Comment: “… that the anatomy of this civil society, however, has to be sought in Political economy.” (Marx) (1992, 2006)
The sentence comes from Karl Marx‘s Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). Marx says his critique of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel‘s philosophy of law convinced him that legal relations and forms of state “originate in the material conditions of life”, whose totality Hegel called civil society. The clause then relocates the key to that society from philosophy to political economy. It is the hinge between the critique of Hegel and historical materialism: sound as method, overstated as a complete theory of politics.
Where the Sentence Sits
- As editor of the Rheinische Zeitung (1842–43), Marx found himself having to discuss “material interests”, notably laws punishing peasants for gathering wood; the state spoke for the universal while serving landowners.
- He turned to a critique of Hegel (1843), then to economics in Paris and Brussels. The sentence closes this narrative and opens the famous paragraph on base and superstructure.
What “Civil Society” Meant
- Adam Ferguson (An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 1767) and Adam Smith described commercial society: trade, property, the division of labour.
- Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1820) made bürgerliche Gesellschaft the “system of needs” standing between family and state: persons pursue private ends through markets and contracts. Hegel admitted it breeds wealth alongside a rabble of paupers (§244), and entrusted the resolution to the state as the universal.
- Marx kept the concept but inverted the ranking. In The German Ideology (1845–46, with Friedrich Engels) civil society embraces “the whole material intercourse of individuals” and is “the true source and theatre of all history”. German bürgerlich means both “civil” and “bourgeois”: civil society is bourgeois society.
What the Claim Asserts
- Anatomy is inner structure. Political economy, the science of Smith and David Ricardo, lays bare that structure: property, labour, exchange and therefore classes.
- The state is derivative, not the realisation of reason. Wages, profit and rent express historical relations of production, not natural laws.
- On the Jewish Question (1843) had already shown that political emancipation leaves civil society a sphere of egoistic man; equality in the state coexists with inequality beneath it.
Why It Persuades
- It explains why constitutions proclaiming equality preserve unequal property.
- Indian thought knew the priority of the material: Kautilya held that dharma and kama depend on artha.
Critiques
- Antonio Gramsci‘s Prison Notebooks moved civil society into the superstructure: schools, churches and press where hegemony is organised. Norberto Bobbio (1967) showed how far this departs from Marx.
- Alexis de Tocqueville‘s tradition sees civil society as voluntary associations checking the state, not a market.
- Max Weber‘s status and party, and B. R. Ambedkar‘s point that caste divides labourers, show hierarchies not reducible to economics.
- Partha Chatterjee (The Politics of the Governed, 2004) finds Indian civil society confined to a propertied, educated minority; most people negotiate with the state through “political society”.
Conclusion
Marx is right that no account of law and state is complete without its material foundation. Read as “only there”, the claim fails: Gramsci and Chatterjee show that culture and the everyday bargaining of the governed are also part of the anatomy.