Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

Past and present

Hegel’s conviction that what validated his belief in the integrative,
expressive power of the state was the interplay of reason and history -
his conviction that the state is the ‘hieroglyph of reason’, which needs
deciphering - is a difficult argument. It is difficult not because it leads
to conservatism of the traditionalist variety but precisely because it
does not. In describing the state as the mediated, integrative (einheimisch)
community, rendered habitable by thought, Hegel was not setting forth
a justification for any current political form but offering a solution to
a set of moral and philosophical problems. Indeed, what makes the
centrality of the state as an integrative agency directly relevant to an
understanding not only of Hegel - who endorsed such centrality - but
also of Marx - who did not - is Hegel’s argument about why this inte-
gration is necessary in the first place.

That Hegel’s political philosophy was emphatically state-centred is
well enough known. What is less well known, but equally important,
is that the centrality of the state in Hegel’s thought was predicated
upon a sustained and incisive critique of all the social, political and
philosophical sources of disintegration he could identify. Hegel was
a relentless critic of all forms of moral individualism since Socrates.
The Phenomenology of Mind and The Philosophy of Right were
scathing in their criticisms of everything Hegel considered to have
contributed to the disconnection and privatization of men in modern
society, and thus to have obscured the prospect of a genuinely political
community. Lack of connectedness, lack of cohesion, lack of a political




public, lack of shared concerns and moral values - there are the themes,
promulgated as a set of cross-cutting dilemmas in The Phenomenology
(a study in moral and cognitive fragmentation), which The Philosophy
of Right was to attempt to resolve at the level of political institutions.
While any sustained examination of the themes that link The
Phenomenology and The Philosophy of Right is beyond the scope
of this study, one element in the continuity between them must be
stressed. Hegel was concerned to account for, and come to terms
with, the thought of the past before constructing philosophical and
political systems that he considered valid for his own time and
place. Yet it is of the essence of Hegel’s philosophical method that
these two tasks were kept separate only in a limited and provisional
sense. Politics and philosophy were always intimately, and intricately,
connected throughout Hegel’s intellectual development. Hegel’s passion-
ately held concern - even as a young man - was for the establishment of
a political life that would educate; from the outset, he believed that
this task presupposed the restoration of intellectual, cultural and
ethical unity. The task was a philosophical one, but Hegel’s under-
standing of philosophy was expansive. He constantly stressed the social
context, and political outcome, of apparently abstract ideas, and
recognized that man’s self-consciousness and intellectual progress are
themselves social products with social and political consequences. In
particular, the culture of a country or epoch - the form taken by
Hegel’s Geist - and the way it moulds men’s minds - Hegel’s Bildung
(which was to Hegel a political enterprise) - strongly influence both the
objective structures of political life, its laws and institutions, and the
subjective sentiments and attitudes of men which sustain - or undermine
-these structures.

The central point of Hegel’s political philosophy is that self-determi-
nation needs an arena in which common (not uniform) values, interests
and purposes can be elicited, formulated and sustained, and that this
arena can be provided only by the modern state. What is striking about
this prescription - and what makes it directly relevant to Marx’s subse-
quent reflections - is the uncommonly acute sense Hegel possesses,
throughout its explication, of the interpenetration of ways of thinking
about the social and political world, and the forms taken by this social
and political world. Even in The Phenomenology, which is concerned
(as its title suggests) with the appearance of knowledge, Hegel’s subject
is the successive endeavours of consciousness to grasp (begreifen) the
world and itself in relation to the world. The process is a reflexive one.
Hegel never counterposed ‘consciousness’ as an external, transcendental
corrective to the social and political world - as many of the utopian
socialists and anarchists criticized in Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach did;
he portrayed consciousness - and indicated whose consciousness it was
- as an immanent presence within the world. Instead of confronting




