authority of the State is always submitted? In other words: does the self-development of the universal essence in objectification through which it is realized actually contain within it—in addition to positing law as the universal legality to which everyone is submitted and which is held to express the general interest—the emergence of the particular, namely the cases which the executive and the administration subsume under the law, the emergence of the individual at last, namely the individual who actually performs the subsumption and, in general, makes the final decision in all the matters of State? Does the prince who governs, in whom the political essence in its active actuality is concentrated and whom, for this reason, Hegel called the “crown,” does he too proceed from the Idea?
It is remarkable that Marx’s critique focuses on this last point, on the problem of the individual grasped in his irreducibility to the ideal essence of universality. The ontological heterogeneity of reality and of ideality is reaffirmed here at the very moment when this reality is grasped and defined unequivocally as the individual. Just when Marx’s problematic seems to move toward a more precise analysis of the specificity of political power, its ontological meaning suddenly appears. In the guise of a critique of monarchy, masked by the polemic against the King of Prussia, the status of reality is at issue; its insertion in ideal objectivity is once more in question.
The impossibility of deducing an individual, this individual, from the internal process of the concept may seem self-evident. If Marx’s manuscript begins with the commentary on paragraph 261 of the Philosophy of Right, we must not, however, lose sight of the earlier development in this same work, in which Hegel intends to justify his political philosophy and, indeed, to provide the conceptual genesis of all the real determinations of the State. The fundamental concept on the basis of which philosophy, and no longer history, reveals the political determinations in their rational necessity is that of free will. Will is the universal essence of which the Idea, or the realized concept, is, precisely, the State in the fullness of its completion and of its organization. So it is the development of the universal essence of will, without any outside assistance, which thoroughly accounts for the particularity and the individuality which lend the State its actual content and which accounts first of all for particularity and individuality as such. The universal essence founds particularity in the sense that the will is able to emerge from the nothingness of its original indetermination only inasmuch as it wills, that is to say inasmuch as it determines itself as this or that act of will and, consequently, as a given, particular act. However, the actual will in its particularity includes within it, if it realizes itself and to the extent that it realizes itself, a monadic structure; it is a will in the sense of someone’s will, and individuality is the third moment of universal essence. Particularity and individuality are originally neither limitations on nor external, incomprehensible alterations of the universal essence of the will but instead moments in its positive becoming and, precisely, its realization. In particularity and in individuality the will becomes Idea, that is, goes beyond the simple level of conceptual existence in order to be reality.
However, the ideal conception of free will is overdetermined in Hegel by a still further ontological presupposition, namely that the internal actualization of the will by which it becomes a particular and real will is its objectification. This is the reason why the self-development of the notion is identical with the emergence of objectivity; why, too, individuality is defined in paragraph 7, γ of the Introduction to the Philosophy of Right as the relation between particularity and universality.14 Individuality is neither simply nor essentially what comes to be in an actual act of will, that is, its internal monadic form, but instead the immersion of particular determinations in the medium of objectivity which is real universality: the self-reflection of the particular. The individual becomes once again what he has always been within the tradition of Western philosophy: a thing to which thought is added, a being in the ekstasis of the horizon that frees him. It is then that the individual determination becomes a determination, properly speaking, in the sense of a negation and that particularity and individuality take on the basic character of finiteness.
The theory of the monarchical State reiterates these presuppositions. The State is the true, completed realization of the universal essence of the will. This means that the will develops its being to its utmost in the State, that it develops each of its determinations, that it pushes each to its limit, draws out of it the entire reality contained in its possibility, “condenses” it, as Hegel says, and thus brings it to a radical realization at the furthest point of its reality, to the point of existence. “The State,” Hegel declares in paragraph 279, “is precisely this totality in which the moments of the concept have attained the actuality correspondent to their degree of truth”; in it, “each of the three moments of the concepts has its explicitly actual and separate formation.” The third element of the concept is thus also carried back to its ground; it is not just individuality but, more precisely, that which ultimately realizes it, its existence, the individual, or rather—since the individual does not yet exist and is still only individuality—an individual, a person, if you like, but “the person enshrines the actuality of the concept” and constitutes someone in particular. The State, the will’s ultimate reason, is therefore presented as necessarily monarchical. “Hence this absolutely decisive moment of the whole is not individuality in general, but a single individual, the monarch.”15
The bulk of Hegel’s demonstration is found in the following text: “personality, like subjectivity in general, . . . has its truth . . . only in a person, in a subject existing ‘for’ himself. . . .”16 With this last statement Hegel demolishes his own philosophy; he not only affirms the eidetically monadic character of subjectivity; he also posits that subjectivity can in every instance be nothing other than an individual. But if subjectivity in the sense of an ideal determination, in the sense of personality, can exist only as a real individual, it is because its original existence is found here and only here. Instead of the action of the will as it produces its own determinations being able to produce the existence of an individual, it presupposes this existence. Moreover, how could the internal process of the Idea, the action of universal will, produce an individual since, as Marx bluntly states, the will does not act?17 One cannot pass, then, from ideal universality and its determinations, from personality, to the real individual, but only from the latter to its own concept. Or, to use the terminology that Feuerbach (who himself borrowed it from Thomas Aquinas) has just taught Marx: personality is not the subject of which the individual would be the predicate but instead the subject is the individual, who in every instance is a particular individual, a real individual; individuality and universality are only predicates.
It can be clearly demonstrated that Hegel, in affirming that “what exists ‘for’ itself is just simply a unit,” leaves his own philosophy behind, if we consider the context of this passage; there we see that real existence is removed from the initial spheres of the objective mind, from the family, the community, civil society, and entrusted to the State only insofar as the State itself ceases to be understood, in reality, as a sphere of the objective mind, as a moral personality. Moral personality, the objectification of universal essence, is swept aside in favor of a single individual. For the person exists no longer in the concrete being of a transcendental totality in which he participates and of which he is a member, but now he really exists as an individual, as a determined and isolated individual. Hegel states: “A so-called artificial person, be it a society, a community, or a family, however inherently concrete it may be, contains personality only abstractly, as one moment of itself. In an ‘artificial person’, personality has not achieved its true mode of existence,” and yet the philosopher, whose wellknown, explicit thesis—which he so often returns to and reiterates—is that the individual is real only in the State, writes quite to the contrary: “It is only as a person, the monarch, that the personality of the State is actual.”18 The rigorous philosophical content hidden under the questionable political theory is, in fact, blindingly obvious: it is the monadic structure of being.
It is in the name of this philosophical content that Marx rejects the political theory, monarchy. For it is to be noted that Marx supports Hegel’s views as long as he strives to reduce the ideal essence of personality to a reality which it neither contains nor founds. The reality to which the “personality,” the “individual,” refers is monadic; this means that it is, in every instance, an individual, not an ideal unity but a real plurality. So that it is not only absurd to claim to deduce a real individual from personality, but it is just as absurd to deduce from it just a single individual. Hegel plays on the sense of the word “unit” and grossly deceives us. Because “what exists ‘for’ itself is just simply a unit,” it in no way follows that there is but a single for-itself. Quite the opposite, the internal gathering together of being in the phenomenological actuality of its monadic structure is identical with its dispersal in the radical diversity of numerous monads. In order to attribute a sense to personality, that is, in order to find its reality outside of it, one can only move from personality to all individuals. Here is Marx’s text: “It is self-evident that since personality and subjectivity are only predicates of the person and the subject they can exist only as person and subject, and the person is certainly but one. However, Hegel should have gone on to say that this one truly exists only as many ones. The predicate, the essence, can never exhaust the spheres of its existence in a single one but only in many ones.”19 Here, then, Marx presents the metaphysical foundation of the theory of democracy.
To begin with, this theory has a twofold signification. On the one hand, it involves the rejection of the unreasonable claim that a single individual be considered the real element of the State—and why this particular individual?—rather than all individuals, and, on the other hand, it involves the understanding that the political substance, namely universality, is indeed not the real moment of the State, its founding reality, since the latter resides precisely in the “individual” in the sense of all individuals. We see that the reality of the State resides in individuals and that ideal universality—no more than its determinations, for example, abstract personality—cannot be considered a principle of this reality, due to the fact that the individual intervenes everywhere in the State and not just in the concrete decision of a single man mysteriously deduced from the Idea. “Hegel,” Marx writes, “should not be astonished to discover that the real person reappears everywhere as the essence of the State—for people make the State. He should rather have been astonished at the reverse, and even more at the fact that the person who appears in the context of his analysis of the State is the same threadbare abstraction as the person found in civil law.”20
If people make the State, if the political substance is founded in them rather than itself founding them, Hegel’s political philosophy is turned upside down along with his ontology. In place of the parts being determined by the whole, on the basis of their substantive homogeneity, is found instead the genealogical thesis, that is, the thesis of their difference, the thesis of the formation and the production of ideal universality out of a heterogeneous reality. By no means can the State, any more than the family or civil society, the great transcendent masses which structure the objective mind, be considered to be primary; none is explained by this mind as its internal distinctions; they all contain, instead, a fundamental reference to a reality of another order. The genealogical thesis then places us before an open question: what is the being of the real considered as the ground of all possible ideality? In the 1843 manuscript we find only the scattered, partial elements of an answer, and these concern only the political aspect which still refers, as in Hegel, to the consciousness of individuals as political individuals, as citizens. That this consciousness belonging to individuals is to be explained by their life is as yet merely intimated.21 The sense, at least, of the relation established between the individual and the political essence is reversed. The latter no longer designates, as in Hegel, the substantiality to which individual consciousness is submitted as it aims at the general, in its “political disposition,” in order itself to become substantial, but rather, through the mediation of their consciousness, individuals themselves produce this substance; it is their work.
