The first section of this chapter closely reads The Kreuznach Notebooks to show how, in 1843, Marx begins to question the normative grammar of practical philosophy behind his earlier Hegelian commitments. The second section revisits Marx’s charge of “accommodation” against Hegel, arguing that critique as “measuring existence by the idea” yields only a merely apparent critique of existing institutions. The third section analyses Marx’s reading of the constitutional state, where his diagnosis of unsolvable antinomies and “concrete freedom” exposes the purely normative status of Hegel’s presupposed notion of free will. The fourth section develops a genealogy of modern political representation, tracing Marx’s path from republican criticism of constitutional monarchy to a subversive constellation in which representation, abstraction, and constitution appear as historically specific forms of political state. The final section reconstructs Marx’s critical account of the antinomies of modern political life—especially between constitutional, legislative, and governmental powers—to argue that modern representative politics is a form of the real contradiction located in civil society. I argue that, for Marx, no normatively grounded form of practical philosophy can resolve such antinomies, since it necessarily presupposes precisely the very network of representative political institutions whose present configuration it purports to criticise.