‘the present’ with ‘the eternal’ as two counterposed realms, it seemed
necessary to Hegel to recognize that ‘eternity’ - if we must so character-
ize it - is incomprehensible apart from the moments of its appearance
and their historical, human character. Hegel here is resolute. To regard
the itinerary of spirit, or consciousness, in the world as the path to the
absolute, as Fichte did, is to leave out the world. Spirit is the path of
the absolute, not to it. The ‘beyond’ (Jenseits) presenting itself to
consciousness as a pure externality (Anderssein) is the enemy of philo-
sophical self-awareness as Hegel conceived it - an enemy taking its cue
from Kantian dualism and dividing the world arbitrarily into actuality
on the one hand and potential on the other. This notion of infinity -
infinity wrongly conceived - denies the finite, and is a form of vapid
world-denial. Its effect is to make duty even more of an abstraction
than it had been with Kant. What is necessary to redress the balance
and rehabilitate the world, is Hegel’s conception of Vemunft, or
reason, as opposed to Verstand, or mere understanding. Vemunft
signifies what Weber was to call ‘this-worldliness’, the inner connections
linking apparently separate realities. It is too often forgotten that
Hegel’s ‘spirit’ (Geist) refers to the totality of attitudes, beliefs, rules,
institutions and habits that make up the political culture of a country
and epoch - and enable us to see how, and why, one political culture
gives way to, or is displaced by, its successor. The concept is far less
mystical than often has been supposed: its proximate mentor, as
Hegel himself frequently and gratefully acknowledged, was Montesquieu,
whose notion of the esprit general is a direct precursor of Hegel’s
‘spirit’, which is in the first instance nothing but human spirit.² The
term refers to the way a community knows and interprets itself, the
way it gives itself form and coherence;and also to the way the individual
personality knows itself through the community - that is, its identity,
which is always integrally connected with the impact of society.³
Knowledge itself - as always with Hegel - consists not in the accumu-
lation of information but in moral transformation.

Hegel’s historical psychology, which owes much more to Montesquieu
than to Herder, is manifestly not relativist. Nor is his political theory at
all complacent. He believed that to see morality and politics historically
is to appreciate their failure. Culture {Bildung) is supposed to help its
human constituents fulfil their potentialities; but it fails, and fails
miserably, to do so in modern times. This is why Hegel, in The
Phenomenology, speaks mainly of ancient politics; in comparison with
these, modernity is characterized negatively, by what it lacks. On the
other hand, as Lukacs has pointed out,⁴ Hegel’s discussions of ancient
society never involve its economic life, and always concentrate on its
politics and religion. His discussions of modern society - as we shall see
- are very different. Culture by its very nature shapes people; but in
modern society, according to Hegel, it does so badly. The outcome is




one of crisis, of moral emergency; the question became whether, in the
face of what were to Hegel observably fragmenting tendencies permeating
modern society, there was any possibility of a politics that would be
either just or stable.

Despite his admiration for the polis, however, Hegel - by the time
he wrote The Philosophy of Right - no longer shared in the prevalent,
and somewhat escapist,Graecophilia ofhis age and nation; he recognized
that the ancient polis had come to grief on the very principle - moral
individualism - for which the modern age stood. Moral individualism,
which Hegel criticized remorselessly, nevertheless cannot be wished out
of existence; on the contrary, it has an integral place in modern society.
This place, sharply demarcated though it is in modern times, was
altogether lacking in the ancient city. Men in antiquity were not yet
individuals; men in modern society run the risk of being nothing more.
Yet men had to move beyond the naive and spontaneous condition of
the polis, where each man unreflectingly had seen every other in
himself, and himself in them; movement beyond this unity is a clear
historical advance, even though it is bought at a heavy - and inflationary
-price; the ancient world, Hegel (unlike so many of his contemporaries)
came to recognize, cannot be uncritically wrested out of its context to
serve as a paradigm to his own times.

To see this emergence more clearly, according to Hegel, we should
have recourse to history, considered broadly and philosophically.
History to Hegel was a rational process; the human past exhibits an
intelligible pattern of development, in the course of which men acquire
an increasing awareness of themselves and their potentialities, creating
institutions that reflect and give substance to their character as self-
determining beings. The process is neither smooth nor uninterrupted,
let alone unilinear; it has its setbacks, its false starts, its failures. These
follow from the pattern Hegel depicts, in which the advances of one
historical period become in their turn limitations which are to be
overcome in the next. Men make their own history but can rarely
predict the eventual outcomes of their own actions - actions which
might be prompted by short-term selfish calculations or private interests,
but whose consequences might prove momentous from a retrospective
standpoint. And the only possible view of the route taken is a retro-
spective one. The mind needs to recollect itself along the path taken.
Reason in history should be understood as active through the individual
not over him; our own comprehension of our own past - spread out, or
eloigne, as the French say, like the self in psychoanalysis - is part of
what history comports. ‘Spirit’ informs and infiltrates social reality by
its purposive action in the world; history itself, that is to say, was to
Hegel as much as to Marx the record of mankind’s autonomous, self-
created needs along with the successive means to their fulfilment. The
language with Hegel as with Marx was that of self-validating emergence




