The Violence of Abstraction The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism

Note the exact words in which, for instance, he criticizes Proudhon in another text of 1846:

Because M. Proudhon places eternal ideas, the categories of pure reason, on the one side and human beings and their practical life, which according to him is the application of these categories, on the other, one finds with him from the beginning a dualism between life and ideas, between soul and body, a dualism which recurs in many forms. You can see how this antagonism is nothing but the incapacity of M. Proudhon to understand the profane origin and the profane history of the categories which he deifies. (1846b: 192)

It is Proudhon's very dualism, the antagonism' of life and ideas, that Marx rejects. Certainly this has the corollary that history is to be explained from living individuals', and not their consciousness or its products considered in artificial abstraction or isolation. But this is a corollary, and it is the main argument from which it follows that is of most relevance here. For that argument implies, amongst other things, that the sense of ‘determination' in such propositions as social being determines consciousness’ cannot be the standard causal one, in which the related terms are seen as being merely externally or contingently connected.

m

Now it is notable (and usually goes totally unremarked in commentary) that the structure of Marx's argument against the historical primacy of (ostensibly) other elements of what is normally taken to be the superstructure - in particular, law and state - is identical with that of his critique of idealism. His denial of superstructural primacy, just as with that of the primacy of the ideal’more generally, rests on a prior denial of superstructural independence – relative’ or otherwise. Thus The German Ideology uncompromisingly avers that:

Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness . . . no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. (1846a: 38)

Marx extends the argument quite explicitly to the institutions of politics and law. 'It must not be forgotten that law has just as little an independent history as religion' (ibid.: 80). The idea that politics is an independent sphere of activity, which develops in its own way' is one shared [by] all ideologists' (ibid.: 528). ‘There is no history of politics, law, science, etc., of art, religion, etc.' (ibid.: 671). I shall exemplify this argument in detail with regard to state and law below. But first, let us consider further what kind of argument it is.

If, with Cohen and ‘traditional historical materialism', and with relative autonomy' theorists, we see the ‘economic structure of society' as exclusive of morality, law, religion, science, art, politics, and the rest, then we have to conclude from these curt propositions that Marx was indeed an economic determinist, and a pretty vulgar one at that. This is implausible, given the oft-remarked undeterministic character of any of his substantive historical analyses, like The Eighteenth Brumaire or part 8 of Capital I. What Marx actually says in these passages, however, is rather different. His concern is to deny that law, religion, politics and so on have a history in themseives, which is independent of that of production and its social relations. He does not say these are epiphenomenal, secondary, subordinate, or otherwise marginal factors in history as such. The two claims are very different.

Marx's point – in fact a mirror-image of Acton's criticism of his supposed position - is that law, state, and so on have no existence independent of people's ‘materialistic connection' (ibid.: 41). This is why, like the subjects of idealistic philosophy generally, they cannot in themselves be seen as the motive forces of history. Like consciousness', they have no existence in themselves'; to treat them as independent entities is to reify them. But this does not, in logic or in Marx's texts, entail a denial or downgrading of their historical import as such. Indeed, if they are inseparable from people's material production and material intercourse', and the latter is held to be 'basic' to society and history, such a conclusion would be somewhat self-contradictory.

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In this connection, it is worth pausing over a much discussed footnote to Capital I. Marx is defending his formulations in the 1859 Preface, against the charge that all this is very true for our own times, in which material interests predominate, but not for the Middle Ages, in which Catholicism, nor for Athens and Rome, where politics, reigned supreme'. He goes on:

this much, however, is clear, that the Middle Ages could not live on Catholicism, nor the ancient world on politics. On the contrary, it is the mode in which thev gained a livelihood which explains why here politics, and there Catholicism, played the chief part. (1867a: 82n)

Certainly there is room for argument as to exactly how the mode in which they gained a livelihood' explains why religion and politics respectively played the chief part' in the life of these societies. Althusser for instance invokes this passage in defence of his structural causality'. My point, however, is that nothing Marx says here denies that politics in antiquity, and Catholicism in the Middle Ages, actually did reign supreme'.

