[Draft]
"Marx and Hegel on the Value of 'Bourgeois' Ideals"
A good deal of contemporary philosophical work on Marx attempts to clarify the
normative resources and presuppositions of his thought—to determine not only what
its standards are but even whether there are (or can consistently be) any in the first
place. This talk is intended to contribute to that inquiry, not by discussing the more
prominent concepts of alienation or exploitation but by asking what positive normative
role, if any, "bourgeois" ideals—freedom, equality, and justice—play in Marx's critique
of capitalism and his vision of communism. In doing so, it's necessary to distinguish
between positive and merely negative roles those ideals might play. The ideal of
equality, for example, would play a merely negative role if Marx's use of it were
restricted to taking a bourgeois conception of equality and showing that capitalism fails
to live up to one of its own standards (which is to say, one of the standards typically
taken by participants themselves to justify capitalist relations). The normative role of
bourgeois equality would remain merely negative if Marx ascribed no positive value to
it outside the capitalist mode of production—if, for example, he thought it played no
role in what makes communism a good social order. My question, in other words, is
whether there's any sense in which "bourgeois" ideals figure positively in the values
that Marx endorses and thinks a good, post-capitalist society ought to realize.
It's clear that Marx sometimes employs bourgeois ideals negatively: part of his
critique of the wage labor contract in Capital depends on arguing that it incompletely
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realizes even bourgeois conceptions of freedom, justice, and equality. It's equally clear
that these ideals aren't the main criteria Marx appeals to in explaining why communism
is good: what makes communism superior to capitalism isn't that it better realizes the
same ideals widely used to justify capitalism. If these were the only alternatives
relevant to deciding Marx's attitude to bourgeois ideals, this would be a very short talk.
But there's a more interesting possibility that falls between the two poles I've sketched,
which is expressed in the question: Is there room in Marx's position for appropriating
bourgeois ideals, not merely to show how capitalism fails to meet its own standards,
but as part of a positive vision of what makes communism good? To appropriate the
ideal of an earlier social order is to take over and endorse a revised version of that ideal
which (in some sense to be explicated) is superior to the version of it used to justify the
practices of the earlier order. Since this model of appropriating ideals from the past is
central to Hegel's normative strategy, another way of formulating my question is: To
what extent does Marx adopt a Hegelian approach to the present or future value of
ideals embraced by past societies? Or, more precisely: Is there room in Marx for
adopting such a stance, and, if so, is it a possibility Marxists should avail themselves of?
The closest Marx comes to following this Hegelian strategy is in his treatment of
bourgeois conceptions of freedom—as embodied in various conceptions of individual
rights—in "On the Jewish Question." My claim is that in this early text Marx employs
aspects of Hegel's strategy for appropriating ideals from the past but then, to his own
detriment, fails to follow through on it fully. After spending most of my time looking at
Marx's treatment of freedom, I'll make some brief remarks about similar issues in his
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approach to bourgeois conceptions of justice and equality.
"On the Jewish Question" diagnoses the ills of modern society as due to a "split"
between civil society and the state that results from the emergence of capitalism and its
political counterpart, the liberal ("bourgeois") state. The text is a critique both of
modern society and of Hegel's attempts to find a remedy for the split in the political
institutions of the Prussian state. But the split between civil society and the state is
also—for both Hegel and Marx—a conflict between competing conceptions of freedom:
civil society is the sphere in which the individualistic freedoms associated with
property ownership and the Rights of Man are realized, whereas the state offers its
members, in roughly Rousseauean fashion, a freedom that consists in willing publicly
determined laws aimed at realizing the good of the state as a whole. The latter counts
as freedom because those who are subject to the state's laws are also the authors of
them. One reason, for Marx, that the two conceptions of freedom are in conflict is that
they presuppose directly opposite types of relations among social members: the Rights
of Man treat individuals as independent atoms with interests defined in opposition to
others', whereas freedom in the state requires citizens to abandon strictly egoistic ends
and to identify with the good of all.
