Karl Marx’s Critique of the State as an Alienation of Society in the 1843 Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of State

Alienation became a central but controversial concept in the reception and interpretation of Karl Marx’s thought after the posthumous publication of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in 1932. Numerous interlocutors debated the content and configuration of Marx’s concept of alienation and its relationship to G.W.F. Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach, as well as his own subsequent critique of political economy. But these debates inadvertently ignored Marx’s prior Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of State. This article aims to remedy this omission. Through close textual analysis and theoretical recontextualization I reconstruct and reinterpret Marx’s elaborate critique of the modern sovereign state as an alienation of civil society rooted in the dynamics of the modern system of private property, which also sheds new light on Marx’s concept of alienation, its relationship to prior political philosophy, (post-)Hegelian philosophy and his subsequent critique of political economy.