68 SOCIAL SCIENTIST do men desire property?"; but he is quite clear in the belief that the rational man he is concerned with, as part of his inherent process of learning to understand and control his environment, of necessity acquires property and has, as an inviolable right, the right to private properly. Hence, on this point, Hobbes, who is concerned with man as a brutal acquisitive creature, and Hegel, whose man is rational, the image of God, are equally bourgeois—property for both is of the essence. Since Hegel adopts the dialectical approach, he does not require the interference of an external force in his imagined movement of history and politics. However, this very dialectic is put upside down in Hegel as his conclusions are dependent entirely on the wrong, unscientific belief in primacy of ideas, consciousness, over material reality. And, contrary to his own theory, the dialectic stops at the establishment of the German state—the primitive forms under Frederick the Great and Bismark, and the sophisticated finished product under Hitler. The great contribution of Hegel, however, is that he fully and finally asserts the sovereignty of the state, the growth of it on a dialectical principle and the fact that it represents the '''wilP5 of those in control of it. (Rousseau had also talked of General Will). The fact that he had no perception of the scientific truth that matter is primary and ideas secondary in both time and importance, and of dialectically operating classes within the state—even the German "all people" fascist state—makes his theory weak, though still advanced compared to that of others. Marx: Production Mode and Relations Marx8 finally provided a concept of the state which, based as it was on his historical predecessors, took all the aspects of the state discussed earlier into account and yet gave a completely new interpretation. For him, the state is part of the superstructure—a reflection of the economic base —and has a dialectical relationship with the given socio-economic reality. Secondly, the state is in essence an instrument of force, a coercive apparatus to maintain the social status quo. Thirdly, maintenance of the status quo is always in the interest of the ruling class. Fourthly, the ruling class acquires its position by virtue of its ownership and control over the means of production. This determines the character of the economy, the society, and the polity. Finally, a society which is based on the ownership of property contains within it the mutually contradictory elements of property owners and non-owners. There is an irreconcilable conflict between the two, and in this situation, the property owners utilize the state to maintain the status quo of conflict and not to resolve it by solving the basis of this conflict: the state legalises the conflict; it cannot reconcile it. Hence, the state comes about in society only when property emerges, property owners emerge and the necessity of protecting the property arises. (Property emerges only when an economic surplus exists). The state, therefore, right from the beginning is an expression of this unequal