Marx on liberal rights and Hegel. Splitting the state and the society.

Marx's "On the Jewish Question" builds on the foundation that "Political emancipation certainly represents a great progress. It is not, indeed, the final form of human emancipation, but it is the final form of human emancipation within the framework of the prevailing social order" (35). Liberal rights are real progress in some sense but they're also, much more importantly, the ceiling of what capitalism can offer. 

To answer why this is the case, Marx turns to America. To counter Bauer's argument that emancipation requires abolishing religion, Marx points out that the US achieved full political equality while remaining deeply religious. If you can have complete political emancipation alongside persistent inequality, formal rights lose any meaningful function. 

Marx later criticizing hegel is also very crucial to his argument. Hegel saw the modern state as the resolution of the contradiction between particular interests in civil society and universal reason in political life. The state reconciles individual and community. Marx instead think this split between civil society and the state is actually the core of the problem "Where the political state has attained to its full development, man leads, not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life, a double existence—celestial and terrestrial. He lives in the political community, where he regards himself as a communal being, and in civil society where he acts simply as a private individual, treats other men as means, degrades himself to the role of a mere means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers" (34). The state publishes equality and simultenously civil society reproduces hierarchy through property and markets. 

Marx sees liberal rights that produce negative liberty as inherenty separating man from man. The meaningful application of liberty is actually just the protection of private property. You're equally free to compete under radically unequal conditions. Rich and poor alike have the same formal right to sleep under bridges and accumulate capital. Politics seems to determine equality and citizenship but this is only theoretical, who owns the apartment you sleep in or thed factory you work at is far more meaningful to your actual life.


Comments

  1. Andy CheungFebruary 5, 2026 at 9:50 AM

    I think the America/France examples that Marx brings up are critical and central to his argument. The US in the 1840s wasn't just religious, but a society where constitutional rights coexisted with commercialism. This makes it such a powerful example for Marx because it demonstrated that political emancipation could exist alongside the most extreme unfreedom (slavery) and thorough commercialization of social relations, proving Marx's point that formal rights actual mask these contradictions. I think there's also something to take away from his point on the Rights of Man in France, where citizens were ostensibly given universal rights of "liberty, equality, and fraternity", but instead of those materializing for the workers, only the bourgeoisie had gained political power. Context-wise, Marx writes this in 1843, just 5 years before the 1848 Revolution that removed King Louis-Philippe because he favored only the wealthy elites.

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