Marx's argument, then, is about how law, the state, religion and so forth should be conceived. It is not, or at least not primarily, about their causal status - determinate or determined - in history. That they are denied causal primacy is a consequence of Marx's prior denial of their very separability. If they cannot in themselves determine or explain historical development, this is because they have no separable existence in themselves. But this does not mean that when properly conceived - not in themselves', but as organic related' (1857: 88) to people's productive activities - they lack causal efficacy. Engels makes this very clear in one of the letters I cited in chapter 1. He says it is ridiculous' to assume that because we deny an independent historical development to the various ideological spheres which play a part in history we also deny them any effect on history' (1893: 92, Engels's emphasis).

The structural similarity between Marx's critique of idealism and his analysis of ‘ideological spheres' is striking. I believe this to be more than a mere coincidence. Marx attacks the independence of

superstructures’ in the same terms as he does idealism's fictitious historical subjects, because he believes superstructures’ actually to be idealizations comparable to the philosophers'‘speculative constructions'. They are constituted in the same way as Hegel's Geist or Stirner's ‘self-consciousness'. Law, state, religion, and so on can be conceived as independent, self-acting spheres, only by virtue of a reification of exactly the sort idealism engages in with regard to consciousness. In reality, they do not exist outwith people's materialistic connection'. For Marx, ‘superstructures’ are not, as they immediately appear to be, levels of reality which are substantially separate from the ‘base'. They are, rather, ideological forms of appearance – Erscheinungsformen, to use his own concept – of the totality of social relations which make up that base itself, and their ideologicality consists precisely in their appearance of real independence. The proper interpretive context for Marx's metaphor of basis and superstructure, then, is that of his critique of ideology. Superstructures, contrary to Cohen, are the ‘social forms of consciousness' in which the essential relations' of society are immediately grasped, and their analysis is coterminous with Marx's critique of immediate appearances.

Alasdair MacIntyre argued similarly (and correctly drew attention to the relevance here of Marx's Hegelian background) long ago:

As Marx depicts it the relation between basis and superstructure is not only not mechanical, it is not even causal. What may be misleading is Marx's Hegelian vocabulary. Marx certainly talks of the basis determining' the superstructure, and of a correspondence' between them. But the reader of Hegel's Logic will realise that what Marx envisages is something to be understood in terms of the way the nature of the concept of a given class, for example, may determine the concept of membership of that class ... The economic basis of a society is not its tools, but the people co-operating using those particular tools in the manner necessary to their use and the superstructure consists in the social consciousness moulded by and the shape of this co-operation ... Creating the basis, you create the superstructure. These are not two activities but one. (quoted in Thompson, 1973: 189n)

If this reading is correct, to construe the base/superstructure metaphor as a model of the relation between substantially discrete levels, practices or ‘instances' within the social formation, and conceptualize that relation in causal (or functional) terms, is to replicate exactly the ideological illusion of superstructural separability Marx is above all concerned to confute. Such constructions spectacularly miss the central point of his argument. The base/superstructure metaphor applies to the relation between social being and social consciousness, it is not a putative model of societal 'levels' at all. We might recall, here, the several occasions in Engels's late letters - and comparable passages can aiso be cited from Marx³ – on which he relates base and superstructure as, respectively, content and form. 4

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For Marx the analytic reification of superstructures - like the fetishes considered in chapter 1 - bespeaks a real social process of estrangement. Given his views on consciousness, it would be surprising if this were not the case. Marx sees ideas, categories' as being but the abstract ideal expression of social relations'(1846b: 189). Accordingly, where, as in capitalism, social relations take on the mystifying form of the violence of things' (1846a: 95), their ‘abstract ideal expression’ is likely to be a reified one. The German Ideology explicitly develops this argument:

Within the division of labour relationships are bound to acquire independent existence in relation to individuals. All relations can be expressed in language only in the form of concepts. That these general ideas and concepts are looked upon as mysterious forces is the necessary result of the fact that the real relations, of which they are the expression, have acquired independent existence. (1846a: 406)

The Grundrisse advances a similar thesis. Contrasting the (relatively transparent) personal dependency-relations of precapitalist societies – kinship and Herrschaft – with the objective dependency-relations' of the capitalist market, Marx argues that:

