Abstract: In his first examination of questions of criminal law, a series of articles on the wood theft law of the Prussian Rhine province (1842), the young Karl Marx unmistakably followed in the footsteps of Hegel. In the following years, however, Marx increasingly broke away from Hegel. While Hegel trusted the state as the custodian of the general public interest to tame the potentially destructive forces of bourgeois market society, Marx considered such a belief illusory: The modern state is not the master of bourgeois society but its servant, and its exaltation by Hegel is nothing but ideology. According to Marx, the doubling of modern societies into a real world of economic conflicts of interest and the ethereal region of an unreal state generality means that such societies cannot be content with one theory of punishment, but need two theories: a doctrine of prevention based on robust protection of interests and a theory of retaliation that is at the height of idealistic semantics of reason and freedom. Marx rejected both types of theory as ideological. Instead of punishing the individual wrongdoer, he argued, it is necessary to eliminate the origins of the crime. This goal could only be realized under communism. In a communist community, the punishment would be nothing other than the judgment of the wrongdoer about himself. In the person who executed this punishment he would therefore find “the natural redeemer from the punishment that he imposed on himself”. In political practice, however, this claim inevitably turns into total control by the association over its members. Not only the Enlightenment is subject to a disastrous dialectic, but also Marx’ idea of radical emancipation.

Author: Michael Pawlik, a chaired professor of criminal law, criminal procedure law and philosophy of law at Fribourg University

Translator: Fan Wen, an associate research fellow at CASS Law Institute

Source: 2 (2021) Macao Law Review