If "On the Jewish Question" were merely concerned with pointing out the conflict
between these two conceptions of freedom, it would hardly be worthy of our attention.
Hegel himself is aware of the tension between the conceptions of freedom that underlie
civil society and the state; his claim, though, is that modern society is constituted such
that civil society and the state operate as semi-independent social spheres that at the
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same time form a coherent whole, where the individualism of the former is reconciled
with the communal spirit required in the latter. In other words, Hegel's claim isn't
about the conceptual compatibility of two conceptions of freedom but about whether a
social institution that gives expression to a certain conception of freedom (civil society)
can co-exist harmoniously with another institution (the state) that aims to realize an
apparently opposite conception of freedom. What's at issue isn't whether the two
conceptions of freedom are logically contradictory but whether both can be realized in a
single social order where neither counts as the whole of freedom and neither encroaches
on the circumscribed sphere of the other. Marx's normative position in "On the Jewish
Question" is grounded, no less than Hegel's, in an empirical understanding of the
specific institutional circumstances of modernity—especially the nature of civil
society—under which the conceptions of freedom at issue are realized. For both
thinkers, philosophical reflection about which conceptions of freedom we ought to
embrace must proceed hand-in-hand with empirical social theory.
To put it very generally, what Marx learned from Hegel is that social philosophy
that restricts itself to a priori theorizing about the "true" nature of freedom is bound to
remain disconnected from the world. Hegel's view is that, while philosophy can't do
completely without abstract conceptions of freedom—definitions of freedom as, for
example, subjection to self-given law or the absence of external impediments—it can't
adjudicate among those conceptions without looking at how they're realized in some
actual social world. Thus, Hegel doesn't attempt to reconcile the concept of liberal
freedom with the concept of political self-governance. Instead, he looks at how those
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conceptions of freedom are (or could be) realized in the existing social world and asks
whether there are (or could be) institutions that make possible the (partial and
circumscribed) realization of both. For Hegel, the conceptions of freedom associated
with civil society and the state are reconcilable only if institutions are available that can
"mediate" the egoism of civil society with the communal spirit required for collective
self-governance in the state. Hegel famously claims to find such institutions in
corporations, which, in civil society, transform egoistic desires into more universal
interests and, in the state, participate in the legislative process in such a way that their
members, starting out with well-defined particular interests, come to understand and
identify with the good of the whole.
Similarly, when Marx criticizes the liberal conception of freedom in "On the
Jewish Question" he starts from an understanding of what that freedom looks like when
realized under the conditions of a specific economic system, capitalism.i Even though
he hasn't yet arrived at his mature understanding of capitalism, his critique of the
Rights of Man depends on claims about the form liberal freedom must take when
realized in a world where material production is carried out by egoistically motivated
individuals and where the particular economic interests of its participants are
irreconcilably opposed. His critique of Hegel isn't merely that corporations as Hegel
envisions them don't exist but that, given the character of particular interests in civil
society, they can't exist. Their disagreement isn't over whether liberal freedom is "real"
freedom or not but over the nature of civil society and the implications of that for what
freedom in such a society must look like.ii In fact, their disagreement concerns two
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questions: what form does liberal freedom—the protection of individuals' rights to act
as they see fit—assume when realized in a capitalist society? And to what extent is this
freedom compatible with the realization of other conceptions of freedom (as well as of
values other than freedom)?
Marx's answer to the first is that the ideal of liberal freedom, when realized in
modern civil society, gets distorted into legal norms that privilege and absolutize one
specific form of the freedom to act as one sees fit—namely, the right of private property,
"the right to enjoy one's fortune and to dispose of it as one will, without regard for
others" (MER, 42; MEW 1, 365)iii. A good example of this can be found in Smith's
treatment of freedom in the Wealth of Nations, where, when speaking concretely about
the sense in which commercial society promotes freedom, it's usually laborers' right to
sell their labor power as they see fit that he emphasizes. It's not that modern, liberal
societies don't also protect other versions of individuals' freedom to do as they want—
religious freedom, freedom of speech, the right to bodily security—but rather that in
such societies the rights of private property tend to be enshrined, as it were, as the
paradigm of freedom and its center of gravity.
One manifestation of this tendency is that the other freedoms guaranteed in
capitalist societies are interpreted in ways that accord primacy to the rights of private
property. For example, in such societies freedom of the press is protected, but only up
to the point where it threatens the freedom most important to civil society, the rights of
property. A similar tendency is evident in the fact that in modern society bourgeois
ideals other than freedom—equality, for example—tend to be defined in ways that
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confirm the primacy of property rights. In the French Constitution of 1795 'equality'
isn't interpreted to mean material equality, or even equal political participation, but
merely formal equality before the law—precisely the sort of equality that civil society
upholds when it treats individuals as parties to contracts, where each has the same
formal rights as all others.
Here's another aspect of Marx's critique inspired by Hegel's procedure of looking
beyond the logical content of conceptions of freedom to their concrete manifestations
when realized in specific social orders: in modern civil society the Rights of Man,
codified in law, don't function merely as external constraints on what individuals are
allowed to do; they also penetrate the subjectivity of those governed by them, fostering
a certain self-conception and ethos among them. In other words, the Rights of Man
present themselves as giving expression to a certain conception of freedom (individuals'
right to act as they see fit), but, when realized in a specific society, they inevitably take
on as well an extra-legal, "ethical" character that's not strictly part of the content of that
ideal of freedom. Marx expresses this point by saying that in modern civil society, "the
Rights of Man . . . are nothing more than the rights of . . . the egoistic human being, of
the human being separated from other humans" (MER, 42; MEW 1, 364), which
encourage individuals to define their interests in opposition to others' and to regard
their associates as mere means to their own private ends. The point here is that a
system of individual rights will manifest itself differently—have a different ethical tinge
and serve different social functions—depending on the character of the society in which
it's realized. How individuals regard and make use of their rights, the significance
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those rights come to have for them, is shaped by the kinds of projects they're compelled
to pursue outside politics in their everyday, "social" lives. Hence what comes to be
most salient in the liberal ideal of freedom for members of a thoroughly egoistic civil
society is the unimpeded right to accumulate as much wealth as they can. Freedom
comes to mean, above all else, the freedom to become rich.
It's important to see that when Marx characterizes the Rights of Man as "rights of
egoistic man," (42) he's not grounding that claim in an a priori argument about the
conceptual content of freedom when defined as the right of individuals to act
unconstrained by others. Instead, he's articulating what that conception of freedom
looks like "in the flesh"—what significance it takes on in the context of a larger ethos—
when realized in a capitalist society. In other words, there's nothing intrinsically
egoistic or competitive in the bare conception of freedom on which the Rights of Man
are based. In fact, considered abstractly, apart from modern civil society, most of those
rights articulate shared interests that are most naturally secured not through
competition but cooperation. There's nothing intrinsic to my interest in life and bodily
integrity that pits me against other individuals with the same interests. Both interests
can be satisfied for all simultaneously, and joining together to protect our common
freedoms is surely the best means of doing so. The same is true for religious freedom
and freedom of speech, and even the freedom to dispose of one's personal property as
one sees fit (as long as 'personal property' doesn't take the form it does in capitalist
societies: the freedom to own the means of production and to exploit those who don't
for one's own gain). To repeat: it's only in the context of modern civil society, where
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particular economic interests are irreconcilably opposed and self-interested competition
reigns supreme, that egoism and social antagonism become fused with freedom as
defined in terms of individual rights.
Marx's critique of what the liberal ideal of freedom looks like when realized in
modern civil society is inspired by a modest and healthy version of holism learned from
Hegel. Philosophers who insist on separating the political from the social—those who
articulate political ideals in abstraction from the role they play in a specific social
order—overlook the important truth that, when it comes to social life, what can be
distinguished in thought is, in reality, inseparably connected. Hegel argues forcefully
for this in the Philosophy of Right, where the social spheres he distinguishes, though
accorded a measure of autonomy, are understood also as always seeping into the
others—as affecting the practices and self-understandings on which the others depend.
The member of civil society, for Hegel, is always at the same time the member of a
family, and the ends, projects, and attitudes he brings with him as a participant in the
system of needs are colored by the commitments and ideals he lives by in the other
social spheres. Moreover, in a rational society the real content of the conception of
freedom on which any given social sphere is based is constrained by—tailored so as to
be compatible with—the conceptions of freedom realized in other spheres. Thus,
Hegel's criteria for a rational society are satisfied only if the individualistic freedoms of
civil society can be realized in a way that's consistent with the ideals individuals must
also embrace as family members and citizens. If it were true that the freedoms realized
in modern civil society were as thoroughly bound up with egoism and social
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antagonism as Marx claims they are, Hegel would be compelled to agree with Marx's
negative assessment of the split between civil society and the state. As I've suggested,
their disagreement is less over fundamental normative issues than over how modern
civil society in fact functions and whether particular interests in that sphere are so
irremediably opposed that it necessarily gives rise to an ethos so thoroughly stamped
by egoism that the communal spirit required in the other spheres is made impossible.
The other philosophical commitment fueling Marx's position in "On the Jewish
Question" is a materialism that also has its source in Hegel. This materialism—a
version of the thesis that social being conditions social consciousness—is expressed in
Marx's claim that one of the spheres distinguished by Hegel—the one in which humans
reproduce themselves materially through labor—has primacy over the others in
shaping the outlooks of social members. As Marx puts the point, activity in this sphere
is bound to be experienced by social members as their "most intimate reality," precisely
because it's closest to their "own individual existence"—closer to who they are in their
everyday lives than the more "spiritual" activities that produce political union in the
state (MER, 34; MEW 1, 355). As I noted earlier, Marx's critique here becomes more
powerful when joined with his mature understanding of capitalism, which provides
him with reasons he doesn't yet have in "On the Jewish Question" for arguing that,
given how particular interests are necessarily configured in capitalism, no political
measures—indeed, no measures short of complete economic transformation—could
reconcile the conflicts among them. This materialist approach to social consciousness
isn't foreign to Hegel. It's expressed in his recognition that, if the state is to succeed in
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harmonizing particular interests through legislation that serves the collective good (and
to do so such that the individuals who pursue particular interests in civil society can see
and will the collective good as citizens), then there must be some institution internal to
civil society (the corporations) with the potential to transform the egoism of members of
civil society into a concern for the collective good. Here again, the disagreement
between Hegel and Marx isn't so much over fundamental premises—both recognize
that a commitment to the collective good requires some foundation in material life—as
over the extent to which particular interests are irremediably at odds in civil society.
Another respect in which the normative position underlying Marx's critique of
civil society is similar to Hegel's is that both embrace a modest version of normative
pluralism. As I've indicated, each recognizes that there's a multiplicity of ways to give
content to the idea of freedom and that a number of such ideals might be compelling,
depending on the circumstances in which they're realized. But their shared pluralism
goes farther than this in that both also recognize ideals other than freedom. It would be
wrong to think of the Philosophy of Right as showing merely that, as realized in modern
institutions, the various conceptions of freedom we've inherited from the past can all be
realized in a single social order. In addition, Hegel wants to show that modern
institutions are good, where the good includes but isn't exhausted by freedom.iv What
makes the family and civil society rational isn't merely that they promote freedom in
various guises but also that they secure for their members substantial goods other than
freedom. In both institutions participants also find various forms of recognition from
their fellow participants; they satisfy natural needs essential to their well-being, and
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they enjoy a range of social attachments that enrich and orient their lives. In other
words, for Hegel a society that allowed room for the freedom of its members but didn't
promote their well-being in this extended sense would be deserving of critique.v This
means that the value of freedom (of any type) depends on the extent to which it can be
fit within a social system that realizes the totality of values recognized by social theory.
An implication of this—one that plays an important role for Marx—is that the value of
any specific type of freedom is diminished if realizing it stands in the way of
individuals realizing other important goods available to them.
In "On the Jewish Question" this aspect of Marx's position is most clearly seen in
relation to the ideal of equality. For one of his main critiques there is that freedom as
articulated in the Rights of Man, when realized under the conditions of civil society,
eviscerates the ideal of equality that the modern social order also claims to promote.
More precisely, the way in which freedom is realized in modern civil society places
severe constraints on the kinds of equality that are possible within it. For, first, a
completely unlimited right of private property means that civil society is compatible
with only formal, not material, equality; and, second, inequalities in the economic
sphere can't help but make themselves felt in the political sphere, thereby undermining
the liberal state's own ideal of equal political participation.
The value pluralism I'm pointing to here becomes more pronounced as Marx's
thought develops. It's especially prominent in chapter four of Capital, volume one,
where after uncovering the true nature of the relation between capitalist and worker
that makes the production of surplus value possible, Marx launches into what looks to
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be a critique of that relation. His critique takes the form of un-masking familiar
justifications of the wage-labor relation by revealing not their falsity but their onesidedness. Let's start with freedom. First—-and consistent with his approach in "On
the Jewish Question"—Marx focuses in Capital on how liberal freedom manifests itself
in the capitalist order, especially in the contractual relation between laborer and
capitalist, and on how fetishizing a single embodiment of freedom distorts the ideal that
underlies it. Second—-and consistent with his view in "On the Jewish Question"
concerning the value of political emancipation—Marx doesn't claim in Capital that the
freedom realized in the wage-labor exchange is illusory or valueless. Rather, he seems
to believe that the legal freedom to sell one's labor power on the market as one sees fit
allows for a kind of self-determination the serf doesn't know: with respect to realizing
freedom capitalism represents a genuine advance over feudalism. The problem, of
course is that in focusing exclusively on the contractual freedom workers enjoy,
defenders of capitalism have to overlook the structural conditions under which those
free choices are made that significantly reduce their character as "free"—namely, the
material neediness and lack of resources that make selling of labor power necessary for
the worker, as well as the radically unequal bargaining positions from which the two
parties enter into contract.
What's of interest here for value pluralism is that Marx doesn't limit himself to
considering the claim that capitalism promotes freedom; he also considers a range of
further normative claims made on capitalism's behalf—that it realizes justice,
maximizes social wealth to the benefit of all, and secures universal equality. His
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critique, in other words, isn't merely that freedom as realized in capitalism is one-sided
but also that an exchange that qualifies as fair from the perspective of contract law—the
exchange of labor power for wages—can mask the profound injustice of the original
bargaining positions it presupposes, as well as the fact that the value laborers contribute
to production is significantly greater than what they receive from it in wages. A similar
masking takes place in claims that capitalism promotes the collective good and realizes
equality: the immense social wealth capitalism produces benefits some of its
participants much more than others, and the formal equality of contracting parties is
compatible with deep inequalities in wealth and social power. Marx's point isn't that
capitalism in no way realizes freedom but rather that the freedom it realizes isn't the
whole of what freedom can be and that its value is diminished by the fact that it goes
hand in hand with exploitation, social inequality, and the impoverishment of most of
society.
I now want to consider how "On the Jewish Question" moves from a critique of
Hegel and modern society to a positive normative position. More precisely, I want to
ask: what conception of freedom does Marx endorse, on the basis of his critique, as a
guide for emancipatory practice? It's in his response to this question, I claim, that we
find an insufficiently "dialectical" (or Hegelian) approach to the question of freedom.
To the extent that Marx has a positive vision of the free society in this text it's
centered around the idea of human emancipation, as contrasted with political
emancipation, or the liberal ideal of freedom as I've characterized it here. The idea of
human emancipation appears to bring together a number of conceptually distinct
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elements that may or may not be separable in reality, namely: the overcoming of
alienation, religious as well as economic; elimination of the split modern individuals
suffer due to the "double existence" they lead in both consciousness and real life; the
realization of human species-being, which in the modern world has only an illusory
existence in the ideology of political life; and, finally, a material version of the
democratic self-determination that Rousseau ascribed to citizens of the just republic.
