Organicism in the Early Marx: Marx and Hegel on the State as an Organism

Abstract

Drawing on Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State, the paper suggests that Marx’s methodological critique of Hegel’s idealist procedure, of hypostatising abstractions and then reinterpreting the world as the realisation of those hypostases, is re-directed onto the state itself. According to Marx, the state is an abstraction – an aspect of the community which separates itself from the community, becomes an end, and reduces the individual humans of which it is composed to mere means. In Marx’s later writings the same argument is applied to capital, presenting labour under capitalism as hypostatised, alienated human activity. Finally, the paper suggests some parallels and points of contact of this view with modern Darwinian thought.

Keywords: Marx, Hegel, organicism, hypostatisation, idealism, state, capital, alienation, Darwin

JEL Classification: B14, B41