ABSTRACT
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developed their doctrine of modern communism partly from a critical digestion of the work of the German classical philosopher Hegel. The latter had regarded society, the collective of individual citizens, as a mere sum of “particulars.” In contrast, the state, the class of bureaucratic officials, was the true “universal.” Marx and Engels turned this around. They declared civil society itself to be the “universal” and degraded the state bureaucracy to a mere “particular.” But civil society was as yet fractured by private property. It was therefore not yet a real “universal.” In order to turn society into a true “universal,” two “particulars” needed to be abolished: private property and the bureaucratic state. The resulting communist society would be a self-governing one based on collective ownership of the means of production, a radical democratic community in the spirit of Rousseau but with the additional characteristic of a nationalised economy.
