Isaac Marx on Republicanism

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The Lion's Skin of Politics: Marx on Republicanism Author(s): Jeffrey C. Isaac Source: Polity, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Spring, 1990), pp. 461-488Published by: Palgrave Macmillan JournalsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3234759Accessed: 14-05-2015 12:45 UTC

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The Lion's Skin of Politics: Marx on Republicanism Jeffrey C. Isaac Indiana University

Many political theorists argue that Karl Marx subscribed to a "myth of individualism" and thus failed to appreciate the importance of republicanism in the modern world. This article faults that interpretation and claims instead that Marx's theory and practice are unintelligible unless republicanism is seen as a central concern. The author insists further that an examination of Marx's critique of republicanism is not merely of historiographical significance but also yields important lessons for contemporary republican and communitarian theorists.

Jeffrey C. Isaac is Associate Professor of Political Science at Indiana University. He is the author of Power and Marxist Theory: A Realist View, as well as of articles in numerous journals of political science and political theory.

Republicanism is currently in vogue among political theorists. Prescrip- tive republicans invoke the themes of virtue, patriotism, and community in purported criticism of contemporary social and political arrangements in both capitalist democracies and communist states.1 Historiographical republicans seek to locate these themes in modern political discourse, subverting the so-called Whiggish views of celebratory liberals and

1. On prescriptive republicanism, see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Indiana: Uni- versity of Notre Dame Press, 1981); Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and "The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self." Political Theory, 12 (February 1984); Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Sheldon Wolin, "The People's Two Bodies." democracy, 1 (January 1981); Benjamin Barber, Strong Democ- racy: Participatory Politics in a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Robert N. Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); and Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1986).

Polity Volume XXII, Number 3 Spring 1990


462 Marx on Republicanism

critical Marxists alike about the rise of liberalism in the modern world.2 These projects are interrelated in many complex ways, and one cannot speak categorically about the way in which they relate as regards any particular writer. But there is clearly something complementary between the historical argument that modernity evinces a vital republican tradition and the moral argument that such republicanism is a currently desirable option.3

The interpretation of Karl Marx figures in both of these dimensions of republicanism. The historiographical thesis, most influentially put forth by J. G. A. Pocock, is that Marx subscribed to a "myth of liberalism," according to which the emergence of capitalism led to the rise of bourgeois individualism, an ideology holding that "market behavior was all that was needed to make a human being a human being."4 As Pocock puts it, "Marxists, as is notorious, maintain the ascendancy of 'bourgeois' values in and out of season."5 Needless to say, this myth is extraordinarily naive, and, if Marx subscribed to it, then we can only infer that his understanding of modern politics was severely flawed. This view leads to the normative thesis that Marx operated with a distorted view of modern political discourse and, as a consequence, sought to replace the individualism he so scorned with a form of bureaucratic statism. In other words, Marx not only failed as an historian to recognize the vitality of republicanism in the modern world; he also failed as a moralist to appreciate its virtues.6

In this paper, I will criticize both of these claims, but I will concentrate primarily on the first, for a simple glance at Marx's writings reveals it to be false. Marx not only recognized the vitality of republican political discourse, he spent most of his life participating in it, first as a proponent and then as a critic. An analysis of his reasons for doing so is of more than simply historiographical interest, for it sheds light on the deficien- cies of the second thesis as well. In short, Marx's socialist vision did not

2. On republican historiography, see particularly J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), and "Virtues, Rights, and Man- ners: A Model for Historians of Political Thought." Political Theory, 9 (August 1981); and Donald Winch, Adam Smith's Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

3. See Don Herzog, "Some Questions for Republicans." Political Theory, 14 (August 1986). 4. J. G. A. Pocock, "Authority and Property: The Question of Liberal Origins," in

After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter, ed. B. Malament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), p. 350.

5. J. G. A. Pocock, "The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: A Study in History and Ideology." Journal of Modern History, 53 (March 1981), p. 70.

6. See Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), and Andrew Fraser, "Legal Amnesia: Modern- ism vs. The Republican Tradition in American Legal Theory." Telos, 60 (Summer 1984).


Jeffrey C. Isaac 463

repudiate republicanism in any simplistic sense, but it did break radically from the dominant form that republicanism had assumed in the nineteenth century. The reasons for this suggest the complexity of Marx's own politics, which are more often than not grossly oversimplified, even by those, like Pocock, who otherwise emphasize the importance of context in interpretation. They also suggest the dangers of an uncritical recourse to republicanism in the contemporary world. It is worth under- scoring that this article is not an attempt to identify the democratic and humanist origins of Marx's thought, a task ably discharged long ago by both Western and Eastern Marxists. It is, rather, an effort to insist on the critical way in which Marx appropriated these idioms. The Marx I will discuss is not a republican or communitarian so much as a vigorous critic of the forms such orientations have taken in the modern world.

Curiously, "republicanism" is a term that goes undefined by many of those who use it most vociferously, whether in support or criticism, and I want to be clear as to my understanding of it. The term refers to a view of politics that draws its inspiration from the classical ideals of ancient Greece and Rome and emphasizes the primacy of civic virtue and public participation in social life. Republicanism exalts, in the words of Pocock, "a way of life given over to civic concerns and the ultimately political activity of citizenship."'7 As a consequence of Pocock's path- breaking historiography, this discourse has come to be associated with a virtual canon that includes Aristotle, Cicero, Polybius, Machiavelli, Harrington, Burgh, Rousseau and Jefferson. Republican ideas have clearly played an important, and frequently neglected, role in the history of modern political thought though, as I have argued elsewhere, their disjuncture with liberalism is open to serious questioning.8

I should note also at the outset that there is some justification for the viewpoint that Marx saw bourgeois individualism everywhere he looked. This observation, made current by C. B. Macpherson in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism,9 finds its most notable textual support in Marx's oft-quoted assertion in The Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie ... has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of

7. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, p. 56. 8. See my "Republicanism vs. Liberalism? A Reconsideration." History of Political

Thought, IX (Summer, 1988), and Ian Shapiro, "Republican Property: Antibourgeois Alternative?" Critical Review (forthcoming, 1990).

9. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959).



chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. . . . In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. . ... All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.10

In this text, political ideologies seem not even epiphenomenal illusions; Marx's language implies that all illusions are swept away by the ceaseless expansion of capital, leaving only possessive individualism and market exchange and rendering such relationships transparently conflictive. But this seems hardly likely. First, such a view is dramatically at odds with Marx's own conception of his project: "enabling the world to clarify its consciousness ... waking it from its dream about itself ... explaining to it the meaning of its own actions.""' Second, it would be a serious mistake to take Marx's bold statement about the bourgeois destruction of all illusions at face value for, if Pocock has taught us anything, it is that we can only understand a text if we can locate its context. And Marx's context here is clear. Politically, he is writing a polemical pamphlet for the Com- munist League, designed for mass distribution, on the eve of widespread European revolutions. Marx's dismissiveness about illusions and fixed relationships, and his optimism about imminent revolution, were widely shared at that time. Rhetorically, Marx is sketching out a grand historical narrative intended to invoke History and to evoke support among Euro- pean workers for a communist politics. The place of his remarks about the "cash nexus" in the text is thus not accidential. Preempting the sorts of criticisms about communist anarchism, moral depravity, etc., which would invariably be expressed by the bourgeoisie during an anticipated red scare, Marx asserts that it is the bourgeoisie which is revolutionary, which holds no respect for tradition, religion, politics, and the family, and is the morally dissolute group. This is the force of Marx's bold claims, which are otherwise incomprehensible. After all, the Manifesto is not simply a descriptive narrative; it is a moral criticism of capitalism, as well as a critique of the illusions plaguing the various European democratic and socialist groupings. Such an undertaking would hardly have been

10. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 1st ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1972), pp. 337-38.