This is why democracy is the truth of the political organization, of the constitution, because democracy explicitly ties it to individuals, to “the people,” and presents it as produced by them and as having to be produced by them. “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 . . . [and] posited as the people’s own creation. The constitution is in appearance what it is in reality: the free creation of man.”22 The refusal, in appearance on ethical grounds, to let individual life be determined by the political essence and, in general, by an ideal legality, has its basis in ontology, if it expresses the genealogy of the universal and results from it. This refusal is expressed in the critique of monarchy: “In monarchy we have the people of the constitution, in democracy the constitution of the people.” But the ultimate philosophical signification of this critique is constantly recalled, just as it will be throughout all of Marx’s later works. “Democracy relates to all other forms of State as its Old Testament. In democracy, man does not exist for the sake of the law, but the law exists for the sake of man, it is human existence, whereas in other political systems man is a legal existence.”23 And yet this legal existence, the political constitution, and politics itself as such are themselves only an appearance if in every instance they presuppose, if the monarchy itself presupposes, reference to the individual. This is why “democracy is the generic constitution. Monarchy is only a variant and a bad variant at that.”24
The inevitable reference of ideal universality to its real foundation is not only found in the theory of the monarch; it is expressed involuntarily throughout all of Hegel’s thought. When political substantiality has been posited as principle, as absolute essence, and, precisely, as substance, as a self-sufficient reality in which everything that is must participate in order to find its being there, we then see this alleged autonomy dissolve in the movement of this alleged substance. Substance is also subject. The State, which is supposed to express and to contain the concreteness of being, in reality never attains this except insofar as it empties itself, making itself into subjectivity. Political substantiality is not only “objective substantiality,” that is, the organism of the State and its constitution; it is also “subjective substantiality,” that is, “political sentiment” (§ 267). In paragraph 270 this substantiality is further defined by Hegel—and here we are quoting Marx’s commentary—“(l) as the universal end of the State and then (2) as its various powers . . . (3) as the real mind that knows and wills itself.”25 In his ideal order Hegel may well invert the real genealogical order, positing first the general interest, then the powers responsible for realizing it, and, finally, the real mind which is directed at this interest and in reality produces it before preserving it, precisely, by instituting the powers of the State; he nevertheless cannot fail to include this third term, real mind, the concrete life of individuals in which political determinations are elaborated as so many ideal, transcendental meanings constituted in and by this concrete life. Once the universal has been hypostatized, it must be returned to its primary origin. The synthetic addition of subjectivity to political “substance” demolishes its claim to Selbständigkeit . Marx’s text is resplendent in its serene simplicity. “Thus sovereignty, the essence of the State, is first objectified and conceived as something independent. Then, of course, this object must again become a subject.”26 “If Hegel had begun by positing real subjects as the basis of the State he would not have found it necessary to subjectivize the State in a mystical way.”27 “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.”28 Ideal objectivity is everywhere carried back to founding subjectivity. Hegel’s God has need of men.
Marx’s analysis, however, should be understood here in its radical meaning. For what is in question is not only the sense of the relation established between political substance and subjectivity. In reality, it is not a matter of knowing which is first, the subjective motivation of individuals who want to and who have to provide for themselves the conditions for their existence in common, or those conditions which Hegel conceives as the objectification of the universal. The genealogical thesis moves toward a more fundamental problematic, which no longer concerns simply the relation between the foundation and that which it founds but which, in a truly original way, concerns the internal structure of this foundation itself, the structure of subjectivity. This decisive meaning is presented to us in the discussion of the problem of the form or the being of the general interest, the “matters of general concern,”* which refer to nothing other than the political essence. As it repeats the elucidation of this essence, the 1843 manuscript provides us with its most essential philosophical contribution.
The elucidation of the “form” of the matters of general concern reproduces first of all that of political ideality in general. Political ideality necessarily refers back to a concrete subjectivity which produces it. “The universal thought of this ideality. . .,” Marx stated in his commentary on paragraph 279, “must be the self-conscious creation of the subjects and must exist as such for them and in them.”29 Indeed, it is only to the extent that political ideality is carried back to all subjects as their conscious work that it can in reality be a general concern, that is, the concern of each and every one. The generality of the general concern does not exist in itself; it is not a substantial essence, concrete in and of itself, but rather its being is constructed and takes shape only in and through its relation to individuals whose concern it is. This generality, then, exists only for them and through them. The generality of the general concern is not generality as such; it is not enclosed within the ideality of an autonomous and self-sufficient genus; it exists only in the for-itself of individuals, of “many individuals.” Having hypostatized general concern in the transcendence of an objective essence, Hegel, on the contrary, cannot but add subjectivity to this concern in order to grant it being in the for-itself; subjectivity arrived at in this way presents a twofold nature. On the one hand, it no longer designates the concrete subjectivity of individuals who assemble themselves together into the State; instead it is none other than the subjectivization of universal essence, the simple demand by this being-in-itself for a becoming-for-itself. Here again Marx’s text is crystal clear:
The development of “matters of general concern” into the subject, and thus into independent existence, is represented here as a moment in the life-process of these “matters of general concern.” Rather than make the subjects objectify themselves in “matters of general concern,” Hegel causes the “matters of general concern” to extend into the “subject.” The “subjects” do not require “matters of general concern” for their own true concern, but matters of general concern stand in need of the subjects for their formal existence. It is a matter of concern to the “matters of general concern” that they should also exist as subjects.30
Because the “subject” is but the formal existence of the general concern, the mere positing of the becoming-for-itself of the being-in-itself of the general, it itself remains general and completely undetermined, and anything at all can be subsumed under the exigency of this becoming. Who, then, will be conscious of the general interest and will be entitled to determine it? Should we mention in this regard the people itself? But for Hegel the people is as yet an inorganic mass that does not know what it wants and shows itself to be incapable of perceiving the path that it must take to realize its own interests. Or should we seek this consciousness of the general interest in the “estates,” that is, in the assemblies of the different orders? But the latter are prisoners of their own particular interests and are unable to elevate themselves to the clear disinterested vision of what is truly the interest of the State. Dignitaries, offices, those in government, and, above all, the king alone know what must be done to maintain the universal interest above and beyond particular interests and, if need be, against them. And it is in this way that the general interest has in reality become something quite different from a general interest—everyone’s interest—namely, a private concern, the monopoly of a few, of the monopolies for instance. In order to provide a content for the general demand for a becoming-for-itself issuing from the being-in-itself of the universal, Hegel turns to the empirical organization of the Prussian State and what exists here or there, here and now, as the mere result of history and of circumstances, is passed off as the very form of rational ideality and the rationality of the State vanishes in the bluntness of the fact.
In this way, the form of the general concern, its being-for-itself, or what is subsumed under this form—those in government, senior officials, monopolies—“the formal existence or the empirical existence of the general concern” is separated from its content, from the genuine general concern which would be everyone’s concern; the general concern hypostatized by Hegel is not really general. The form is alien to the content, the content is alien to the form. Marx sums up his critique in these terms:
“Matters of general concern” already exist “implicitly,” in themselves, as the business of the executive, etc.; they exist without really being matters of general concern; they are in fact anything but that for they are of no concern to “civil society.” They have already achieved their essential, implicit existence. If they now really enter “public consciousness” and achieve “empirical generality,” this is purely formal and amounts to no more than a symbolic achievement of reality. The “formal” or “empirical” existence of matters of general concern is separate from their substantive existence. The truth of the matter is that the implicit “matters of general concern” are not really general, and the real, empirical matters of general concern are purely formal.31
However, it is not just because matters of general concern are in fact the privileged domain of a few that they are not matters of general concern, or that the form (the intention of a few) is in opposition to the content (the universal); it is the form of the universal which in itself and in principle is inadequate to it. In the text quoted above Marx says: “The ‘formal’ or ‘empirical’ existence of matters of general concern is separate from their substantive existence.” These are not the same things; “or” here means neither exclusion nor equivalence. The “empirical” existence of matters of general concern means those in government, officials, those who take it upon themselves to work for the public welfare. The “formal” existence of matters of general concern originally designates nothing of the sort. The formal existence of matters of general concern is the becoming-for-itself of universal existence, the general presupposition of a subjectivity which is in general implied in substance inasmuch as the latter attains the concreteness of being only in the actuality of being-for-itself. It is not without importance that an empirical existence, and moreover a variable one, is subsumed under the formal existence of matters of general concern. This means that the form of the matters of general concern is of itself empty, that by itself as form it has no content. The form of the matters of general concern is purely formal. But what, then, is this purely formal form belonging to matters of general concern? As we have seen, it is the becoming-for-itself of the being-in-itself of the universal. The universal essence is objectivity, the luminous milieu in which what is there is there for everyone, the condition and the reign of the “general.” The universal essence’s becoming-for-itself is its objectification. The subject’s subjectivity which substance “is also,” its becoming-for-itself, is the movement of self-positing by which the Idea renders itself phenomenal by setting itself in opposition to itself in the form of an object. Subjectivity is opposition. The opposition of the form and the content of the “matters of general concern” is not due to the empirical organization of the Prussian State, it is rooted in the structure of subjectivity and is identical with it—in the structure of subjectivity as Hegel understood it. Marx writes: “Hegel thus separates content and form, being-in-itself and being-for-itself, and admits the latter only formally and externally.”32 Being-for-itself is added on externally to the in-itself as a formal element because it is the form of exteriority, exteriority itself as exteriorization and as ekstasis. The critique of formalism is the critique of ekstatic subjectivity. Against the backdrop of an ekstatic conception of subjectivity, no criticism of formalism is possible. Hegel vainly attempted to overcome formalism. He affirmed the immanence of the subject and of being. Substance itself, in itself is subject. But what matters is the nature of subjectivity. As long as subjectivity is ekstasis, it allows what is to exist in exteriority and as external. The immanence of subjectivity in being signifies the exteriority of being in relation to itself. Posited in this way in the self-positing of its exteriority in relation to itself, being is forever external, and its form—the form of this self-positing which cast it into exteriority as external to itself, as other than itself—is forever empty. An external content, an empty subjectivity—such is the metaphysical situation which Hegelianism assumes once more as its own and which Marx unceasingly attacks. “Subjective freedom is purely formal for Hegel. . .”;33 and even more explicitly: “it is inevitable that the real subject of freedom should be assigned a purely formal significance. The separation of the in-itself from the for-itself, of substance from subject, is a piece of abstract mysticism.”34
