PHIL3395: Marx

Novy SP09

“Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” & Correspondence of 1843

What is a Left Young Hegelian?

Hegel

1. Reconciles the ideal and real: reality is the unfolding of an idea, and thus rational

2. Human consciousness manifests itself objectively in our social/ political/ moral institutions

3. Social system is divided between “civil society” & “the state”

1. The state gives rise to our existence in civil society

2. The state is the subject and the humans are mere predicates

4. State: “the reality of concrete liberty”

1. Synthesis our particular rights and universal reason

2. We are not free by nature but only in the state

Marx’s Methodology

Democracy

5. A state creates a bureaucracy independent of the wishes of the people

6. Abstract “political man” is not the real person

1. So long as civil society/ state are separate, there can be only formal democracy

7. State: people are an appendage to the political constitution whereas in democracy, the constitution is the self-expression of the people

1. “Just as religion does not make man but man makes religion, so the constitution does not make the people but the people make the constitution”

Bureaucracy

1. M: Hegel has transferred the attributes of humanity as a whole to a monarch or a government bureaucracy which illusorily represents universality of modern political life

2. “Bureaucracy counts its own eyes as the final aim of the state … [It] constitutes an imaginary state alongside the real state and is the spiritualism of the state. Thus every object has a dual meaning – a real one and a bureaucratic one …”

1. An ends rather than a means

2. Will cease to exist in a true democracy

Voting

3. Universal suffrage is solution to the division of civil society (where we pursue individual interests) from the political state (the sphere of collective, universal, species-interests)

4. “It is not a question of whether civil society should exercise legislative power through deputies or through all as individuals. Rather it is a question of the extent and greatest possible extension of the franchise, of active as well as passive suffrage. …”

Correspondence with Ruge

1. Intellectuals & “suffering humanity”

2. Reform of consciousness: “that we not dogmatically anticipate events but seek to discover the new world by criticism of the old”

3. “So our slogan must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but through the analysis of mystical consciousness that is not clear to itself, whether it appears in a religious or political form.”