11. Karl Marx, "For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing," in Tucker, Marx- Engels Reader, p. 10.



necessary had Marx believed in the superfluity of political ideologies.1 Textual support for Pocock's thesis also comes from another source,

Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Here, after ob- serving that "the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time in Roman costume and with Roman phrases, the task of unchaining and setting up modern bourgeois society," Marx notes that.

the new social formation once established, the antidiluvian Colossi disappeared and with them resurrected Romanity-the Brutuses, Gracchi, Publicolas, the tribunes, the senators, and Caeser himself. Bourgeois society in its sober reality has begotten its true inter- preters and mouthpieces in the Says, Cousins, Royer-Collards, Benjamin Constants and Guizots. ... Wholly absorbed in the production of wealth and in peaceful competitive struggle it no longer comprehended that ghosts from the days of Rome had watched over its cradle.13

Here ideology plays a crucial role but, as Marx seems to have it, the anachronistic ghosts of republican political ideology necessarily give way before classical political economy and the ideology of the market. But this can hardly prove Pocock's point, for the Roman "costumes and phrases" are the focus of Marx's analysis, and if so it can hardly prove that Marx failed to recognize the importance of republican ideology.

Having dismissed the most obvious grounds for Pocock's claim, I will now analyze three contexts in which Marx addressed republicanism: his early writings on democracy, in which he articulated clearly republican themes; his early critique of political emancipation and the capitalist state; and his analysis of the failure of the revolutions of 1848. My point, once again, is to insist that for Marx republicanism was a living and problematic feature of modern politics.

I. Marx's Early Republicanism There are two senses in which Marx's earliest political writings can be construed as republican. First, they articulate clearly republican themes:

12. See David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (New York: Harper, 1973); Alan Gilbert, Marx's Politics: Communists and Citizens (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981); and Norman Geras, "The Controversy about Marx and Justice." New Left Review, 150 (March-April 1985).

13. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (hereafter MECW), vol. 11 (New York: International Publishers, 1979), p. 104.



opposition to monarchy and to established privilege, whether religious or corporate, and advocacy of a universal state based on the virtues of rational participation. As Marx put it, "every modern person understands, and can understand, by the state only the sphere common to all his fellow citizens.'"14 Second, they fall into the range of what is taken to be republican by his contemporaries.

As is well known, the young Marx was an associate of "the Young Hegelians," who sought to radicalize Hegel's rationalist humanism, and to execute a radical critique of the religious and political establishment.'5 David MacLellan cites the dismissive opinion of Heinrich Leo, a conservative opponent, that the Young Hegelians were "a new edition of the En- cyclopaedists and the heroes of the French Revolution."''16 The group was clearly radical, unwilling to accept either German liberalism's aversion to rebellion or its inclination to settle for a constitutional monarchy. As Arnold Ruge put it: "the German world has to adopt the new way of thinking which ... makes free men the principle and the people the object of its action, in other words it has to transform liberalism into democracy.""'7 A number of political labels were affixed to this tendency-"humanism," "democracy," "republicanism" and, by the mid-1840s, sometimes "communism" as well.'8 The conflation of these terms, which to us have such distinct meanings, is significant. More important, though, is the general political viewpoint which was denoted, one inspired by Rousseau which criticized all forms of particularism in the name of humanism and a universalist, democratic state.

Marx began his career as a political journalist. His first article, "Com- ments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction," was written in 1842 for Ruge's Deutsche-Franzoesische Jahrbucher. MacLellan quotes the opinion of conservative Hegelian Karl Rosenkranz: "It is a great pity about this journal, which began so excellently; but Ruge has let himself succumb completely to radical tendencies. . . . The Jahrbucher have come to the point where no contribution is accepted unless it is written in a brusque, dictatorial, atheistic, and republican tone."19 Marx's essay, a strident polemic against the Prussian censorship decree of 1841, satisfies all of these adjectives.

14. Karl Marx, "Communism and the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung," in MECW, vol. 1, p. 220.

15. See Sideny Hook, From Hegel to Marx (New York: Humanities Press, 1950); George Lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (New York: Praeger, 1971); and David McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (London: Macmillan, 1969).

16. McLellan, The Young Hegelians, p. 24. 17. Ibid., p. 25. 18. Ibid., p. 34. 19. Ibid., p. 29.



Echoing Locke, Marx objects that, due to the arbitrariness of restric- tions on the freedom of ideas, "my existence is under suspicion, my in- nermost being, my individuality." He insists that, in a properly constituted state, "only insofar as I manifest myself externally, enter the sphere of the actual, do I enter the sphere of the legislator. Apart from my actions, I have no existence for the law, am no object for it.'"20 Pre- figuring Mill, he points out the absurdity of a situation where "every drop of dew on which the sun shines glistens with an inexhaustible play of colours, but the spiritual sun, however many the persons and whatever the objects in which it is refracted, must produce only the official colour."'21 Drawing on the critical atheism of the Young Hegelians, Marx criticizes the effort of the censorship decree to simultaneously prohibit anti-religious ideas, a nod to religious conservatism, and "the fanatical transference of religious articles of faith into politics," a nod to German liberalism. Driving home the distinction between a religious state which of necessity produces intolerance and fanaticism, privileging certain articles of faith to the exclusion of others, and a disestablished state, he writes, "Hence either forbid religion to be introduced at all into politics-but you don't want that, for you want to base the state not on free reason, but on faith, religion being for you the general sanction for what exists-or allow also the fanatical introduction of religion into politics.'"22

These themes are all characteristically liberal, though apparently more consistently so than most German liberals of the time were wont to ad- mit. But what is interesting is their easy conjunction with characteristically republican themes. Echoing Rousseau, Marx claims that censorship damages the common good, and "is not a law of the state promulgated for its citizens, but the law of one party against another party. The law

20. Karl Marx, "Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction," MECW, vol. 1, p. 120. It is true that for Marx writing too is an act by which I "manifest myself externally," and in this sense writing, a consummately political act, "enters the sphere of the legislator." And yet it is also clear that Marx wishes to argue that, however public an activity, writing should not be subject to the sphere of the legislator, i.e., the state. This could be argued in Lockean terms, similar to the way in which Locke justifies religious toleration and private property in his "Letter Concerning Toleration," i.e., that the proper task of the state is to guarantee, but not determine or coercively affect, the free exercise of certain social albeit properly private activities. It could also be justified in consequential terms, i.e., until my own activities palpably infringe on the rights of others, they are properly my own. Finally, it could be justified in Rousseauean terms, i.e., precisely because the political community is constituted by the equality of citizens, my equal right to express my views must be sustained by the community of which I am a part. Marx, of course, does not so much provide precise arguments as invoke previously articulated arguments. But the intention of this text is clear-censorship violates a certain sphere of privacy.

