The German Ideology
Although Marx and Engels saw the origins of the nation state and national identity as bourgeois in nature, both believed that the creation of the centralized state as a result of the collapse of feudalism and creation of capitalism had created positive social conditions to stimulate class struggle. Marx followed Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's view that the creation of individual-centered civil society by states as a positive development in that it dismantled previous religious-based society and freed individual conscience. In "The German Ideology", Marx claims that although civil society is a capitalist creation and represents bourgeois class rule, it is beneficial to the proletariat because it is unstable in that neither states nor the bourgeoisie can control a civil society. Marx described this in detail in "The German Ideology", stating: