In his essay of 1843 on ‘The Jewish Question', Marx elaborates on his proposition that ‘egoistic man', ‘the member of civil society’ – the ‘abstract individual' whom we have been discussing - is ‘the basis, the precondition of the political state' (1843c: 166). He develops his argument via a series of historical contrasts with feudal society. It is best to follow the text closely, for Marx's language is not always easy:
Feudalism . . . was directly political, that is to say, the elements of civil life, for example, property, or the family, or the mode of labour, were raised to the level of political life in the form of seigniority, estates, and corporations. In this form they determined the relation of the individual to the state as a whole, i.e., his political relation, that is, his relation of separation and exclusion from the other components of society ... Thus, the vital functions and conditions of civil society remained ... political, although political in the feudal sense, that is to say, they secluded the individual from the state as a whole and they converted the particular relation of his corporation to the state as a whole into his general relation to the life of the nation, just as they converted his particular civil activity and situation into his general activity and situation. As a result of this organisation, the unity of the state, and also the consciousness, will and activity of this unity, the general power of the state, are likewise bound to appear as the particular affair of a ruler isolated from the people, and of his servants. (1843c: 165-6).
What Marx is saying, in more modern vocabularies, is something like this. In feudalism, 'civil' and ‘political', public' and private', coincided; indeed these very terms are anachronistic as applied to the medieval world, for such distinctions are precisely a product of bourgeois historical development. Individuals'civil' statuses were at the same time ‘political', and it would be meaningless to try to differentiate between public' and private' at the level of institutions. Thus, for instance, feudal lords were not merely property' owners – and we have already seen the inappropriateness of that description of them, if property is taken in its modern sense – but suzerains who enjoyed jurisdiction over their serfs and tenants. Feudal estates had distinct and differential privileges in law; in medieval England, for example, villeins had no access to the royal courts in matters affecting relations with their lord, while the nobility were exempt from corporal punishment. Most medieval parliaments were organized by estates. The king, conversely, was ideally expected to live off his own', and farmed taxes. This is the kind of thing Marx had in mind in his earlier quoted remark about privilege' being the basis of medieval society.
In this social context, a ‘political sphere', a ‘state' in the modern sense of the word, cannot meaningfully be separated off from civil society'. Nor can it be construed as the realm of the public' interest as distinct from private life'. Feudalism recognizes no such distinctions. Politics ‘in the feudal sense' is rather the private' affair of the ruler and his servants, ‘the political nation', to use a term drawn from English historiography. Though Marx does not say so here, the same is true of the polis of antiquity. For Aristotle only the free can be citizens, and ‘a citizen in the fullest sense is one who has a share in honours' associated with holding office in the polis (1984: 184). St Paul too, of course, escaped a whipping on the grounds that he was a civis Romanus (Acts of the Apostles, 22–6).
Bürgerliche Gesellschaft fractures this identity of civil and political public and private, in ways which profoundly alter the very meanings of the concepts of polity and society, making their modern distinction conceivable. In ancient and medieval political thought society was rarely, if ever, theorized independently of the polis: it was conceptualised as a community of citizens (civitas) with a public-political form (res publica) (see Frisby and Sayer, 1986: ch. 1). Marx continues:
The political revolution which overthrew this sovereign state of affairs and raised state affairs to become affairs of the people, which constituted the political state as a matter of general concern, that is, as a real state, necessarily smashed all estates, corporations, guilds, and privileges since they were all manifestations of the separation of the individual from the community. The political revolution thereby abolished the political character of civil society. It broke up civil society into its simple component parts: on the one hand, the individuals; on the other hand, the material and spiritual elements constituting the content of the life and social position of these individuals. It set free the political spirit, which had been, as it were, split up, partitioned, dispersed in the various blind alleys of feudal society. It gathered the dispersed parts of the political spirit, freed it from its intermixture with civil life, and established it as the sphere of the community, the general concern of the nation, IDEALLY independent of those particular elements of civil life. A person's distínct activity and distinct situation in life were reduced to a mereiv individual significance. They no longer constituted the general relation of the individual to the state as a whole. Public affairs as such, on the other hand, became the general affair of each individual, and the political function became the individual's general function.
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