These objective dependency-relations, also appear, in antithesis to those of personal dependency (the objective dependency-relation is nothing more than social relations which have become independent and now enter into opposition to the seemingly independent individuals; i.e. the reciprocal relations of production separated from and autonomous of individuals) in such a way that individuals are now ruled by abstractions, whereas earlier they depended on one another. The abstraction, or idea, however, is nothing more than the theoretical expression of those material relations which are their lord and master. Relations can be expressed, however, oniy in ideas, and thus philosophers have determined the reign of ideas to be the peculiarity of the new age. (1858a: 163–4)

It was at such abstractions', rather than the relations of which they were the expression, that the Young Hegelians characteristically tilted. The objective of Marx's critique was to refocus attention on the relations themselves, to locate the secret of the holy family' in the earthly family' (1845b).

In Marx's later writings, a distinction between the substance of essential relations' and the variously misleading phenomenal forms' in which they present themselves to consciousness is a systematic, organising principle of his critique of capitalism.4 He held that science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided' (1865a: 817), and that in general ‘it is only the direct form of manifestation of relations that is reflected in [people's] brains and not their inner connection' (1867b). In capitalism, though not in all societies, these two diverge. Patrick Murray, criticizing my Marx's Method, has suggested that Marx leans heavily here on Hegel's distinctive logic of essence, which can be typified in the phrase "the essence must appear as something other than itself (namely, the phenomena)"(1983: 496). Under certain conditions, essential relations necessarily appear to their subjects in misleading forms (and Marx's critique of appearances shows why this should be the case, in terms of the character of the underlying relations themselves). In Murray's words, Marx works with a non-traditional model which conceives of the discrepancies between essence and appearance to be a necessary consequence of the very nature of the essence' (ibid.). I have exemplified this above for commodity and capital fetishism. This Hegelian logic of essence is, for Marx, accurately expressive of a specifically alienated social reality: the enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world’ of capitalism with its personification of things and conversion of production relations into entities' (1865a: 830). Only such a logic can penetrate this religion of everyday life (ibid.) - again we see Marx's persistent analogy between religious and other fetishes. In this sense Lenin was quite right when he famously observed that Capital could not be fully understood without reference to Hegel's Logic (1916: 180).

It is exactly such Erscheinungsformen which comprise Marx's superstructure'. It is the discrepancy between essential relations and the misleading forms in which they are experientially manifested⁵ which makes sense - I am tempted to say, which alone can make sense - of his repeated characterizations of superstructures as ‘ideal' or ‘ideological'. This argument has an unsurprising corollary, for those who have followed my reconstruction of historical materialism thus far. That the base/superstructure metaphor has been understood in the way it conventionally has is itself readily explicable in terms of Marx's own ‘logic of essence'. It is an ideological consequence of the fact that within capitalism, social relations of production do manifest themselves phenomenally in the form of obstensibly independent economic and non-economicspheres'. Here, as elsewhere, traditional historical materialism' uncritically takes appearance for reality. It grounds its analytic categories on the natural, self-understood forms of social life' of the bourgeois world, whose characteristics it then proceeds unhistorically to generalize to all social formations. It is the depth, the tenacity, the sheer massive obviousness of these capitalist Erscheinungsformen that makes what Marx was saying so eternally difficult to grasp.

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IV

I shall shortly exemplify this argument with regard to Marx's analyses of state and law. But first, a clarification. I have tentatively suggested the identification of superstructures and Erscheinungsformen elsewhere (Corrigan and Sayer, 1978; Sayer 1983: 80–1), but in ways which are likely to be misleading.6 The same goes, more generally, for my account of ideology in Marx's Method. My concern there, as here, was to deny the independence both of consciousness from experience and of politics, law, and so on, from what Marx understood by economic structure'. My language, however, tended to suggest that the relations at issue could be adequately comprehended in terms of structural ‘correspondences'. This was unintentional. But I would now be more cautious.

In talking of the economic structure of society, we should never forget – and Marx rarely did .– that we are talking of relations between living, acting, thinking, and above all historical individuals; real men and women. Far from dichotomizing society and the individual, structure and action, Marx is insistent throughout his work that above all we must avoid postulating“society"... as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual. The individual is the social being' (1844a: 299); ‘my own existence is social activity' (ibid.: 298). Society has no existence independently of individuals: its only subjects are the individuals, but individuals in mutual relationships, which they produce and reproduce anew' (1858a: 712; cf. Frisby and Sayer,

1986: 91-6). These relations, moreover, are always in the process of formation and transformation: Marx's continual revolutionizing, in practical activity, of circumstances and selves. ‘Structure’ thus resolves into activities.

