Storming Heaven: Marx’s Critique of Political Theology and the Possibility of “True Democracy”

The proposed paper will recover and develop Marx’s highly original materialist reconceptualization of democracy and constituent power in Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of State (1843). Through close textual analysis and theoretical recontextualization, I reconstruct Marx’s deployment of these intertwined concepts as a central part of his critique of political theology, that is, the idea of the state as a sovereign subject transcending and exercising absolute power over society. Marx conceptualized democracy as the social foundation of all constitutional forms of the state, which simultaneously revealed the inherent possibility of overthrowing it and the system of private property that it was structurally integrated in, and constituting a continuous and collective non-sovereign form of self-determination he described as “true democracy.”