Abstraction, which Marx calls mysticism, is not the product of an operation performed by the subject, it is the subject itself. Abstraction is the subject because it is the act of withdrawing itself, of abstracting itself from the content. And it is in this act of abstracting itself from the content that the form is constituted as an empty form, as subjectivity and as purely formal freedom. In this act, however, the form relates to the content and is inextricably bound to it.The form is but the abstraction of the content; it exists only as an abstraction of that from which it has removed itself, an abstraction of that which it is not, whereas the content exists only in this form which repudiates it. The indissoluble tie between form and content resides in abstraction. In abstraction, the form and the content are posited as opposing terms, as extremes, but in such a way that each leads back directly to the other, finds its being in the being of the other, and is the other. In abstraction lies the power and the essence of the dialectic, and through this power “every extreme is its opposite.” As the poles of abstraction, as opposing terms each of which leads back directly to the other, form and content are, however, clearly defined. Form is an abstraction, objective ideality, the not-being-content in which the content exists as what the form is not and yet as that whose being it is—as finite being in its object-condition. Form is mind, content is matter. Mind and matter are not in opposition as two terms opposing one another in themselves; they are in opposition only in the unity of one and the same essence, in the unity of abstraction. The opposition of materialism and spiritualism is prephilosophical; it does not carry back to the ultimate ontological presupposition, for which matter and mind conjointly produce one another in the unity of a single event and a single structure, in the event of objectivity and in its ekstatic structure. Marx has not yet uttered the cry of his most extreme theoretical demand, his call for a philosophy which “differs both from idealism and materialism,”35 but the conditions for this demand have already been posited. Right after writing that “every extreme is its opposite,” he adds: “Abstract spiritualism is abstract materialism; abstract materialism is the abstract spiritualism of matter.”36 The conceptual genesis of the dialectical unity of materialism and of spiritualism as having its basis in abstraction and as constituted by it is stated explicitly by Marx: “. . . the issue turns on the fact that a concept . . . is viewed abstractly, that it is not treated as something autonomous but as an abstraction from something else and that only this abstraction has meaning; thus, for example, mind is only an abstraction from matter.”37 This dialectical unity explains “the inevitable transformation of the empirical into the speculative and the speculative into the empirical. . . ”38
The dialectical unity of spiritualism and of materialism, of idealism and of naturalism, points up the difficulties Hegel encounters in his attempt to determine the form of the matters of general concern. “The ‘formal’ or ‘empirical’ existence of the matters of general concern . . .,” Marx wrote in his commentary. We must now say instead: “The formal and empirical existence. . . .” For the opposition between form and content is established not only between the form and the content of the matters of general concern, between the for-itself and the in-itself of the political essence. Inasmuch as there is an attempt in a political philosophy to give a content to the very form of the general interest, for example, to the constituting power, this form then falls under the sway of the pitiless dialectic of abstraction, under its own dialectic. The form itself is split in two; it is at once formal existence and empirical existence, namely that of the estates, the bureaucracy, the government, the prince—every concrete existence which one might wish to subsume under this form in order to give it a content. Everywhere true existence is shattered; it breaks apart in ekstasis and is, in the light of ideality, no more than a dead, opaque, indifferent content. For reality itself becomes this content when it leaves its own ground, its own reality outside itself, in exteriority. Existence slips away when that which confers upon it its phenomenological actuality, and which makes it what it is, no longer stems from its own mind but now resides in an “alien mind.” All existence is alienated in objectivity; its law is no longer within itself and the real is no longer rational. Marx leads us to understand that the abandonment of that which is unfolded in the light of objectivity refers to the latter and to the way in which it is unveiled in every instance, to the structure of ekstatic subjectivity itself. Marx states this in a proposition which encompasses the destiny of Western philosophy: “The profundity of Germanic subjectivity becomes manifest everywhere as the barbarism of mindless objectivity.”39 The critique of the matters of general concern leads us back to the ontological presuppositions with which Marx’s manuscript began, and it gives them their decisive meaning. By refusing to oppose form and content, his critique outlines the concept of original existence which is not separated from itself, which remains within itself and finds therein its motivation, its legitimation, its actuality, its mind and its life. Marx’s thought encounters here the ontological ground upon which all the subsequent developments will be constructed and, in particular, the rejection of all transcendence, the ever-continuing critique of alienation; this thought can already be understood and defined as a philosophy of radical immanence, a philosophy of life.
The paradox of the Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State lies in its claim to apply the concept of original existence—in which the separation of form and content does not occur, in which life is grasped in itself prior to any subsumption under an ideal horizon—to ideal existence, precisely to the political essence. Whereas the general was understood as a meaning produced by the consciousness of individuals on the basis of their real existence and in order to establish the possibility of this existence understood, consequently, as an objective meaning different from this real existence, Marx, on the contrary, rejects a difference of this sort. Whereas the universal essence was posited in its ideality, in its fundamental heterogeneity in relation to reality, Marx now wants to make them identical, to restore the homogeneity of the universal and the particular. Whereas exteriority was recognized as the form of the general concern, as constituting its being, Marx claims to conquer this exteriority, to conquer the transcendence of the political, and demands that the substance of the State become the individuals’ very life. In this last presupposition, the 1843 manuscript attests to the fact that Marx’s thought continues to be influenced by Hegelianism, and that reality continues to be the political totality in which the individual must participate. But in Hegel, the place of this reality is that of ideal objectivity, for it is in and through objectivity that universality becomes possible and is realized. What is present for each and every one is what is before them all; it is in the light of ekstasis that the individual relates to the essence and makes it consubstantial to himself. By claiming, on the contrary, to apply the structure belonging to life and its radical immanence, which he has just discovered, to political universality, Marx slips into an insurmountable contradiction. This same contradiction determines all of his analyses in the Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State and runs throughout this work.
The thesis on democracy, for example, is contradictory. On the one hand, it affirms that the State is produced by individuals, and this is done through opposition—“The State is objectified man”—hence as something different, as something derived. The people is the determining element, the State that which is determined; the people is the subject, the constitution is the predicate, and this is why the constitution evolves, inasmuch as the individuals themselves evolve. This, too, is why there is no need to subjectivize the State, to form a subjectivity that would be proper to it—the universal in its becoming-for-itself—because subjectivity existed before it in the concrete life of individuals and as this very life. But even though Hegelian presuppositions still dominate, so that what is held in common appears to be what is most essential, Marx—beyond whatever paltry preoccupations and particular interests he may display in line with the presuppositions that are already his own—cannot accept that what is essential is to be found precisely in some beyond, beyond real life, in ideality. The critique of the doctrine of the State then carries the meaning it truly has in the 1843 manuscript. What is at issue there is no longer the conception of the State as what is essential, the conception of political substantiality, but its status. The political element is the essence, but precisely because it is the essence it cannot be separated from us. What now dictates the preoccupations of the analysis is a philosophy of immanence; it is the rejection of separation, of all privation and of all alienation, the rejection of opposition as the opposition of form and content, of the opposition which allows the form to exist outside the content and the content outside the form. The State, precisely, cannot be a formal, ideal principle alien to the concrete life of individuals, to the real “material” content of society. “In democracy,” says Marx, “the formal principle is identical with the substantive principle.”40 And it is in this that democracy differs from the other political forms. It differs from them in that it is itself no longer a form. “Every other political formation is a . . . form of the State,”41 says Marx. The republic, for example, is distinguished from the monarchy as the government of all in opposition to that of just one, but this sort of distinction remains purely formal because it concerns only the political constitution and not the real content of the State. “Property, etc., in short the whole content of law and the State, is broadly the same in North America as in Prussia. Hence the republic in America is just as much a mere form of the State as the monarchy here. The content of the State lies beyond these constitutions.”42 This means that the real State is not political, or, again, that in the State there is a political sphere alongside other spheres which are not political and which, as a result, cannot be determined except in an external, formal, and apparent fashion by the political sphere itself, by the constitution. “In all forms of the State other than democracy the State, the law, the constitution is dominant, but without really dominating, i.e., without materially penetrating the content of all the non-political spheres.”43
In this way the critique of the political element is redirected: it is no longer the critique of the political element but instead the critique of that which is not political, not yet political, and which has to become political. The opposition directed at Hegel—the philosophy of immanence—leads to a hyper-Hegelianism, to political totalitarianism. The State is no longer what is determined and, in accordance with the genealogical thesis, the product; instead it is what determines, it must determine, determine radically, “penetrating” all the spheres of the State. To tell the truth, no nonpolitical sphere can be allowed to remain in this sort of State. Individual activity, private life, affectivity, sensibility, sexuality must themselves be political. The rejection of all transcendence establishes the undivided reign of transcendence itself, and all that exists must be displayed, present to the gaze of all.
