Philosophy and Revolution by stathis Kouvelakis

Author:stathis Kouvelakis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

From civil society to the state

In turning outwards, towards worldly realities, philosophy-become-criticism had immediately to confront this social formation in crisis, heavily dominated by an alliance of social forces of the kind typical of the ancien régime. If we take this fact as our starting point, we can make sense of the intellectual and political strategy to which Marx intended to harness the ‘party of the concept’; for anyone who wishes to develop a strategy needs first to define his objectives, and, to that end, identifying the adversary is the first item on the agenda. Criticism accordingly took as its main targets the three pillars of the existing order: an aristocratic caste that clung fiercely to its privileges, a Prussian regime that was rapidly regressing towards the ‘Christian state’, and the reactionary ideologues who legitimized the perpetuation of absolutism. It was above all the partisans of Romanticism, among whose number Marx included the theoreticians of the Historical School of Law, who drew his fire. As he saw it, the Romantic principle was not merely nostalgia for a vanished world, but the defence of an actually existing social and political order, the ancien régime,44 undertaken at the very moment when that order had become cognizant of the threats hanging over its future.

Marx meant to turn one very precisely identifiable weapon against the Holy Trinity that constituted the German – and, especially, Rhenish – misère: the achievements of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, which he summons his readers to assume and defend en bloc. To avoid all misunderstanding, let me point out here that this is the explanation for his frequent and insistent references to a tradition encompassing Machiavelli and Kant, Spinoza and Hobbes, the work of the Convention and Benjamin Constant. The significance of these references is inseparable from the strategic use to which Marx put them. Thus his homage to Kant does not in any way indicate adhesion to Kantianism in the strict sense; it is, rather, a defence, in the words that Marx here borrows from the early Görres, of ‘the German theory of the French revolution’ against ‘the German theory of the French ancien régime’45 represented by the Historical School of Law and its attempted destruction of any and all rational foundations for moral values. Similarly, Marx does not cite the names of all the classics of modern political philosophy, from Machiavelli through Spinoza to Hegel, out of a desire for doctrinal totalization but, rather, as a way of evoking an intellectual modernity thanks to which it has become possible to theorize the call for a secularization of politics.46 He means to present a contrast capable of bringing out the regressive spiral into which the Prussian state was being drawn in the mistaken belief that it could resolve the crisis confronting it by abandoning the rationalism of the reform era for the model of a patriarchal authority with strong clerical overtones.

Bearing this in mind, we need to distinguish Marx’s defence of the universality of the concept ‘man’ from his subsequent recourse to Feuer-bachian anthropology.

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