For Marx, going further than Hegal in criticizing the atomization unleashed by an unfettered civil society, any separation of spheres between state and civil society had to be overcome entirely, Marx also rejected Hegal’s account of the supposedly impartial, ‘universal’ state ruling over civil society ; as far as he was concerned this state actually furthered the dominance of the bourgeois class over subordinate classes in civil society. Thus, although Marx retained Adam Smith’s identification of civil society with economic interactions through the mechanism of the market, he was decidedly less sanguine than Smith about the possibility of the ‘greater good’ emerging from the sum total of these transactions. The formal ‘freedoms’ of civil society were for Marx a sham masking the deep structure of class inequality that defined this sphere in the first place. Real political freedom could only be attained if the working class took over state functions which, in being alienated from civil society, reinforced the letter’s individualistic, egoistic and revolution, ‘particularistic’civil society itself would be abolished by the universal rule of the proletariat. Marx’s damning critique concerning the alienation and exploitation supposedly to be found in the sphere of civil society contributed thereafter to its significant decline as a field of study. More generally, the growing dominance of the modern state from the second half of the nineteenth century led anyway to declining interest in the sphere of civil society.