For Marx, going further than Hegel in criticizing the atomisation unleashed by an unfettered civil society had to be overcome entirely. Marx also rejected Hegel’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 whit economic interactions though 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.