An Evaluation of Marx's Critique of Hegel's Political Organism

Abstract

In his Critique of Hegel's ‘Philosophy of Right,' Marx states that Hegel achieves a great advance by thinking of the state as an organism. Nonetheless, Marx criticizes the way Hegel presents this political organism and its inner differentiation. He argues that Hegel's account of the state as an organism is a mystified attempt to fit empirical observations into the framework of his logical category of the Idea without providing a derivation of uniquely political determinacies. Also, for Marx, because Hegel does not specify the organic constitution of the state in distinction from the Idea, he cannot differentiate between the animal and the political organism. By focusing particularly on the initial determinacy of Hegel's Idea of the state and the transition to this determinacy from what precedes it, this paper examines the extent to which Hegel accounts for the organic constitution of the state without falling prey to logical reductionism and empiricism.