Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of RightKarl Marx

Marx wrote his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right in 1843 as a paragraph-by-paragraph commentary on sections 261–313 of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, the chapters on the internal constitution of the state. The full manuscript remained unpublished in his lifetime. What appeared in 1844, in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, was a separate Introduction that states the political stakes of the critique.

The manuscript charges Hegel with inverting subject and predicate. Hegel treats the Idea as the real agent and existing institutions (crown, executive, estates) as its predicates. Marx reverses the order: real human beings and their material life produce the state; speculative logic merely sanctifies what already exists. Hegel's constitutional monarchy, bureaucracy, and system of estates express a split between civil society and political state rather than the rational fulfillment of freedom. Democracy, for Marx, is the constitution in which the people appear as the actual source of political form.

The Introduction is sharper and more famous. It declares that the criticism of religion is largely complete and turns that criticism toward politics. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature and the opium of the people; to abolish the illusory happiness of religion is to demand real happiness. Germany's political backwardness, Marx argues, means that its revolution cannot be merely political. It requires a class with radical chains, the proletariat, whose emancipation is universal because it has no particular privilege to defend. The Critique is Marx's first sustained break with Hegelian political philosophy and the seed of his later theory of class and revolution.