It is not without interest to note that this properly demential requirement, the unlimited reign of the political essence, is presented by Marx and legitimated by him in light of a dialectic borrowed from Hegel. If indeed the political element remains a mere form, leaving outside of itself a content which is unchanged in its own being, it is no longer the universal but a particular reality. This is the reason why political formations other than democracy, “political forms,” are called “determinate, particular.”44 This is also why in democracy the political constitution does not exhaust the entire political reality; it is only one particular political reality, a part of the entire political reality of the State. In this way we may explain these apparently enigmatic lines: “In democracy the State as particular is only particular, and as universal it is really universal; i.e., it is not something determinate set off against other contents.”45 The claim that the political essence reduces the totality of the real to itself is identical with the refusal to allow the political essence to be circumscribed within the sphere of the constitution alone, inside the “political sphere,” its rejection of the pre-democratic state in which “the sphere of politics has been the only [real] state-sphere in the State, the only sphere in which both form and content was that of the species [Gattungsinhalt], i.e. truly universal. At the same time however, because politics was opposed to all other spheres, its content too became formal and particular.”46
The claim that the political essence is no longer just a simple form, a particular sphere, but that it reduces the totality of the real to itself because it is now ratified and assumed by Marx as his own explains the nostalgic gaze he casts in the direction of the States in which this claim might seem to have been realized, in the direction of what he calls “original” (immédiats) political regimes. “In the original models of monarchy, democracy and aristocracy there was at first no political constitution as distinct from the real, material State and the other aspects of the life of the people. The political State did not yet appear as the form of the material State.” This is the case in Greece—which offers us a new example of the ideal common to Hegel and to Marx—where “the res publica was the real private concern of the citizens, their real content,” where “the political State as such was the only true content of their lives and their aspirations,” where “a substantive unity [existed] between people and state.”47 This is also the case of the Middle Ages, where the organization of concrete life—serfdom, feudal property, guilds—is originally a political organization, the very organization of the State, so that here too “property, trade, society and man were political; the material content of the State was defined by its form; every sphere of private activity had a political character, or was a political sphere, in other words politics was characteristic of the different spheres of private life.”48 Certainly the Middle Ages is presented as an era of “unfreedom”; it is considered nonetheless, in the sense of the 1843 manuscript, a “democracy.”
We have been speaking of “Marx’s hyper-Hegelianism.” For Hegel himself was more realistic. Hegel’s realism,49 in the case we are considering, consists in this—that although the concrete spheres of civil society are posited by the movement of the Idea which is objectified in the State and are thus given as “Ideal,” they nonetheless preserve a specific character which lies in the opacity of natural instincts and in the arbitrary character of individual will. Despite the fact that it is permeated with the universal, which secretly animates it, Hegel’s civil society conforms to the description of the English moralists and economists. This is why there is, at the very least, a problem with respect to the homogeneity of civil society and the State, with respect to the reduction of the particular to the universal. The Hegelian conception of the State concerns, precisely, the means by which this homogeneity is to be established, the whole set of mediations through which the particular is carried back to the universal as to its true, albeit hidden, essence. And Marx’s critique of the Hegelian conception of the State is precisely the critique of mediations . Now, in all its detours, in its complexity, which indeed reflects that of the political organism, the critique of mediations places us face-to-face with its constant presupposition, its rejection of all separation, the refusal to allow a true opposition to be established between particular individuals and the political essence, between civil society and the State. For it is indeed this prior difference between the terms which the mediation is then to relate which is implied in the idea of mediation and which motivates Marx’s rejection.
The first and the most important of the mediations established by Hegel between civil society and the State is constituted by the “Estates” in the medieval sense, that is by the representative assemblies of the various groups into which society is divided by virtue of the concrete activity of their members. The Estates constitute the mediation that Hegel was seeking between the particular interest and the general interest because, as is stated in paragraph 289,
at the same time the corporation mind, engendered when the particular spheres gain their title to rights, is now inwardly converted into the mind of the State, since it finds in the State the means of maintaining its particular ends. This is the secret of the patriotism of the citizens in the sense that they know the State as their substance, because it is the State that maintains their particular spheres of interest together with the title, authority and welfare of these. In the corporation mind the rooting of the particular in the universal is directly entailed, and for this reason it is in that mind that the depth and the strength which the State possesses in sentiment is seated.
But how can the corporation mind, which always represents a determined condition, the state of the shoemaker or the tanner, expressing particular preoccupations and interests, “the sense and temper of ‘individuals and particular groups,’ ” ever be changed into the intention of the general and the universal as such, uniting with “the political and administrative sense and temper”? “The Estates,” says Marx, “are the synthesis of the State and civil society. There is no indication as to how the Estates should go about reconciling the two opposed tempers.”50 The conception of the Estates as mediating between private interests and the general interest, far from being able to resolve their contradiction, on the contrary, presupposes and establishes it. “The Estates are the incarnation or contradiction between the State and civil society within the State. At the same time they symbolize the demand that this contradiction be resolved.”51
It is true that in Hegel’s view private interest does not directly run up against the general interest. Because it is divided from the start into corporations, orders, etc. and because the latter are themselves organized into “Estates,” civil society’s own interests are displayed only through the mediation of its political assemblies; it is on the level of these assemblies that the particular interest confronts the general interest and is then in a position to join together with it. As Marx recognizes in his commentary, “Only in the Estates as an element in the legislative power does it [civil society] acquire ‘political significance and efficacy.’”52 But, precisely, this “political” efficacy, which has as its aim the general and the universal and which is nothing other than the efficacy of the universal itself, represents something entirely new in relation to the efficacy of the state, which is of its very nature a private state.* The private state is the state of civil society and has nothing to do with the “general state”; far from being able to join together with the general determinations, with the general as the end of its essential activity, it is directly opposed to this. The private state (der Privatstand), says Marx, “is the [state] [der Stand] of civil society against the State [den Staat]. The [state] [der Stand] of civil society is not a political [state] [Stand].”53 In order to become political, to have the universal as its aim and to be integrated into the State, the private state “must rather abandon what it is, viz. its private status.”54 This self-renunciation remains absolutely inexplicable on the basis of what this state is; the political act of civil society is a “thorough-going transubstantiation” and, for this reason, completely unfounded. “Civil society,” says Marx, “must completely renounce itself as civil society, as a private [state], and must instead assert the validity of a part of its being which not only has nothing in common with, but is directly opposed to, its real civil existence.”55
It is remarkable that in order to make the Hegelian antinomy apparent, Marx transposes it to the level of the individual, who thus appears at once as the criterion and as the place where the opposition between civil society and the State is to be found. “What we see here in the individual case is in fact the general rule. Civil society is separated from the State. It follows, therefore, that the citizen of the State is separated from the citizen as a member of civil society.”56 Because the citizen of the State and the simple citizen are one and the same individual, it is therefore in him that the opposition now resides, an opposition which is no longer that between two different terms but an opposition within life, sundering it. Henceforth, the individual leads a double life; “he finds himself in a double organization,” citizen on the one hand, a private person on the other. Only, as a private person the individual is actually outside the State. To enter political life, he must renounce his real life; he cannot draw from the latter the property that makes him a member of the State. “If he is to become effective as a real citizen of the State, if he is to acquire true political significance and efficacy, he must abandon his civil reality, abstract from it. . . . ”57
The argument by which Hegel thought he could found the transposition from the civil to the political upon his ontology is inverted here. In fact, in accordance with this ontology, the transposition to the political realm is by no means made on the basis of a state which would be of its essence different from the general state: the universal reigns in civil society before it is realized in political society. The reign of the universal in civil society is manifested by the ever-widening series of concentric “circles” or “spheres” within which the concrete life of men is spontaneously organized: family, corporation, etc. It is on the basis of these spheres, which themselves are already general realities, modes in which the universal is realized, that the properly political edifice of the State takes shape; and it is for this reason that these spheres truly are and are capable of being the “bases” of the State. Hegel’s political thought has always rejected the notion of an immediate sphere composed of an atomistic multitude of individuals, and this is what motivates, for example, the polemic against Rousseau. With this prior condition of an immediate sphere, which already involves mediation, organization, totality, and idealism, Marx’s critique in the 1843 manuscript finds its proper ground and the intervention of the individual finds its true sense. The private state which must be reunited with the political state is precisely not that of isolated individuals; it is a state common to a great number, a state which is a genus, the Estate of the peasant, the tradesman, etc. The private state is the state of individuals organized into society. “The [private state] is the [state] of civil society, or, civil society is the [private state].”58 Civil society may then well be presented organically in the “available forms of community”; it nevertheless remains in itself private, nonpolitical. Its internal distinctions, the different spheres, the “available forms of community” are nonpolitical as well. “Now if Hegel counterposes the whole of civil society as a private [state] to the political State, it inevitably follows that all distinctions within the private [state], i.e. the various classes of citizens, have only a private significance in respect to the State and no political status at all.”59 To the extent that the communities in which the individual exists immediately are private, nonpolitical, the emergence into politics, the transubstantiation through which what is not political becomes so, thus bears a well-determined form: it is only in and through the annihilation of these private communities that politics can be born; it is only by breaking out of the concrete spheres of civil society that the individual can become a citizen, can exist and live in line with the State. Hegel did not think nor did he intend that the aim of the general should originate in solitary individuals, but this is what he is forced to do to the extent that the immediate organization of civil society is that of the private state. “The atomism into which civil society is plunged by its political actions is a necessary consequence of the fact that the community . . . in which the individual exists, civil society, is separated from the State, or in other words: the political State is an abstraction from civil society.”60
Such is now the sense of the individual as he enters in here: he is no longer the foundation, the sign, and the place of the real, on the basis of which politics is constituted. The universal is primary, the individual arises only in and through his decomposition in the dissolution of the primitive organic masses of society. This dissolution, which is at the same time the abandonment of the individual to his atomistic condition, is an event; it is prepared for by the absolute monarchy with its bureaucratic centralization, which, bit by bit, takes all political power away from the Estates, leaving them to fend for themselves, cut off from the meaning of the universal; it is realized under the French Revolution, which pulverizes these Estates themselves, in the sense that the tie existing between the private state, the social state, and the individual becomes an external, contingent tie. At work, the individual is no longer rooted in a true community; he is not sustained “as a member of a community, . . . an objective community, organized according to established laws and standing in a fixed relationship to him.”61 He no longer works just because he is spurred on by need; the relationship he maintains with his Estate involves both chance and vital necessity: “the principle of the civil (state) or civil society is enjoyment and the capacity to enjoy.”62
In this way the historical situation described by the Hegelian theory of the State is actually realized. “Hegel should not be blamed for describing the essence of the modern State as it is, but for identifying what is with the essence of the State.”63 What exists is a shattered, disjointed reality which has allowed the universal to attain the condition of being-for-itself, to attain effective political consciousness, but in an external fashion, as a mere form. “In the modern State, as in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the conscious, true reality of the universal interest is merely formal. . .”64 How then can reality, which has slipped back into natural contingence and which has been left to scatter into atomistic elements, be reunited with a rationality which itself has withdrawn into ideality, into the irreality of the political heavens? The second mediation established by Hegel between civil society and the State has the merit of no longer referring to an archaic situation, to Estates which in modern times have lost all political and even social significance, but of being based instead on the real world. For this very reason, however, the second mediation established by Hegel is doomed to failure because, relying on the real separation of civil society and the State, it too can do no more than express it.
