ABSTRACT
Hegel’s depiction of civil society is as much a portrayal of asocial sociability as Karl Marx’s more detailed characterization of industrial capitalism was later to provide—and for many of the same reasons. The importance of Marx’s early reflections on Germany in particular to his theory of the state in general is not just that the former mark a break from Hegel’s beliefs. What underlies all Marx’s early speculation about the state is an insight of distinctly Hegelian provenance. With the collapse of feudalism, civil society and the state become discontinuous in an unprecedented, radical way. Marx awards the state in its modern form the consolatory functions once monopolized, according to Ludwig Feuerbach, by religion. If citizenship is a religious phenomenon, the fantasy of universality, then the reintegration of political powers to which Marx refers can be seen at this level as the realization of the fantasy of citizenship, as a genuine, thoroughgoing secularization of the spiritual world.
