Introduction to Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law

The Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law is an early book by Marx Marx's first work criticizing Hegel's philosophy.It was written in the summer of 1843 in Kreuznach, Rheinland, and is therefore also known as the Kreuznach Manuscript. The original manuscript ***39 sheets, no title, the current title was added in 1927 when the Central Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet ****production party (Bolsheviks) published this manuscript. The Chinese translation was included in Volume 1 of The Complete Works of Marx and Engels, published by the People's Publishing House in 1956. This work is an analysis and critique of G.W.F. Hegel's Principles of the Philosophy of Law, sections 261-313, which deal with the problem of the state. During his tenure as editor-in-chief of the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx shook his faith in Hegel's philosophy by engaging in real-life struggles. After quitting the Rheinische Zeitung, he systematically studied the history of some countries in Europe and America, especially the history of the French Revolution, and read L. Feuerbach's Provisional Outline on the Transformation of Philosophy, and was greatly inspired, so he began to criticize Hegel's philosophy. However, unlike Feuerbach who focused only on nature and religious criticism, Marx's attention was mainly focused on social and political issues. In this manuscript, Marx exposed the mysticism of Hegel's discursive philosophy, reversed the relationship between the logical conception and the real thing which was inverted by him, pointed out that what has philosophical significance is not the logic of the thing itself but the thing of the logic itself, criticized Hegel's view that the civil society is subordinate to the political state, and came to the famous conclusion that the civil society determines the political state; and criticized Hegel's claim that the monarch, Bureaucrats to determine the state system of the heroic view of history, articulated the idea of the people to create the state; criticized Hegel in the development of the country on the issue of the denial of a qualitative change in the slow evolutionary theory, put forward the must go through a real revolution to establish a new state point of view.