The second mediation is constituted by the body of functionaries whose activity is characterized not by an interest stemming from some personal individuality but by service to the State. The second mediation is based on the real world because it starts with the isolated individual, because it offers to each individual considered separately the possibility of acceding to the universal. “This opportunity to join the class of civil servants, available to every citizen, is the second bond established between civil society and the State; it is the second identity.”65 We know the irony with which Marx discussed this “identity.” By positing that the service of the State requires that men forego “selfish . . . satisfaction” and “subjective ends,” Hegel recognized the right to find this satisfaction in the discharge of one’s duty, along with the civil servant’s right to earn his living from this work. “There lies the link,” said Hegel, “between universal and particular interests which constitutes both the concept of the State and its inner stability.” “In § 294,” says Marx, “Hegel derives the payment of salaries to officials from the Idea. Here, in the payment of salaries to officials . . . the real identity of civil society and the State is postulated.”66 Polemics aside, the paradox of the second mediation consists in the fact that access to the universal is reserved to those who have entered public service. Access to the universal is the privilege of a closed group. But on what does this privilege rest? On the one hand, on caprice—it is the prince who appoints the civil servants; on the other hand, on examinations, whereby those who want to serve the State have to prove their capabilities. Leaving irony aside once again here (“it is plain that in every examination the examiner is omniscient”), the critique of the examination brings us back to what is essential, to the division into two sorts of knowledge, “the knowledge of civil society and the knowledge of the State,”67 the examination being the initiation into the latter, “the official recognition of the transubstantiation of profane knowledge into sacred knowledge.”68 However, the possibility for a few to reach the knowledge of the universal essence in another sphere through their initiation, the break which allows a transubstantiation, presupposes an earlier state in which the others still remain, each suffering his obscure fate. The mediation of the examination, of public service, has the same sense as all the mediations constructed by Hegel, that of referring back to a primary and insurmountable division. Division, “mediation” permeate the entire edifice. The bureaucracy, which should establish the bond between civil society and the government, expresses only their conflict and is itself an element of this conflict. The bureaucracy prevents the Estates from having their particularity recognized for what it is in opposition to the State, whereas the Estates prevent the bureaucracy from foundering in its own caprice. What is more, the bureaucracy must not only be protected from itself by the Estates, which it protects from themselves, it must also be protected from itself by itself, by its hierarchical organization, by “the sovereign working . . . at the top.” Finally, each civil servant must be protected against himself, for his existence is twofold, and in him the service of the State must win out over private interest. But the service of the State itself leads to the “‘mechanical’ nature of bureaucratic knowledge and work”; it must therefore be corrected by the personal development of the civil servant, by the “direct education in thought and ethical conduct” (§ 296), so that, as Marx says, “The human being in the official is supposed to save the official from himself. But what a unity! . . . What a dualistic category. . . !”69
And, constantly referring to the opposition between civil society and the State which it presupposes, the mediation, far from being capable of surmounting it, attests to the fact that the political essence was unable to reduce the real to itself, that it is not the essence of the real. That the political essence is the essence and the ultimate reality of the real, that it must as a result restore reality to itself and make it homogeneous with itself in the adequation and the transparence of a perfect consubstantiality, this is, on the contrary, the presupposition of the 1843 manuscript, a presupposition borrowed from Hegel but which Marx wants to render actual. But what if, instead of coinciding in an original ontological unity, the real and the political are prey to an opposition which makes them spring apart as if they were separate poles, “[if] it cannot have escaped Hegel’s notice that he has established the executive as an antithesis of civil society, and indeed as a dominant polar opposite. How then does he prove the existence of an identity?”70
The critique of primogeniture—which is just one more mediation that Hegel has borrowed purely and simply from the Prussian State—is interesting because it makes more obvious and more imperative the requirement that the actual reign of the universal, the actual political penetration of civil society, be established, but above all because it allows us to perceive for the first time an economic definition of this society. The relation between the political and the economic is therefore also posited explicitly for the first time in Marx’s work, and there is no mistaking the solution proposed. The economic element is not the essence, it is not reality and can neither define reality nor determine it, the economic element cannot be a principle of determination. Far from constituting reality, the economic element is, on the contrary, the loss and privation of reality, alienation from reality. Now this initial characterization is found not only in the 1843 manuscript and is due not only to the very peculiar way in which the economic element intervenes at this point in the problematic. All of the subsequent work will attest to the fact that the economic element is never, for Marx, the determining element, the principle in the sense of an ontological productive principle, a naturans, or a founding power, that it is never true and original reality but instead, for the thought that moves back to reality, simply an effect, a determination that has been produced and engendered, a naturata. Certainly, any critical elaboration of the concept of economy is as yet lacking in the 1843 manuscript, or rather the concept is elaborated here in such a naïve fashion that it will later be explicitly rejected. At least the status of the economic element receives a determination that will prove to be decisive, although it still remains purely negative, that of not being reality.
In the 1843 manuscript, reality is political reality. The relation of the political to the economic is precisely the relation of what is real to what is not real. And Marx’s critique of the Hegelian interpretation of primogeniture is precisely the critique of a conception which, by making the economic the determining element, thereby grants it a role, a status, an unreasonable and out-and-out scandalous claim. It is true that Hegel wanted to show the same thing as Marx—their presuppositions, once again, are identical—namely that the State determines the organization of civil society, including, for example, the institution of primogeniture, which he posits as a mediation in the process of its own realization. Only, Hegel showed the contrary: not that the State determines primogeniture, but that primogeniture, or the landed property it represents, determines the State. Against his wishes, Hegel’s analysis produces the inadmissible theory, which is ontologically false, that the economic determines the political. Let us turn to the texts in question.
Primogeniture is the institution whereby the family reserves its landed property for the firstborn, who then receives it as his inheritance. This allows the firstborn to be independent of “the uncertainty of business,” of the fluctuations in possessions that are generally observed in civil society, independent too of governmental power and its favors and, finally, of the very will of the firstborn himself, since he cannot dispose as he likes of the possessions he has received. Through his independence, which rests on that of his fortune, the firstborn is free to assume the tasks and the problems of the State, and in this way the order of primogeniture is, as § 306 states, “more particularly fitted for political position and significance. . . .” Ever faithful to his realism, Hegel thinks that he can find in the family and in nature itself the conditions for realizing the universal. The order of primogeniture forms a “class . . . whose ethical life is natural, whose basis is family life. . . .” (§ 305).
However, the principle of family life is love, “equally loved children,” which grants to each member of the family an equal share in its possessions. Far from being able to rest on the principle of family life, from expressing its “spirit,” primogeniture is its radical negation. The sacrifices entailed for political ends which Hegel asks of the family means sacrificing the family itself, its liquidation. “The state which is called family life,” says Marx, “is thus deprived of the basis of family life.”71 Moreover, according to the Philosophy of Right, property is held to be the expression of free will, its realization, objective becoming in the world. It is in this way that property has a moral, rational, even spiritual significance. In primogeniture, however, landed property falls outside the freedom of the will, outside the will of the father, of the other members of the family, and of the firstborn himself. Property cannot be shared, divided up; it is inalienable, so that “the ‘inalienability’ of private property implies the ‘alienability’ of the universal freedom of the will and of ethical life.”72 Primogeniture should mean independence, but, in fact, it means absolute dependency, the dependency of everyone and of the whole social organization with respect to property, which is set up as an absolute, and to its own proper law. “Property is no longer mine in so far as T put my will into it’; it is truer to say that my will only exists ‘in so far as it exists in the property.’ My will does not possess, it is possessed.”73 Or we might say that the arbitrariness of the owner has become the specific arbitrariness of private property and, to borrow once again from the language of Feuerbach, that “private property has become the subject of will, the will survives only as the predicate of private property.”74 As a matter of fact, it is not only the will which is now no more than the predicate of private property; the entire social organization, the political organization itself, and the State along with it are only the expression of this reversal. It is private property which designates those who possess the right of primogeniture, those who participate directly in the affairs of the State, and, consequently, it is private property which defines the esential element of constituent authority, for it is the stability of landed property that confers upon the State the stability which models and determines its constitution. “The political constitution at its highest point is thus the constitution of private property.”75 And again: “What makes the glories of primogeniture appear in such a romantic light is that private property . . . is made to appear as the highest synthesis of the political State.”76
In the analysis of primogeniture found in the 1843 manuscript, the concept of alienation is divided into three different levels. Alienation designates: (l) the condition in which love is thwarted, prevented from acting in accordance with its own law and made, on the contrary, to accept this transgression of its law—love itself refers here to the “family spirit,” to a manifestation of the objective mind rather than to the life of the individual; (2) the condition in which the will is kept from accomplishing what it wills, that is to say, is unable to objectify or to realize itself—the will here being individual will in the sense of a particular determination, in the sense of “arbitrary”; (3) the condition in which the authentic moral life, the becoming-for-itself, of the universal essence in political consciousness, in consciousness of the State, is itself thwarted in the sense that the real elements of the State are precisely not of the same nature as this consciousness, are not the objectification of the universal—for the real elements of the State no longer designate here the monarch, civil servants, or the various Estates but, in fact, the right of primogeniture. The three terms which serve as the reference for the definition of alienation and which function in each case as its criterion—the spirit of love, arbitrary will, and the effective self-consciousness of universal and rational will—are borrowed from Hegel and are comprehended and defined in light of his ontology. These are Hegel’s own presuppositions which Marx then turns against Hegel, not in order to question them once more but in order to demand their radical realization.
