Compare and Contrast Hegel and Marx on Civil Society and the Problem of Human Freedom
Essay
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel argued that civil society is characterized by private property, the pursuit of self-interest, and human needs. He viewed civil society as a body of needs wherein people align their specific personal interests with social expectations and necessities, which are finally negotiated by the all-embracing state. Hegel claimed that civil society is perfectly able to balance the wide array of human interests and needs. However, he further stated that the state, as a highly ethical entity, provides stability to the totality of needs by guaranteeing the security and strength of the division of labor, social class, and private property (Hegel, 1991). Inhabiting the domain of capitalist objectives, civil society is not totally free from conflict. Therefore, the purpose of the state was to fix the limitations and errors of civil society. Hegel shares this idea with Marx—basically, both Hegel and Marx believe that an efficient and productively operational civil society was not possible without the support of the state.
The particular objective of Hegel in his work Philosophy of Right is to explore the 'objectivity' of human freedom. Human freedom, as explained by Hegel, only attains objectivity when it transforms into a vigorous society of free, self-determining human beings. The key components of this so-called 'ethical' and 'free' society, according to Hegel (1991), are the state, wherein people willingly accept and surrender to the institutions and laws formed to guarantee their wellbeing and security; civil society, wherein citizens voluntarily work or provide their labor so as to earn for themselves and satisfy their basic needs; and, family, which represents a naturally moral life.
Hegel believes that the people of civil society decide and behave toward the fulfillment of their self-interest and are interested in the fulfillment of their personal needs and wants. As clearly stated by Hegel: “In civil society, each individual is his own end and all else means nothing to him. But he cannot accomplish the full extent of his ends without reference to others; these others are therefore means to the end of the particular [person]” (Hegel, 1991, 220). This statement simply means that people are forced to act self-importantly or with their own selfish motive, yet, despite such selfishness, they are left with no choice but to fulfill the needs of each other, which, in consequence, leads to a strong social unity (Hegel, 1991, 221):
The selfish end in its actualisation, conditioned in this way by universality, establishes a system of all-round interdependence, so that the subsistence and welfare of the individual and his rightful existence are interwoven with, and grounded on, the subsistence, welfare and rights of all, and have actuality and security only in this context.
Without a doubt, as clearly stated in the above statement, Hegel believes that freedom can only be found in a civil society. Nevertheless, similar to Marx, Hegel argued that the civil society is naturally bourgeoisie, and was governed by capitalistic structures and institutions. He did not deny the fact that civil society is dominated by market forces. This is where Hegel and Marx converge, as well as diverge.
Writing during the emergence of industrial capitalism and the widespread resistance to it in 19th-century Europe, Karl Marx did not bring to mind the idealistic, Utopian ideologies or the collaborative relationship between producer and consumer struggling to cope with capitalism. Marx embraced modernity, yet not like Hegel he believed that there was no chance for a compromise or pacification of its conflict, conflict that predicated the preservation of capitalist social relations. Civil society, according to Marx (2012), is where all histories happen. Even though civil society has been in existence for a long time, it is a stage fully achieved merely in social productions governed by capitalism and merely along with the presence of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie wields its economic and social influence within the civil society, and the state is a mere unnatural, factitious body that awards genuine liberty and freedom only to the owners of the means of production.
Basically, Marx embodied another phase in the emerging debate on civil society. He also accepted the previous ideas about it, yet deviated from his forerunners in his interpretation of the features and mechanisms of civil society and its relationship with the state. Even though Marx at times argued that civil society was present in all historical periods, his overarching belief was that it was different from the modern society of the bourgeoisie, particularly with regard to independence and liberty from communal and moral restrictions. Marx (2012) claims that civil society was marked by need for equality and freedom, pursuit of self-centered interests, rights, and individualism.
Inspired by Hegel yet going beyond his ideas, Marx viewed civil society as the site of tensions and conflict or, in essence, a clash of social classes. Being naturally volatile or unpredictable, the civil society required the state to preserve the established economic order. Deviating from Hegel's argument, Marx (2012) asserted that the equality, liberty, freedom and other human virtues that rest at the core of civil society were profoundly perverted and made shallow and superficial by the capitalist society's class system. Laborers were left with no choice but to detach themselves from the very process and product of their labor, and held no true freedom. Having limited or no access to the needed resources and opportunities, these laborers' rights also stayed mostly futile and senseless. The same is true with individual choice and equality.
Opposing Hegel, Marx asserted that the state could not and did not go beyond or bypass civil society. Being the outcome of and completely connected to the class struggle innate in civil society, the state did not have the ability to function independently. The collectiveness or unity that it declared to embody was nothing but the motive, goals, and demands of the powerful class disguising as representatives of the society as one. Civil society for Marx was never an occasion of the state as was presumed by Hegel, but its groundwork. As soon as the civil society was drastically reconstructed and the classes were eliminated, the state relinquished its purpose (Marx, 2012). Individuals would take back the power they had already surrendered to the socially boundless state, and administer their common, collective pursuits in a democratic way. Afterward, civil society would be supplanted by an organized economy rooted in a communist ideal. It embodied the dialectical connection between the state and civil society.