21. Ibid., p. 126. 22. Ibid., p. 118.



which punishes tendency abolishes the equality of the citizens before the law. It is a law which divides, and all laws which divide are reactionary." He continues by contrasting this mistrust of the citizenry with the "moral state," which "assumes its members to have the frame of mind of the state, even if they act in opposition to an organ of the state, against the government. " The censorship is thus neither simply irrational, the language of Young Hegelian philosophy, nor unlawful, the language of recht. Instead, it breeds privilege, corruption, and dissension, which is the language of republicanism. It is therefore not simply unjust; it is, Marx insists, "an insult to the honour of the citizen, a vexatious law which threatens my existence.''23

This same conjunction of liberal and republican arguments is also found in Marx's first article for the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842, entitled "Debates on Freedom of the Press." Distinguishing between a "press law" regarding libel, and censorship, he writes, echoing Locke, that "laws are in no way repressive measures against freedom, any more than the law of gravity is a repressive measure against motion, because while, as the law of gravitation, it governs the eternal motions of the celestial bodies, as the law of falling it kills me if I violate it and want to dance in the air. Laws are rather the positive, clear, universal norms in which freedom has acquired an impersonal, theoretical existence independent of the arbitrariness of the individual." He proceeds, however, without skipping a beat, in a republican vein, referring now not to universal rules governing individual behavior but to indivisibly communal interests: "A statute book is a people's bible of freedom.'"24

In fact, the Rousseauean notion of a self-legislating public clearly ani- mates the article. Drawing a contrast with the fearfulness of the Prussian state, Marx notes that "a country which, like ancient Athens, regards lickspittles, parasites, and flatterers as exceptions to the good sense of the people, as fools among the people, is a country of independence and self-reliance.'" 25And he adds that "the popular character of the free press . . . the historic individuality of the free press, which makes it the specific expression of its specific popular spirit, [is] repugnant to the speaker from the princely estate," insisting that, unlike the member of the medieval estate, "the citizen does not want to have anything to do with right as privilege."''26

Even representative government, he points out, requires that the con-

23. Ibid., p. 120. 24. Karl Marx, "Debates on Freedom of the Press," MECW, vol. 1, p. 162. 25. Ibid., p. 137. 26. Ibid., pp. 143-46.



cerns of the public and the debates of its legislators "be converted into the publicly audible voice of the country." Otherwise representation is simply a fiction, as "a representation which is divorced from the consciousness of those whom it represents is no representation . . . it is a senseless contradiction that my self-activity should consist of acts unknown to me and done by another."27 And so, Marx concludes, censorship suffocates political life and corrupts the body politic:

Inseparable from it is the most powerful vice, hypocrisy, and from this, its basic vice, come all its other defects, which lack even the rudiments of virtue, and its vice of passivity, loathsome even from the aesthetic point of view. The government hears only its own voice, it knows that it hears only its own voice, yet it harbors the illusion that it hears the voice of the people, and it demands that the people, too, should itself harbour this illusion. For its part, therefore, the people sinks partly into political superstition, partly into political disbelief, or, completely turning away from political life, becomes a rabble of private individuals.28 Marx's 1843 Contribution to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law

evinces a more ambiguous relationship to republicanism. On one level it clearly represents a continuation of Marx's democratic republican position. There is no need to rehearse Marx's argument that Hegel inverts the subject and the predicate, treating man as the predicate of a hypostatized state rather than the state as a predicate of man. What follows from this for Marx is that Hegel mystifies actual history and thus fails to appreciate the specificity of the modern state. He therefore is guilty of "the worst kind of syncretism,"29 and provides rationales for a number of practices which Marx believes irrational and obsolete.30

Echoing Thomas Paine, Marx writes of monarchy that "thus at the very summit of the state, instead of reason, the merely physical would be decisive. Birth would determine the quality of the monarch, as it deter- mines the quality of cattle.'"31 And he observes of the estates system that

27. Ibid., pp. 148-49. 28. Ibid., pp. 167-68. 29. Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, in MECW,

vol. 3, p. 95. 30. On this see R. N. Berki, "Perspectives in the Marxian critique of Hegel's political

philosophy," in Hegel's Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives, ed. Z. A. Pelczynski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), and K. -H. Ilting, "Hegel's concept of the state and Marx's early critique," in The State and Civil Society: Studies in Hegel's Political Philosophy, ed. Z. A. Pelczynski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

31. MECW, vol. 3, p. 33. As Paine writes on hereditary monarchy: "Government ought to be a thing always in full maturity. It ought to be so constructed as to be superior to all the



Nothing is more ridiculous than the fact that the appointment by "birth" of legislators, representatives of the citizens, should be op- posed by Hegel to their appointment by "the fortuitousness of elec- tions." As if election, the conscious product of civil confidence, did not stand in a very different, necessary connection with the political purpose than the physical accident of birth. . . . In this [Hegel's] system nature directly produces kings, directly creates peers, etc., just as it makes eyes and noses. It is astonishing to see as a direct product of the physical species what is only a product of the self-conscious species. . . . The secret of the nobility is zoology.32

Echoing Jefferson's insistence that "the earth belongs to the living," he writes of primogeniture and entail that "the 'inalienability' of private property is one with the 'alienability' of the general freedom of will and morality. ... The subject is the thing and the predicate the human being. The will becomes the property of the property," contrasting "the crass stupidity" of medieval fixed land property with the freedom of modern private property, in whose "qualities the beat of the human heart, that is, the dependence of man on man, sounds right. .. ."33 His critique of Hegel's limits on the sovereignty of the legislature echoes the views of Rousseau and Jefferson: "if man is to do consciously what otherwise he is forced to do without consciousness by the nature of the thing, it becomes necessary that the movement of the constitution, that advance, be made the principle of the constitution, and that therefore the real bearer of the constitution, the people, be made the principle of the constitution."34 And his objections to the Prussian bureaucracy and to its claims of privileged expertise hearken back not simply to Rousseau but to Aristotle:

accidents to which individual man is subject; and therefore, hereditary succession, by being subject to them all, is the most irregular and imperfect of all the systems of government ... Kings succeed each other, not as rationals, but as animals." The Rights of Man (London: Penguin, 1969), pp. 194-95.

32. MECW, vol. 3, pp. 105-06. 33. Ibid., pp. 101-106. See Thomas Jefferson, "The Earth Belongs to the Living," in

The American Enlightenment, ed. Adrienne Koch (New York: Braziller, 1965), pp. 329-330. See also Paine's remark that "I am contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away, and controlled and contracted for, by the manuscript assumed authority of the dead," The Rights ofMan, p. 64. On this see also Marx's critique of the German Burkeans, Leo and Savigny, in "The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law," MECW, vol. 1, pp. 203-210.

34. Ibid., p. 57. Jefferson's full statement was: "I hold that a little rebellion now and again is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storm in the physical ... It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government," in Koch, The American Enlightenment, pp. 314-15.



