Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie) is a manuscript written by German political philosopher Karl Marx in 1843.
Unpublished during his lifetime (except for the introduction, published in Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher in 1844), it is a manuscript in which Marx comments on fellow philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's 1820 book Elements of the Philosophy of Right paragraph by paragraph. One of Marx's major criticisms of Hegel in the document is the fact that many of his dialectical arguments begin in abstraction.
This work contains the formulations of Marx's particular alienation theory, which was informed by Ludwig Feuerbach's work. Narrative of the work develops around analysis of the relations between civil society and political society, including Marx's most famous commentaries on the function of religion in the introduction.
See also
- Opium of the people, a phrase coined in this work