Of the three modes of realizing the concept of alienation as these are implied in primogeniture and which, in turn, determine it, the third is the most important because it concerns reality itself, universal will and its realization in the State, the political essence. To say that by virtue of primogeniture landed property prevents the realization of a rational State and, quite the opposite, makes it merely the formal expression of private property, all this means that the economic element is what in the State prevents the realization of the universal and keeps it at the level of an empty structure. And this in turn means that the economic element is the alienation of the political element. At the time he wrote his Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State, Marx had not yet begun his studies on political economy, and this is why we have asserted that, in the 1843 manuscript, the determination of the concept of the economy remains as yet naïve and, for the most part, negative. This determination is naïve because it purely and simply assimilates the economy with material things, with landed property, with the land. It is especially negative because, in this material, opaque, and determinate element, it grasps only what is opposed to the realization of the universal, to the consciousness of the State.
On the other hand, is it not obvious that the determination of the economic element is actually neither naïve nor negative, since this concept does not arise in Marx’s problematic in complete isolation but, precisely, in connection with the political essence? And it is this relation, the one existing between the economic and the political, which is straightaway in question. And this relation receives, no less immediately, an interpretation in terms of a schema which is far from naïve, that very schema by which Jacob Boehme attempted to understand the relations between God and the world and to which Hegel will return. We have presented this schema because it in fact directs the Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State. This is the schema of opposition. The political and the economic elements are placed within this framework with, on one side, the phenomenal essence of spirituality and, on the other, the opaque determination of matter, raw being. The political element is the “light of the State,” universality in the actuality of its being-for-itself, pure consciousness; the economic element is the earth, its determination restricted to landed property, the “soil.” And the paradox of primogeniture lies in positing as the principle of the State not the State itself, the luminous will of the universal, the being-for-itself of the general, the mind, but rather the absurd claim attaching to a piece of land, the deaf stubbornness of an obscure element, the bluntness of the fact of the matter and the hardness, so to speak, of the ground itself. Here again Marx’s text is enlightening: “The ‘substantial will manifest and revealed to itself’ becomes transformed into a mysterious will broken on the soil, a will intoxicated by the very opacity of the element to which it is attached. The ‘assured convicton with truth as its basis’ which is . . . ‘political sentiment’ is a conviction based [literally] ‘on its own ground.’”77
In the 1843 manuscript Marx gives the name of religion to the naked, brute fact, to its claim to be something in and of itself, matter’s claim to take the place of mind. Religion designates materialism. This is why Marx writes in the same passage: “Because primogeniture is the religious form of private property we find that in our modern age religion has generally become an integral part of landed property. . . . Religion is the highest conceptual form of this brutality.” And again: “Primogeniture is private property enchanted by its own independence and splendor, and wholly immersed in itself; it is private property elevated to the status of a religion.”78 Religion represents the primacy of the economy.
By subsuming the relation between the political and the economic under the schema of opposition, Marx has not entirely forgotten the dialectical relation which never fails to refer the form back to the content. “At every point Hegel’s political spiritualism can be seen to degenerate into the crassest materialism.”79 This relation, however, is no longer comprehended in its necessity, as the very structure of opposition; this structure is no longer questioned. Quite the contrary, Marx himself takes over the Hegelian presupposition of objective universality without admitting as a result just what this objectivity implies, what it is, that is, the liberation of finite being, the manifestation of an obscure element. German philosophy continues to reign although its sense has been lost. For what Jacob Boehme wanted to account for was precisely the manifestation of finite being. In his pathetic effort to justify the world on the basis of the concept of mind, Boehme indeed interprets finite being as the condition of manifestation itself and so thereafter he is able to understand manifestation as the manifestation of finite being. In this way opposition, objectification, and the alienation of mind in the world receive as their decisive meaning the mind’s own proper realization, its capacity to become itself in the emergence of phenomenality. Becoming other is the self’s becoming itself. Consciousness of the object is self-consciousness. The concept of alienation which also—and above all—means realization is nevertheless none other than the Hegelian concept of alienation. This concept secretly determines the entire philosophy of mediation and, on the level of political philosophy, dictates the possibility and the necessity for the objective mind of the State to include within itself natural, material determinations, to posit them as its own condition, as “ideal” determinations.
The moment has now come to state explicitly for the first time: between Hegel and Marx stands Feuerbach. Indeed, it is in Feuerbach that the concept of alienation undergoes a decisive modification. Alienation no longer means realization but, in the ordinary sense of the word: loss, privation. Starting with Feuerbach, then, the concept of alienation in the sense of simple privation dominates neo-Hegelian thought and, through it, the subsequent development of modern philosophy. The second sense of the Hegelian concept of alienation—alienation in the sense of loss or privation—comes thus to cover and to hide the essential determination, that is, alienation in the sense of realization. This is the case notably in Marx. Marx’s entire work—not just the early writings but the later texts as well—is commanded by the privative, negative meaning of the concept of alienation. The opposition is from then on nothing more than a mere opposition. Far from being the condition of light, the earth signifies its suppression. Far from being integrated into the actual becoming of the self-consciousness of the universal, in the State, landed property is its very antithesis, but an antithesis lacking movement, its extreme opposite but a nondialectical opposite, the term frozen in itself, petrified, forever irreducible, the irrational. “In reality primogeniture is a consequence of private property in the strict sense, private property petrified, private property [quand même] at the point of its greatest autonomy and sharpest definition.”80 And Marx even speaks of “the barbarism of private property as opposed to family life.”81
With the decisive modification of the concept of alienation, nature—of which private property is at one and the same time a part and the symbol—thus loses all possible political significance, all spiritual significance, since it has ceased to be the condition for the realization of the concept of mind, one of its elements and, as Jacob Boehme (even before Hegel) would have it, its “basis.” The critique of naturalism that continues throughout the 1843 manuscript derives from this conceptual mutation. Paradoxically, it is under the influence of Feuer-bach’s “materialism” that Marx’s radical political spiritualism, his hyper-Hegelianism, is developed. The denunciation of primogeniture then links up with the great critiques developed in the Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State, thereby enabling us to recognize one of its major themes, the impassioned rejection of any material element which could claim to participate jointly in the constitution of the State organism or even to serve as its ground. The denunciation of primogeniture connects up with the critique of monarchy. In primogeniture, nature claims to define legislative power since those who possess this right are designated by natural birth. “Participation in the legislature is then an innate right of man. Here we have born legislators. . .,”82 As if the position of ideal universality and, above all, the designation of the legislator himself had to refer back to a natural determination rather than to the very form of universality, to thought, to conscious and free will, as this is expressed, for example, in elections, for “elections, the conscious product of the trust of the citizenry, stand in quite a different necessary connection to the political end than does the physical accident of birth.”83 In monarchy nature is held to define sovereign power and, through it, the executive since the king is determined by birth, and it is sexual activity that produces kings just as it determines who will benefit from the right of primogeniture. In the project of the universal, nature is everywhere substituted for mind. “In this system nature creates kings and peers directly just as it creates eyes and noses. What is striking is to discover the product of a self-conscious species represented as the product of a physical species.”84 And again: “At the apex of the political State birth is the decisive factor that makes particular individuals into the incarnations of the highest political office. At the highest level political office coincides with a man’s birth in just the same way that the situation of an animal, its character and mode of life, etc., are the direct consequence of its birth. The highest offices of the State thus acquire an animal reality.”85 This is why it must be said of the very principle of the Hegelian State what Marx said of the nobility and its “secret”: it is mere “zoology.”86
The critique of naturalism therefore now includes an attack on the concept of the individual understood as a natural, “empirical” individual. The naturalistic definition of the individual is borrowed from Feuerbach’s materialism. Not only is the individual tied to the natural functions that take place in him—drinking, eating, procreating—but his essence is constituted by them, the essence of individuality is corporeity. If “the understanding is the power which has relation to species,”87 if it is the consciousness of the species and in this opens us to the universal, no actual existence can ever arise in the milieu opened in this way; the species is ideal and finds its existence only outside itself, in an existence which in its very principle is determined, individual, corporeal. The body is just this very principle of individuation, that is to say, the principle of reality as well. “Individuality and corporeality,” says Feuerbach, “are inseparable.”88And again: “The body is the basis, the subject of personality.”89
However, if the individual is defined in terms of his body—as this is naïvely understood by Feuerbach, that is, as an empirical object—and if the body’s most representative activity is its sexual activity, then the question of its relation to the supreme essence, to the essence of political universality, arises once more with even greater urgency. Now, Marx never ceased to affirm the primacy of this essence. Not only do universality and its objectification in the State, and these alone, define that which is to be considered—and which truly is—rational and substantive, but it is repeatedly stated that this essence is not and must not be something ideal, that it cannot continue to develop outside the real, outside of actual existence, precisely, outside of the individual. Eating, drinking, sex, and the activity through which these functions continually seek their satisfaction together constitute civil society, but civil society must not be something different from the State, from the species, from the universal. If the individual and the State are cast time and again as opposite poles, as the individual, precisely, and the universal, as the real and the ideal, as the empirical and the spiritual, how then can this structural ontological heterogeneity, on the contrary, be overcome; how can a homogeneity be reestablished between them? The 1843 manuscript itself creates a divide of the highest philosophical tension; to Marx must be put the question he himself posed to Hegel: “How is unity to be established?”
