But the completion of THE IDEALISM OF THE STATE was at the same time the completion of the materialism of civil society. Throwing off the political voke meant at the same time throwing off the bonds which restrained the egoistic spirit of civil society. Political emancipation was at the same time the emancipation of civil society from politics, from having even the semblance of a universal content. (1843c: 165-6; Marx's italics, my capitals)
In the bourgeois world, civil society’ ceases to be directly political'. Or, to use a formulation I would prefer since it is less anachronistic than Marx's own, civil society as such is actually constituted, and becomes a possible object of theorization, for the first time, as a society of (formally) free, equal, independent human individuals.11 Unlike in feudalism, individuals' differential material positions do not - in appearance at any rate – any longer coincide with differential political’ powers, statuses or rights. They can be conceived of as a private’ matter, irrelevant to one'spublic’ existence as a citizen. At the same time, and correspondingly, an identifiable public' sphere – the state - is also demarcated for the first time, as (ideally) the domain of ‘the general interest', in which all equally partake as citizens. In sum then, for Marx:
political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society, to an egotistic, independent individual, and, on the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person. (1843c: 168)
As later for Durkheim, Elias or Foucault, state formation and individualization are complementary processes, entailing one another: the abstraction of the state and the abstraction of the individual originate in one and the same act'.
Now this is evidently an ideal-typical account, which at the least savagely truncates the protracted, uneven and complex process of bourgeois state formation. It is also in some respects undoubtedly misleading, if taken as a straightforward statement of historical fact. Real feudal societies often differed considerably from Marx's archetype. In England, for example, state formation (and with it such notions as equality - of free men - before a law which overrode seigneurial prerogatives) was well advanced long before anything that can reasonably be called a bourgeois economy had developed. Marx equally overstates the degree to which abstract equality of individuals was (or is) the basis of bourgeois political life. Property qualifications remained the explicit, hierarchized criterion for successive nineteenthcentury English franchise extensions, for instance, while adult women did not gain the vote on the same terms as men until 1929, or equal rights to own property or make contracts until later still. The Equal Rights Amendment outlawing discrimination on grounds of sex has yet to pass the US Congress. For long the individuals’ of whom Marx speaks – to take up again my arguments about patriarchy in the last section of Chapter 3 – were specifically household heads, the household being a crystallization of age, gender and property relations. But regarded as an analysis of the distinctive ideological forms – the legal and political superstructures, as I am using the term – of bourgeois society, Marx's observations remain, to my mind at least, extremely insightful.
For he goes on to develop a critique of this political emancipation’, which denies its substance. The burden of Marx's argument is that the political state, far from transcending the material inequalities of civil society, in fact reproduces and reinforces them: ‘far from abolishing these real distinctions, the state only exists on the presupposition of their existence'(1843c: 153). To anticipate later formulations, the state is a form of class rule. Specifically it is the form in which the modern bourgeoisie publicly organizes its social power. Now in my last long quote from ‘The Jewish Question'I capitalized two of Marx's phrases: he speaks of the political state as being ideally' independent of the particular elements of civil life', and of 'the completion of the idealism of the state'. Another passage in the same text elaborates on this theme of the state's ideality, drawing an instructive analogy with religion (to which, of course, Marx also persistently compared fetishism in the economic sphere’):
Where the political state has attained its true development, man – not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life - leads a twofold life, a heavenly and an earthly life: life in the political community, in which he considers himself a communal being, and life in civil society, in which he acts as a private individual, regards other men as a means, degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers. The relation of the political state to civil society is just as spiritual as the relation of heaven to earth. The political state stands in the same opposition to civil society, and it prevaiìs over the latter in exactiy the same way as religion prevails over the narrowness of the secular world, i.e., by likewise having always to acknowiedge it, to restore it, and allow itself to be dominated by it. In his most immediate reality, in civil society, man is a secular being. Here, where he regards himself as a real individual, and is so regarded by others, he is a fictitious phenomenon. In the state, on the other hand, where man is regarded as a species-being, he is the imaginary member of an illusory sovereignty, is deprived of his real individual life and endowed with an unreal universality. (ibid.: 154)
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IDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES
IDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES
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