In a rational state, to sit an examination should be demanded of a shoemaker rather than an executive civil servant. For shoemaking is a skill without which one can be a good citizen of the state and social human being; whereas the necessary "political knowledge" is a requirement without which a person in the state lives outside the state, cut off from himself, from the air. The "examination" is nothing but a Masonic right, the legal recognition of citizenship as a privilege.35 But Marx does not simply criticize Hegel's anachronisms from the per-

spective of a consistently modern democratic republicanism, for Hegel's "syncretism" does not simply uphold the residues of the past. He also criticizes Hegel for being the theorist of the modern state par excellence, to be challenged not for "depicting the nature of the modern state as it is, but for presenting that which is as the nature of the state. "36 In this respect, Hegel is acknowledged by Marx to have isolated the central feature of modern politics, i.e., the separation of state and civil society, and the dualism of bourgeois and citizen. "In modern states, as in Hegel's philosophy of law, the conscious, the true actuality of matters of general concern is merely formal, or, only what is formal is an actual matter of general concern. "37 All of Hegel's difficulties and his tortuous attempts to invoke extinct political practices stem from his effort to ra- tionalize this state of affairs. Hegel, Marx argues "has presupposed the separation of civil society and the political state [a modern condition], and expounded it as a necessary element of the idea, as absolute rational truth."38

Marx contends that the modern state is a great advance. For the first time in human history, the equality of the species and the communal nature of man is generally recognized. The modern representative state replaces the sovereignty of the monarch with the sovereignty of the people. But it does so only formally and is thus defective, "a merely particular form of state" rather than the true content of universality. Under the political republic, "the state, the law, the constitution is what rules, without really ruling-i.e., without materially permeating the content of the remaining spheres."" 39 This is, as Paul Thomas has put it, a form of "alien politics."40 In true democracy, by contrast, Marx insists, "the

35. Ibid., p. 51. 36. Ibid., p. 63. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., p. 73. 39. Ibid., p. 75, 28, 30-32. 40. See Paul Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,

1980), pp. 56-122, and "Alien Politics," in After Marx, ed. Terence Ball and James Farr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).



constitution, the law, the state itself, insofar as it is a political constitution, is only the self-determination of the people, and a particular content of the people." The constitution "is established as the people's own work.''41

As Shlomo Avineri has noted, here Marx is speaking not as a republican but as a critic of republicanism, both of its passive acceptance of civil society, and of its scholastic and religious pretensions to incarnate the universality of man. While in his prior essays Marx regarded political democracy as the answer to the superstitions engendered by censorship and repression, here aspects of the political republic itself are regarded as superstitious. In this sense, the Critique marks an important step on Marx's road toward a socialist critique of republicanism. It is, however, quite another matter to contend that Marx's argument in the Critique is "communist," and that "the Communist Manifesto is immanent in the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right."42

Avineri rightly wishes to emphasize the continuities in Marx's thought and the organic connection between his early advocacy of "true democracy" and his later espousal of socialism. But we can recognize these points without supposing that Marx's thought proceeded in an unprob- lematic spiral of dialectical progress. There is no reason to suppose that the communal or "communist essence" of which Marx speaks in criticizing Hegel is the same communism that Marx advocates in his later writings. The notion seems rather to figure here as a general synonym for the universal equality and "species being" of men. Furthermore, Marx's critique of political republicanism itself bears the traces of republicanism. It is true that he views universal suffrage here as both the completion of the abstraction of the modern state and "at the same time the transcendence of the abstraction."43 However, Marx displays an optimism about the structural significance of political emancipation quite removed from the more critical insights of his later writings on the subject.44 And the concepts of class and class struggle, the foundation of Marx's mature theoretical edifice, figure not at all in the argument. A year after having written the Critique, Marx criticized the French revolutionary republicans for failing to identify the state as the source of social problems. Instead of analyzing the connections between state and civil society, "they saw in great poverty and great wealth only an obstacle to

41. MECW, vol. 3, pp. 30-31, 20. 42. Shlomo Avineri, Karl Marx's Social and Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1968), p. 34. 43. MECW, vol. 3, p. 121. 44. Gilbert, Marx's Politics, makes this point on pp. 163-64.



pure democracy. "s Marx's Critique seems liable to the same objection. While it clearly criticizes the modern separation of state and civil society, it does so in the name of the full realization of political reason and citizenship rather than in the name of proletarian socialism. It is thus hard to agree with Avineri's assertion that "Marx's demand for universal suffrage does not draw its arguments from a democratic or republican radicalism.''46 While Marx gestures toward the abandonment of modern republicanism, the Rousseauean arguments he exploits in his critique of Hegel's anachronisms seem carried over into his critique of Hegel's mod- ernisms as well. In any case, however one interprets the Critique, it clearly both punctuates Marx's early republicanism and prefigures his later critique of it.

II. Marx's Critique of Political Reason Marx's 1843 essay, "On The Jewish Question," marks a decisive break with republicanism. The immediate purpose of this essay was to criticize Bruno Bauer's analysis of Jewish emancipation, but the more general purpose was to provide a critique of political emancipation-the disestablishment of all social differences from the sphere of the state- and to criticize that political standpoint which conflates this with genuine human emancipation. In this essay, Marx recapitulates many of the arguments developed in the critique of Hegel, but he also deepens his critique of republicanism.

Bauer, Marx claims, believes that the political disestablishment of religion leads to the abolition of religion. This view, he continues, suffers from two basic flaws. The first is broadly philosophical, namely the belief that the task of philosophy is theological criticism, i.e., the criticism of religion. This secular humanist viewpoint was characteristic of the Young Hegelians, according to whom the destruction of religious superstition would bring in its train the rule of human reason and its proper political incarnation, the political republic.47 Against this view, Marx asserts that "we do not turn secular questions into theological questions; we turn theological questions into secular ones.'"48 In other words, the task of theory is to go beyond the criticism of religion to the criticism of politics and society as such, and the existence of "defects" or

45. Karl Marx, "Critical Marginal Notes on the Article by a Prussian," in MECW, vol. 3, p. 199.

46. Avineri, Karl Marx's Thought, p. 37. 47. See McLellan, The Young Hegelians, pp. 6-33. 48. Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question," in Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, p. 29.



"irrationalities" should be sought not in intellectual error but in the organization of society. Marx is here foreshadowing the argument of The German Ideology, namely that ideas are causally related to material realities, and that critique must extend to these realities. In short, Marx rejects the polarization of religion and reason characteristic of Enlighten- ment thinking and insists that modern forms of reason can themselves be ideological and distorted.

But this methodological flaw is for Marx inextricably tied to a broader political mistake: the belief that the modern representative state manifests an authentic rationality and universality, and that its constitutive principle-political emancipation, the generality of res publica-is truly sovereign. Marx insists that this is not so:

The state abolishes, after its fashion, the distinctions established by birth, social rank, education, occupation, when it decrees that birth, social rank, occupation are non-political distinctions, that every member of society is an equal partner in popular sovereignty. ... But the state, none the less, allows private property, education, occupation, to act after their own fashion, namely, as private property, education, occupation, and to manifest their particular nature. Far from abolishing these effective differences, it only exists so far as they are presupposed. ..49

The "political standpoint" of democratic republicanism is thus limited and illusory. A number of important insights follow from Marx's point.

The first is that, contrary to the view of the Critique, universal suffrage, a major objective of nineteenth century democratic republicans, does not constitute the victory of true democracy and the triumph of the common man over wealth and privilege: "The state as a state abolishes private property (i.e., man decrees by political means the abolition of private property) when it abolishes the property qualification for electors and representatives, as has been done in many of the North American States." It is true that from the political standpoint "the masses have gained a victory over property owners and financial wealth. ... But the political suppression of private property not only does not abolish private property; it actually presupposes its existence."50 This is a more radical critique of the separation of state and civil society than that of- fered in the Critique, because here universal suffrage is viewed as constitutive of this separation.

