Kommentar zu Hegel und Marx, Chapter 10
The Critique of the State and Its Continuation
At one point Marx’s critique goes beyond the question of Hegel’s presentation, and this point carries further than anything else in the manuscript.
Hegel defines the state as “the actuality of the ethical Idea” — as the ethical spirit “which thinks and knows itself, and carries out what it knows insofar as it knows it” (§ 257). This is the sphere in which the universal becomes conscious — the place where what has fallen apart in civil society comes together again. The civil service is here the universal estate, because its interest coincides with the universal one. Marx disputes this on grounds of actuality: bureaucracy, he says, has an interest of its own, treats the purpose of the state as its private property, and what presents itself as the realization of the universal is in fact the special standing of one group.
At this point the objection is still empirical. It only becomes load-bearing once one takes it for what it is in form: an application of the distinction between what an institution ought to accomplish and what it actually does. Hegel defines the task; Marx shows that fulfillment does not come included.
This distinction, however, lacks a third question, without which it leads to a trivialization. It presupposes that the task is one worth fulfilling — which holds for many institutions, but not for all. The extreme case makes this clear: a warehouse administration has a task and can fulfill it well or badly; whoever asks only that question has missed what matters. Prior to the question of whether an institution fulfills its task stands the question of whether that task is defensible at all.
From this follow three levels, each demanding a different answer: If the purpose cannot be defended, no reform will help. If the purpose holds but the design fails it, the design must be rebuilt. And only once both stand firm does the question become one of what has accreted onto them.
Confusing these levels is the most common error of institutional critique — and at the same time a proven defensive strategy: whoever wants to protect an institution whose purpose cannot be defended shifts the debate onto the question of procedure.
Hegel himself wavers here, and this is why the passage became so consequential. He describes the state both as though the reconciliation of civil society’s contradictions were already accomplished within it, and as though this reconciliation were a task still owed. Both readings find support in the text, and he does not decide between them. Read in terms of conceptual logic, his sentences designate the task of a mediating instance; read speculatively and apologetically, they sound like the report of a reconciliation already achieved. This ambiguity decides whether the Philosophy of Right delivers an analysis or a justification, and the history of its reception has for over a hundred years been the history of this dispute.
Marx takes hold exactly there. He destroys the formulations that permitted the ambiguity — and in doing so frees what lies beneath them. What is struck is the diction, not the conceptual-logical core. In this respect he is at this point not Hegel’s opponent but rather the one who asserts Hegel’s own claim against Hegel’s own manner of expression. Whoever treats the two as alternatives has missed the point at which they belong together.
This opens the question that the later analysis fills in. If the state does not realize the universal simply because its concept demands it, then by what does it? And if it does not realize it, what does it do instead? The answer that later takes shape defines the state by its function: it posits and secures the legal forms within which property, contract, and competition exist at all; it provides the conditions that no individual market participant can secure but that all require. In this determination it appears as what [[kapitalismus-einfuehrung:15]] calls the ideal collective capitalist — not as an authority standing above social relations, but as the authority that sets their framework.
Whoever takes this path should see both the step being taken and its limit. The step consists in no longer taking the task as a description. The limit consists in the fact that the task does not thereby disappear. A state that fails the universal fails at something — and that it fails can only be said if the standard remains in force. Whoever strikes out the task because it is not fulfilled has taken away the very means of naming the failure. Hegel’s determination remains in force as a standard, precisely where Marx’s finding holds true. How the two can be thought together is worked out in [[hegel-recht]]; the economic side is treated in [[kapitalismus-einfuehrung:15]].
For practical use this means: a theory of the state can be drawn from the Kreuznach manuscript, but only if one takes both sides along. Taking only Hegel, one gets a standard without a test. Taking only Marx, one gets a description of function against which nothing can any longer be measured.