WorkKarl Marx

Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

A young Marx takes Hegel's revered state apart paragraph by paragraph — a manuscript no one read until 1927, behind the introduction that called religion the opium of the people.

by Karl Marx68 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts
First published: 1843(aged 25)
Original language: German

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Overview

Hegel had taught that the modern state was reason made concrete — that behind its monarch, its bureaucracy and its estates stood the rational Idea working itself out in history. In the summer of 1843, newly married and shut out of journalism by the Prussian censor, Marx sat down with Hegel's Philosophy of Right and worked through its paragraphs on the state one at a time. Turning against Hegel a method he had taken from Feuerbach, he argued that Hegel had stood the world on its head: real people, families and the clash of private interests are the actual subject of political life, and the state Hegel exalted is their product, not their author. The manuscript stopped mid-argument and Marx never published it; it stayed unread until it was first printed in Moscow in 1927. What did reach print was the essay Marx wrote as its introduction, which appeared in the single issue of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in Paris in 1844. Those few pages carry the most quoted thing Marx ever wrote about religion — that it is the opium of the people — and, more consequentially, the first appearance of an idea he would return to for the rest of his life: that the propertyless workers were the one class able to free itself only by freeing all of society, and so carried a universal task. Marx soon abandoned the larger manuscript and left Germany for Paris; from there economics, not Hegel, took over.

Key concepts

What does Marx mean by Hegel inverting subject and predicate?

He means Hegel reversed cause and effect. Real people, families and clashing private interests are the actual subject of political life, but Hegel made them mere predicates of the Idea, treating the state and monarch as reason incarnate and the living society beneath as its mere expression. Marx, borrowing Feuerbach's method, turns this the right way up: society produces the state, not the reverse.

What does 'religion is the opium of the people' mean?

It appears in this work's published introduction, and it is less dismissive than it sounds. Marx calls religion the sigh of the oppressed creature, a real consolation for real suffering, not a lie priests invented but a comfort people reach for in a heartless world. Abolishing the illusion therefore means changing the conditions that make it necessary, not merely mocking belief.

Who are the 'proletariat' first named in this work?

The propertyless workers who, in the essay's introduction, make their first appearance in Marx's thought as a universal class. Because they own nothing and suffer wrong in general rather than a particular wrong, Marx argues they can free themselves only by freeing all of society. This idea of a class carrying a universal task recurs across everything he wrote afterward.

What does Marx mean by Hegel's 'mystification'?

He means dressing an ordinary fact in mystical robes so it seems the work of a higher power. Where Hegel presents monarchy and bureaucracy as the self-development of reason, Marx sees only human institutions mystified into divinity. The critique's method is to strip that veil away, to show the mundane social content hiding inside Hegel's speculative language.

Why did this critique stay unpublished until 1927?

The manuscript broke off mid-argument, and Marx set it aside when he left for Paris and turned to economics; it was first printed in Moscow only in 1927. What did reach readers in his lifetime was the separate introduction he wrote for it, published in Paris in 1844, the pages that named the proletariat and called religion opium.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Hegel's State Turned Right Side Up

Does the state stand above society as reason made flesh, or is it the product of the real people and private interests beneath it? The answer decides whether politics is theology or something a person can change.

Reading Hegel's Philosophy of Right paragraph by paragraph, Marx turns Feuerbach's method against its author: Hegel had made the actual subject — families, needs, the clash of interests — into a mere predicate of the Idea, and crowned monarchy and bureaucracy as its incarnation. Against that mystification Marx sets democracy, where the state is openly the people's own work. The manuscript broke off unpublished and waited eighty years for a reader, but its wager, that material life underlies political form, set the direction of everything he wrote after.

state
sovereignty
monarchy
democracy
political theory
political philosophy
abstraction
mystification
self-consciousness
metaphysics
state theory
civil society
political constitution
constitution
critique of idealism

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Within this work

passages held: 68
distinct concepts: 121
by passages held, corpus-wide: #210

What this book thinks together

Every arc around the wheel is one concept in this book. A ribbon joins two the text reaches for together, and its width is how many of its passages hold both. Strongest: critique with logic.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 15 pairings. 40 shared passages in all. 20 weaker pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
critique	logic	4
logic	metaphysics	4
logic	political theory	4
logic	methodology	3
logic	political philosophy	3
logic	subjectivity	3
methodology	political philosophy	3
critique	metaphysics	2
critique	methodology	2
critique	political theory	2
critique	subjectivity	2
metaphysics	political theory	2
metaphysics	subjectivity	2
political philosophy	sovereignty	2
political theory	subjectivity	2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1843 Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts) you are here DE
1844 On the Jewish Question (Zur Judenfrage)
Written alongside the Hegel critique and published in the same short-lived Paris journal, this is Marx settling accounts with Bruno Bauer and the Young Hegelians. It marks his turn away from religion and the state toward the economic life he came to think lay underneath them.
DE
1845 The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism (Die heilige Familie oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik)
Overwhelmingly Marx's despite the shared title page, and aimed squarely at Bruno Bauer's circle. It sits on the hinge between the Young Hegelian quarrels Marx was leaving and the historical materialism he was about to work out.
DE
1845 Theses on Feuerbach (Thesen über Feuerbach)
Eleven notebook jottings, not an argument built for readers but private markers Marx set down in 1845 and Engels rescued in 1888. They register the moment he broke with Feuerbach and put human practice at the centre of his thinking.
DE
1848 The Communist Manifesto (Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei)
Commissioned to a deadline as revolution gathered in 1848, and the most public thing Marx ever put his name to — the opposite pole from the manuscripts he left unfinished in drawers. It states in a few pages the view of history his longer works spent decades grounding.
DE
1849 Wage Labour and Capital (Lohnarbeit und Kapital)
An early, popular run at the economics Marx would spend the next twenty years perfecting. Engels reissued it in 1891 with the term "labour-power" set where Marx had written "labour" — repairing it with a concept that arrived only later.
DE
1852 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte)
Marx as historian and political analyst rather than economist or agitator: a close reading of a single French coup, written for a New York émigré paper in 1852. It handed later Marxism its theory of the state's independence from the classes beneath it.
DE
1858 Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie)
Written a decade before Capital and unknown for almost a century: the notebooks Marx filled to clarify his own thinking, rediscovered only after 1953 and central to the Marx revival that came with the New Left.
DE
1865 Value, Price and Profit (Lohn, Preis und Profit)
A pair of lectures rather than a book — Marx answering a fellow member at the General Council of the International in 1865, in English. His daughter Eleanor found the manuscript and published it in 1898, and it became the shortest way into the economics of Capital.
DE
1867 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Das Kapital)
The work of Marx's maturity and the one book of his economics he saw into print. Volume one appeared in 1867; Engels assembled volumes two and three from the unfinished manuscripts after Marx died, in 1885 and 1894.
DE

— or open another of their works