over time. (To describe social reality, Hegel constantly had recourse
to the root verb wirken which describes or implies human action
having concrete social effects, and which lacks the static, ‘given’ im-
plications of the Latin res.) Social reality is both repository and realiz-
ation of the finite, manmade past; what this means is that historical
change is not only recognized as being fundamental to an understanding
of normative problems (rights, duties, obligations) but also as the only
vantage point from which the perennial problems of political theory
could properly be viewed.

State and civil society

The path to freedom - in Hegel’s sense of freedom as self-determination

• 
  runs through society, not outside it; there is no point outside society
  from which its progress can be judged. Hegel’s notion of das Allgemeine
  (the universal, general, common, public) - the most important word in
  The Phenomenology and The Philosophy of Right alike - is not the
  enemy, but the expression, of freedom; and freedom, in Hegel’s view
  of it, is the identity (not the correspondence) of the universal with the
  personal goals of the individual. Freedom, as the identification of sub-
  jectivity and objectivity is not a state or a condition, but an opportunity
  for action; it is an activity that has its conditions.
  

According to Hegel, the rationality that permeates the human,
historical world becomes apparent and reveals itself by stages. At the
level of the family, rationality is hidden behind feeling and sentiment;
in civil society, it appears as the instrumentality of individual self-
interest; but only at the level of the state does reason become ‘conscious
of itself. Morality, which exists in the family and in civil society,
reveals itself as thought only in the state. Hegel’s state is meant to
provide us with an opportunity. Only in the properly political realm
can men’s actions be at one with their intentions; only in the state may
man, as a self-determining being, know what he wants and be able to
act accordingly to bring it about. This requires that certain rather strict,
ambitious requirements be met - not by men, but by the state - if the
state is to be worthy of men’s moral purposes. Hegel’s state was to be
free from the shackles of feudal absolutism, based on a complex,
articulated network of institutions that would represent the various
interests in society, served by a rationally ordered bureaucracy, and
not to be based upon anything so ‘accidental’ as nationalistic, linguistic
or ethnic ties. What justifies the state is its satisfaction of rational
criteria; it should mediate, and strike a balance not simply among
conflicting individual imperatives - this can be done within civil society

• 
  but among all the complex institutions and groups needing represen-
  tation throughout the political community at large.
  

The picture is not an orthodox traditionalist one. Hegel distinguished
himself from those who based their political constructions upon reason
alone, and from those who were content to accept the status quo with-
out enquiring too searchingly into its foundations. He certainly asserted
the primacy of the modern state against, not alongside, the traditionalist
notion of the German Volk as a political unity. In his forthright oppo-
sition to grossdeutsch nationalism, Hegel unequivocally dismissed
Herderian attempts to revive the German Ur-Mythos\ old German
tradition, he had insisted, ‘has nothing in our day to connect or adapt
itself to; it stands as cut off from the whole circle of our ideas, opinions
and beliefs, and is as strange as the imagery of Ossian or of India’.⁵
Hegel decisively turned against the German nationalism of his day,
largely because this movement had turned its back upon the fait ac-
compli of the Napoleonic rationalization of law and politics, and had
promulgated, in place of these needed reforms, an obscurantist and
backward looking set of romantic chimeras. Hegel did not believe that
mere survival over time conferred legitimacy on any state-form. As
opposed to thinkers like Savigny, von Haller and Fries (or, for that
matter, Burke) who - much to Hegel’s disgust - would deny men even
the capacity to legislate, Hegel set forth the belief that the legitimacy
of the modern state has to meet requirements that do not involve any
celebration of the customary of the kind paraded by the political
theorists of German Volksgemeinschaft. It is, perhaps, no accident that
the pietistic, romantic and pseudo-medieval Prussia of Frederick William
IV - who went to the lengths of summoning the aging Schelling to
Berlin University to stamp out the vestiges of Hegelianism - virtually
ostracized Hegel. Hegel’s Prussia - the Prussia in which and for which
he wrote The Philosophy of Right - was the earlier, reformed and
‘enlightened’ Prussia of von Stein and Hardenburg. His servility to
even this Prussia had its limits: the institutional structure of Prussia at its
most reformed did not correspond to that which Hegel outlines in The
Philosophy of Right. Far from having uncritically venerated or celebrated
the Prussia of his day, Hegel, for all his pretensions, seriously misread
the Zeitgeist, and underestimated the force of German nationalism.