Let me quote in its entirety the paragraph in which Marx most fully defines the
conception of freedom he endorses:
Human emancipation will be complete only when the real, individual human
has re-absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual human,
in his empirical life, in his individual work, and in his individual relationships he
has become a species-being; and when he has recognized and organized his own
powers as social powers so that he no longer separates this social power from
himself as political power (MER, 46; MEW 1, 365).
It's not difficult to see how the various elements of the conception of freedom
articulated here follow from the critique of modern society Marx has just given. First,
the vision of community at the core of the idea of species-being has its source in the real
but unrealized aspirations of modern individuals, as expressed, in a veiled manner, in
the ideals that animate their religious and political consciousness. Second, if one of the
problems revealed by Marx's critique is a split in individuals—an inability to bring two
aspects of their identities into coherent unity—it follows that a solution must find some
way of realizing their aspiration to be individuals while also satisfying their need for
social bonds based on more than mutual self-interest. Finally, the ideal invoked at the
end of this passage—that of individuals collectively organizing their productive powers
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with the aim of furthering the interests of all—takes the idea of self-determination that's
supposed to govern political life and infuses it with material content deriving from the
analysis of social reality carried out in "On the Jewish Question": in calling on us to
recognize and organize our powers as social powers, Marx endorses a version of
Rousseau's ideal of political autonomy in which it's no longer laws that are determined
by the general will but the more intimate reality of everyday, productive life.
But to say that Marx proceeds dialectically isn't to say that he's Hegelian in every
detail. The most obvious respect in which he diverges from Hegel is that he advocates
resolving the split between civil society and the state by merging the two into one rather
than maintaining some kind of separation while reforming each so that they function as
complementary spheres that reconcile their members' longing to live as both individual
and communal beings. Marx, one is tempted to say, seeks social unity by abolishing
difference (at the level of social spheres) rather than preserving it.vi Marx's reasons for
not preserving a duality of social spheres, rest on two considerations I've already
mentioned: first, the unrestrained, conflict-generating egoism of civil society and,
second, the materialist claim that an ethos rooted in economic life can't be undone by
merely political measures. But, however compelling these reasons, Marx's solution
finds no place, however circumscribed, for the specific conception of freedom that
modern civil society strives to realize. That is, it provides no socially protected space in
which individuals are free to pursue a certain range of ends merely because they've
chosen them—a social space, in other words, where individuals are recognized as
possessing a dignity that derives merely from their ability to set ends for themselves
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and to follow their own conceptions of the good. In this respect Marx diverges radically
from Hegel, who treats the various conceptions of freedom we inherit from history as
cultural achievements to be preserved, even if limited and modified so as to cohere with
competing conceptions of freedom and other ethical values. What's more—so I want to
argue—Marx has no good reasons for not following Hegel on this important issue.
That a more Hegelian position on the (limited) value of liberal freedom is
available to Marx is suggested by his own ambivalence to political emancipation in "On
the Jewish Question." What distinguishes Marx's position there from the ultra-leftism
of Bauer is his insistence that political emancipation, though not the whole, or the
highest form, of freedom, is nevertheless of genuine value and that it's therefore wrong
to call on Jews to abandon their struggle to be recognized as the political equals of
Christians merely because achieving that won't bring them full human emancipation.
In taking this stance against Bauer, Marx shows himself to be the closer follower of
Hegel, who ascribes some value to all forms of self-determination, even while
recognizing a hierarchy among them that defines limits to the scope and value of each.
Yet even here there's a subtle but consequential difference between Marx and Hegel.