The question of how the individual enters into the sphere of the universal is the theme and the content of Hegelianism in general, and this question finds its formulation on the level of political thought in § 308 of the Philosophy of Right:
To hold that every single person should share in deliberating and deciding on political matters of general concern on the ground that all individuals are members of the State, that its concerns are their concerns, and that it is their right that what is done should be done with their knowledge and volition, is tantamount to a proposal to put the democratic element without any rational form into the organism of the State, although it is only in virtue of the possession of such a form that the State is an organism at all. The idea comes readily to mind because it does not go beyond the abstraction of “being a member of the State,” and it is superficial thinking which clings to abstractions.
The quality of being a member of a State is abstract in a democracy because it is presented as immediate, as self-evident. Hegel wants to say that an individual attains universal life only at the end of a process, the process of internal self-negation through which the individual denies his natural determination in order, in this negation and through it—that is, in the negation of the particular which is the work of the universal and which institutes it—to make himself homogeneous with the universal and to participate in its life, to become a member of the State. This sort of process is one of mediation, the final example of which we find here: elections. For everyone cannot participate directly in the affairs of the State but can do so only through the intermediary of elected delegates who, as part of a political assembly, will be able to overcome their natural determinations and their immediate interests. Consciousness of the State passes by way of political representation. We are thus led back to the problematic of the “Estates.” But the critique of elections cannot be a mere repetition of the critique of mediations, which always presuppose the separation they wish to overcome. To the question of the relation between the political essence and the individual, the 1843 manuscript must now provide a response.
This response consists in the metaphysical coup d’état by which the universal is presented straightaway as the essence of the individual. The identity of the civil and of the political no longer remains to be established; it is already given in their very source. The individual is a member of the State. This is why from the outset Marx’s text contests the claim that the determination which consists in being a member of the State must itself be abstract. Is this not the most concrete determination in Hegelianism itself? “In the first place Hegel describes ‘being a member of a State’ as an abstraction, although even according to the Idea, and thus the tendency of his own theory, it is the highest, most concrete social determination of the legal person, of the member of a State.”90 It is therefore not a “superficial” thought, lost in “abstraction,” which considers the individual as a member of the State. It is only in Hegel’s analysis and, it is true, in the modern State that the individual is only abstractly a member of the State, and this is so precisely because the modern State is itself an abstraction, because the political essence is located beyond the reach of real society. It is therefore necessary that this society in itself, that is in its very reality, become “political” and that the individual in himself be “political.” But how is this to occur? “In a really rational State one could reply: ‘Not all, as individuals should share in deliberating and deciding on political matters of general concern,’ for ‘individuals’ do share in deliberating and deciding on matters of general concern as ‘all,’ i.e. within society and as members of society. Not all as individuals, but the individuals as all.”91
With “the individuals as all,” Marx avoids the Hegelian dilemma: either all participate in the affairs of the State—but this is impossible—or else—and this is, consequently, inevitable—only a few: the delegates. But whether all or only a few participate in the affairs of the State, the condition of Hegelian individuals is in every instance identical: the political essence is located beyond them, and this is why they must strive, through a magical transformation, through the internal self-negation of what they are, to arrive at this essence—no matter whether all or only a few ever reach it. It is this metaphysical condition, in which the individual finds himself from the outset separated from the universal essence in the Hegelian world, that Marx attacks; this is why he can say that, in this world, participating in the affairs of the State “either all the individuals act, or a few. . . . In either case ‘all’ refers only to an external multiplicity or totality of the individuals. [Universality] . . . is not an essential, mental, real attribute of the individual.”92
What is meant by “all the individuals” becomes clear. What is important is not the plural form, not the multitude of individuals. It is not a matter of considering a collection, a sum, the plurality of individuals, their external totality. “External,” that is, as this totality is developed in exteriority, as external precisely to each individual. It is a question of each individual, of each individual considered in himself, in his internal essence, in his inner quality. Universality denotes this quality at the same time as it defines reality. And it is to the extent that the individual has this quality in himself that he is real. As long as he does not possess this quality, the individual can only be defined in terms of “abstract individuality.” Inasmuch as he contains this universality, and with it reality, the individual has no need to acquire this quality and, in fact, he would be incapable of acquiring it by joining together with others, by making up a totality together with them, one external to his being which would go beyond the individual in some sense. Universality is not a composite, as in the Hegelian State, in which universality is “only the complete sum of individuality. One individual, many individuals, all individuals. One, many, all—none of these determinations affects the essence of the subject, of the individual.”93
What is in question is therefore the being of the individual, of his essence. The essence of the individual is the political essence. It is on the grounds of this essence in him that the individual is a member of the State, that he not merely shares in the State but that the State is his share,94 his substance, the reality of his particular reality, his individual reality. In the final analysis, democracy is founded on the essence of the individual understood as the political essence. The theory of democracy says that “each is really only a moment of the demos as a whole.”95 It is in the political essence of the individual that the problem of the form of the general concern finds an adequate solution. In § 277 Hegel wrote: “The particular activities and agencies of the State are its essential moments and therefore are proper to it. The individual functionaries and agents are attached to their office not on the strength of their immediate personality, but only on the strength of their universal and objective qualities. Hence it is in an external and contingent way that these offices are linked with particular persons. . . .” Marx calls into question the concept of an individual who would not be defined by his “universal and objective qualities,” who would not be a member of the State, along with the idea of an “immediate personality” the essence of which would not as yet be the political essence. There is indeed a natural element in the individual, but this element could not be the basis of his personality, which is constituted only within the light of the State. “The activities and agencies of the State,” says Marx, “are bound to individuals . . . but not to the individual conceived as a physical being, only as a being of the State; they are bound to the state-like qualities of the individual. It is therefore ridiculous for Hegel to assert that these offices are ‘linked with particular persons in an external and contingent way.’ On the contrary, they are linked to the individual by a vinculum substantial, by an essential quality in him. They are the natural outcome of that essential quality.”96 And again: Hegel “forgets that the essence of the ‘particular person’ is not his beard and blood and abstract Physis, but his social quality, and that the affairs of State are nothing but the modes of action and existence of the social qualities of men.”97 Is it necessary to call attention here to the fact that the definition of the individual in terms of his “essential quality,” understood as “social quality,” as the whole of his “universal and objective qualities,” is really nothing but the hypostasis of the universal with which Hegel was reproached earlier by Marx himself? The general character of the general concern no longer consists in a meaning placed on the horizon of real concerns and intended to render them coherent within a possible unity, a meaning produced by the individuals themselves through the numerous activities of their lives; rather, it defines this very life as its essence, its substance. The life of the individual is no longer the diversity of needs and of labors; it is the universal in and for itself, and this is why it is recognized only in the State. The genealogical thesis, that is to say, the constitution of the political by a reality that precedes it and that is different from it, collapses under the weight of Hegelianism. But the determination of reality is not so easily forgotten, the political concern itself is always a particular concern, and its “general” form, the meaning it possesses, that of being everyone’s concern, enters into contradiction with its concrete content just as, within the individual himself, his alleged universality confronts the actual determination of life in him. What then is the real relation of a particular individual to the being of a real political concern, which is itself something particular?
“On the other hand,” says Marx, “when we speak of specific affairs of State, of a single political act, it is again obvious that it cannot be performed by all people individually. If this were not so it would mean that the individual was himself the true society and thus would make society superfluous. The individual would have to do everything all at once, whereas in fact society has him act for the others, just as it has them act for him.”98 We now see more clearly just what the political element is at the moment when the political essence of the individual is confronted with his reality, with real individuals and with their concrete activity. In the first place, the political element has lost its specific character; it now refers neither to a State nor to a specific State activity but instead to the activity of civil society itself. The political significance of an individual’s activity no longer consists in his participation in “specific affairs,” in a “single political act,” but instead it characterizes his individual activity as such, his daily activity, both personal and professional. This decisive mutation by which the political element is carried back to the social sphere is, of course, not something foreign to Marx’s discussion; rather, it is implied in it, if indeed the political essence is not to remain outside civil society but is to penetrate all its various levels. But how does this “penetration” occur concretely?
This penetration consists in the fact that each individual acts within civil society and, consequently, in his own particular activity for “the others,” just as the others act “for him.” The fact that the individual acts for the others constitutes, however, a meaning which transcends the effective content of his action. When I walk or when I run, when I carry a burden or eat something, the reality of my act does not yet contain in itself, in its mute subjectivity, the “generality of the State,” any more than it represents “private interest” or “egoism.” That the aim of the general is not included analytically in the reality of individual actions is apparent in the fact that such actions can take place, and indeed initially and most often do take place, in the absence of this aim: such is, precisely, the civil society of which Hegel and Marx speak.