In other respects, however, Hegel read the Zeitgeist all too well. The
most relevant aspect of Hegel’s theory of the state to Marx’s response
was Hegel’s adamant insistence that the state should not be confused
with, nor reduced to the level of, civil society. ‘If the state is confused
with civil society’, Hegel emphasized, ‘and its specific end is laid down
as the security and protection of property and personal freedom, then
the interest of the individual as such becomes the ultimate end of their
association. But the state’s relation to the individual is quite different
from this.’⁶ Hegel’s statement is less illiberal than it sounds. In civil
society, he tells us, ethical life (Sittlichkeit) is ‘split up into its extremes
and lost’,⁷ whereas the state has an altogether worthier and more




integrative aim. The citizens of Hegel’s state are united because they
are conscious of the moral possibilities of acting together. All its
institutional mechanisms are designed to encourage and facilitate such
an advance in consciousness over the level it can attain in civil society,
and the advance is moral and rational all at once. Hegel justifies the
modern state because of the social self-understanding it permits, and
which permits it. As modern men, Hegel admits, we appropriate the
world subjectively - in the first instance; he adds that we may under-
stand the world we appropriate only by paying attention to the appro-
priations of others. We understand them through ourselves, and our-
selves through them, in a process (which can be a struggle) for recognition
and acknowledgment. The state provides what is in modern times the
only possible forum in which this acknowledgment can take place; it
helps us focus on one another.

Freedom in Hegel’s political philosophy consists in self-determination
of the kind that specifically depends on the self-determination of
others, and which presupposes an ethical community - the state - as
well as the elements of moral autonomy and critical reflectiveness
that emerge in civil society. Political self-determination contains within
itself abstract self-assertion as one of its ‘moments’ but it cannot be
satisfied by what self-assertion provides. It needs something altogether
worthier: an arena where values, interests and purposes can be elicited,
formulated and sustained. This arena - the state - makes provision (as
civil society and its institutions cannot make provision) for the harmon-
ization and synthesizing of private and public interests by means of the
institutional and juridical structures that Hegel outlines, in all their
complex articulation, in The Philosophy of Right. Ethical and political
cohesion are achieved by means of an interpenetration of government,
group representation and public opinion; this pattern of interaction,
while it does not displace or annul the ethically less worthy pursuits
of men in civil society, does provide an ethical content for men’s lives
that civil society, taken as a model, would be woefully incapable of
furnishing.

The modern state Hegel outlined and defended is based on the
rational and moral allegiance of the citizen as mediated by ‘the spirit
and art of political institutions’ and not by social, nationalistic, linguistic
or religious uniformities taken abstractly; all these could be regarded in
Hegel’s lexicon as ‘accidental’, although to more orthodox conservatives
they were the mainstay of legitimacy. Hegel’s concern that specifically
political membership should be reduced to nothing outside itself is
expressed most forcefully, however, in opposition to those who would
make of the state, with its ‘prodigious strength and depth’⁸ a mere
watchdog over men’s pursuits in civil society. Properly political pursuits
should on no account be confused with, or reduced to, economic
pursuits. The state should not be regarded in instrumental terms. It




works to its own end. In particular, not only is the state not a device
for the protection of property (by its very nature it offends against
property by levying taxes and waging war); it provides a system of
moral integration specifically because economic life in civil society has
particularized and atomized men so that they need the simultaneous
higher membership the state provides. Hegel’s state is said to overcome
what Marx was to insist no state could overcome: it is to overcome
the atomistic individualism of the economic sphere without in any way
displacing or abolishing this individualism. It should be emphasized
that Marx’s opposition to Hegel’s state is based more on what it cannot
do than on what it does: as far as Marx was concerned, any state that
does not abolish economic individualism is itself subsumed within - or
beneath - such individualism. The need to abolish it is not postponed
but strengthened if it is given a new lease of life by being validated and
artificially kept alive by the state.