49. Ibid., p. 31. 50. Ibid.



This leads to Marx's second insight, that republicanism and the exaltation of modern citizenship is not simply a cognitive error but a causally efficacious illusion. In short, Marx engages in a critique of republicanism as ideology, insisting that republican notions of citizenship and community are constitutive of reality at the same time that they misdescribe it."5 For Marx this has both an historical and a structural dimension. Histori- cally, republican ideology was an indispensible weapon in the struggle for political emancipation:

The political revolution which overthrew this power of the ruler, which made state affairs the affairs of the people, and the political state a matter of general concern, i.e., a real state, necessarily shat- tered everything-estates, corporations, guilds, privileges-which expressed the separation of the people from community life. . . [It] liberated the political spirit from its connexion with civil life and made of it the community sphere, the general concern of the people.

But, as Marx continues, "the consummation of the idealism of the state was at the same time the consummation of the materialism of civil society.'52 To demonstrate this point, that political emancipation liberates both the language of civic virtue and the language of individual rights, Marx examines the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the American state constitutions of Pennsylvania and New Hamp- shire as central documents of modern politics. These texts, he argues, clearly illustrate that the constitutive norms of modern political life are liberal and republican, the latter in form, the former in substance.

The formalism of citizenship, however, should not be construed as somehow unreal simply because its content is determined in civil society. "Where the political state has attained to its full development," Marx insists, "man leads, not only in thought ... 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. " Political participation is "sophistical," "but this sophistry is not personal. It is the sophistry of the political state itself." Mocking the rationalism of Young Hegelian republicanism, Marx asserts that citizens of the democratic republic are religious

51. For a discussion of Marx's concept of ideology, see Issues in Marxist Philosophy, ed. John Mepham and David Hillel-Ruben, 3 vols. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1979).

52. Marx, "On the Jewish Question," in Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, p. 43.



in the sense that man treats political life, which is remote from his own individual existence, as if it were his true life . . . Political democracy is Christian in the sense that man, not merely one man but every man, is there considered a sovereign being, a supreme being; but it is ... man just as he is in his fortuitous existence, man as he has been corrupted, lost to himself, alienated, subjected to the rule of inhuman conditions and elements, by the whole organization of our society-in short, man who is not yet a real species- being. Creations of fantasy, dreams, the postulates of Christianity, the sovereignty of man . . . all these become, in democracy, the tangible and present reality, secular maxims.53

Republicanism is thus a vital discourse, embodied in the constitutional and statutory laws, in the political rhetoric, and in the everyday consciousness of the citizens of the modern state. Man's communal identity as citizen, what Marx facetiously calls his "political lion's skin," coexists in an uneasy but stable tension with his private identity as member of civil society. It functions as an ideological legitimation of the bellum omnes contra omnes which constitutes civil society, compensating for the practical debasement of ordinary life by elevating the alienated man to the status of species-being. This elevation is, of course, fictitious. It does not mean real and effective equality, nor does it entail the genuine humanization of social existence. Marx's advocacy of human emancipation in concluding his argument is well known. But it is less widely acknowledged that Marx is also arguing that it is in the nature of the "merely political standpoint," i.e., republicanism, to confuse itself with human emancipation. A major intention of his political writings is to ex- pose this illusion and to call not simply for the abandonment of illusions, but for the abandonment of social institutions that require illusions.54

Marx thus proceeded to the critique of political economy, a road which began with his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and ended, unfinished, with the writing of Capital, but the critical analysis of civil society was in no way incompatible with a continued interest in republicanism. In fact, insofar as civil society presupposes the state, Marx's economic concerns required it. Marx's 1844 "Critical Marginal Notes on the Article by a Prussian" is in this regard significant. Its ostensible subject was the Silesian weavers' uprising of June 4-6, 1844, but Marx uses this occasion to break with the republicanism of his former associate Ruge and to offer some general reflections on class struggle.

53. Ibid., p. 32, 37. 54. I am here, of course, paraphrasing Marx's ringing statements in his "Contribution to

the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law: Introduction," in MECW, vol. 3, pp. 175-187.



It was Ruge's view that the workers' rebellion was a grave error, repre- senting the partial interests of a particular social group and symptomatic of the political backwardness of Prussia. "It is impossible," he wrote, "to make such an unpolitical country as Germany regard the partial distress of the factory workers as a matter of general concern.'"5 The im- plication is that, given sufficient political development, i.e., the victory of democratic republicanism, the distress of the workers could be addressed as a matter of public interest. For Marx, this is simply another instance of the illusions of the political mind. He points out that neither the English Poor Laws, the decrees of the French Revolutionary Conven- tion, nor the decrees of Napolean had any appreciable effect on the inci- dence of poverty and proletarian distress. The state, Marx insists, has proven itself to be powerless to affect the issue substantially, ultimately relying on either charity or meager administrative measures. "From the political point of view," he argues, "the state and the system of society are not two different things. The state is the system of society." The state is thus incapable of recognizing the system of society in which it is impli- cated as the source of social ills:

The contradiction between the purpose and goodwill of the administration, on the one hand, and its means and possibilities, on the other hand, cannot be abolished by the state without the latter abolishing itself, for it is based on this contradiction. . . . Hence the administration has to confine itself to a formal and negative activity, for where civil life and its labour begin, there the power of administration ends. ... If the modern state wanted to abolish the im- potence of its administration, it would have to abolish the private life of today.56 The political mind, in Marx's view, thinks exclusively within the

framework of politics and state action and is incapable of understanding social ills and of acknowledging the constraints under which political activity operates. No instance demonstrates this for Marx more than that of French republicanism:

The classic period of political intellect is the French Revolution. Far from seeing the source of social shortcomings in the principle of the state, the heroes of the French Revolution instead saw in social defects the source of political evils. Thus Robespierre saw in great poverty and great wealth only an obstacle to pure democracy.

55. MECW. vol. 3, p. 192. 56. Ibid., pp. 197-98.



Therefore he wished to establish a universal Spartan frugality. The principle of politics is the will.57 The Jacobins were intoxicated with delusions about the power of polit-

ical will and civic virtue. Marx pursues this theme in The Holy Family, quoting Robespierre in a manner which could only make contemporary republicans blush: "What is the fundamental principle of democratic or popular government? It is virtue, I mean public virtue, which worked such miracles in Greece and Rome and which will work still greater ones in republican France; virtue which is nothing but love of one's country and its laws.""58 But, invoke virtue as they may, republicans had ultimately to deal with the realities of modern society. The effort to reproduce ancient virtue and frugality only resulted in a burst of terror followed by political exhaustion. The Jacobins were the victims of their own political illusions:

Robespierre, Saint-Just and their party fell because they confused the ancient, realistic-democratic commonweal based upon real slavery with the modern spiritualistic-democratic representative state, which is based on emancipated slavery, bourgeois society. What a terrible illusion it is to have to recognize and sanction in the rights of man modern bouregois society, the society of industry, of universal competition, of private interest freely pursuing its aims, of anarchy, of self-estranged natural and spiritual individuality, and at the same time to want afterwards to annul the manifesta- tions of the life of this society in particular individuals and simultaneously to want to model the political head of that society in the manner of antiquity.59

Marx does not claim that the extravagances of Jacobin republicanism represent the normal form of bourgeois politics. But he does suggest that the republicanism of which Jacobinism was the extreme expression is a pervasive feature of modern politics.

