The Kreuznach Manuscript (1843): The First Confrontation
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Between the closure of the Rheinische Zeitung and his move to Paris, Marx writes a commentary on the sections on the state in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in the summer of 1843. The manuscript remains unfinished and is not printed during his lifetime; it is nonetheless the only text in which Marx goes through Hegel paragraph by paragraph.
His procedure comes from Feuerbach: Hegel turns the predicate into the subject and vice versa. The Idea appears as the active agent, family and civil society as its moments, whereas in truth they are the presuppositions of the state. Applied to the critique of religion, this reversal made good sense—it locates the real author of what had been credited to a foreign instance.
What Marx hits with this is considerable: the mode of speech that makes the Idea the agent; the coincidence of conceptual completeness and real reconciliation; the elevation of Prussian constitutional provisions to the rank of the necessary; and the bureaucracy that presents itself as the universal estate while having an interest of its own. What he does not hit is the content of the determinations. That Hegel presents the family as a moment of the ethical Idea credits the Idea with nothing that belonged to the family—it says something about the family, and whether it is correct is not decided by the exchange of subject and predicate.
For the history of its reception, the text matters for two reasons. It is the source of the formula of the inversion, which returns thirty years later in the afterword to Capital and will determine the history of its impact. And it is the origin of Marx’s critique of the state: what later appears as an analysis of the state in its economic function begins here as an objection to Hegel’s determination of the estate of civil servants. The detailed treatment of the manuscript is found in Marx’ frühe Schriften als aufgeklärter Hegelianismus (German edition, 2026).