What Hegel and Marx share is very fundamental indeed: an opposition
to the dissociative tendencies produced by modern civil society and the
operation of the modern economy, and a profound recognition that
modern economic life is the antithesis of community. The continuity
between Hegel and Marx in this very respect - a continuity that has
never been sufficiently emphasized - has as its outcome the demolition
of what has been called ‘the political theory of possessive individualism’.
In Hegel’s view, to regard the economy as a primary, inviolate realm -
arid the state as a mere regulatory agency, standing outside civil society
and merely preserving the exterior conditions of civil society’s sup-
posedly automatic tendency to adjust and correct its own workings-is
to get one’s priorities reversed and to mistake cause for effect. Yet the
‘hidden hand’ of the classical economists would reduce the state to
being the arbitrary political resultant of the play of social forces, and
these social forces, the economists added, are in turn reducible to the
clash of subjectivities in civil society. This reduction was to Hegel
unconscionable. The clash of subjectivities can neither implement nor
sustain a community of right. Indeed, the clash and clang of subjec-
tivities according to Hegel is unlikely to produce anything more har-
monious than the clamour of the market-place, which should on no
account be allowed to drown out properly political discourse.

Over and above this objection, what was particularly bothersome
to Hegel was the idea that contract between individual wills could
stand as a model or paradigm for properly political relationships, as
in social contract theories of the state. Social contract theory transfers
‘the characteristics of private property into a sphere of a quite different
and higher nature’.⁹ The state is not a partnership. Nor is it something
that anybody decides for or against. Political power cannot be dissolved
into the assertion of private rights; it is not a matter of adjudicating
conflicting individual claims. A state reduced to the level of doing so




would become arbitrary in the sense that its basis, the individual human
will, is arbitrary. Yet what was to Hegel the facile constitution-mongering
of contractarian liberalism would reduce the state, which is ‘exalted
above the sphere of things that are made’, to the level of an arbitrary
political resultant of the play of social forces.¹⁰ Hegel was happy to
endorse Montesquieu’s immanent critique of contractarian liberalism’s
mechanistic and artificial notion of a ‘constitution’ as a mere external
juridical act. To Montesquieu and Hegel alike, the state is not an
outcome but a presupposition; it is the basis, not the effect, of the
individual’s conscience and will.

Hegel, indeed, was at his shrewdest in disputing the claims not
only of ‘state of nature’ theories of government but also of what
generally were their basis, ‘state of nature’ theories of property. Such
theories - Locke’s would be an example - which endeavour to justify
property in society on the grounds of its pre-social existence are,
according to Hegel, deeply confused. All these theories can do is to
establish or explain appropriation as a power or faculty, and not
property as a right. Property rights, like all rights, depend for their
existence on being recognized within a normative order; they are
claims or entitlements and not the straightforward consequences of
original appropriation. Locke - unlike Hegel-even presupposes original
self-possession in the state of nature, which is from Hegel’s point of
view not only wrong but also ridiculous. The economic sphere to Hegel
is not just a reflection of pre-existing needs and the struggle to satisfy
them. It is a medium for their development, and ‘political economy’
itself, correspondingly, is not given but constituted within other aspects
or areas of human life. Political economy does not stamp or dominate
these areas - that power relations would collapse into relations of
wealth was one of Hegel’s greatest fears - but, instead, these areas
make political economy comprehensible. Political economy was not
with Hegel the master science, or even the basis for a general philosophi-
cal position, it was to be with some utilitarians.