The "Critical Marginal Notes" is not, however, simply a critique of the political mind. Rather, for the first time, Marx executes the critique of republicanism from the perspective of working class socialism. Con- trary to Ruge, Marx argues that the great defect of working class radicalism is not its lack but its excess of political understanding. The more developed the political understanding of the workers, he maintains, the

57. Ibid., p. 199. 58. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Holy Family, in MECW, vol. 4, p. 121. 59. Ibid., p. 122.



more they locate the source of their problems in the state and its will, throwing their weight senselessly against political authority and squandering their power in revolts often "drowned with blood." Politi- cal struggle based on the assertion of membership in the state is simply a dangerous illusion, as witness the Lyons workers, "who believed that they were only pursuing political aims, that they were only soldiers of the republic, whereas actually they were soldiers of socialism." Marx thus insists that:

the community from which the worker is isolated is a community the real character and scope of which is quite different from that of the political community. The community from which the worker is isolated by his own labour is life itself, physical and mental life, human morality, human activity, human enjoyment, human nature ... Hence, too, the abolition of this isolation-and even a partial reaction to it, an uprising against it-is just as much more infinite as man is more infinite than the citizen, and human life more infinite than political life.

He concludes then, by advocating a genuine social revolution in Ger- many, which would be political insofar as it was aimed at the state, but social insofar as it had not simply political life, but the revolutionization of social life, as its end. As he puts it, "where its organizing activity begins, where its proper object, its soul, comes to the fore, there socialism throws off the political cloak.60

III. 1848: Republicanism and the Failure of Revolution As Alan Gilbert has argued, Marx's political thought was highly nuanced and contextualized.61 It is thus important to emphasize that, despite his criticisms of democratic republicanism, Marx was in the forefront of the struggle to achieve this limited, "partial emancipation" throughout Europe. It is thus misleading to assert, as Avineri does, that "Marx does not see any fundamental difference between a monarchy and a republic."62 Even in "On the Jewish Question" Marx insists, against the essentialists of his own day, 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. . ."6 But, more importantly, the

60. MECW, vol. 3, pp. 204-06. 61. Gilbert, Marx's Politics, pp. 3-19, 256-76. 62. Avineri, Karl Marx's Thought, p. 37. 63. Marx, "On the Jewish Question," in Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 33, 44.



claim makes Marx's strategic arguments and political practice unintelligible, premised as they were on a cross-class alliance to achieve republicanism as a necessary prelude to socialism.64

In "Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality," for example, Marx criticizes Karl Heinzen, who reproaches the socialist preoccupation with class struggle and advocates a form of federal republicanism based on the United States. For Heinzen, it is the monarchy which is the source of social ills. He "divides German humanity into princes and subjects," Marx observes, and insists that a republic, incarnating the "interests of humanity," is the appropriate solution. Marx, as we might expect, counters that "the more advanced this society is . . . the more glaringly does the social question obtrude itself . .. in a republic more glaringly than in a constitutional monarchy." While "for Herr Heinzen all classes melt away before the solemn concept of 'humanity,' " for Marx it is "the social difference between classes" which lies at the heart of the social question. According to Marx, Heinzen's view is a dangerous "bourgeois illusion," one not shared by the proletariat. This, however, does not lead him to simply dismiss Heinzen's republicanism. The workers, he insists, "can and must accept the bourgeois revolution as a precondition for the workers' revolution. However, they cannot for a moment regard it as their ultimate goal. " For Marx, the English Chartists, who allied with bourgeois radicalism against the Corn Laws but held no illusions about the transitory nature of this alliance, exemplify this position.65

This strategic perspective was most optimistically articulated in the Communist Manifesto. And as many commentators have observed, the defeat of the revolutions of 1848, while it did not cause Marx to abandon the notion of an alliance with the bourgeoisie, did cause him to become more skeptical about such an alliance and to incline toward a more independent working class politics.66 Unsurprisingly, Marx's reconsidera- tions involved once again the critique of republicanism, which for him, in 1848, was a crucial obstacle to revolutionary success, as the republican illusions of the February revolt against Louis Phillipe gave way to the harsh realities of class struggle and bourgeois repression. As he observed in his famous 1848 Neue Rheinische Zeitung editorial, "The June Revo- lution," "the fraternit6, the brotherhood of the opposing classes, of which the one exploits the other . .. proclaimed in February, written in

64. This argument is made by Gilbert, Marx's Politics, and Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, Volume 3: The "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985).

65. Karl Marx, "Moralizing Criticism and Critical Morality," in MECW, vol. 6, p. 323, 330-31, 333.

66. See Draper, Karl Marx's Thought, pp. 145-227.



big red letters on the face of Paris, on every jail and on every barracks- has for its true, unadulterated, prosaic expression civil war . . war of labor against capital. This brotherhood flamed from all the windows of Paris on the evening of June 25, illuminating the Paris of the bourgeoisie while the Paris of the proletariat burned, bled and moaned." For Marx, however, the defeat of the workers, and the rise of political reaction, was not in vain, for it served to lay bare the "hazy, blue sky of republican ideology" and reveal the stupefying effects of the "opium of 'patriotic' feelings.''67

Marx extends this critique in his classic The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), which provides a complex analysis of the shift- ing political alliances from the victory of the French republic in February 1848 to its demise with the coup of Louis Bonaparte in December 1851. What is significant for our purposes is that for Marx at the center of the narrative lies the "farce" of republican illusions. Marx begins with reference to the Roman costumes and phrases of the first French Revolution of 1789-94. As he observes,

As unheroic as bourgeois society is, it nevertheless took heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war, and battles of peoples to bring it into being. And in the classically austere traditions of the Roman Republic its gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self- deceptions that they needed in order to conceal from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles and to maintain their passion on the high plane of great historical tragedy.68

Republican illusion is, again, a constitutive feature of bourgeois revolution. But if in 1789 this "borrowed language" of republicanism served the cause of progress and greatness, in 1848, ghostlike and farcical, it served the cause of reaction.

Marx depicts how the heterogeneous revolutionary movement against the bourgeois monarchy of February 1848 gives rise to the bourgeois republic: "whereas a limited section of the bourgeoisie ruled in the name of the king, the whole of the bourgeoisie will now rule on behalf of the people." The bourgeois character of the state is punctuated by the workers' revolt of June and its suppression, revealing "that here bourgeois republic signifies the unlimited despotism of one class over other classes."69 It is important to point out that, though for Marx this incident highlighted the coercive nature of political power, the notion of

67. Quoted in Gilbert, Marx's Politics, pp. 140, 142. 68. MECW, vol. 11, pp. 104-05. 69. Ibid., pp. 110-11.



"class despotism" need not be taken to imply a view of the state as pure- ly repressive. Rather, it means, as Marx put it, that "the present bourgeois property relations are 'maintained' by the state power which the bourgeoisie has organized for the protection of its property relations."70 In other words, the institutions of the state, legislative, juridical, as well as coercive, support the system of bourgeois private property and its relations of class domination. Marx makes this clear in his discussion of the bourgeois republic after the June repression. He points out that the republic established a set of freedoms--"'personal freedom, freedom of the press, of speech, of association, of assembly, of education and of religion, etc."--and that "each of these freedoms is proclaimed as the absolute right of the French citoyen. " The republic, in other words, incarnates the principle of universality. But Marx adds that this freedom is then qualified, "so far as it is not limited by the 'equal rights of others and the public safety,' or by 'laws' which are intended to mediate just this harmony of individual freedoms with one another and the public safety.""