'Ideological superstructures' - understood as the forms in which these relations are experientially apprehended - likewise do not mechanically arise', except in analytic shorthand. Indeed I would now argue that the blanket term ‘ideology' is inadequate, except for the most abstract analytic purposes, to elucidate the multiple and complex ways in which social being is articulated in the social consciousness of individuals. It is too blunt an instrument to embrace (for instance) languages, symbols, moralities, artefacts, myths, faiths, traditions, customs; all of these, moreover, more or less institutionalized in churches, legal systems, political rituals, and so on. The concept of ideology has suffered the fate of many in Marx. Where for him its primary use was adjectival and descriptive of qualities illusoriness, class bias, etc. – which some particular historical forms of consciousness had, it has become reified as itself descriptive of a supposed real entity, a noun which sails through history innocent of any reference to real individuals and the lives they lead. And as Marx remarks against Stirner, concepts, ‘if they are divorced from the empirical reality underlying them, can be turned inside out like a glove' (1846a: 362).

It is people – not individuals in the abstract, but definite, socially and historically located individuals - who have ideas, build (and modify) institutions, shape their world. The process through which being is expressed’ in consciousness is an active one. An appropriate image of this is the picture of a sculptor: creating something genuinely novel, but always out of materials - physical and cultural - which constrain (and in that sense, ‘determine')7 what can be made of them. Marx thought the ultimate basis of people's consciousness lay in their experience, which is why it makes sense to seek to ground an explanation of its ideologicality (where such a claim is made) in Erscheinungsformen. But we have hardly begun to explain, with this presumption, the actual empirical forms - think of millenarianism, rough music, carnival, or grands peurs – which social consciousness assumes in actual history. It is a starting-point, no more. Least of all can we simply read off' forms of consciousness from the bare concept of a ‘mode of production’ or its abstractly specified essential relations'.

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In the final analysis the relation between social being and social consciousness can only be elucidated historically, over time, through empirical investigation of – in Marx's words - exactly how people make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are confronted' (1852: 103).

Amongst these ‘given and inherited circumstances', I would add, the cultural legacy of the past must be reckoned a powerful material constituent of the present, framing present experience, informing phenomenal forms'. Societies exist in time, and cannot be made sense of otherwise. Erscheinungsformen equally have an historical dimension, even if it is never independent of people's materialistic connection'. Forms of consciousness cannot adequately be analysed statically or synchronically. We cannot begin to understand, for instance, the phenomenal forms of the modern' English state without invoking the traditions symbolized and materialized in Magna Carta, Parliament and the common law, without remembering that England is an old Protestant country, or even – some would argue – without comprehending the long reach of the cultural and institutional heritage of Anglo-Saxon England (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985). It is not irrelevant to the aetiology of social forms of consciousness in England that, for instance, county boundaries were with few exceptions continuous from before the Norman Conquest to 1974. Counties are not just names on maps, they are real repositories of historical experience. Such traditions' - themselves contested (think of the centuries-long myth’ of the Norman yoke (Hill, 1954) or the differential meanings of 'English liberties' (Thompson, 1968: ch. 1) – are formative of individuals' social identities, of, precisely, their social forms of consciousness’ and self-consciousness.

The ‘arising' of ‘superstructures', in short, cannot be directly comprehended through some structural (or functional) logic. It needs rather to be painstakingly and empirically traced through time, as without doubt constrained, but also without doubt active, social formation – to give that usually static term a more historical nuance than it is usually granted. Theory alone, no matter how elegantly formulated, provides no short-cuts here to knowledge. This caution should be borne in mind in all that follows. It is essentially that I drew from Engels's testament’ in chapter 1. Base and superstructure are in the end metaphors, and what Marx had to say about them in the