Or must we say along with Hegel that individuality is not as bad as it may seem and that, without knowing it, each works “for all”? But what can be the meaning of ideal universality, of the phenomenology of the City, when its status is carried back in the most absurd fashion to that of the unconscious, that is to say, to nature? Marx reproaches Hegel, precisely, with allowing the universal to be lost in the dark, to fall outside of the actual everyday life of civil society and to be experienced only in the exceptional times of “war or a situation of exigency.” “. . . the ideality of the State [exists] . . . as blind, unconscious substance.”99
To say that the “ideality of the State” exists in civil society only as blind substance, this means precisely: the immanent phenomenality of individual activity which constitutes the fabric of civil society, the effective phenomenality of action in its subjective tonality, in its reality for the individual who performs it or experiences it, is not ideal universality nor does it contain ideal universality . By looking within the concrete life of the individual, within the structure of the original experience in which the experiences that are his happen to him and through which this life continues, the philosopher does not find what he is looking for, and what to him has never ceased to stand as the essence, rational universality, the being of that which is the same for all. What is the same “for all” is precisely not what is first of all for each one, namely one’s need, one’s hunger, one’s desire, nor is it the effort or the labor by which one tries to carry these through to their fulfillment. It is just because labor or need are first of all the reality of one individual and belong solely to him that they possess an external relationship to the labor and the need of another individual. This radical exteriority finds its representation in ideal objectivity. Now that this exteriority is hypostatized as a selbständig substance, and now that it is placed within the individual himself as his very reality, exteriority is thus no longer the exteriority of two prior realities, it no longer presupposes them as its condition, it has instead become their condition, preceding them and determining them; it is their inner being. Each individual is essentially this relation to the other; each of his particular determinations bears the mark of this relation and is defined by it, by the universal. Of the individual it must now be said: . . his mode of life, his activity etc. [make] him a member, a function of society.”100 Need, each and every need in its particularity, has become “social.” In this way Marx poses “an essential requirement that every social need, law, etc., should be investigated politically, i.e. as determined by the totality of the State, in its social meaning.”101 It is indeed the State as a whole, the relational totality, which henceforth determines each particular activity, each of the modalities of civil society, each need. Each need is not only social; it does not only contain an essential relation to the other; it actually defines itself in terms of this relation. Because each need defines itself in terms of this relation, it is the relation that defines need, and need thus constitutes the expression of this relation, one expression among others. Because every particular activity expresses the single ideal relation, it also expresses all the other expressions of this relation, just as the others express it; it represents them. Representing in every instance all the other determinations of one and the same essence, it is in every instance this essence that is represented. Every particular activity of civil society is the expression and the “representation” of the human species. “. . . every definite form of social activity, because it is a species activity, represents only the species. That is to say, it represents a determination of my own being just as every man is a representation of other men.”102
It must be explicitly stated once more: between Hegel and Marx stands Feuerbach. It is to Feuerbach that the 1843 manuscript turns in an attempt to overcome the contradictions in which it has become entangled as a result of having carried through its own presuppositions, in an attempt to overcome the contradiction of reality, recognized in its specificity, and of ideality, which continues to be posited as the essence. It is the Feuerbachian concept of “species” which is to make possible and to show the unity sought with respect to civil society and the State, the individual and the universal, the finite and the infinite. Feuerbach’s concept of species is, precisely, the universal; it is the common being, the general, but this universal presents a very peculiar nature. Although it is ideal, it is constituted by the sum of all the concrete individual determinations of existence, by the totality of all the affective, sensuous, and intellectual modalities capable of being actualized in the real life of men. Constituted by the totality of the concrete determinations of existence—an existence which is, in principle, empirical and as such not ideal—the species is ideal nevertheless because these determinations do not, properly speaking, exist in it but are held in it and make up its being only as virtual, potential, unreal determinations. It is always outside the species that these determinations are capable of really existing, in really existing individuals, who, as such, are empirical, material.
What, then, could be simpler, more inevitable, and more obvious than to consider the multiple determinations and activities of individuals as but so many realizations, so many expressions of a single species, a single essence—the human species, the essence of man. “Thus,” says Feuerbach, “the human nature presents an infinite abundance of different predicates, and for that reason it presents an infinite abundance of different individuals. Each new man is a new predicate, a new phasis of humanity.”103 The shoemaker’s activity thus realizes and expresses the human species in its own way, just as does the activity of the painter, the activity of the philosopher, or, yet again, sexual activity, which is considered particularly important (whence the decisive influence of Feuerbach’s work and its widespread echo today as a precursor of Freud). Because all of these activities express one and the same species, they mutually express and represent one another; they are “social” says Marx, “human” says Feuerbach, and the civil society they constitute thus finds in the species from which they all proceed at once its essence, its universal and properly political meaning, and its unity.
The species, however, is only the external grouping together and the mere gathering up of the real activities of different individuals, and their projection into the ideal sphere of representation. How could this representation of diverse activities actually forge them into a real unity, a unity other than that of representation, which consists simply in being represented together? For activities which are not only diverse but even incompatible among themselves can well be represented together. It is on the plane of reality that the unity, or at least the complementarity, the coherence, of these activities must be shown. Far from being able to found the unity of civil society, its immediate political meaning, the species, on the contrary, presupposes it and can at the very most only represent it.
Indeed, it is not only the unity of civil society, the unity of the multiple activities that make it up, which the species is powerless to found, but these very activities themselves. For the species is ideal, according to Feuerbach himself.104 How then could it posit an existence that is located outside of it and that is, in principle, structurally and ontologically heterogeneous with respect to it? And yet Feuerbach makes this absurd deduction, this deduction of the real from the ideal, when he conceives of the species as the primitive unity, as an originary power of multiple determinations, as a productive principle (naturans) which is expressed and realized in them, when, speaking of the “idea of the species” in relation to personality, he says that it “forever unfolds itself in new individuals,”105 and when he writes: “Doubtless the essence of man is one, but this essence is infinite; its real existence is therefore an infinite, reciprocally compensating variety, which reveals the riches of this essence. Unity in essence is multiplicity in existence.”106
These texts would hardly be worth citing if they had not exerted a direct influence on the 1843 manuscript. It is not only the solution that Marx claims to provide for the problem of the immanence of the political essence in civil society which rests on these texts; the critique of monarchy, despite its deliberately anti-Hegelian stance, was already dangerously inspired by them. Although the final philosophical sense of this critique was, as we have shown, the opposition of monadic reality to ideal universality, Marx, in order to deny Hegel the right to include sovereignty within a single individual to the detriment of all the others, thought he had to pass by way of the mediation of the concept of species in presenting his argument. This was the starting point in order to show, after the manner of Feuerbach, that from the species one must then move to all individuals. Marx said that “the essence can never exhaust the spheres of its existence in a single one but only in many ones.”107 This was to reverse the sense of the founding relation which is established between the real and the ideal, to posit at the origin not the real itself, individuals, but precisely the essence, personality; the universal or their Feuerbachian substitutes: the species, “man.”
The 1843 manuscript ends with this reversal. But the substitution of the concept of species for that of rational universality is not a simple return to Hegel, for what we find in Feuerbach is rather a caricature of Hegel. For Hegelian universality is based on an ontology in which ideality defines existence itself if it is true that the latter emerges at the same time as phenomenality in the process by which the Idea sets itself in opposition to itself. But when ideality, instead of founding existence, happens on the contrary to be explicitly opposed to it, when ideality signifies nothing but the non-real, the imaginary, in order, finally, to designate the realm of illusion and of dreams, then the primacy of the species becomes quite simply absurd. For how could the species be the foundation of civil society if civil society is the real and if the species is itself, as ideal, outside of existence: the non-real as such?
In 1843 Marx believed he could counter Hegel by borrowing from Feuerbach because the absurdity of the Feuerbachian concept of “species” had not yet become evident to him, because he had not yet understood that Feuerbach’s philosophy, just as neo-Hegelian philosophy in general, is but a laughable sub-Hegelianism, an Hegelianism emptied of its substance, robbed of its ontological substratum. In fact it is to Hegel that the 1843 manuscript is addressed, and it is out of this dialogue with Hegel and with him alone that this text receives both its sense and the numerous contradictions in which it flounders, inasmuch as, under the mask of Feuerbachian anthropology, it is through a return to Hegel that this text finds its completion, as is shown in the persistence of the teleology of the universal.
From Hegel to Marx, the Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State is a dead end that finally only leads back to Hegel. However, by obstinately showing, like a student set against his teacher, that Hegel was able neither to make the real homogeneous with the development of objectivity nor to reduce the real to objectivity, what Marx questions is indeed the ontological claim of ideal universality, the grounding of objective communities and of transparent totalities; it is the ground of all political thought, that of past Hegelianism as well as that of the Marxism to come, which is shaken and which slips out of sight, while, at the same time, the stage is set for the overthrow of Western philosophy.
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*Ob-ject: the hyphen is used here by the author to remind us of the sense of the prefix ob- as that which is placed before, over, and against.—TRANS.
*We have rendered by ekstasis Henry’s term ekstase, which, with its Heideggerian overtones, is intended in its etymological sense as opening an original dimension of exteriority in which something can then be posited.—TRANS.
*To conform to the author's analysis, we have translated “allgemeine Angelegenheit” as matters of general concern rather than matters of universal concern and have correspondingly modified the quotes from the English-language edition of The Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State. —TRANS.
*The term “private state” (état privé) refers to the private life of the individual; state (état) in lowercase is to be taken in the sense of a condition or situation, while the uppercase form, State, refers to the political entity, in particular to the Hegelian State. Since the author employs “état privé” as the translation of Privatstand and develops in his own text the notion of state as condition in contrast to State as political body, we have kept this distinction in our translation and have modified the passages quoted to correspond to this terminology.— TRANS.