64 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
other forms of state as Christianity has to all other forms of religion.
Christianity is the religion par excellence, the essence of religion, deified
man as a particular religion. Similarly democracy is the essence of all
constitutions of the state, socialized man as a particular constitution of
the state.^20In Greece and the Middle Ages the political aspects of life had been
intimately linked with the social ones; it was only in modern times that
the political state had become abstracted from the life of society. The
solution to this problem in which 'the political constitution was formerly
the religious sphere, the religion of the people's life, the heaven of its
universality over against the earthly and real existence' was what Marx
called 'true democracy'.^21 This concept could be summed up as a humanist
form of government in which free socialised man was the one and only
subject of the political process in which the state as such would have
disappeared.
Turning to Hegel's views on executive power, Marx produced several
interesting passages on bureaucracy which represented his first attempt
to give a sociological definition of state power and reflected in part his
own difficulties with officialdom when editor of the Rheinische Zeitung.^22
Hegel had said that the state mediated between conflicting elements
within civil society by means of corporations and bureaucracy: the former
grouped individual private interests in order to bring pressure to bear
upon the state; the latter mediated between the state and private interests
thus expressed. By bureaucracy Hegel meant a body of higher civil serv-
ants who were recruited by competition from the middle classes. To them
were entrusted the formulation of common interests and the task of
maintaining the unity of the state. Their decisions were prevented from
being arbitrary by the monarch above them and the pressure of the
corporations from below.
Marx began by denouncing this attempted mediation that did not
resolve, and at best only masked, historically determined oppositions.
Hegel had well understood the process of the dissolution of medieval
estates, the growth of industry and the economic war of all against all.
Indeed some of Marx's most striking characterisations of the capitalist
ethic were taken almost directly from Hegel.^2 ' But in trying nevertheless
to construct a formal state unity, Hegel only created a further alienation:
man's being, which was already alienated in monarchy, was now even
more alienated in the growing power of the executive, the bureaucracy.
All that he offered was an empirical description of bureaucracy, partly as
it was, and partly as it pretended to be. Marx rejected Hegel's claim that
the bureaucracy was an impartial and thus 'universal' class. He reversed
the Hegelian dialectic by asserting that, though their function was in