1859 Preface was never intended to be any more than a ‘guiding thread'.

V

It is time to substantiate these arguments. I shall take Marx's analysis of those two closely linked institutional realms which for Cohen are superstructures par excellence, state and law. We may begin once more in the 1840s. E.P. Thompson (1978a: 247 ff.) has argued that Marx's texts of this period are significantly wider in the scope of their historical sociology than his later, supposedly more mature' writings, and that his critical focus on political economy in the 1850s and 1860s brought losses as well as gains. Certainly this case can be persuasively made for Marx's 1840s analysis of state and law. Marx himself acknowledged in the 1860s that ‘the relations of the different state forms to the different economic structures of society’ was something he did not deal with adequately in Capital, and others might find it difficult to do on the basis provided there.⁸

Early in 1845, Marx signed a contract with the Darmstadt publisher Leske for a work whose proposed title – an instructive one - was The Critique of Politics and Political Economy'. He never delivered. But his plans for his ‘economics' included a ‘book' on the state at least until 1862 (see Sayer, 1985). Had such a book materialized, it might have amplified on a pregnant remark of 1843:

The establishment of the political state and the dissolution of civil society into independent individuals – whose relations with one another depend on law, just as relations of men in the system of guilds and estates depended on privilege – is accomplished by one and the same act. (1843c: 167)

Marx says much the same in another manuscript of the same year, using slightly different terms:

The political constitution as such is brought into being only where the private spheres have won an independent existence. Where trade and landed property are not yet free and have not yet become independent, the political constitution too does not yet exist ... The abstraction of the state as such belongs only to modern times, because the abstraction of private life belongs only to modern times. The abstraction of the political state is a modern product. (1843b: 32)

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The ‘political state', 'the state as such', is, then, for Marx an historical phenomenon, coterminous with the establishment of a civil society’ of ‘independent individuals' whose mutual relations depend on law. In view of my arguments in the earlier sections of this chapter we should not let pass unremarked Marx's description here of both the state and private life as abstractions'.

In many of his earliest writings, as here, Marx employed the concept of civil society to refer to what he was in The German Ideology to call ‘forms of intercourse’ (Verkehrsform) and later clarify as relations of production (Produktionsverhältnisse). He took the concept from Hegel, who in turn had it from eighteenth-century French philosophers via Adam Smith (see Frisby and Sayer, 1986: ch. 1). Thereafter, interestingly, the term civil society does not disappear entirely from Marx's lexicon. He uses it in his autobiographical sketch in the 1859 Preface, to refer to the totality of’ the material conditions of life' (whose anatomy',9 he says there, is to be sought in political economy) (1859a). More significantly, perhaps, the concept of civil society surfaces again in The Civil War in France, in connection once more with the analysis of the modern state (1871: 149 and passim). I have suggested elsewhere (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985) that this is part of a wider set of neglected continuities between Marx's 1840s and post-1870 writings, which reinforces Thompson's point about the relative narrowing of focus in the texts of the intervening years, and suggests that any simple dismissal of the 1840s analyses of the state as immature' is ill-considered. The later Marx continued to see civil society and ‘the political state' as coeval phenomena.

Although Marx notes in The German Ideology that the concept of civil society is conventionally extended to embrace the social organization evolving directly out of production and commerce, which in all ages forms the basis of the state and the rest of the idealistic superstructure', he makes it clear that civil society is in fact an historical category in both its origins and its specific reference. The term "civil society"', he says, ‘emerged in the eighteenth century, when property relations had already extricated themselves from the ancient and medieval community. Civil society as such develops only with the bourgeoisie' (1846a: 48-9). The German term bürgerliche Gesellschaft indeed translates both as civil and as bourgeois society. The 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse extends this argument, and takes further the theme of ‘the dissolution of civil society into independent individuals’.

Here Marx contends that the isolated individuals’ who form the theoretical starting-point both of classical political economy, and of Rousseau's contrat social, which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract', are in fact projections back into an imaginary past of individuals as they appear within modern civil society, in preparation since the sixteenth century and making giant strides towards maturity in the eighteenth' (1857: 83). The error here, for Marx, is exactly the same as Hegel's on landed property, discussed in the last chapter – the treatment of concepts not as historical but rather as eternal categories'(1865a: 615). Indeed, it is but the other side of the same coin, for the process whereby property' is ‘freed’ from its former. political and social embellishments and associations', to achieve its purely economic form', is the same process wherein individuals appear progressively detached from the communities through whose membership they previously became proprietors or possessors of land: family, clan, Herrschaftsverhältnisse. They appear in bürgerliche Gesellschaft for the first time as, precisely, mere individuals, in dot-like isolation'. But 'human beings become individuals only through the process of history. He appears originally as a species-being, clan being, herd animal' (1858a: 496). It is, specifically, the social relations of capitalism - and in particular its social division of labour – which constitute individuals as apparently autonomous, freely contracting subjects: owners either of means of production or labour-power.