Contractarian liberalism is ‘abstract’ to Hegel because it would build
social and political relations on individual will and subjective self-
assertion. If human relations are no more than relations among individual
wills, then every individual would see in every other individual a rival,
an obstacle, a limitation on his own purely personal freedom, and
nothing or nobody outside the individual could express or embody
that individual’s freedom. At the level of civil society, each constituent
can realize his own ends only in this way - either by disregarding those
of everyone else, or by treating and encountering others abstractly and
interchangeably. Contractarian liberalism, consequently, is based on
deficient principle; specifically, two things are confused that at all
costs, according to Hegel, should be kept apart - the merely social
and the properly political. Contractarian liberalism, like economic life




in civil society’s ‘system of needs’, is reducible not to a genuinely moral
principle of self-determination, but only to individual (hence ‘abstract’)
self-assertion, which could provide no politically generative principle.

Hegel’s criticism, though forthright, is not a blanket condemnation;
he nowhere denies that the subjectivism and egoism that amount to
deficient, incomplete political principles also have some salutary
preliminary characteristics. Civil society is progressive in that its emerg-
ence signifies a break with the ancien regime, with all traditional
legitimations - including that of religion - that might have restricted
economic activity. Men in civil society are left free to do what they
think fit, and this is an advance. Modern individualism corrodes tra-
ditional, ascriptive values, releases the individual from assigned, feudal
status (a status the passing of which Hegel, like Marx, was not at all
inclined to mourn),and makes possible - as well as necessary - individual
participation in the state. For the first time individual satisfaction
emerges from feudal circumscription as a human right, as one indis-
pensable basis for membership in the state. Hegel never denied that
critical, reflective subjectivity (however ‘abstract’ it may be) provides
the basis of a higher morality than that of unthinking attachment to
hallowed institutions and immemorial customs.

Subjectivity implies independence, self-sufficiency, autonomy and
personal liberty, and all these have their part to play in modern society.
Nevertheless, by their very nature they cannot provide unity, or provide
for the cohesiveness that modern political life increasingly needs. Con-
catenation is a more likely outcome of the play of subjectivity than is
unity. Relations of external dependence among isolated individuals -
with their corollaries of egoism and conflict, both inner and outer -
cannot produce or sustain properly political membership.

Hegel’s portrayal of civil society (burgerliche Gesellschaft) was
predicated upon Adam Smith’s - and Sir James Steuart’s - depiction
of modern society as, above all else, an institution of exchange. Within
society so defined, self-interested persons separately pursue wealth,
and their actions create, unintentionally, a minimal public interest.
Thanks to Smith’s ‘hidden hand’, separate private pursuits intersect
into what is - to wrest a phrase from Kant - a kind of asocial sociability,
one which results from the clash of subjectivities. Yet J.N. Findlay’s
claim that ‘Hegel sees a deep affirmation of his own philosophy in the
principles of Adam Smith and Ricardo, which connect the selfish
pursuit of individual good with the realization of the collective good of
all’¹¹ is unjustified. Hegel’s limited arguments for ‘the selfish pursuit
of individual good’ - which, as he recognized, was not a socially gen-
erative or integrative principle at all - were often defences against the
aristocratic assertion that mere trade was base and ignoble. (Hegel’s
interpreter ignores the incisive portrait of bourgeois versus aristocrat
in The Phenomenology¹² at his peril.) Men relate to one another in




the commercial system of civil society, Hegel insisted, as the bearers
of rights - in particular, of property rights and the rights of conscience;
these may not have been fully recognized or sanctioned in the Germany
of his day, but they are established as imprescriptible rights in The
Philosophy of Right, long before Hegel deals with civil society as such.
Men in civil society, that is to say, exhibit a self-certainty to which
they are morally entitled; and they exteriorize themselves as the sub-
jects of needs. In expressing and fulfilling these needs, men need some,
minimal, measure of social co-operation. What Hegel calls ‘the system
of needs’ provides this measure of co-operation, but in a wholly external
manner. While at the level of the family the principle of social and
moral unity is immediate, unreflective and inward, at the level of civil
society people encounter other people reflectively, calculatingly, out-
wardly and indirectly. These encounters denote an advance in social
self-consciousness over the level it attains within the family, and this
advance makes of civil society a means to liberty (in the sense of self-
determination) or a presentiment of liberty. But Hegel’s civil society is
an unsubstantiated version of liberty. It provides and can provide no
real focus for individual or social identity; these need a specifically
political, and not a merely social focus, as Rousseau had recognized.

