On Hegel's Civil Society Theory And Its Influence On Mar

There have been many studies on Hegel’s theory of civil society,and these studies have made a lot of breakthroughs,but there are still some shortcomings:Firstly,most of the studies on Hegel’s civil society are trapped in the economic attributes of civil society,but fail to grasp its multi-dimensional contents such as culture,law and ethics;secondly,most of the studies explain the relationship between the state and civil society in a unilinear way,but fail to explore the foundational role of civil society for the state;thirdly,most of the studies are short in textual coverage.,failing to include Jena Manuscripts on the Philosophy of Spirit and Manuscripts of Lectures on the Philosophy of Right.Based on the analysis of the original texts and the assimilation of the current studies,this dissertation attempts to systematically discuss Hegel’s theory of civil society from three aspects:economy,right and ethics.As Habermas points out,Hegel was the first thinker to propose a system of concepts applicable to the description of modern society at the level of terminology,distinguishing civil society from the political sphere.Civil society is a concept whose meaning changes constantly with the changing times.In the ancient Greek period,civil society was synonymous with the "polis",and in modern natural law doctrines,civil society was nearly equivalent to the political state.With the historical events such as the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution,the universal abstract idea of "person" began to spread widely,and the social productive forces developed vigorously,thus a social sphere partly independent of the political sphere emerged.Hegel grasped this change and used conceptual terms to analyze this modern sphere,namely civil society.Civil society is first and foremost an economic field,and Hegel’s discussion of the "system of needs" in civil society begins with the central concept of labor.By analyzing Hegel’s interpretation of labor in the Outlines of the Philosophy of Right、the Jena Manuscripts on the Philosophy of Spirit and Manuscripts of Lectures on the Philosophy of Right,we can see that labor is a purposive activity that objectifies oneself and that it has two central characteristics.Firstly,labor is a spiritual activity that transcends the immediacy of nature,because it is not a direct satisfaction of natural desires,but contains a mediating moment of thought;secondly,labor is an expression of subjectivity,which allows the subject to recognize the realization of its own purpose in the factual state realized by labor.Hegel analyzed the system of needs through the concept of labor and understood that the system of needs exerts a double influence on human beings:on the one hand,it washes away the simplicity and selflessness of human beings through education and makes them develop habits of doing things and acquire labor skills;on the other hand,the highly divided and mechanized mode of production in the system of needs causes a division between planners and executors.In the activities of planners,the concept of labor is perfectly realized,while in the executors,labor lose its spirituality and became a kind of monotonous and repetitive activity which does not require consciousness,and the latter lose the opportunity to be recognized as a contributor to society through their labor skills.Secondly,civil society is the domain of rights(Recht).The members of civil society as bourgeois or concrete human beings enjoy a series of human rights in civil society,which can be subdivided into liberal rights and social rights according to their nature.In Hegel’s theory of civil society,liberal rights are "rights to something ",such as ownership,right of migration,right of contracting,while social rights are "rights for something ",such as the right to receive education,the right to be relieved.The rationality of the former lies in the fact that liberal right is the verification of the personal freedom,while the rationality of the latter can be explained by the key role it play in stabilizing recognition mechanism of citizenship and the state.In Hegel’s interpretation,the liberal rights can be guaranteed by the judicial system,while the guarantee of social rights often requires the intervention of the police(Polizei)as an administrative force.In Hegel’s view,the institutional structures that guarantee human rights are defective in two ways:on the economic level,they are able to regulate the market only to a limited extent,without being able to curb the polarization of the rich and the poor;secondly,on the indoctrination dimension,they do not enable man to achieve a substantive freedom,but only a juridical freedom in a negative sense.The shortcomings of the state of the right will eventually lead to a mode of recognition based on the scale of the wealth.The unordered movement of the system of needs and the negative regulation of the juridical order leads to the polarization of the rich and the poor in civil society,and this polarization will lead to the generation of rich rabbles and poor rabbles.For Hegel,the phenomenon of rabble is primarily an ethical problem,representing a split between the subjective attitude of the individual and the objective ethical institutional structure,because rabbles lose their tendency to obey ethical norms and adopt a hostile attitude toward the existing order.Hegel adopts a "normative reconstruction"approach here,conceptually constructing the organization of the corporation to bridge the ethical split in order to achieve social integration.Through inner security system and mechanism of professional recognition,corporation achieves limited identity between individual and universal.However,through a realistic analysis,we can see that Hegel’s corporation cannot solve the problem of rabble because:one the one hand,they interfere with the free operation of the market economy excessively;on the other hand,they are not competitive in the capitalist market.However,we need to see the significant role the corporation plays in the construction of the ethical state:on the one hand,the corporations provide the subjective prerequisites for the shaping of political attitude by cultivating the estate dignity and spirit of corporation in the mind of their members;on the other hand,the corporations provide the institutional basis for the implementation of the political system of representation。Hegel’s theory of civil society had a profound influence on Marx,and Marx’s critique of Hegel’s philosophy of Right constituted a key node in his turn toward historical materialism.On the one hand,Marx accepted Hegel’s separation of civil society from the state,and on the other hand,he deduced the dependent nature of the political state by analyzing the administrative and legislative powers in Hegel’s doctrine of the state,which laid the foundation for the idea of "civil society determines the state" that he later explicitly put forward in On the Jewish Question.After moving from the philosophy of right to the study of political economy,Marx inherited and transformed Hegel’s theory of labor and used them as theoretical tools to deeply expose the state of alienation in civil society.Through subsequent analysis,Marx gradually realized that the essential force governing civil society was capital,and the capitalist mode of production was the essential cause of the state of alienation.Therefore,Marx believed that the fundamental way to solve the contradictions of capitalism was to establish the revolutionary subjectivity of the proletariat,to overthrow the capitalist system,and to establish a communist system.The essential features of the communist system are "distribution according to need" and "nonalienated labor".In Marx’s view,neither "distribution according to need" nor"unalienated labor" could be realized mere through the abolition of private ownership,moreover,communalization of the means of production,the abolition of wage labor,the development of the productive forces and the establishment of a system of professional rotation are also necessary preconditions for the realization of the communist society.