The Problem of Human Freedom
Hegel gives great importance to the concept of human freedom, and thus places it at the center of his social philosophy. For him, freedom is the most valuable, inviolable, and transcendental possession of human beings. It is a fact that terms like 'reconciliation', 'self-actualization', and 'spirit' also form the core of Hegel's argument, but the meaning of these terms fully depends on Hegel's perspective of human freedom. The concept of reconciliation refers to the act of providing people with justifications to confirm the core values, practices, and institutions of their social order by proving that these elements function to bring about human freedom (Hegel, 1991). Hegel also claims that a person attains complete self-actualization in the sense that they enhance and use their abilities to freely and rationally act. And, the unique attribute of 'spirit' is its freedom. Therefore, in order to make sense of Hegel's ideas, it is crucial to understand first his notion of human freedom.
Nevertheless, Hegel does not support the idea that democracy is fundamental or imperative to rational acceptance and submission to the law. Therefore, in spite of his ideas about the premises of human freedom, how he establishes these premises conflicts with the notion of freedom that reinforces them. In other words, freedom is essentially moderated into the mere act of submitting to or complying with the law. Hegel vividly argues, “the state is absolutely rational in as much as it is the actuality of the substantial will which it possesses in the particular self-consciousness, once that consciousness has been raised to consciousness of its universality. This substantial unity is an absolute universal end in itself, in which freedom comes into its supreme right. On the other hand, this final end has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state” (Hegel, 1991, 106). Thus, Hegel views the state as an ethical entity and state laws are seen as the expression of the people's moral and rational determination.
Therefore, goodness or righteousness, according to Hegel, is a life lived in accordance to the law. Wrongdoing or immorality implies disobeying these laws and hence living a life that is against them. These immoral acts represent a contradiction of reason. Hence, by means of the law of the state, society fixes such deviation from morality and reason through punishment. In consequence, punishment by state laws is the contradiction of the contradiction or, more specifically, the revival of morality, freedom, and reason (Hegel, 1991). Nevertheless, this is exactly the reason why the philosophical explanation of Hegel of the problem of human freedom or the true existence of human beings deceives the individual and throws him/her into a new form of un-freedom and un-reality. Because the individual is imprisoned by his/her imagination s/he becomes alienated from the real world-- s/he becomes subjected to the opinions and judgments of his/her fellow people and thus experiences him/herself as an unstable, evolving human being.
On the other hand, Marx places emphasis on the mutuality or cooperation between the universal and the individual. Hegel's idea of human freedom requires that the laws of the state-- universal-- be the absolute standard of self-consciousness or individual self-determination but his final argument places self-consciousness under state power that operates on top of individual self-determination and remains in existence even without human freedom. While Hegel argues that the state power should be represented by a single ruler or regime, Marx claims that self-consciousness or human freedom must move toward state power through actual involvement in state activities. For Marx, therefore, human freedom can only be attained through democracy.
If human freedom on the whole is the shared, collaborative, and coordinated power to create the circumstances of social life based on a deliberately and thoughtfully negotiated set of values, objectives, and rules, and if people can live as citizens merely in social groups, then the challenge of achieving and actualizing human freedom is to recognize the institutional barriers that restrict self-consciousness and individual self-determination and to attain purposeful compromise among the people as to the ways they could be most successfully resolved (Marx, 2012). Within a political perspective, the key to the problem demands democratic agencies, policies, and discourses, because it is simply by means of political debate and discussion that purposeful agreement can be openly reached. In other words, only when citizens take part in the development and implementation of the law can they embrace the law as genuine, justifiable, and reasonable.
Contrary to Hegel, Marx (2012) sticks to the earlier, more virtue-based interpretation of human freedom. For Marx, the problem of human freedom is basically the achievement of morality and freedom in a harmony between absolute self-determination and individual self-consciousness. However, unlike Hegel, Marx does not in any way view these as accomplished in modern state. Such harmony can be attained, instead, only if the class struggle and social conflicts generated by capitalistic social, political, and economic relations are defeated. This victory, therefore, of morality and human freedom remains out of reach; it must be aggressively pursued by the revolutionary efforts of the socially marginalized and oppressed in an uprising against capitalism. Thus, in his critique of Hegel's idea of the problem of human freedom, Marx clearly explains that Hegel did not merely put a restriction on his own thoughts, but also created major restrictions of the class struggle itself. Hegel was only concerned about the advancement in the knowledge of constitutional, political freedom in its political and academic programs.
Hegel, unlike Marx, did not understand that human freedom should also be indebted to economic progress, to the dynamics of the people's economic self-reliance by means of capitalistic processes. Therefore, unlike Marx, Hegel was not able to realize that this mechanism which produces human freedom and civil prosperity also produces a new class of socially, economically, and politically oppressed and marginalized individuals bound to their labor whose core disadvantage at the mercy of capitalism cannot be eradicated by civil or political freedom. Therefore, unlike Hegel, Marx argued that human freedom must be viewed as part of a historical development, of a rational mechanism of becoming part of the universality, and of the actual processes motivated by the forces of production and class relations.
Conclusions
Hegel has formed the foundation for the theorizing of civil society. He sees the civil society as a sanctuary of human freedom and a social contract between the state and the people. Therefore, for Hegel, it is impossible to separate the concept of civil society with human freedom. Likewise, Marx believes that human freedom cannot be attained without the relationship between civil society and the state. However, Marx goes beyond Hegel's simple equation of civil society plus state equals human freedom by looking at the underlying economic, social, and political forces operating within society to produce the class consciousness and individual self-determination that would eventually pave the way to genuine human freedom-- that is, devoid of oppressive and exploitative economic and social relations.
References
Marx, K. (2012). Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844. New York: Courier Corporation.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1991). Hegel: elements of the philosophy of right. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
