[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
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critique of the wage labor contract in Capital depends on arguing that it incompletely

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
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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

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.

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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

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
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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

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
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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

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
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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

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
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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

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
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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

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
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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 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
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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

harmonizing particular interests through legislation that serves the collective good (and
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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
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their fellow participants; they satisfy natural needs essential to their well-being, and

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
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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

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 one-

sidedness. 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
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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

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
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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

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,
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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

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
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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

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
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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

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
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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

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:
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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,

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
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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

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
 23

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.

 24

Frederick Neuhouser
Barnard College, Columbia University
 25

2pp. = 4:08 = 4.13 min.

further point, OJQ, 366: political membership is a mere means to securing the (egoistic,
individualistic) rights of man
i
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, 1956-91).
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.).