Hegel’s distinction here between the bourgeois and the citoyen is
very much a distinction between individualism and individuality con-
sidered as animating principles, largely as the German Romantics had
perceived it. Individualism may satisfy the requirements of the market
economy, i.e. self-awareness and action (self-assertion) based upon it.
Yet individuality requires more than civil society can provide. Men in
civil society relate to one another through their own individual pur-
poses which intersect, cross-cut and collide; civil society itself can best
be seen as a force-field, its institutions taking the form of resultants
rather than syntheses. Civil society exhibits some cohesion, but cannot
supply integration; it operates as some sort of system - regularly and
predictably - and it stimulates similar responses among its inhabitants,
without in any way really uniting them. The network of individual
purposes on which it is based enables the system to function pre-
dictably enough; but what is not needed for the system to function
is needed by those human subjects whose activities make the system
work. The analogy with Marx’s portrayal of capitalism is striking;
Hegel’s civil society, and Marx’s capitalist society, both operate, or
function regularly and predictably, not despite but because of the
moral and social reduction of their human constituents. But there is
one crucial difference. According to Hegel, man is part of the system
of civil society only in one of his aspects, only as a producer; he is
integrated in no other sense. To Marx, it is precisely as a producer that
man is most manifestly not integrated; the question of what else is
left as a source of integration is quick to impose itself.




Sir James Steuart’s conception of the ‘statesman’ (which really
means ‘form of government’), whose function is to superintend econ-
omic activity, points to conclusions very different from those of Adam
Smith. The modern commercial economy in particular, according to
Steuart, far from bringing into play some providential ‘hidden hand’,
needs the kind of superintendence over its rate of growth that the
‘statesman’ can provide; only in this way, Steuart - and, following
Steuart, Hegel - believes, can some of the more pernicious aspects of
the growth of commercial relations be mitigated, and ‘harm to any
member of the commonwealth’ be avoided. Steuart, who in this way
was alien to Smithian laissez faire, was probably influenced by the
German Cameralist tradition and in particular by Justi (Steuart’s
Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy was composed in
Tubingen where as a Jacobite he was exiled after the 1745 rebellion).¹³
Hegel’s ‘police’ (Polizei) - the controlling function over civil society’s
‘system of needs’ - follows from Steuart’s ‘statesman’; each means the
public authority making more secure the contingent and haphazard
relationships dominating civil society. The problem - particularly in
the case of Hegel - was that of securing and superintending civil society
without stifling the freedom and autonomy that animate civil society
in the first place. Hegel’s solution is to restrict the authority of the
‘police’ very severely - so that it merely restores sufficient equilibrium
to enable society to carry on - and to place it under some kind of
representative control, without which it would appear as alien, as an
intrusion. Marx, as we shall see, was to insist that the most ‘represen-
tative’ modern political authority, the liberal bourgeois state, must
appear alien and intrusive in this very sense. What Hegel objected to in
Adam Smith’s depiction of civil society was not so much its accuracy -
or indeed its character as what looked like the wave of the future - but
its providentialism. On Smith’s presentation, conflicting interests are
balanced out by some ‘hidden hand’ so that harmony results. To Hegel,
harmoniousness is exactly what is lacking in civil society. It has no
principle of unity and it is incapable of producing any principle of
unity. Smith had acknowledged the lack of any natural principle of
equilibrium, and had sanctioned the removal of natural and super-
natural validations for society and politics; the hidden hand is at
least an intrinsic, artificial validation. As far as Hegel was concerned,
however, artificial balance is no more morally worthy or integrative
on Smith’s presentation than is natural balance.

