ABSTRACT
Karl Marx's account of the source of 'solidarity between humans' can be extended into an account of the source of 'human solidarity' much more easily than G. W.F. Hegel. For Hegel the source of human solidarity lies in the fact that humans are self-aware beings and that self-awareness has an inherently 'universal' character. The chapter describes the emergence of the view that humans are 'species-beings' in Marx's writings. It shows that how this view is closely related to Hegel's view of human beings as conscious subjects who are rationally driven to become universally self-conscious. In his 1842 writings Marx effectively adopts Hegel's idea that subjects actualize their freedom by establishing and participating in the institutions of right, culminating in the state. In the 1843 'Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State' Marx develops a slightly different, though characteristically Hegelian view of the relationship between the human essence and the properly constituted socio-political association.
