An Existing Untruth: A Reconstruction of Marx’s Theory of the State as a Material Abstraction

This article reconstructs and develops Marx’s theory of the sovereign state (qua political theology) as a material abstraction based on Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of State. Marx argues that this idea is an abstraction in the double sense that it abstracts (separates) the state from its social and material foundation in civil society, which makes it an abstraction in the sense of an illusion. Yet this is an illusion with a social and material foundation and effect. It is the immediate appearance of society’s collective agency as a separate and sovereign subject caused by the (individual and class) divisions within civil society. Insofar as civil society’s members accept and act in accordance with this appearance – continuing to participate in and obeying its institutions – they confer a contradictory social and material reality upon the abstraction of the sovereign state, which is structurally integrated in the capitalist system.