Marx's view in this early text appears to be: political emancipation is the highest
freedom achievable in the present order, but a better social order is on its way in which
that limited form of freedom will no longer be relevant. The premise here seems to be
that if egoism is overcome in the economic realm, there's no longer a point in
guaranteeing individuals protection from the interference of others, as intended by the
Rights of Man. To the extent that Marx envisions no place for liberal freedoms in
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communism, he adopts an attitude to history that diverges importantly from Hegel's:
while certain conceptions of freedom may have value in specific historical conditions,
when history moves on, it wipes the slate clean, proceeding as though the ethical
achievements of the past can be dispensed with—canceled but not preserved. Although
this move finds theoretical justification later in Marx's career (in historical materialism's
account of the relation between the economic structure of society and social
consciousness), it's worth noting that this form of radicalism stands in conflict with his
position in "On the Jewish Question" as I've articulated it here. In relegating the value
of liberal freedom entirely to the past, Marx has forgotten his own point that philosophy
can't judge conceptions of freedom apart from examining how those general
conceptions get realized in specific social orders. This implies that the defects of liberal
freedom under capitalism don't impugn every possible realization of the core liberal
ideal (that all humans are deserving of some socially protected space in which they're
free from the interference of others to pursue the ends they set for themselves). As I've
suggested, it's only in specific social orders (such as modern civil society) that
individual rights and thoroughgoing egoism are inseparable. Apart from the fact that
there's nothing intrinsically egoistic in the Rights of Man, it's highly implausible that
members of a culture in which the dignity of the individual is the fruit of a long history
of struggle would all at once, in a new social order, simply cease to care about an ideal
so central to their own cultural legacy. Surely one lesson to be learned from the
twentieth century—something Hegel already knew—is that a wiping clean of the
cultural slate of this sort is bound to be experienced by those subject to it as a form of
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violence and that, for us moderns, a satisfying normative philosophy can be had only
by integrating the various ethical ideals we've inherited from the past so as to overcome
the defects that plagued them in their past incarnations. Moreover, with respect to the
Rousseauean ideal of freedom (collective political self-determination), Marx attempts
precisely the kind of Hegelian appropriation of past ideals that I'm suggesting he
should have also taken with respect to the liberal, individualistic conception of freedom:
he re-interprets—gives new, material content to—the ideal underlying the concept of
the general will in a way that makes it appropriate for communism: the ideal of political
democracy is turned into that of the collective organization of social forces, most
notably the productive powers of freely associated laborers.
Let me recap what I've said in light of the questions I raised at the beginning of
this talk. I've argued that, with respect to his own normative commitments, Marx
replaces the bourgeois conception of freedom with a fundamentally different,
"communist" conception of freedom rather than appropriating it in some revised form
that's appropriate to communist society. In other words, his conception of human
emancipation has no space for the ideal at the core of bourgeois freedom: that all
individuals require a socially protected space within which they're unimpeded by
others to pursue the particular ends they set for themselves. I've also argued that this
position stands in some tension with his own claim that (in capitalism at least) political
emancipation has a real, if limited, value, as well as with his own methodology in "On
the Jewish Question," which relies on a distinction between the abstract content of an
ideal and the way that ideal manifests itself in specific societies. To condemn the latter,
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I've been arguing, isn't necessarily to reject the general ideal on which it’s based, in all
its possible manifestations. In other words, even though Marx seems not to take this
course himself, there's room in his normative position for recognizing a positive, if
limited, value to the ideal underlying bourgeois conception of freedom, and not merely
within capitalist society but in future societies as well. I've also suggested that in this
respect Marx should have followed Hegel even more closely than he did.