This qualification is eminently reasonable, and from the perspective of the state it applies equally to all, establishing no special privileges. But Marx points out that the content and application of such qualifications is a different matter entirely:

Later, all these organic laws were brought into being by the friends of order and all those freedoms regulated in such a matter that the bourgeoisie in its enjoyment of them finds itself unhindered by the equal rights of the other classes . . . in the interest of "public safety, " that is, the safety of the bourgeoisie, as the Constitution prescribes. 72

One particularly important consequence of this exaltation of bourgeois order is the negative role republicanism accords to labor unions. Marx on more than one occasion pointed this out, criticizing for instance the French republican "September Laws" of 1830, which made "the incite- ment of various classes of the nation against each other" a serious political offence, and this issue was one which distinguished Marx's socialism from both bourgeois republicanism and the various forms of "true" and utopian socialism which Marx consistently scorned.73

70. MECW, vol. 6, p. 319. 71. MECW, vol. 11, pp. 114-15. 72. Ibid. 73. For Marx's views on the September laws, see MECW, vol. 6, p. 331, and Hal Draper,

Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, Volume 2: The Politics of Social Classes (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978).



But Marx's analysis is not confined to the exposure of the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie, for it is the upshot of his analysis that republicanism, in one form or another, mystified all of the forces which had struggled against the monarchy. He writes of the petty-bourgeois democratic Mon- taigne party that it limited itself to "defending the 'eternal rights of man' as every so-called people's party has done, more or less, for a century and a half," a posture which serves to "veil" the class struggle.74 And he considers "Social-Democracy," the more inclusive tendency which united petty bourgeois democrats with socialists and working class orga- nizations, to be equally mystified by the illusions of merely political reason. "The peculiar character of Social-Democracy," he writes, "is epitomised by the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not of superceding two extremes, capital and wage labour, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony." Marx somewhat reductively associates this perspective with the economic interests of the petty bourgeoisie, but more important for our purposes is his criticism, that

the democrat . .. imagines himself to be elevated above class antagonism generally. The democrats concede that a privileged class confines them, but they, along with all the rest of the nation, form the people. What they represent is the people's rights; what interests them is the people's interests. Accordingly, when a struggle is impending, they do not need to examine the interests and posi- tions of the different classes. They have merely to give the signal and the people, with all its inexhaustible resources, will fall upon the oppressors.

The social democrat, in short, subscribes to the same illusions about the communal nature of the state as does the bourgeois republican. He thus fails to "distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality."75

What follows from this is an inflated sense of political power, and a failure to recognize both the real issues and antagonisms at stake in political conflict and the substantial obstacles in the way of a genuine humanization of the social world. Such illusions debilitate any serious movement for socialism. Thus Marx insists that the proletarian movement must break with the republican ideologies of the past:

74. MECW, vol. 11, p. 127. 75. Ibid., pp. 133, 128.



The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped off all superstition about the past. Earlier revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to dull themselves to their own content. In order to arrive at its own content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead. There the words went beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the words.76

Marx's expectation that "proletarian revolutions . .. criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course . . . deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltriness of their first attempts" may itself have proven tragic, if not farcical, in the twentieth century. But, regardless of how one interprets the history of Marxian socialism, this injunction to criticize political illusions, and to create a new "revolutionary soul" and a new "poetry," has lost neither its relevance nor its potency.

IV. On Criticizing the Illusions of Republican Politics It should now be clear that the idea that Marx subscribed to a myth of liberalism is misleading in the extreme. It may be true that Marx dis- cerned in modern political discourse the ascendancy of bourgeois values, though this should be unsurprising given the fact that he certainly dis- cerned the ascendancy of bourgeois society. But it is simply false that in his view bourgeois values were exhausted by possessive individualism. If nothing else, Marx's understanding of his own past led him to recognize the vitality of republicanism in the modern world, a recognition which made vociferous criticism of it a central concern of his political writing and activity as a socialist. Marx believed that the language of republicanism had been incorporated into the discourse of capitalist society, that the "political lion's skin" of the bourgeois citizen was an operative ideological reality to be understood and combatted.

Having said this, however, it is important to issue several qualifications. The first has already been raised above, but it bears repetition: Marx both recognized the historically progressive character of modern republican ideas and actively supported, throughout his career as a socialist, the various republican movements which sought to advance the cause of political emancipation, at the same time that he recognized their limitations. He was thus an avid supporter of Irish republicanism and of

76. Ibid., p. 106.



Polish independence." And it should not be surprising to learn that a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, "the single-minded son of the working class," hung in the Marx living room, or that he considered the Ameri- can Civil War to be "the first grand war of contemporary history [in which] the highest form of popular self-government till now realized is giving battle to the meanest and most shameless form of man's enslaving recorded in the annals of history."78 Marx viewed not simply bourgeois forces of production, but the politically emancipated bourgeois state, as a necessary condition of human emancipation." Moreover, his politics of always seeking out broad democratic alliances reflected this. It would be a mistake to overestimate, as Avineri does, the degree of continuity between political democracy and socialist democracy for Marx, but to underestimate it would be likewise mistaken.

Not only is it the case that Marx's attitude toward political republicanism was one of critical support, it is also the case that Marx's own understanding of socialism, if it did not "draw upon the poetry of the past," certainly sounded several of its republican themes. Thus the views of man as "not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can in- dividuate itself only in the midst of society," and of socialism as a "naturalized humanism" where individual talent and interest (virtue?) govern social existence, clearly draw their inspiration from Aristotle.80 The outline of the working class "social republic" of the Paris Com- mune draws its inspiration from Rousseau. The concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat itself, much misunderstood by contemporary theorists, has its lineage in the phraseology of ancient Rome; and the martial imagery on which it draws-of sacrifice, vigilance, solidarity- evokes the "Machiavellian moment" which Pocock has done so much to delineate.81 Even Marx's theory of exploitation in Capital is linked to

77. See Gilbert, Marx's Politics, p. 139-58. 78. Karl Marx, On America and the Civil War, ed. Saul K. Padover (New York, 1972), p.

85. 79. This point is made emphatically in Michael Harrington's Socialism (New York:

Bantam, 1972). 80. These ideas are, of course, developed by Marx in his Economic and Philosophic

Manuscripts of 1844, in MECW, vol. 3, pp. 230-346, and his Grundrisse, tr. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973). On this, see Carol Gould, Marx's Social Ontology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980). Alan Gilbert has delineated the Aristotelian roots of Marx's moral theory in his Marx's Politics, pp. 3-45, and his "Marx's Moral Realism: Eudaimonism and Moral Progress," in Ball and Farr, After Marx;. See also Nancy Schwartz, "The Distinction Between Public and Private: Marx on the ZOON POLITIKON," Political Theory (May 1979).