But for Marx – as later for Emile Durkheim (1984) – this appearance of individual autonomy, of lack of dependence on social relations, is ultimately illusory. The more the division of labour which individualizes people expands, the more socially interdependent individuals actually become. Given capitalism's inherent dynamism, ultimately such interdependence becomes global, through the world market. Overt relations of personal dependency give way to general objective dependency-relations' (1858a: 163–4, quoted more fully above, p. 92):

the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also that of precisely the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) reiations. The human being is in the most literal sense a zoon politikon, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. (1857: 84)

This objective interdependence may not be apparent, because of the alienated forms - the fetishized appearance as relations between things (commodities), rather than people - it assumes under capitalism. But it is real. Accordingly, Smith's, Ricardo's or Rousseau's 'Natural Individual' is ‘an ideal' (ibid.: 83) – note again the use of this significant term. Marx had criticized Feuerbach in the same terms ten years earlier: the abstract individual whom he analyses belongs in reality to a particular form of society' (1846a: 57; cf. 1843d: 175).10

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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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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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We should take the religious analogy seriously, because for Marx religion is the paradigm of alienated consciousness, its fetishes the exemplars for fetishes elsewhere. He once famously remarked (in a text contemporary with ‘The Jewish Question') that ‘criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism' (1843d: 175). What he is saying here, I think, amounts to much more than that the state's pretentions to be above classes are to be disbelieved.

Marx's claim is that the institution of the political' state as such is an illusory, ideal community – an ideological fiction – built upon the construction of an equally fictitious social identity for the individual, that of the citizen. Individuals are citoyens only as abstract' individuals – individuals, in other words, divorced from the material circumstances and social relations which concretely make them what they are. The ‘ideal' state is predicated on the ideological denial of real individuality. Real differences between people are submerged in the ascription of unreal universality'. In capitalism, the individual and the community are therefore simultaneously idealized: the bourgeois citizen is an imaginary member of an illusory sovereignty'. We cannot begin to understand Marx's thinking on the state, to my mind, unless we take these words in their literal sense. The state is an ideological representation of bourgeois society, an Erscheinungsform In Philip Abrams's provocative adaptation of Durkheim, it is capitalism's ‘distinctive collective misrepresentation' (1977: 15). And individuals as identified and represented (in all senses) within the community of state are not individuals as they really are.

For ‘The Jewish Question', then, the political state as such is without doubt an ideological form, an ideal superstructure on real relations in the sense argued above. But beyond its references to ‘egoistic individuals', this text offers no material analysis of the social relations which underpin this form. Later writings, however, do – but without sacrificing any of the essential insights of ‘The Jewish Question'. The German Ideology roots the ‘illusory community' of the state (and law) in the particular class relations of bourgeois society, which it in turn sees as based in the division of labour (1846a: 65, 83):

the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interests of the separate individual ... and the communal interests of all individuals ... And out of this very contradiction between the interests of the individual and that of the community the latter takes an independent form as the State, divorced from the real interests of individual and community, and at the same time as an illusory communal life, always based, however, on the real ties . . . and especially . . . on the classés, already determined by the division of labour. (1846a: 44-5)

Specifically, Marx relates the fact that bourgeois power takes the characteristic forms of domination through a political state and the rule of law to the circumstance that the bourgeoisie is the first social group in history truly to rule ‘as a class’.

