Were Hegel and Marx against democracy?

Hegel was against universal suffrage - so if you define democracy as everyone having the vote then he was against it. It is a pretty conventional 19th century liberal view - "democracy" was a dirty word meaning rule by the mob; only men of property could be trusted with the vote.

Hegel expresses it rather differently though; he appears to think that the problem with universal franchises is that they pretend a sort of social equality which is not realistic. Universal suffrage tends towards indifference because we are but one voter among many and so the representative does not need to listen to us as an individual it pretends to confer power but really it doesn't.

Therefore political power should be allocated in a way that is reflective of "real", i.e economic, power - rather than political institutions effectively lying to people by creating a fictionalised version of society, they should reflect the reality of who holds power in a society. Hence his view that people should participate as part of "corporations" (like a guild, rather than a limited company) rather than an individual franchise.

This really links back to Hegel's dissatisfaction with the way that modern political thought focused on individuals - he believed that "individual freedom" had no meaning outside the realms of society. An individual is only free to achieve his aims within a society/community (think of it as almost the opposite of Rosseau's supposed "state of nature") - therefore too much focus on men as individuals will lead to atomisation/alienation.

As for Marx, his criticisms of "democracy" as we understand it (election of representatives by universal suffrage) runs along similar lines - though he advocates of course for different solutions. Individual-based universal franchise is abstraction and relies on a false conception of individuals.

I think he did advocate for universal suffrage on the basis that it would result in the end of the bourgeois state, but saw it as a means and certainly not an end.

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