Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of State and Law and the Basic Orientation of State Socialization

Abstract: Unlike identifying the starting point of Marx’s socio-political theory as the German Ideology, Doctoral Thesis, or Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, this paper identifies the starting point of Marx’s socio-political theory as Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ and Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction, and On the Jewish Question in the period of German-French Yearbook. In these documents, Marx realized the transition from enlightenment liberalism to radicalism. By following Feuerbach’s subject-predicate inversion logic, Marx reversed Hegel’s “state determines civil society” into “civil society determines the state”. However, Marx did not stop at the ready-made judgment that “civil society determines the state”, but explored the historical sublation of civil society and mapped out the possible forms of the state respectively. Marx’s civil society is obviously not the ready-made egoistic civil society of the young Hegelians and Feuerbach, but as a historically existing bourgeois society, which becomes the object of criticism of political economy in the process of the promotion and transformation of human society, thus achieving the historical materialism. Through the criticism of Hegel’s rational state or ethical state, Marx also tried to realize the transformation from the material or bourgeois state to the people’s state. But the people’s state is different from an anarchist and populist state, but a social community associated with the construction of a new society. The socialization of the state is the basic theoretical orientation that has been given in Marx’s critique of Hegel’s philosophy of state and law.