81. See Draper, Karl Marx's Thought, vol. 3; Frederic Bender, "The Ambiguity of Marx's Concepts of 'Proletarian Dictatorship' and 'Transition to Communism,' " History of Political Thought, 2 (Winter 1981); and Roy Medvedev, Leninism and Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1979).



republican imagery, capital being depicted as a blood-sucking vampire who taxes the industry and compromises the independence and skill of the worker. And it is interesting in this regard that Marx describes the capitalist in much the same way as he describes the corrupt officials of the French state in his manifestly republican discussion of the Com- mune-' 'blood-suckers, the notary, advocate, executor, and other judicial vampires [which the Commune would have transformed] into salaried communal agents, elected by, and responsible to [the workers and peasants].' 82

And yet it would be a grave error, however tempting in the light of current intellectual fashion, to view Marx as simply a warmed-over Aristotle or Rousseau. For despite his incorporation of republican themes, he was ultimately a radical critic of the ideology in which these themes were embedded in the modern world. Unlike the republicanism of his day, Marx's "red" or "social republicanism," his socialism, involved a revolutionary critique of the foundational principle of modern bourgeois politics-political emancipation-and of the institutions of state and economy which this principle served to legitimate. Marx did not seek to simply judge existing institutional arrangements against the standard of a vague communitarianism. He sought to analyze scientifically and criticize the structure of capitalist society, its manifest and latent antagonisms and its future possibilities. He did not draw from his analysis of the defects of social life the conclusion that their solution lay in a more perfected political state, more capable of inculcating a proper sense of civic virtue. Rather, the conclusion of his analysis was the moral and practical necessity of creating a revolutionary movement which would challenge the very structure of the capitalist state.

I began this article by suggesting that a critique of the contemporary republicans' historical thesis could shed light on the limitations of their prescriptive thesis. In short, their failure to understand adequately Marx's criticisms of early modern republicanism has led them to ignore the challenge posed to their own beliefs by Marx's critique. This is not the place to assess the general validity of Marx's writings or of Marxism. Indeed, there is much here to criticize and, if current events in Eastern Europe are any guide, it may well be that some kind of republicanism is a necessary corrective to the shortcomings of Marxism.83 But despite this,

82. Karl Marx, "The Civil War in France," in Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, p. 559. 83. On these limits of Marxism, see my Power and Marxist Theory: A Realist View

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 192-213; "Arendt, Camus, and Postmodern Politics," Praxis International, 9 (April and July, 1989), and "One Step Sideways, One Step Backwards: Postmarxism and its Critics," Theory, Culture, and Society (in press, 1990).



it is clear that Marx had good reasons for criticizing modern republicanism, and we can learn several lessons from them.

The first is the necessity of maintaining the distinction between ap- pearance and reality in political theory, of distinguishing "the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests." Marx makes clear that modern republicanism is a species of philosophical idealism-that it suffers from an exaggerated sense of the independent potency of ideas and of the role of political will, that it operates with a reified notion of community as public sentiment and virtue, and that it is blind to the structural determinations and constraints which operate in political life. Marx insists that we must not simply take existing beliefs and understandings of community as a given, but rather we should investigate the structural causes and consequences of beliefs which may be opaque to those who hold them. Contemporary communitarians who write about "embodied selves" and "public virtues" and invite us to cultivate our existing communal attachments have something to learn from this. For what their arguments frequently lack is precisely any diagnosis of the structural dimensions of our political malaise, substituting instead general appeals to the common good. In this regard, communitarianism can be viewed as a variation on the more general theme of interpretative sociology, replacing the institutional analysis of social life with what Perry Anderson has called the "exorbita- tion of language."84 As Marx saw, believing in public virtue will not solve our public problems. What will solve them is attention to the material practices and relations of power which cause them.85

The second is, quite simply, that republican discourse has served historically as an absolutely crucial ideological support for the institutions of capitalist society. This does not mean that all republican ideas, or ideas of republican inspiration, are therefore ideologically tied to the status quo. But it does mean that the historical, constitutional, and rhetorical discourses of capitalist society are suffused with republican language and imagery. This clearly has an historical dimension. It is no mistake that the most influential liberal revolutions of the modern world-England in 1642, America in 1776 and 1861, France in 1789 and 1848-were animated in large part by republican themes which can be traced throughout the subsequent history of these nations. But it also has

84. See Anthony Giddens, New Rules of Sociological Method. A Critique of Interpreta- tive Sociology (New York: Basic Books, 1976), and Perry Anderson, In The Tracks of Historical Materialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 85. For a discussion of some of these issues, see my Power and Marxist Theory, and Ian

Shapiro, Political Criticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming 1990).



a profoundly enduring ideological dimension. I refer here not simply to the "commercial republican" espousal of "bourgeois virtue" so ably documented by Joyce Appelby and Isaac Kramnick, but also the specifi- cally political power of republican rhetoric regarding virtue, vigilance, and the dangers of corruption. Such Machiavellian themes, in conjunction with the above-mentioned economic idiom, constitute the rhetorical foundations of the authoritarian populism of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, whose republicanism hardly renders them anti- capitalist.86 Critics of political life must thus be wary of invoking this language and imagery, which ordinarily sustains illusion rather than il- illumination of the nature of a genuinely democratic society. Samuel Johnson's quip, that "patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel," may not quite be a truism. It may, however, not be a bad maxim for contemporary social critics, who might do better to investigate the relations of domination which constitute state and civil society, and the dangers which national egoism poses in the contemporary world, than to wax elo- quent about the virtues of public virtue.

Republicanism encourages us to think in terms of our existing political conventions and communal attachments and to invoke them in order to reconcile and harmonize the existing distribution of power and interests. Marx's critique of republicanism encourages us to analyze these conventions and attachments critically and to challenge the powers and interests which they support. In urging us to "shed the cloak" of republicanism, he enjoins us to articulate a critique of the present and a vision of the future so as to educate, mobilize, and organize oppressed groups in their struggle. But he insists that only struggle, and not appeals to the common good, can challenge the interests of dominant classes and groups. Such a vision does not require us to discard the achievements of political democracy, but encourages us to extend and to deepen them. And it suggests that only if we shed our "political lion's skin" can we ever hope to realize in practice the vision of human, rather than merely political, freedom.

86. Nicos Poulantzas was unique among contemporary Marxist political theorists in recognizing this, which he called the "national-popular" character of the capitalist state. His work has been an important inspiration for the argument of this paper. See his Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1973), and State, Power, Socialism (London: Verso, 1978). See also Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Politi- cal Strategy (New York: St. Martin's, 1985), and Stuart Hall, "Authoritarian Populism," New Left Review, 151 (May-June 1985).


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Issue Table of ContentsPolity, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Spring, 1990) pp. 379-557Front MatterNo Success like Failure: Existential Politics in Norman Mailer's "The Armies of the Night" [pp. 379-396]Public Organizational Existence: A Critique of Individualism in Democratic Administration [pp. 397-418]Tocqueville's Caveat: Centralized Executive Foreign Policy &American Democracy [pp. 419-441]Judges before Congress: Reform Politics &Individual Freedom [pp. 443-460]The Lion's Skin of Politics: Marx on Republicanism [pp. 461-488]Organizing the "New Boston": Growth Policy, Governing Coalitions &Tax Reform [pp. 489-510]CommentaryLike Waiting for Godot: The Uselessness of Realignment for Understanding Change in Contemporary American Politics [pp. 511-525]

Research NoteReligious Orientations &Political Attitudes among Blacks in Washington, DC [pp. 527-543]

Review EssayNazi Science [pp. 545-556]

Back Matter [pp. 557-557]

Documents

Isaac Marx on Republicanism