At first sight, this notion is odd, for did not previous forms of society also have ruling classes: feudal lords, ancient slaveholders, oriental potentates, and so on? Clearly they did, and Marx obviously does not mean to deny that pre-capitalist ruling strata lived off surplus labour. The contrast he has in mind is a narrower one, between social forms of rule; in particular, between rule as a class and rule as an estate (Stand). In this sense, class too is a historical category.12 Rule as an estate, as we saw in chapter 3, is based in personal relations of domination and servitude, as also is slavery. Personalized domination is in fact for Marx the norm in all precapitalist societies. The bourgeoisie, by contrast, rules impersonally - and is the first class in history to do so - in the context of the formal equality of all individuals. The form in which bourgeois social power is embodied is the purely economic' (and specifically alienated) one of its property, in the modern meaning of the word. Control over people (and their labour) is mediated through control over things. The ultimate expression of this impersonal social power is in money - ‘the consumate fetish'. In bourgeois society, according to the Grundrisse:

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VI

The reciprocal and all-sided dependence of individuals who are indifferent to one another forms their social connection. This social bond is expressed in exchange value ... the power which each individual exercises over the activity of others or over social wealth exists in him as the owner of exchange values, of money. The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket. (1858a: 156-7)

It is the materialization - the alienation - of the social bond' in the thing-like forms of commodities, money and capital, which permits people to exercise power over one another indirectly and impersonally, as abstract individuals, rather than directly and personally as master and slave or lord and serf. In Capital Marx observes that it was on precisely these grounds – social power becomes the private power of private persons'- that the ancients denounced money as subversive of the economic and moral order of things' (1867a: 132), an order seen by for instance Aristotle as one of natural and personalized hierarchy.

The German Ideology relates the existence of both state and law to this impersonal', and alienated, form of class domination through property’ alone:

pure private property ... has cast off all semblance of a communal institution and has shut off the state from any influence on the development of property. To this modern private property corresponds the modern state . . . By the mere fact that it is a class and no longer an estate, the bourgeoisie is forced to organise itself no longer locally, but nationally, and to give a general form to its mean average interest. Through the emancipation of private property from the community, the state has become a separate entity, beside and outside civil society; but it is nothing more than the form of organisation which the bourgeoisie necessarily adopt, both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests. (1846a: 79, emphasis added)

Marx savs exactly the same of law: in the law the bourgeoisie must give themselves a general expression precisely because they rule as a class' (ibid.: 671).

The clue to the necessity of bourgeois rule taking the form of an ideally independent state enforcing the rule of law lies, for Marx, in the atomized, fissiparous character - precisely the individualized nature – of the bourgeois class itself. This in turn follows from the specific form of social division of labour between independent commodity-producers in which capitalist production is based. The individuals of the bourgeoisie, Marx considers, form a class only in so far as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors' (ibid.: 69). Their common class interest can be secured only by maintaining conditions – above all the defence of individual propertyrights – in which they can continue to act freely as individuals, each pursuing his own private interests, in apparent isolation from one another. This entails both the safeguarding of bourgeois right against the political and moral economies of other classes (whether aristocratic or proletarian) and the maintenance of equal right among bourgeois individuals themselves. The rule of law’ is the paradigm form of such regulation:

the fact that they [the bourgeois class] enforce their own will in the form of law, and at the same time make it independent of the personal arbitrariness of each individual among them, does not depend upon their idealistic will. Their personal rule must at the same time assume the form of average rule. Their personal power is based on conditions of life which as they develop are common to many individuals, and the continuance of which they, as ruling individuals, have to maintain against others, and, at the same time, to maintain that they hold good for everybody. The expression of this will which is determined by their common interests, is law. It is precisely because individuals who are independent of one another assert themselves and their own will, and because on this basis their attitude to one another is bound to be egotistical, that self-denial is made necessary in law and right, self-denial in the exceptional case, and self-assertion of their interests in the average case. (ibid.: 329)

Marx's discussion of the English Factory Acts in Capital I (1867a: ch. 15) admirably illustrates this thesis. Certainly he stresses the degree to which parliamentary limitation of hours of labour represented a victory for the political economy of the working class' (1864a: 845– 6); law is a theatre of class struggle as much as a form of class rule. But he is equally sensitive to the cry of the capitalists for equality in the conditions of competition'(1867a: 490). The German Ideology argues, comparably, that the representative system’ of modern parliamentary democracy is a very specific product of modern bourgeois society which is as inseparable from the latter as is the isolated individual of modern times'(1846a: 217–18).

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