Hegel here is referring us to what it is that is being balanced. When
individuals live ethically apart from one another, using or being used by
other individuals, negotiating mutual use across a broadening spectrum
of social existence, any real, morally generative rules can appear only as
‘abstract’, as distant, external, and partial; they would also have to be
imposed. The rules that govern property, its acquisition, inheritance


and exchange are moral rules - they are among the first moral rules. But
there are severe limits to the content of the morality involved. The
operation of property regulations establishes what Hegel calls ‘abstract
right’ - the web or network of assurances and predictability (what the
French call prevision) that underlies property relations. ‘Abstract right’
is exemplified in contractual relations, yet even these are to Hegel
minimal relations among immediate persons - persons, that is, who are
conceived of abstractly, and who are considered independently of all
social relations, independently of the actual position in society that
each of the contracting parties might hold. ‘Abstract right’ thus en-
joins the notion of equality before the law - which in Hegel’s lexicon
is a presupposition of civil society, as well as of the more elevated
state. The necessity for such legal fictions - which Hegel nowhere
denies - nevertheless indicates the arbitrary, formal nature of con-
tractual ties. Agreements about honouring contracts are arbitrary in
the additional sense that they presuppose what they cannot create -
the power that communal life and social expectations can give them.
Contractual obligation, again, is morally unworthy in the sense that it
brings about no change in the moral identity of the individuals who are
engaged in contracting; these individuals start out as egoists, calculate
accordingly, and emerge from the contract as egoistic as they were
before (if not more so). There may be a bare-bones morality in keeping
one’s promises for the sake of maintaining the web of assurances made
necessary by private property relations - it is not generally in one’s
long-term interests to break one’s word - but this morality was to
Hegel proximate not to significant morality but to criminality and
cynicism (which passed for morality with Voltaire and the early political
economists). Civil society, because it signifies the deprivation of ethical
possibilities, creates requirements it cannot satisfy. In itself.it contains
the germs of disillusion,hopelessness, cynicism and anarchy; it produces
an ethical contagion it lacks the wherewithal to remedy.

Hegel considered wealth to be a purely instrumental category the
pursuit of which cannot of itself inspire ethical ideals or educative
values.¹⁴ Wealth, indeed, is instrumental in the extremely limited sense
that it can generate further wealth. But it leads nowhere beyond itself.
Its limited character is pointed up by its obverse, aristocratic honour,
as well as by its converse, pauperism; both wealth and honour breed
arrogance and exclusivity, and both wealth and pauperism breed self-
absorption. As an alternative to both aristocratic honour and the
poverty of the ‘rabble’, wealth can provide power and independence,
to be sure; but it is not power and independence that are lacking in
the first place. They are components of the individual personality and
will; but they are not its only components. Self-determination requires
much more than power and independence taken (as Hegel thought
they were being taken) as ends in themselves.




The individualism animating and exemplifying civil society is in
Hegel’s eyes sufficiently finite and restrictive to constitute what can
only be, morally, a case of arrested development. In civil society one
is simply not constrained to make choices. One does not decide how
(or even whether) one should live in civil society: one does not reflect
- nor does one need to reflect - what one’s goals ought to be. Purely
personal goals are of no account; and, sacrificing or bracketing them,
one simply acts, or behaves, the way others act or behave. There is
in civil society no conscious purpose, only given necessity. No agree-
ment on the fundamentals of moral and social life - no properly political
agreement - can arise there. It is because so little leeway is provided in
civil society for the exercise of the rational will that Hegel insisted that
this exercise is political.

The search for wealth fails the self. In pursuing it, the self engages
others only abstractly; all encounters among individuals in their pursuit
of wealth are blocked encounters, which point the way to a society of
interchangeability. Market relations in civil society represent an un-
interrupted self-existence which is necessarily disruptive and discon-
tinuous, and which comes unhinged. Others are encountered, but only
barely; everyone encountered has a use, but no one has a place. People
think of themselves and others as dissociated beings; the prerequisite
for an ethical order-intersubjectivity-is unavailable. People encounter
others (and themselves through others) indirectly, if at all; self-under-
standing emphasizes the marginality of others in the conduct of everyday
life; and any search for moral meaning is blocked off in advance.
Consequently, moral meaning itself becomes elusive; access and recog-
nition are reduced to the level of a blocked encounter; and moral
horizons are foreshortened. Self-assertion, in short, turns into the
negation of selfhood, for selfhood depends on the possibility of real
moral transformation, which self-assertion, taken as an end in itself,
must preclude. Civil society, the arena of self-assertion, the realm of
the accidental, the contingent, the fortuitous, the arbitrary, the ca-
pricious, adds up to a system of universal dependence.