I'd like to close with a few confused remarks words about equality and justice. I
feel some confusion with respect to these bourgeois ideals because my attitude to them
seems to be different from my stance on freedom, and I find myself unable to say why
this should be the case. I belong to the group of interpreters who believe that the ideal
of equality plays no or, at most, only a very small positive role for Marx; moreover, I
find this an attractive feature of his position. That equality (in my view) plays no major
role in explaining what makes communism is a good social order marks a radical
contrast to the importance that ideal played in inspiring bourgeois revolutions and in
justifying capitalist relations. I believe what I want to say here, however, is that Marx
appropriates, or has the space to appropriate, the ideal of equality in a way that both
revises the content of that ideal and greatly reduces its significance, subordinating it to
other ideals such as freedom, self-realization, and so on. Nevertheless, I think there are
two places where appropriately revised conceptions of equality have roles to play in
Marx's position. First, if, as I've argued, a satisfactory version of Marxism has to allot
some circumscribed place for an appropriately defined set of individual rights, then the
idea of equality will have some role to play, since, presumably, whatever rights it’s
21
appropriate to grant to individuals will be distributed equally, with each individual
having the same rights as all others. Second, and more important, Marx's vision of
communism can be seen as appropriating the ideal of equality in precisely the most
important sense it had in motivating bourgeois revolutions of the past. I'm thinking of
the ideal of equality of status that, expressed negatively, recognized no privileges due to
birth or caste. The ideal of a classless society that does play a major role in Marx's
vision of communism can be understood as incorporating a re-interpreted version of the
bourgeois ideal, according to which, with respect to fundamental social status, there
should be no difference among human beings.
The issue of justice is even more complex. The abolition of exploitation—or, as
some Marxists will say, the abolition of oppression—surely contains some remnant of
the ideal of justice, even if it's very far from what liberals mean by the term. I don't
have anything more illuminating to say about this point at the moment. But if my
claims here are on the right track, then there's a further striking similarity between
Marx's position and Hegel's. For Hegel's own appropriation of bourgeois ideals, as
articulated in the Philosophy of Right, also accords only very minor roles to the ideals of
equality and justice. Hegel, like Marx as I'm interpreting him, makes freedom—a
complex and multi-faceted conception of freedom—the dominant value in his account
of a rational social order and ascribes only a very limited importance to equality and
justice. Again, I'm not sure what to make of this similarity, but I find it an interesting
point that's worthy of further reflection.
22
Frederick Neuhouser
Barnard College, Columbia University
23
2pp. = 4:08 = 4.13 min.
further point, OJQ, 366: political membership is a mere means to securing the (egoistic,
individualistic) rights of man
In this early text Marx doesn't yet speak of "capitalism," nor has he arrived at a mature
conception of how it functions. Still, it's essentially what he will later call capitalism
that he's criticizing here.
ii Not only does Hegel's account of civil society lack a concept of capitalism, the
economic world he describes need not be capitalistic (only market).
iii MER = The Marx-Engels Reader, second edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York:
Norton, 1972); MEW = Werke, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 195691).
iv This point is complicated by the fact that 'freedom' has a very extensive meaning in
Hegel, one that sometimes includes the idea of the good. I abstract from these
complications here.
v Hegel would formulate these points differently from how I have here. He would say
that a conception of freedom that's indifferent to the well being of individuals is a
deficient conception of freedom and that complete freedom must include realizing the
good. The essential point is that Hegel's standards for a fully rational society include
the well being of its members. See previous note.
vi It's important, though, to be precise about the sense in which he does this. While it's
true that he seeks to eliminate difference at the level of social spheres, his solution
envisions the flourishing of difference (or "particularity") among the inhabitants of a
world where the split between civil society and the state has been overcome. This is
evident in the frequency with which Marx uses 'individual' in the passage I cited earlier:
"human emancipation will be complete only when the . . . individual human, . . . in his
individual work, and in his individual relationships has become a species-being." In
other words, Marx envisions a kind of reconciliation between the values of
individuality and communal life, in which living in a certain type of community is a
condition of humans' fully expressing their particular natures. The implicit claim is that
by belonging to a society where the development of laborers' productive forces rather
than the accumulation of profit is the organizing aim of production, the social
conditions obtain, for the first time, under which individuals can develop themselves
fully and "in every direction" (MER, 197; MEW 3, 74). That this ideal—a flourishing of
individual particularity—is meant to replace the aspiration to individual freedom that
animates modern civil society is made clear when, later in his career, Marx labels this
ideal "personal freedom" (ibid.).
i