Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

Also known as the Kreuznach Notebooks. An unfinished book manuscript by Marx. Written in Kreuznach from mid-March to the end of September 1843, with 39 original sheets, the first of which was not preserved, and the title added at the time of publication. First published in the 1927 Marx-Engels Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, I/1, under the title Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Hegel’s Doctrine of the State (§§ 261–313).

Marx paid close attention to Hegel’s philosophy of right during his time at the University of Berlin and was deeply influenced by it, however as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, he “first found himself in the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known as material interests”, which shook his belief in Hegel’s philosophy. After leaving the editorial office of Rheinische Zeitung, Marx read a large number of historical works in Kreuznach, which provided him with rich materials, while Feuerbach’s materialist discourse on the relationship between thinking and existence in the Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy directly promoted his critique of Hegelian philosophy and provided him methodological reference.

In this work Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx focused his critique on social and political issues by criticizing Hegel’s exposition of state from many aspects, section by section. Hegel turned the idea into an independent subject, and the actual relationship of family and civil society to the state into the “inner imaginary activity of the idea”. Marx criticized Hegel’s inverted speculative idealism, pointing out that “family and civil society are the presuppositions of the state”, “family and civil society make themselves into the state”, and “the political state cannot exist without the natural basis of the family and the artificial basis of civil society”. While analyzing the relationship between civil society and the state, Marx combined the political situation of Germany and Western Europe to reveal that the main reason is that modern countries can not realize the universal nature of human beings and the interests of the people. Only “true democracy” can eliminate the separation of the separation of civil and political society, or rather, only the separation of the civil and political classes expresses the true relationship of modern civil and political society. “In democracy the constitution itself appears only as one determination, and indeed as the self-determination of the people.” Marx emphasized that the people played a decisive role in social life: “All individuals should share in deliberating and deciding on political matters of general concern”, and that the people absolutely have the right to determinate a new state system for themselves. This shows that Marx was quite close to expound the idea that “it is the people who create the idea of state”. At the same time, Marx exposed in his critique that Hegel has done nothing but resolve the constitution of the state into the universal, abstract idea of the organism; but in appearance and in his own opinion he has developed the determinate reality out of the universal Idea, and he has made the subject of the idea into a product and predicate of the Idea, and he “does not develop his thought out of what is objective [aus dem Gegenstand], but what is objective in accordance with a ready-made thought which has its origin in the abstract sphere of logic”, and “it is not a question of developing the determinate idea of the political constitution, but of giving the political constitution a relation to the abstract Idea, of classifying it as a moment of its (the idea’s) life history, and this is an obvious mystification”.

Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is of great significance in the development of Marx’s thought. At this time, Marx was only at the level of general materialism, far from historical materialism, but this manuscript marked Marx’s conscious transition to historical materialism in the process of criticizing Hegel’s philosophy of right. As Marx himself recalled this experience, he said: “My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the conditions of material life, the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English and French thinkers of the 18th century, embraces within the term ‘civil society’; that the anatomy of this civil society, however, has to be sought in political economy.”